“Conrad, this isn’t about you and this isn’t about me. It’s about the world at large and the greater good. You have to consider other people.”
“I am considering them. This is an unprecedented development in human history. And I want to share it with the world.”
“No, you want to magnify the great name of Doctor Conrad Yeats,” she said. “To hell with the rest of the world. But why should you care? It’s the information about Earth that’s more important than the planet or its people. Isn’t that how it goes with you? You haven’t changed a bit.”
“If you’re referring to our relationship, you knew exactly what you were doing then, Miss High and Mighty. You just didn’t want to take responsibility for your actions.”
“I was pure as the driven snow, Conrad. But you pissed on me. Just like you’re going to piss on this planet.”
“Hey, it’s not like we actually did anything.”
“My point exactly,” she said. “But you didn’t do much to contradict the rumors, did you?”
“I am not the bad guy here.”
“Aren’t you?” she asked. “You’re nothing but a pawn of the United States, willing to betray everything you believe in about international cooperation and the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity to satisfy your selfish curiosity.”
“I don’t want to change the world,” he told her. “I just want to understand it. And this is our best shot yet to make sense of who we are and where we came from. You make it sound like the fruit of forbidden knowledge. One bite and we’ll all be cursed.”
“Maybe we already are, Conrad. Isn’t that what attracted you to me in the first place? I was your forbidden fruit. Just like these ruins you’ve found under the ice.”
“Try the other way around, Serena,” he said. “And my mind is made up.”
Serena nodded. “Then you might as well take me down with you.”
Conrad stared at her incredulously. The only reason he was here was because he was the world’s leading authority on megalithic architecture and the son of the general leading the expedition. Serena didn’t have a prayer. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“What happens when you come across some inscription down there?” she asked simply. “Who’s going to figure it out? You?”
Not only had he failed to extract any meaningful information from her, Conrad thought with a sinking feeling, but she also had directed their conversation to precisely this point. The point that Yeats had just predicted this would all come to. And somehow, Serena knew as much.
“Granted, I’m no linguist, but here and there I’ve picked up a thing or two.”
“Like a venereal disease?” she shot back. “For all you know, Conrad, the only reason you’re here is because they thought they couldn’t get me.”
The thing that bothered Conrad the most was that she said it with absolute humility. It wasn’t a boast, but a plausible probability. Then Conrad realized she was playing to the security camera near the ceiling. She had been talking to Yeats all along.
“You’re unbelievable, you know that?” he told her. “Absolutely unbelievable.”
She flashed him a warm smile that could melt the ice caps. “Would you have me any other way?”
U.S.S.
CONSTELLATION
, SOUTHERN OCEAN
“D
AMN
Y
EATS,”
cursed Admiral Hank Warren.
The short, powerfully built Warren scanned the blacked-out silhouettes of his carrier group’s battle formation with his binoculars from the bridge of the aircraft carrier U.S.S.
Constellation.
They were twenty miles off the coast of East Antarctica, and Warren’s mission was to keep his battle group undetected until further orders.
To that end, all radars and satellite sets were turned off. Only line-of-sight radios capable of millisecond-burst transmissions were allowed. Extra lookouts with binoculars were posted on deck to sweep the dawn’s horizon for enemy surface ship silhouettes and submarine periscope feathers.
The idea was to get the battle force in close to the coast without betraying their position and then strike at the enemy without warning. A diesel-powered carrier was good at that. But who the hell was the enemy down here? He and his battle force were freezing their asses trying to avoid detection, and the only enemy they were intimidating was the penguins.
Meanwhile, an unidentified aircraft using a U.S. Navy military frequency had placed a distress call before disappearing from radar. And if the crew of the
Constellation
heard it, then others had heard it too.
All he knew was that this had something to do with that crazy bastard Griffin Yeats, and that made him even more uneasy.
Way back when, Warren had done some time with the U.S. Naval
Support Task Force, Antarctica. It was his rescue team that found Yeats wandering in a stupor back in ’69 after forty-three days in the snow deserts, the sole survivor of a training mission for a Mars launch that never happened. The nut insisted on dragging three NASA supply containers with him even though the navy had its own. Not a care about the three bodies he left behind. Only later did Warren’s team learn that the containers Yeats dragged out with him were radioactive. But that’s the kind of man Yeats was, unconcerned with the havoc he wreaked in other people’s lives if they got in the way of his own agenda. When Warren filed a complaint, all he got was the “classified” and “need to know” bullshit.
