Raising Atlantis (6 page)

“It has Sonchis’s name on it,” the pope said. “But the rest of the writing is pre-Minoan.”

She said, “Give me a few weeks and—”

“I was hoping you could decode it on the way to Antarctica,” the pope said. “I have a private jet fueling up on the runway for your journey.”

“My journey?” Serena said. “You said it yourself, Your Holiness. This city, if it truly exists, is buried under two miles of ice. It might as well be on Mars.”

“The Americans have found it,” the pope insisted. “Now you must find them. Before it is too late.”

The pope placed one hand on the terrestrial globe to his right and the other on the celestial globe to his left.

“These globes were painted by Dutch master cartographer Willem Bleau in 1648,” he said. “At the time they, too, displayed the ‘modern world.’ Unfortunately, they depict an entirely wrong version of the planet and the heavens. Look, California is an island.”

She looked at the terrestrial globe and saw monsters in the sea. “I’m familiar with Bleau’s work, Your Holiness.”

“What everybody once thought was true is false,” he replied. “A warning that the way we see the world today will probably look equally wrong a few centuries hence. Or a few days.”

“A few days?” Serena repeated. “Your prophecy is to be fulfilled within a few days and you have not revealed it to the Church?”

“There are bitter spiritual, political, and military implications, Sister Serghetti,” the pope said, continuing to address her as a nun, a member of the family, and not an outsider. “Just consider what would happen should moral anarchy reign on Earth because humanity has cast aside the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

“I have, Your Holiness, and that day came a long time ago to the rest of the world outside Rome.”

The pope said nothing for an uncomfortable minute.

Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “Have you ever wondered why you chose to join such a secure and predictable surrogate family as the Church?”

Serena remained silent. It was a question she took pains to avoid asking herself. The truth was that despite her public differences with it, she believed the Church was the hope of humanity, the only institution that kept an amoral world from spinning out of control.

“Perhaps because as a nun you felt it would be easy for you to be right with God,” the pope said. “Perhaps because you desperately needed to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you were acceptable to him.”

The pope was probing so close to the truth that it was almost too unbearable for Serena to remain in the room. She wanted to run away and hide.

“It’s not by my good deeds but by God’s mercy through Christ’s atoning death on the cross that my immortal soul is saved, Your Holiness.”

“My point exactly,” the pope said. “What more do you hope to add?”

Serena could feel the emptiness inside her like a dull ache. She had no answer for the pope but wanted to say something, anything. “Banishing me to Antarctica to expose the Americans isn’t going to—”

“Finally make you worthy of your calling as Mother Earth?” The pope looked at her like a father would his daughter. “Sister Serghetti, I want you to go to nature’s

‘last wilderness’ and find God—away from all this.” He gestured to the books and maps and works of art. “Just you and the Creator of the universe. And Doctor Yeats.”

4

Discovery

Plus Twenty-Three Days,

Six Hours

Ice Base Orion

THE COMMAND CENTER OFICEBASEORIONwas a low-ceilinged module crammed with consoles and crew members watching their flickering monitors in the shadows. But to Major General Griffin Yeats it was a triumph of Air Force logistics, erected in less than three weeks in the most alien terrain on planet Earth.

“Thirty seconds, General Yeats,” said Colonel O’Dell, Yeats’s neckless executive officer, from the shadows of his glowing console.

An image of Antarctica hovered on the main screen. The ice-covered continent was an eerie blue from the vantage point of space, a great island surrounded by a world ocean and an outer ring of landmass, the navel of the Earth.

Yeats stared at the screen incredulously. He had seen that very picture of the Southern Hemisphere once before, from the window of an Apollo spacecraft. That was almost a lifetime ago. Still, some things never changed, and a sense of awe washed over him.

“Satellite in range in fifteen seconds, sir,” O’Dell said.

The video image blurred for a moment. Then a gigantic storm cloud jumped into view. Yeats saw what looked like the legs of a spider swirling clockwise around Antarctica. There were twelve of these legs or “strings of pearls”—low-pressure fronts endemic to the region.

“That’s one hell of a storm,” Yeats said. “Give me the specs.”

