Conrad took a step forward, but Yeats dug the snubby barrel of the pistol into Serena’s temple. “Stay right where you are.”
Conrad took another step closer.
Yeats yanked Serena’s long black hair until she cried out in pain. “Now or never, son.”
Conrad took a third step.
“I said drop it!” Yeats yanked Serena’s hair even harder. Conrad knew he could snap her neck in a second if he wanted to.
“Don’t listen to him, Conrad,” Serena strained to say. “You know he’s going to kill you.”
But all it took for Conrad was another look into her frightened eyes to convince him that he could take no chances. He lowered his weapon.
“Good boy,” Yeats said. “Now drop it.”
Conrad dropped his AK-47 on the floor of the fore-aft passageway, where it clanked. He could see tears roll down Serena’s face as their eyes locked.
“You’re hopeless, Conrad,” she whispered.
34
Dawn Minus Fifteen Minutes
Conrad watched Yeats pick up the AK-47 from the floor. They were only a few feet apart now and Conrad could see a manic look in Yeats’s eyes that he hadn’t detected from a distance. The man looked like an animal trapped in a snare, willing to bite his own leg off to get free.
“I knew you couldn’t kill me,” he said, keeping a tight hold on Serena, who struggled in his grip. “And I sure as hell don’t want to kill you. But I will if I have to.”
“Get your claws off her, Yeats.”
“As soon as you’re good and frozen, son. Maybe when we get to wherever we’re going and thaw out, you’ll come to your senses.”
Conrad said, “You’re going to have to kill me before you freeze me, Dad.”
Conrad dove for the gun, and it exploded, the bullet plowing into his shoulder and spinning him to the floor. Dazed, he clutched his shoulder and saw blood pumping out between his fingers. He then looked up to see Yeats step forward to finish him off.
“I’ll say hello to Osiris for you.”
Yeats was about to knock him out with the butt of his gun when Conrad rolled back on his other shoulder and kicked Yeats in the chest with both feet.
The blow drove Yeats back into the pointed end of the Scepter of Osiris Serena was holding and she screamed. Yeats hit it with such force that he cried out in agony.
Dropping his gun, Yeats staggered for a few seconds before Conrad body slammed him into the cryogenic chamber. He shut the door as a blast of subzero mist blew out.
Suddenly all was quiet, save for the low hum of the ship’s power surging through the consoles, walls, and floors.
Conrad struggled to stand in the shaft of light when Serena ran over and embraced him. Then she must have felt the warmth of his shoulder.
“You’re a bloody mess,” she told him.
“You just figured that out?”
She ripped off a strip of cloth from his sleeve and wrapped it around his upper arm and tied it tight, aware of his stare. “And now you’ve got everything you ever wanted. Maybe we really should walk off into the sunset together.”
Conrad saw the bloody Scepter of Osiris on the floor. Picking up the scepter, Conrad realized she was right. All he had to do was let the Solar Bark take them to its preprogrammed destination and he’d finally discover the Secret of First Time.
He stared at her in disbelief. “Do you hear what you’re saying?”
“I’m saying we don’t know if this ECD is a global extinction event,” she said. “Maybe humanity survives, or maybe we go the way of the dinosaur. But the only way to ensure the survival of our species is for you and me to proceed on course.”
Conrad looked into her pleading eyes. She didn’t want to go along for him, he realized, but rather for humanity. And she was willing to give up everything she held dear to do so.
“You’d have us condemn the world to hell?” he said.
“No, Conrad. We could create a new Eden on another world.”
As he considered this insane idea, the ship started to rumble. He put a finger to her cheek and wiped away a tear. “You know we have to go back.”
She knew, and she didn’t resist as they silently rode the platform down to the base of the Solar Bark.
When they finally surfaced several hundred yards from the silo, the ground rumbled more violently than ever. He had barely pulled Serena out of the tunnel when a geyser of fire shot into the air, hurling them across the ground.