Now, more than thirty-five years later and bearing the rank of admiral, Warren was still in the dark when it came to Yeats. And it frustrated him to no end. His crew had just picked up a short-burst distress call from what appeared to be some black ops flight calling itself 696, which apparently crashed on approach to some phantom landing strip. Yeats’s fingerprints were all over this debacle, and Warren was personally going to see to it that the man got the early retirement he deserved.
“Conn, Sonar,” shouted the sonar chief from his console.
“Conn, aye.” Warren had the conn for the morning watch. It was important for the crew to see him in command and even more important for him to feel in command.
“Lookouts report unknown surface vessel inbound at two-zero-six,” the sonar chief reported. “Range is under a thousand yards.”
“What!” the admiral blurted. “How the hell did we miss it?”
Warren lifted his binoculars and turned to the southwest. There. A ship. The letters across the bow said MV
Arctic Sunrise.
It was a Greenpeace ship, and on board was a guy pointing a video camera with a zoom lens at the
Constellation.
“Helmsman, get us out of here!”
“Too late, sir,” said a signalman. “They’ve marked us.”
The signalman pointed to a TV monitor.
“This is CNN, live from the
Arctic Sunrise
.” The reporter was broadcasting from the bow of the Greenpeace ship. “As you can see behind me, the U.S.S.
Constellation,
one of the mightiest warships ever made, is cruising off the coast of Antarctica, its mission shrouded
in secrecy. But first, CNN has captured on video large cracks in this Antarctic ice shelf, which suggest that the collapse of the shelf is imminent.”
A scruffy college type, the kind who wouldn’t last a week at Annapolis, came on-screen to say, “Scientists consider the rapid disintegration of this and other ice shelves around Antarctica a sign that dangerous warming is continuing.”
Footage appeared of an iceberg that had split off the coast a few weeks ago. The reporter’s voice-over noted that the towering ice cube covered two thousand square miles, with sheer walls rising almost two hundred feet above the waterline, and had an estimated depth of one thousand feet.
“And now a bizarre new twist to the global warming phenomenon has surfaced regarding accusations of unauthorized nuclear tests by the United States in the interior snow deserts of Antarctica.”
The CNN report concluded with a long shot of the
Constellation
’s ominous profile on the ocean horizon at dawn.
“Aw, hell,” said Warren. MSNBC and the other network news shows would soon give out the same information. It couldn’t get any worse. “Damn you, Griffin Yeats.”
S
ERENA SAT ON HER BUNK,
listening to the whirring of the two fans pumping air and God knew what else into the cold brig. She shivered. Images she had trained herself to suppress had resurfaced after seeing Conrad. Now, as she hugged her body to keep warm, the memory of their last time together came flooding back.
It had been March, six months after they first met at the symposium of Meso-American archaeologists in La Paz, Bolivia’s capital. She was still a nun then, and they were seeing each other almost daily, working side by side on a research project in the lost city of Tiahuanaco high in the Andes.
Conrad Yeats was intelligent, attractive, witty, and sensitive. He was almost more spiritual than her colleagues from Rome, and what attracted her to him most was the purity of his calling. Some found his unorthodox theory of a Mother Culture threatening, but to her it made a wild kind of sense, based on her own studies of world mythologies. She and Conrad were approaching the same conclusion from different ends, he from archaeology and she from linguistics.
On the last night of their field studies program he invited her to join him for a “revelation” on Lake Titicaca, about twelve miles away from Tiahuanaco.
It was a curious place for good-byes, she thought as she strolled the shore. Locals and tourists alike were bustling about and drinking beers at the lakeside taverns as the sun began to set.
Then a tanned and handsome Conrad showed up in an elegant reed boat, like some Tiahuanacan visage come to life. The boat came from the lake’s island of Suriqi. It was a fifteen-footer made from bundled totora rushes, wide amidships and narrow at either end with a high curving prow and stern. Tight cords held the bundles of reeds in place.
“Look familiar?” he asked as he beckoned her aboard. “Just like the boats made from papyrus reeds that the pharaohs used to sail the Nile during the Age of the Pyramids.”
“And I suppose, Doctor Yeats, that you can explain how these strikingly similar designs could arise in two such widely separated places?” she asked, playing along.
It was just one of the many mysteries of Lake Titicaca, he said in his best tour guide twang and offered to take her to the middle of the lake to show her his “revelation.”
She had a pretty good idea what that revelation was and smiled. “There’s nothing you can show me in the middle of the lake that you can’t show me here.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he told her.
She shouldn’t have gone with him. The sisters had a policy of traveling in pairs and never being alone with a man in a room with the door closed. It wasn’t out of fear or paranoia but for appearances’ sake. There must not be a hint of impropriety that would harm the cause of Christ.
But Conrad, as usual, was too persuasive to resist.
