Raising Atlantis (21 page)

She couldn’t wait forever. And who knew where Conrad’s path of self-discovery would take his loyalties? She, on the other hand, knew exactly what she had to do. She had to take the Scepter to the Shrine of the First Sun. There she would find, she hoped, the so-called Secret of First Time that would somehow enable her to stop whatever was happening.

As for Conrad, it was clear she could not trust him, just like she could not trust Yeats. For all she knew she couldn’t trust the pope or even God. How could he let this happen—again? She thought of the girl in the ice. She couldn’t get the expression on her face out of her mind. This had happened once before, so clearly God could let it happen again. But she couldn’t.

She put the obelisk back in her pack, slung the pack over her shoulder, and stepped out of the chamber through the open door. The tunnel led her to a fork at the bottom of the great gallery, and she took the middle tunnel down and out through P4’s entrance.

When Serena emerged from the dark interior of P4 into the light of day, it seemed to her that the sun was more brilliant than ever. It was hot, but it was the dry kind of heat that she liked. Antarctica was a desert climate with or without the ice, she thought as she shaded her eyes. More likely, however, the heat originated from the vast geothermal machinery underground.

A minute later, after her eyes had adjusted, she realized that she was standing in the center of a city at the bottom of some great crater. Walls of ice lifted up in the distance, forming a spectacular backdrop for this desert landscape of pyramids, obelisks, temples, and waterways. She could hear the roar of a distant waterfall.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The rush of fresh, oxygen-rich air overwhelmed her senses. So did the realization that there were probably centuries of research down here, and if she lived a thousand lifetimes she still would just be getting started at unraveling the city’s mysteries.

Whatever else, she realized, this discovery changed everything about human history.

Eyes still closed, she thought she heard a dog barking.

Ridiculous, she thought, and realized she should be praying, listening for some inner prompting from the Holy Spirit or direction from God. But all she heard was that barking, and it was getting louder and more annoying. Then she blinked her eyes open to see Yeats’s husky, Nimrod, trotting toward her.

She was surprised by the joy she felt and called out to him, “Here, boy!”

Nimrod ran into her arms and started licking her face.

“Are you OK?” she asked him. “Is everybody else OK?”

Nimrod immediately turned and started running in the other direction, pausing to look back.

“You want me to follow, boy?”

Nimrod barked and kept running and this time did not look back.

Serena followed the canine for a half hour along what appeared to be the main waterway of the empty city. But the longer they walked, the less it felt like a city. There was nothing to suggest anybody ever actually lived hereon the plateau. No streets, just waterways. Some coursing with glistening water, others dry. And the ground between the pavilions was barren. No plant life, nothing. Maybe that would change in a few days.

Perhaps the dwellings were on the outskirts, she wondered, still buried under ice. But these monuments, however coldly magnificent, reminded her of a city of abandoned oil rigs she once toured along the Caspian Sea in the former Soviet Union: miles of rusted pipes you could drive a truck through and ghostly refineries that stretched like heaps of filth across the horizon.

She also had the uneasy feeling of being watched, although she knew that was absurd. There was nobody around to watch her. Then again, Nimrod was here. Maybe there were others. She occasionally lost sight of the dog but always remained within earshot of his barks. Then the barks grew louder, and she realized he was waiting to show her something.

From a distance she could see the object glisten in the sun. Soon she came upon a smashed Hagglunds tractor on the banks of the water channel. The rear cab was crushed to bits, fragments of fiberglass gleaming across the ground. But the front cab seemed intact.

Serena walked over to the driver’s side door, which was ajar, and opened it. She gasped as the body of Colonel O’Dell crumpled to the ground at her feet, his head a bloody mess with bits of the dashboard matted in his hair. Nimrod sniffed the corpse with a whimper.

Poor O’Dell, she thought, realizing she would have to bury his body. It would be only proper. But first she had to see if the tractor’s transmitter was working and if there was any food or water. She hated to admit it, with O’Dell lying there on the ground, but she was famished.

She climbed inside the cab and searched methodically for any SAT phones, weapons, food packs, anything. But the cab had been stripped of everything save for a single meal-ready-to-eat and a shortwave radio.