When he looked up he saw a dozen other geysers erupt in a ring around the silo as the Solar Bark lifted out of its crater and climbed into the sky. Conrad watched the starship carrying his father, dead or alive, disappear into the heavens.
“I hope to God you know what you’re doing, Conrad.” Serena ripped a torn lace from her boot and tied the burnt ends of her hair back. “Because that was the last flight off this rock.”
35
Dawn Minus Two Minutes
Standing in P4’s star chamber,tears flowing down her cheeks, Serena watched the geodesic ceiling spin. The noise of the grinding, whirling dome was deafening, and she couldn’t hear what Conrad was saying. He was standing by the altar, motioning her to come over.
“Put the scepter in the stand,” he shouted.
She looked at the Scepter of Osiris in her hands and once again read the inscription to herself:Only he who stands before the Shining Ones in the time and place of the most worthy can remove the Scepter of Osiris without tearing Heaven and Earth apart. Was there ever such a “most worthy” moment in human history? Or was the Hebrew prophet Isaiah right when he said human acts of righteousness were like “filthy rags” before the holiness of God?
“Yeats was right, Conrad,” she said as she felt her heart sinking. “The Atlanteans were too advanced for our level of thinking. We can’t win.”
“I thought we agreed that the gods of Egypt were defeated once before,” Conrad said. He started talking faster, his voice rising. “Well, just when was that?”
Serena paused. “During the Exodus, when Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt.”
“Exactly,” Conrad said. “It was one of those cosmic events that changes cultural history, like a colliding meteorite changes natural history. If no Exodus, then no epiphany at Sinai. And if no Sinai, then no Moses, Jesus Christ, or Mohammed. Osiris and Isis would reign supreme, pyramids would dot Manhattan’s skyline, and we’d be drinking fermented barley water instead of cafe lattes.”
Serena felt her blood pumping. Conrad was onto something.
“The question is,” Conrad continued, eyes gleaming as if on the verge of a great discovery, “what was the straw that broke Pharaoh’s back and led him to release the Israelites?”
“Passover,” Serena said. “When the God of the Israelites struck down the firstborn of every Egyptian but ‘passed over’ the houses of those Israelite slaves who coated their doorposts with the blood of a lamb.”
“OK,” said Conrad. “Now if only there was a way to be more inclusive and extend the Passover to all races.”
But there was, she suddenly realized, and blurted out, “The Lamb of God!”
“Jesus Christ, you’re right!”
Conrad’s hands flew as he began to reset the stars on the dome of the chamber to re-create the skies over Jerusalem.
Suddenly the entire chamber seemed to turn upside down. But it was an optical illusion, she realized, as the heavens of the Northern Hemisphere suddenly flipped places with the Southern Hemisphere.
“OK, we’ve got a place on earth,” Conrad said. “We need a year.”
That was harder, Serena thought. “Tradition says Jesus died when he was about thirty-three, which would place the crucifixion between A.D. 30 and 33.”
“You’ve got to do better than that.” Conrad looked impatient. “Give me a year.”
Serena fought the panic inside. The Christian calendar was based on faulty calculations made by a sixth-century monk-Dionysius Exiguus. Latin for “Dennis the Short.”
Appropriate, considering that Dionysius’s estimates for the date of Christ’s birth fell short by several years. Church scholars now placed the Nativity no later than the year King Herod died- 4 B.C.
“A.D.29,” she finally said. “TryA.D. 29.”
Conrad adjusted the scepter in its altar, and the dome overhead spun around. The rumble was deafening. “I need a date,” he shouted. “And I need it now.”
Serena nodded. The Catholic Church celebrated Easter at a different time each spring. But the Eastern Orthodox Church kept the historical date with astronomical precision. The Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325 decreed Easter must be celebrated on the Sunday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox, but always after the Jewish Passover, in order to maintain the biblical sequence of events of the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
She shouted, “Friday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox.”
