Raising Atlantis (30 page)

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 against 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.

Unable to move for a few minutes, he was shaken by the earth tremors and deafening rumble of the ice mountains tumbling down into the city valley.

A trickle of water ran past his ear, and he realized there was no place to hide: above or below ground, anything under an altitude of two miles from the subglacial surface was about to be deluged and frozen. With dread he recalled the people in the ice he had seen during the descent to P4

and decided he did not want to be one of them.

Somehow he managed to get on all fours and crawl through the rising water. Within a few paces he could feel the temperature dropping as the winds whipped. He shivered in the cold, damp air.

He slowed down for a second when he saw a body floating his way, bloated and blue. As it passed by, Conrad recognized the face of Colonel O’Dell from Ice Base Orion. The expression of horror on the corpse’s face motivated Conrad to pick up his pace.

The water was up to his knees now, and the bowl of mountains around the city was beginning to collapse like a tin can under the tremendous pressure. His shoulder hurt more than ever, the stabs of pain unbearable. He applied more pressure with his other hand as he rose to his feet and staggered. Then he saw a flash of color through the water.

It was a smashed red Hagglunds, a relic from Ice Base Orion. It was useless for travel, but the forward cab might provide a cocoon of shelter and life support.

Suddenly the ground pitched violently and Conrad was thrown facedown. He looked up to see a fifty-foot wall of water and ice thundering down on him. His jaw dropped in surrender at the spectacle. There was simply no place to hide from such a force of nature, and he knew then it was time for him to die. But he thought of Serena and with one last push reached up to the door of the Hagglunds and twisted the black handle until the hatch opened.

Then the water came. First a few droplets on his head.

Then a spray.

He hoisted himself inside and barely managed to snap the seat belt in place and shut the door before the wall slammed into the Hagglunds and it was lost in a cauldron of churning water and ice.

37

Dawn Plus One Hour

SERENA LOOKED OUT ACROSSthe stormy skies from inside the mouth of the southern star shaft near the top of P4. Whiteout conditions threatened, the clouds over the ice deserts in the distance were heavy with snow, and bolts of lightning flashed on the distant horizon.

Then she heard a familiar whirring noise overhead and looked up in stunned disbelief to see a U.S. military Black Hawk helicopter drifting across the stormy sky. She waved frantically.

A rope ladder dropped down like something out of a dream, and she took a firm hold. She glanced back down the dark shaft and saw something shiny. She hesitated and looked closer. It was water, coming up like a geyser. She tugged the rope ladder and was lifted away as a spray of water shot into the air, barely missing the chopper.

An American airman grabbed her shoulders and dragged her into the Black Hawk. She could see from the faces of the crew that they were as shocked to see Mother Earth as she was to see them. Almost as shocked as they were to survey the ruins below. Their commanding officer introduced himself as Admiral Warren and shouted to the pilot over the roar of the helicopter and waters outside.

“Take us out!” Warren ordered.

“No,” Serena said, her teeth chattering. “We have to find Conrad, Doctor Conrad Yeats. He’s still down there.”

Warren stared at her. “You mean General Griffin Yeats?”

“No, I mean his son.”

Warren looked at the pilot who shook his head. “Believe me, no one’s down there now.”

The Black Hawk began to pull away.

“No!” Serena tried to climb in front and grab the controls. But four airmen restrained her and shoved her back against the medical supplies. She tried to get up, but all energy left her. Then the medic stabbed a needle in her arm.

“Calm down, Sister, you’ve been through a lot,” Warren said as he wrapped a navy jacket around her shivering body.

She felt dizzy and light-headed.

She brushed back wet strands of hair from her face and looked out the window. A whirlpool of water had nearly swallowed the city. Only the peak of P4 stabbed out from the murky deep. She had often imagined as a child what it must have been like when the Red Sea parted for the children of Israel to pass through and later came together again to drown all of Pharaoh’s horses and chariots. Now the picture was all too clear.

She prayed to God that Conrad was safe but knew better.

In her delirium, she could picture herself searching for him.

Then, through the sheets of ice, Conrad would be spotted stumbling across the plain, miraculously having survived. He would emerge from the mist whiter than snow, his eyebrows and hair white, almost glowing, like he had come forth from the shiny veils of the holiest of shrines. The Americans would be forced to land the chopper. She would run to Conrad and embrace him. He would return with her to the awaiting chopper, his past buried behind him. They would hold each other tightly as snowflakes fell around them like stars.

But there was no Conrad, she realized bitterly. And God didn’t always answer her prayers the way she liked. As the chopper lifted off and away, she looked down to see the flattened tip of P4 barely showing above the water. It was as if they were flying over the Southern Ocean now. Not a trace of the city below—or Conrad. It was all gone, swept clean as if it had never been there.

Warren started shouting something again. She couldn’t pick up much of what he said under the whine of the blades and howl of the winds. Then she looked up to see him hanging out the open doorway. The Black Hawk swung toward whatever he was pointing at.

Serena was on her feet in an instant, clinging to Warren, peering out. There was a lone figure atop P4. The man who waved frantically was in a U.N. uniform.

“That’s him!” she said with as much force as she could muster.

“Get lower!” Warren ordered the pilot, who was struggling against the wind gusts.

Serena grabbed Warren’s binoculars as the Black Hawk started down. When they were no more than thirty feet away, she could see the man look up. With dismay she realized that the face she was looking at wasn’t Conrad’s at all. It belonged to one of the Egyptians, and his arm came up holding a machine gun.

“Admiral, pull back!” she said.

“We got him, don’t worry,” Warren said, and Serena looked back to see two marksmen with rifles trained on the man. “I want him alive.”

Serena felt a pop of air brush past her ear and looked down to see a bullet catch the Egyptian in the leg and send him down with a splash.

Warren nodded approvingly. “Move in.”

As soon as the chopper came in, however, the Egyptian rose from the water and started shooting wildly into the air.

Warren, standing in the open door, took a bullet in the throat and fell back against Serena, dead. She struggled to push his heavy body off her and called for help. But when she looked over her shoulder, she saw one of the Americans, also hit, falling backward. As he went down, his machine gun raked the cockpit with bullets. Serena heard the pilot cry out.

The Black Hawk lurched forward, and Serena grabbed at a strut for support. Then the chopper lifted violently, and she was thrown out through the open door. She felt herself falling through space. Then she splashed onto the top of P4.

She rolled onto her back and looked up. The Black Hawk bucked twenty or thirty feet up in the air, veered sharply to the left, and exploded in a great ball of fire. Burning debris scattered like shrapnel, destroying any hopes she had for escape.

Soaked to the bone and waist-deep in water, she stood up and faced the wounded Egyptian. The lone remnant of Zawas’s army, blood spurting from his leg, pointed his unsteady AK-47

at her.

She didn’t bother to put her hands up as he approached her with a desperate expression on his face. Or was he looking at something over her shoulder?

She turned to see another military chopper sweep in, this one with U.N. markings. Its heavy machine guns exploded and bullets kicked up water along the P4 summit, hitting the Egyptian and driving him backward over the edge and into the water.