She tore open the MRE. Nimrod made it clear that he expected a share of the food, nuzzling his way into the cab.

“Oh, OK,” she said. “Come on in.”

Together they split the meal. But the longer she chewed, the more she realized what she was really hungry for was news. She eyed the shortwave radio, wondering if it worked, but perversely almost hoping it didn’t.

Unable to bear it any longer, she turned the radio on. It worked. The static grew louder as she turned up the volume and then searched the band of frequencies to find the BBC.

When she did, the announcer’s voice was filled with tension.

“Mass evacuations of U.S. coastal cities are under way,”

the announcer said. “The federal government reports that it is opening up the nearly six hundred fifty million acres of public land it owns—almost thirty percent of the United States—for refugees.”

Bit by bit, the details began to fill in: the massive

“seismic event” in Antarctica that split off a glacier the size of Texas, the swamping of the Maldives and other Pacific Islands, the meetings of the U.N. Security Council in New York, and accusations of secret American nuclear weapons tests in Antarctica.

Dear Lord, she thought. What have we done? Serena looked at her food and suddenly lost her appetite. She didn’t stop Nimrod from finishing the meal.

Various commentators, analysts, and scientists of the international sort soon weighed in, some expressing fears that the ice cap was breaking up, others that rising sea levels would wipe out coastal cities and sink low-lying lands such as Florida. Those with access to the corridors of power confessed to hearing whispers of a potential shift in Earth’s crust and global geological catastrophe.

She turned off the radio and removed the Scepter of Osiris from her backpack. Staring at it, thinking about all that it had wrought thus far, she felt her stomach churn.

She opened the passenger door of the cab. Nimrod jumped out and ran to the river’s edge and began lapping up water.

She walked over and squatted next to him and looked across to the other side. It was about five hundred feet away.

Seeing that Nimrod was no worse for his drink, she removed an empty water bottle from her pack and dipped it into the water. The current was so strong it ripped the bottle away in an instant, so she cupped a hand into the water and sipped. She was splashing some water on her oily, dusty face when she heard a yelp.

She looked over to see Nimrod lying on his side, panting heavily, eyes in shock. She spit the water out of her mouth and looked him over.

“What’s wrong, boy?” she asked, suddenly worried as she stroked his ear. “Please don’t tell me it’s the water.”

It wasn’t. There was blood coming from Nimrod’s thigh.

She looked closer. It looked like a bullet hole.

“Oh, God,” she began to say when a bright red dot appeared on Nimrod’s furry chest. A second later blood spurted out. She jumped back and screamed.

A dozen soldiers in UNACOM uniforms emerged from the horizon and closed in around her with their AK-47s at the ready. Their commanding officer stepped forward from the circle around her and spoke into his radio.

“This is Jamil,” the man said in Arabic. “We have one survivor, sir. A woman.”

The accent sounded Egyptian to Serena, and this was confirmed when she heard the reply on the radio: “Bring her to me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Before Serena could move, Jamil motioned to one of his men, and the grunt flung her across the ground, holding her down with one hand and considerable strength. He ripped open her fatigues, slipped a hand inside, and felt her up and down.

“What is this?” the soldier said with a Saudi accent, yanking away a switchblade knife.

The Saudi held up the knife and sprang the blade, eliciting howls of laughter from his comrades. Then he flipped the knife across the air to bury itself in the dirt.

His eyes sparked fire as he stood over Serena, hands on his hips.

Serena had had enough. The Saudi was about to step away when she kicked him in the groin. As he doubled over in pain she jumped up and prepared to knee his bowed face. But suddenly a half-dozen red dots painted her chest and she looked up to see the barrels of a dozen AK-47s pointed at her.

Serena put her hands up in surrender and looked at the Saudi she had kicked. He was groveling in the dirt. Another Arab came behind her, this one an Afghan by the sound of his accent, and marched her outside the circle to stand before the commanding officer, Jamil.

Jamil seemed delighted by her performance. “Ah, what have we here?”