“Looks like we’ve got four separate storms merging into a double-low, sir,” O’Dell reported. “Almost four thousand miles wide. Big enough to cover the entire United States.”

Yeats nodded. “I want the runway cleared again.”

The room got quiet, only the low hum and soft beeps of the computers and monitors. Yeats was aware of the stares of his officers.

O’Dell cleared his throat. “Sir, we should warn six-nine-six.”

“Negative. I want radio blackout.”

“But, sir, your—Doctor Yeats is on board.”

“We’ve got forty men on that transport, Colonel. And a fine pilot in Commander Lundstrom. No transmissions. Buzz me on their approach.”

“Yes, sir,” said O’Dell with a salute as Yeats marched out of the command center.

The floor-to-ceiling window in General Yeats’s quarters framed the yawning ice gorge outside, offering him a skybox seat of the excavation. Pillars of bluish, crystal plumes billowed out of the abyss. And at the bottom was everything he and Conrad had been searching for.

Yeats poured himself a Jack Daniel’s and sat down behind his desk. He hurt like hell and wanted to howl like the katabatic winds outside. But he couldn’t afford to let O’Dell or the others see him at less than his best.

He propped his right boot on the desk and pulled his pant leg back to reveal a scarred and disfigured limb, his parting gift from his first mission to this frozen hell more than thirty-five years ago. The pain throbbed a few inches below the knee. Goddamn tricks the cold played on him down here.

But damn if it didn’t feel good to be in charge again, he thought, catching a dim reflection of himself in the reinforced plexiglass window. Even now, in his sixties, he still cut a commanding figure. Most of the baby faces on the base had no idea who he used to be way back when. Or, rather, who he was supposed to have been.

Griffin Yeats should have been the first man on Mars.

TheGemini andApollo space veteran had been tapped for the job in 1968. The Mars shuttle, as originally formulated by rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun in 1953 and later revised by NASA planners, was scheduled to depart the American space station Freedom on November 12, 1981, reach the red planet on August 9, 1982, and return to Earth one year later.

If only politics were as predictable as the orbit of the planets.

By 1969 the war in Vietnam had sapped the federal budget, and the moon landing had temporarily satiated Americans’

appetite for space exploration. With congressional opposition to the mission mounting, President Nixon rejected the Mars mission and space station program. Only the space shuttle would get the green light. It was a catastrophic decision that set the Mars program back for decades, left the space shuttle all dressed up with no place to go, and cast a rudderless NASA adrift in the political backwaters of Washington without a clear vision.

It also killed Yeats’s dreams of greatness.

The desk console buzzed and broke Yeats’s trance. It was O’Dell in the command center. “Sir, we think we’ve picked them up on radar. Twenty minutes to landing.”

“Where are we with the runway?”

“Clearing it now, sir, but the storm—”

“No excuses, Colonel. I’ll be there in a minute. You better have an update.”

Yeats took another shot of whiskey and stared outside. At the time Nixon decided to scrap the Mars mission, Yeats was here in Antarctica, in the middle of a forty-day stay in a habitat specifically designed to simulate the first Martian landing. They were a crew of four supported by two Mars landing modules, a nuclear power plant, and a rover for exploring the surrounding territory.

Antarctica was as cold as Mars, and nearly as windy. Its snowstorms packed the same kind of punch as Martian dust storms. Most of all, the continent was almost as remote as the red planet, and in utter isolation a crew member’s true character would reveal itself.

For Yeats it was an experience that would forever change his life, in ways he never imagined. Four men walked into that mission. Only one limped out alive. But to what? To roam the subbasement corridors of the Pentagon as a creaky relic of the old space program? To raise an orphaned boy? To lose his wife and daughters as a result? Everything had been taken away from him.

Today he was taking it back.

5

Discovery

Plus Twenty-Three Days

IT WAS FREEZING IN THE FUSELAGEof the C-141 Starlifter transport when Conrad woke with a start. Groggy and sore, he rubbed his eyes. He was strapped in with two dozen Special Forces commandos sporting polar freezer suits and insulated M-16s.