He paddled with long, powerful strokes and they glided across the silvery surface. At 12,500 feet above sea level, Lake Titicaca was the highest lake in the world, and it felt like it. Serena thought she could almost touch the heavens.
“Now the odd thing about this lake is that it’s located hundreds of miles from the Pacific, yet it contains ocean-variety fish, seahorses, crustacea, and marine fauna,” Conrad lectured with a wink.
“And you think it’s seawater from the Genesis flood?” Serena asked.
Conrad shrugged. “When the waters receded, some got dammed up here in the Andes.”
“I guess that explains the docks in Tiahuanaco.”
Conrad smiled. “Right. Why else would the ruins of a city twelve miles away have docks?”
“Unless it was once a port and the south end of this lake extended twelve miles and more than a hundred feet higher,” Serena concluded. “Which means civilization flourished here before the flood and Tiahuanaco is at least fifteen thousand years old.”
“Imagine that.”
She could. She wanted to. A world before the dawn of recorded history. What was it like? Were people really that much different from us today? she wondered. There must have been women like me back then, she thought, and men like Conrad. He had dropped his skeptical pose and opened up so beautifully out here. So different from his posture before the academics.
The night air was chilly, and Serena was huddled in the bow. Conrad paddled slowly. The twilight sky above was a magnificent turquoise blue, and the lake stretched on like glass for eternity.
For the longest time they were silent, gliding along the reeds with only the dip of Conrad’s paddle making soft lapping sounds like an ancient metronome. Then, when they were in the middle of the glistening waters, he pulled up his paddle and let them drift beneath the stars.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He produced a basket of food and wine. “Absolutely nothing at all.”
“Conrad,” she began, “I really should be getting back. The sisters will worry.”
“As well they should.”
He sat beside her and kissed her, then pushed her gently backward until she was lying down. He stroked her face and kissed her on the lips, and she shivered.
“Conrad, please.”
Their eyes locked, and she thought of his childhood pain, their connection, thought that if there was ever any man to do this with, any time of her life and any place on the planet, this was it.
“Tomorrow I go back to Arizona and you go back to Rome,” he whispered in her ear. “And we can remember our last night in Bolivia as the night that never happened.”
“You got that right,” she said, and pushed him overboard to a satisfying splash.
Inside his compartment, as he packed his gear for the impending descent to P4, Conrad, too, was thinking about that night with Serena on the reed boat.
He had always been in awe of her determination and courage. And her beauty was unmatched. Yet she wore it so effortlessly, as if she didn’t care whether she was seventeen or seventy. She was charming and self-effacing, even funny. But that night it had been her glimmering eyes, almost glowing under her dark hair, that had mesmerized him.
She told him she had always admired his purity and single-mindedness. He was what he was, she said, and not like herself—someone able to pretend to be what she was not. He wondered what dark secret she was about to confess but soon realized she had none. Her only sin was being an unwanted child.
It was then, for a fleeting moment, that he came closest to knowing her. For the first time he grasped her holy death wish and understood her drive to be a martyr, a saint, a woman who counted. If anything, he realized, her works of compassion were her way of avoiding intimacy. She feared being “found out” and thus not measuring up to her standards, much less God’s. She would do anything to avoid those feelings of not being needed, of feeling worthless, a “mistake” like her birth. But she didn’t fear that rejection from him. She knew he loved her.
And that’s how he knew she truly loved him.
He felt he had come to the end of his lifelong quest, had found the Temple of God. That he was a thief in the sacred shrine, taking what did not belong to him, only made the experience more exciting, dangerous, and satisfying than any relic or ancient artifact he had ever taken, before or since.
But he knew it was over when she pushed him off the reed boat and into the freezing waters of Lake Titicaca. When he climbed back on board, she wasn’t laughing. It hadn’t been a prank. Instead the fear had returned to her eyes.
Suddenly Conrad realized she was the one who had stolen something from him. “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
“Back to Tiahuanaco,” she said, “before anybody realizes I’m missing at breakfast.”
“Be a risk taker. Let’s enjoy what time we have.”
“I’m disappointed in you, Doctor Yeats,” she said, handing him the paddle. “I didn’t think you were the kind of man who took advantage of nuns.”
Conrad, a man with no small ego, was disappointed that she had spurned his advances. Worse, she was denying her own complicity. “And I didn’t think you were the kind of nun who cares what other people think.”
“I’m not,” she shot back.
She was right, of course. That much was obvious to anybody. But Conrad also sensed that what she was truly afraid of was her feelings for him, of losing control. And if Serena Serghetti could be defined as any kind of nun, she was most definitely the kind who made damn well sure she was always in control.
