Conrad replayed the footage on the flat display screen on the back of his camera. It glowed bright in the darkness.
“Stop,” said Yeats.
Conrad paused the screen. There was something in the center of the crater. A circle or hub of some sort.
“Can you zoom?”
“A little.”
Conrad, fingers tingling with adrenaline, magnified the image until it filled the display. But the picture was still too blurred to make it out clearly.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Conrad and Yeats marched in unison toward the center, careful not to lose their balance on the sloping floor. Conrad could feel his heart pounding. He’d never experienced any sort of chamber like this in Egypt or the Americas, nothing even remotely similar in size or configuration.
At the half-mile mark Yeats called a halt.
Conrad lowered his flashlight beam to the floor and found something about ten yards in front of them. Carved across the polished stone floor were four rings radiating from an oval cartouche in the center, like some magnificent seal.
Yeats let out a low whistle. “Finally, inscriptions for Mother Earth.”
“Not quite,” said Conrad, breathing hard. Part of him wanted to run back and get her. Another part refused to admit he couldn’t figure this out by himself. “It’s an icon or symbol.”
“Then even you should be able to decipher it.”
Conrad walked to the center of the floor, where a familiar-looking hieroglyphic was inscribed inside the oval cartouche. It was of a god or king seated inside some sort of mechanical device. He resembled a bearded Caucasian and wore what looked like an elaborate head ornament known as an Atef crown. And he held some sort of scepter in his hand. It looked like a small obelisk.
“This figure looks familiar,” Conrad heard himself saying, “but I can’t put my finger on why.”
Conrad looked again at the cartouche on the floor. The image inscribed inside was similar to the symbols he had seen depicting the gods of Viracocha in the Andes and Quetzalcoatl in Central America. But this otherworldly symbol awakened something primeval and terrifying inside him, and suddenly he knew why.
“This pyramid is dedicated to Osiris.” Conrad’s voice wavered.
“So what?” said Yeats. “I thought most of these pyramids were dedicated to some god.”
“You don’t understand,” Conrad said excitedly. “This seal suggests P4 was built by the King of Eternity himself, the Lord of First Time.”
“First Time?”
“The Genesis epoch I told you about back at Ice Base Orion, the time when humanity emerged from the primordial darkness and was offered the gifts of civilization from the gods,” Conrad said. “Ancient Egyptian texts say these gifts or technologies were introduced through intermediaries or lesser divinities known as ‘The Watchers’ or
Urshu.”
Yeats paused. “So you think the
Urshu
were the Atlanteans who built P4?”
“Maybe,” Conrad said. “I’m sure Serena has her own interpretation. But there’s no denying that we’ve found the mother lode.” Conrad could hear the triumph in his voice. “The Mother Culture.”
“First Time,” Yeats said.
“First Time,” Conrad echoed and spoke the phrase in his best Ancient Egyptian:
“Zep Tepi.”
As soon as the words fell out of his mouth, they seemed to swirl around the chamber, spinning out from the center of the crater floor like some centrifugal force. The floor started to shake.
Suddenly the cartouche split open and Conrad stumbled backward as a pillar of fire shot up from the floor and through a circular shaft in the ceiling.
“Whoa!” he shouted and slipped flat on his back. He started to slide across the bottom of the crater floor toward the fiery hole.
Yeats grabbed his arm and held him back. “Easy, easy, easy.”
Then the fire burst disappeared and the rumbling stopped. All that remained was a craterlike shaft where the cartouche had split open.
Conrad felt a tug as Yeats pulled him up on his feet. “Now where on earth do you think that goes, son?”
Conrad leaned over and peered down the fiery shaft. For a flickering second he glimpsed a glowing tunnel that seemed to descend to the very bowels of the earth. But the residual heat from the blast burned his forehead and he quickly pulled away.
“From the looks of it,” Conrad said, gingerly touching his forehead to see if it was still there, “I’d say the pit of hell.”
I
T WAS THE VODKA.