“Friday?” There was doubt in his eyes. “Not Sunday?”
“Friday.” She was firm. “The resurrection was a demonstration of victory over death. But the most noble time had to be when Jesus was dying on the cross for the sins of humanity and forgave his enemies.”
“OK,” he said. “I need the hour.”
“Scripture says it was the ninth hour,” she said.
He looked at her funny. “Huh?”
“Three o’clock.”
Conrad nodded, made the final setting and stepped back. “Say a prayer, Sister Serghetti.”
The geodesic dome spun round and locked into place, re-creating the skies over Jerusalem circa A.D. 29 at the ninth hour of daylight on the fifth day after the first full moon of the vernal equinox.
“But now a righteousness from heaven, apart from the law, is revealed,” she prayed under her breath, repeating the words of St. Paul to the Romans.
A sharp jolt rocked the chamber and she jumped back as the floor split open and the altar containing the scepter dropped down a shaft and disappeared. Before she could peer over the ledge, the shaft closed up into a cartouche bearing the symbol of Osiris. And she could hear something like the peal of thunder rumble below.
Suddenly it was eerily quiet. Serena could hear someone sobbing. It sounded like a young girl. She felt a tear roll down her cheek and realized it was her. For some reason she felt clean inside, as if all her worries and fears and guilt had been washed away.
“You did it,” she said, embracing Conrad. “Thank God.”
“How about when we get out of here?” he said when a deep, disturbing rumble echoed all around, inside and out.
Serena grew very still. “What’s happening, Conrad?”
“I think we’re about to be buried under two miles of ice.”
36
Dawn
Zawas and his men were watching the Solar Bark disappear into the sky from their camp on the promontory of the Temple of the Water Bearer when the first big shock wave hit. Tents began to collapse, and Zawas panicked as he watched his only working Z-9A jet helicopter skid across the helipad to the ledge.
“Secure the chopper!” he shouted, and five Egyptians raced to tie it down.
No matter what may befall the rest of the world, Zawas told himself, no matter how many coastline cities should be swallowed up by the sea, there was no safer place on earth than where his team was established at that very moment. For should it take a day or a week, once the earth-crust displacement had run its violent course, the ground on which they were standing would be the center of the new world.
This is what he kept telling himself as his thoughts drifted to his extended family back in Cairo, most living in substandard “luxury” high-rise apartments that were bound to crumble in any major quake.
The air suddenly felt very warm, and the shocks grew more violent.
They were becoming so jarring, in fact, that he began to reconsider his strategy of encamping inside the Temple of the Water Bearer and wondered if an open area away from any monuments or shrines would be more prudent.
Zawas stepped inside his chamber off the promontory, found the Sonchis map on his desk, and rolled it up inside the nun’s green thermos along with the American blueprints to the Solar Bark.
Another shock nearly threw Zawas from his chair. He gripped his desk to steady himself. But it too began to move. He screwed the outer shell of the thermos into place and threw it in his pack before the shouts of his men brought him outside. What he saw made him shrink back in terror.
The sky seemed to be falling.
Zawas grabbed a pair of binoculars and scanned the mountains of ice that formed a ring around the city. And then it hit him: the sky wasn’t falling. Rather, it was the cliffs of ice surrounding the city that were falling.
An avalanche of ice from all sides was about to bury them all.
“Into the chopper!” Zawas shouted, waving his men in as he climbed inside the Z-9A and started the motor in a frantic bid to get airborne before impact. The blades started to move but then sputtered. The chopper was designed by the French but built under special license by the Chinese, who had supplied the Egyptians with several models. “Damn those infidels in Beijing!”
He tried to get the blades moving again while a dozen Egyptians piled inside. As the pilot took the controls, Zawas adjusted his binoculars to make a quick estimate of how much time they had until impact.
A wall of ice jumped into focus, and it was on course to slam the chopper and crumple them all into a bloody pulp of twisted metal and flesh. Zawas felt his heart stop beating as the foaming avalanche swept under the temple and began to rise toward the promontory. Then he could feel the chopper being lifted up toward the sky.