He felt another jolt. For most of the flight they had soared through clear skies and over endless white. But now they were floating in some murky soup, and the turbulence grew worse by the second. The giant cargo containers in the rear shifted, straining their creaky tiedowns with each shock.

Conrad glanced at his multisensor GPS watch, which used a network of twenty-seven satellites to pinpoint his location anywhere on the globe and was accurate to within a hundred feet. But the past sixteen hours aboard various military craft must have chewed up the lithium batteries, because the longitudinal and latitudinal display was blanked out. The built-in compass, however, spun wildly—NE, SE, SW, NW. They must be nearing a polar region, he realized, most likely the South Pole.

He turned to the stone-faced commando sitting next to him and shouted above the whine of the turboprop engines, “I thought military personnel were banned from Antarctica.”

The commando checked his M-16, stared ahead, and replied,

“What military personnel, sir?”

Conrad groaned. This was precisely the sort of bullshit he had to put up with his entire life as the son of Griffin Yeats, a washed-out NASA astronaut who had somehow managed to march through the shadowy corridors of power at the Pentagon to become an Air Force general. Yeats firmly believed that truth should be divulged strictly on a “need to know” basis, starting with the circumstances surrounding Conrad’s birth.

According to Yeats’s official version of events, Conrad was allegedly the product of a one-night tryst between a Captain Rick Conrad and a nameless Daytona Beach stripper.

When Captain Conrad died in Antarctica during a training mission, the woman dropped off their bastard child at the doorstep of the Cape Canaveral infirmary. A short time later she herself died of a drug overdose. NASA, eager to maintain the squeaky clean image of its astronauts, was only too eager to cut the red tape and let Captain Conrad’s commanding officer and best friend, Major Griffin Yeats, adopt him.

Growing up, however, Conrad began to doubt the veracity of Yeats’s story. His stepmother, Denise, certainly did. From the beginning she suspected that Yeats was Conrad’s biological father and that he used Captain Conrad’s death as a convenient cover to explain the birth of his own illegitimate son. No wonder she divorced Yeats when Conrad was eight and moved away with her daughters, ages eleven and nine, the only friends Conrad had.

Finally, after years of base hopping and misery, Conrad had become enough of a rebel to have been tossed out of several schools and to confront Yeats. Not only did Yeats deny everything, but he refused to use his government contacts to help Conrad decisively identify his biological parents. That alone gave Conrad all the reason he needed to hate the man.

But by then it was obvious that General Yeats didn’t really seem to care what Conrad or anybody else thought of him. Despite his failed career as an astronaut, Yeats went from one promotion to another until he finally got his star, and with it command of the Pentagon’s mysterious Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Thanks to the financial backing of the Reagan administration throughout the 1980s, Yeats and his team of extremist military planners invented the Internet, the global positioning system, stealth technology, and the computer mouse, among “other things.”

This mission, Conrad concluded, no doubt fell into the latter category of “other things.” But what, specifically?

Conrad had long suspected that a fabulous discovery lay under the ice in Antarctica. After all, East Antarctica was an ancient continent and at one time tropical. Yeats had obviously found something and needed him. Or maybe this was merely a sorry attempt at some sort of father-son reconciliation.

Two big turbo jolts brought Conrad back to the freezing fuselage of the C-141. Without asking permission, he unbuckled his strap and stumbled toward the cockpit, grabbing an occasional strut in the fuselage for support.

The glass flight deck was deceptively bright and airy.

Conrad could see nothing but white beyond the windshield.

Lundstrom sat in the pilot’s seat, barking at his copilot and navigator. But the engines were whining so loudly that Conrad couldn’t catch what he said.

Conrad shouted, “Could I at least see this phenomenal discovery before you kill me?”

Lundstrom definitely looked annoyed when he glanced back at him over his shoulder. “Get back to your seat, Doctor Yeats. Everything’s under control.”

But the pilot’s eyes betrayed his anxiety, and suddenly Conrad knew where he had seen him before. Until four years ago, Conrad recalled, Lundstrom had been a space shuttle commander. His leather glove, now tightly gripped around the steering column, disguised a hand that had been badly burned and disfigured along with a third of his body in an explosion on the launch pad before his aborted third mission.