“I’ll show you,” said Serena in Arabic, and with her elbow spiked the face of the Afghan behind her. He let out a cry and dropped his AK-47. Serena took it and pointed it at the wounded soldier.

“Let me go,” Serena ordered Jamil, digging the AK-47 into the back of the Afghan. “Or I’ll kill your man here.”

“You couldn’t hurt a butterfly, mademoiselle.”

Jamil took out a pearl-handled Colt, aimed it at Serena’s hostage, and shot him dead himself. Serena watched in stunned silence as the Afghan fell to the ground, leaving her standing alone and exposed to Jamil’s pistol.

“Hand over the Scepter of Osiris, mademoiselle, or I’ll kill you too.”

“You know about the scepter?”

“Shoot her,” another soldier told Jamil.

Jamil smiled. “Not before she tells me what she knows.”

The wind picked up and Serena looked up to see a chopper flying in. It was one of those French jobs she had flown a couple of times herself, a Z-9A, and it apparently belonged to the UNACOMers, because Jamil wasn’t terribly concerned with its arrival.

“The scepter, I said.”

“I’ve hidden it in a safe place,” she said. “Let me go and I’ll show you.”

But one of Jamil’s men, who was ransacking Serena’s pack, suddenly called out and produced the obelisk.

Jamil took the obelisk in his hands, examined it for a moment, and then looked at her and laughed. “Tell Colonel Zawas we have found the Scepter of Osiris.”

25

Dawn Minus Thirteen Hours

FROM HIS PERCH NEARthe summit of P4, Conrad had a bird’s-eye view of the lost city in the late afternoon. If only Dad could see this, he thought, gazing out from the mouth of the exterior shaft.

The city was comprised of concentric waterways laid over a grid. Wide avenues flanked by temples and pavilions radiated outward from the central P4 compound. This layout reminded him of the Avenue of the Dead in Teotihuacán, Mexico, and even the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

About a mile long, the necropolis was anchored by P4 in the center, a Sphinx-like structure at the east end, and at the west end a step-pyramid with working waterfalls that churned brightly in the sunlight. The dimensions were spectacular.

Most astounding of all, Conrad could see the various rings of pavilions slowly shifting and locking into place. Or was it P4 that was slowly rotating? He couldn’t tell. At any rate, the builders did more than construct a city aligned to the stars before an ancient earth-crust displacement shifted the continent. They constructed a city in which the monuments could somehow realign themselves, perhaps through the hydraulic pressure of the water that coursed through its very veins.

Conrad tried to let this otherworldly landscape sink in, to burn this image into his memory so he’d never forget it.

The magnitude of its scale, however, defied comprehension.

There were probably ten square miles of city to explore inside a crater of ice whose walls rose two miles into the sky along the city outskirts. And that was only the part of the city that was visible. Conrad could only assume what he saw was part of a bigger metropolis.

He was tempted to slide back down the shaft that instant to tell Serena what he had found, if only to convince himself. But he knew he must first capture a picture. He pulled out his pocket digital camera and panned the valley below. Whatever else he took away from this city, he could at least have this, proof that he was the first person in twelve thousand years to glimpse humanity’s earliest epoch. Perhaps he was the first human to glimpse an entirely alien civilization. Maybe even his own, if Yeats was to be believed.

Yeats’s revelation raised more questions than it answered. It certainly raised a wall between him and Serena.

He had seen the uncertainty in her eyes as she studied him back in the star chamber. He couldn’t tell if it was for who he was or what he had done. But the pangs of guilt for an obsession that cost the life of the only man who might have answers for them—Yeats—refused to subside.

The reality was that the only father he had ever known was dead.

He loved me, Conrad thought. He did the best he could. He even tried to tell me that in his own way. Now Yeats was gone, and they’d never have the father-son reconciliation Yeats deserved.

Conrad suddenly felt nauseated. But he took a deep breath of fresh Antarctic air and asked himself what Yeats would say. And the answer that came to mind was clear.

Yeats would no doubt quote some military figure like Admiral Mahan of the American Navy during the Revolution and say: “Whenever you set out to accomplish anything, make up your mind at the outset about your ultimate objective. Once you have decided on it, take care never to lose sight of it.”