Inside P4’s star chamber, Serena felt hot as she climbed up the southern shaft using the line Conrad had taken with him when he first surveyed the city. But when she looked back, Conrad was still in the chamber below, trying to pull himself up with one hand, the other dangling uselessly to the side in the bloody tourniquet. She could see water bubbling around his ankles and began to panic.
“Conrad!” she shouted.
She braced her boots against the sides of the shaft and stretched out her hand to grasp his right arm. She pulled with a grunt but felt his hand slip away and heard a splash.
“Use this,” he shouted, waving what looked like a long scarlet bandanna. It was his tourniquet. He had untied it.
She wrapped one corner around her wrist and lowered her arm so Conrad could wrap the other around his wrist. She pulled so hard she could feel her back spasm in pain, and she cried out as she pulled harder until he finally climbed up in the shaft.
“Thanks,” he said, breathing hard. “Now let’s go.”
Serena looked up the shaft at the square of blue sky. “Why bother?” she said, out of breath. “There’s nothing out there. No radio, no way to signal anybody.”
“It’s our only shot,” he said. “The subterranean geothermal vent is powering down. The last blast of heat it’s giving off is probably melting everything around us, pumping the water through its hydraulic system. But the water is about to turn to ice. Everything’s going to freeze.”
Serena understood. “The girl in the ice. That’s going to be us.”
“Not if I can help it. Take this.” He gave her the bloody tourniquet strip. “Use it like a flag. Now move! I’ll be right behind you.”
Reluctantly, she took the bloody rag and made her way up the shaft, aware of Conrad falling behind. Occasionally she’d call back and hear him reply, but each time the echo grew fainter.
Finally, she reached the square of the shaft, her fingers turning cold as they clawed the edge. The wind was howling, and the temperature was dropping just as suddenly as it had risen. She pulled herself up to look out and beheld a fantastic sight that took her breath away.
The entire bowl of ice surrounding the city was crumbling, the melting snow turning into a huge lake that was drowning the city a mile below. Already only the tops of the taller temples and obelisks were visible. And the waterline was rising aga
inst the pyramid below. It would be only minutes before it reached her.
“No, God, please,” she said and looked back to Conrad.
But he was gone.
Filled with panic, she screamed, “Conrad!”
There was no answer.
She peered down the darkened shaft and saw something flicker. It was water, rising her way. And there was no sign of Conrad.
Conrad, unable to hold on any longer, slipped down the shaft into P4’s star chamber, which was filled to the ceiling with water. Desperate for air, he clawed at the stone ceiling in the dark to find a shaft opening again. But all he felt was the water closing in on him.
Then a powerful suction from below grabbed his legs and pulled him down the pyramid’s Great Gallery into some sort of pipe. Unable to hold his breath any longer, he let go and felt the water fill his lungs.
He was sinking into blackness when his body slammed against a stone grating. The water suddenly washed over him and receded down the drain.
Soaked and gasping for breath, he put his hands on the grating and pushed himself up. Then he ran wildly down the tunnel, trying to get his bearings, knowing he was totally lost. He was confused and more than a little worried about Serena. His body ached all over as he slogged through the water, which was ankle deep and getting deeper. Then he heard a rumble from behind.
He didn’t need to turn around to know what was coming. He simply braced his body and took a deep breath. A wall of water slammed into him and swept him down a smaller tunnel. He gulped in some water as he was sucked in, tumbling over and over beneath the current.
Conrad held on as long as he could but felt his consciousness slowly slipping away. Unable to cling to anything, he let go. A blackness overwhelmed him and he felt himself whooshing through a tunnel.
Suddenly he was pushed into daylight and thrown almost fifty feet into the air by a geyser of water blasting out of the drain. He landed with a heavy thud on the trembling ground, the wind and water knocked out of him.
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