Their parting was not happy. She acted as if she had made a huge mistake and had potentially blown her whole future with their night together. In truth, however, she didn’t regret it for a minute. At least that’s what Conrad eventually concluded. What Serena feared was further intimacy. Like she had something to hide. Then he understood. It was herself. She had disappointed herself and as a result felt unworthy of him.
She was wrong, he knew, and he vowed to prove to her that she was worth something without the title of Sister and that he was worth the price of her sacrifice. But she would have none of it.
The last memory he had of her was standing at the shore, trying to kiss her good-bye, and watching her run to hail a cab. He waved to her, but she never looked back. He tried to reach her in Rome by phone a week later, and after months of unreturned calls, he even showed up at one of her conferences unannounced. Now she had become famous, throwing herself so fully into her work that he wondered if it was the unwanted child in her she wanted to forget, or him.
In any case, a private audience with Mother Earth, he soon
discovered, was about as probable as his discovering his beloved lost Mother Culture.
Until now.
The nun’s got titanium balls, Yeats thought as he reviewed Serghetti’s exchange with Conrad on a video monitor in the command center. I have to give her that. The pope knew exactly what he was doing when he sent her.
“How does she know so much, sir?” asked O’Dell, who was standing next to him.
“Moot point now,” said Yeats. “I doubt the Vatican wants her to talk. But for all we know, she’s right. Her presence may even be necessary for what’s ahead.”
“And your son, sir?”
Yeats looked at O’Dell. “What about him?”
“I’ve seen the DOD report.” O’Dell looked concerned. “Your boy’s been in therapy since kindergarten. Nightmares of cataclysmic doom. Visions of the end of the world. With all due respect, sir, he’s a lunatic.”
“So he had a traumatic childhood,” Yeats said, wishing O’Dell would put a lid on it. “Didn’t we all? Besides, the DOD doesn’t have his complete file. Trust me, I wrote it.”
Yeats was about to turn his attention back to the monitor when Lieutenant Lopez, one of his communications officers, walked up. Besides Sister Serghetti, young Lopez was the only other woman at Ice Base Orion.
“General Yeats,” she reported. “I think you better see this.”
Yeats followed her to the big screen and saw the U.S.S.
Constellation
on TV with a CNN logo in the lower right corner.
“Warren,” Yeats cursed under his breath. He stared at the intrepid Greenpeace vessel juxtaposed on-screen with the mighty
Constellation
. Goddamn that sausage in a sailor suit!
O’Dell said, “How did they know, sir?”
“Take a wild guess, Colonel.” Yeats pointed to Sister Serghetti in her cell on the little monitor. “She’s been stalling the whole time, waiting for the cavalry to arrive. It’s only a matter of time before an army of U.N. weapons inspectors comes knocking at our door.”
Which meant the insertion team had to be in and out of P4 before then, Yeats concluded, and he mentally began to make the calculations. P4 would have to be wiped clean of significant technology or data before any internationals reached the site.
“It gets worse, sir,” Lopez said. “McMurdo reports that Vostok Station intercepted our communications with Flight six-nine-six. They’ve already dispatched a UNACOM team.”
Yeats groaned. “I knew it. Who’s leading the team?”
“An Egyptian air force officer,” she said, handing him a report. “Colonel Ali Zawas.”
“Zawas?” Yeats looked at the photo of a handsome man in uniform with dark, thoughtful eyes and black wavy hair. “Holy shit.”
O’Dell said, “He wouldn’t be related to—”
“He’s the secretary-general’s nephew,” Yeats said. “And he’s a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy. Flew with the Allies during the first Gulf War and downed two Iraqi jets for us. Damned fine officer and gentleman.” Yeats handed the report back to Lopez. “What kind of backup does Zawas have, Lieutenant?”
“Well, there are the Russians at Vostok under the command of a Colonel Ivan Kovich. And the Aussies are offering support from Mawson Station.” She paused. “So are some of our own American scientists from Amundsen-Scott who have been kept out of the loop.”
“Damn it!” Yeats growled. “The whole world’s going to be here in a few hours.”
“Not with this storm kicking up again, sir,” O’Dell said. “ETA six hours. WX Ops says this thing is going to slam us hard. Might pin everybody down for three weeks.”
Yeats looked out the window. The skies had darkened. Snow pelted the glass like bullets. “The storm might stop the Aussies, but it will only slow down Zawas and his UNACOM team.” Yeats turned to O’Dell. “You hold off the barbarians here on the surface while I take the insertion team down to P4.”
O’Dell said, “And how am I going to explain holding Mother Earth against her will?”
“You won’t have to,” Yeats said. “I’m taking her with us. Now.”