It had to be the vodka, Colonel Ivan Kovich swore, when he first beheld the pyramid at the bottom of the ice chasm. That or some experimental hallucinogenics the Americans had slipped into his drink at their base on the surface.
Whatever it was, he decided, it was part of an American plot to drive the Russian people insane. It had started with the imperialist capitalist bankrolling of the Communist revolution in 1917. It had moved into full gear with the installation of Stalin and the gulags, and then the slaughter of twenty million during World War II. It culminated in the humiliating disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 and rise of the golden arches of American hamburger stands in Moscow.
Now that the United States was the world’s undisputed superpower, Kovich was convinced, the Americans were simply keeping the Russians alive for their own cruel pleasure, starving their bodies of nutrients with Big Macs and their souls with TV shows like
Bay-watch.
It was from this hell that Kovich had sought refuge in the spare, unspoiled beauty of Antarctica, only to stumble across a veritable Four Seasons Resort in the snow in the form of Ice Base Orion. With state-of-the-art computers, plush sleeping quarters, toilets that flushed, and a stockpile of food, the only thing lacking was a swimming pool and health spa.
The concierge of Hotel Orion, Colonel O’Dell, was pleasant enough during the inspection. But the American grew increasingly nervous when Russian dosimeters detected radiation, and Kovich suggested a survey of the gigantic ice chasm over which the base was perched.
Kovich was convinced he was on the verge of discovering a rogue nuclear testing facility, mostly because Russia itself had one at the other end of the planet in the Arctic Circle.
Only after reaching the bottom of the abyss and beholding the protruding summit of a pyramid did Kovich realize that the Americans had pushed him and his twenty Russian comrades over the brink. And how could he ever forget the horror on his men’s faces when they saw the hundreds of human bodies frozen in the walls of this ice tomb?
Truly their commanding officer had finally led them down to hell.
The shiny white exterior of the pyramid didn’t even show up on their radio-echo scans from a few feet away. It was obvious the Americans had developed a supersecret, indestructible stealth material that could render their fleets and bombers both invisible and invincible.
As if that were not enough, a message played in Kovich’s head over and over again: “Wait, there’s more!” the voice repeated, like some terrible American infomercial. “Much, much more!” As a special bonus at the bottom of hell, the Americans had left what looked like an RV parked atop the pyramid summit along with another hole that beckoned them farther.
Here at this “habitat” Kovich left the two American observers who had accompanied them down, along with five of his men. He and the rest of his team proceeded down the seven-foot-tall shaft and didn’t reach the other end for a good half hour.
They emerged inside what seemed to be a massive stone oven the size of an Olympic stadium. And inside this chamber were four American soldiers—two men and two women—who surrendered their weapons but refused to say a word.
As a final bonus, there seemed to be no way out of this tomb. When attempts to reach Vlad and the rest of the crew at Ice Base Orion on the surface failed, Kovich feared the worst.
He had been duped, he concluded. This was a trap. They had
been lured into this mass grave so they could be killed. Meanwhile, the Americans would monitor their slow descent into madness with hidden cameras and use the results in their training videos for new recruits.
Finally, one of his men found an open passageway.
Kovich left a few men to guard the Americans and took the rest down a low, square tunnel to a plateau overlooking what looked like a gigantic Moscow metro tunnel plunging toward the center of the earth. It was at least one hundred meters tall, he guessed, and could swallow Russia’s GUM retail mall, the biggest in the world. Running along its shiny walls and floor and ceiling were sunken channels about forty feet wide and twenty feet deep.
“Look, sir!” shouted one of his soldiers, pointing into the abyss. “There’s more!”
Peering over the ledge, Kovich could only rub his disbelieving eyes. For inside one of the channels were two lines daring him to descend even farther.
Something rose up inside Kovich’s bubbling psyche, bursting through the swirling images of fast food, bikinis, Ginsu knives, and self-improvement CDs. That something was the stark realization that he and his men were going to die. They would never make it back to the surface again.
With chilling clarity, Kovich made the last strategic decision of his life: if they weren’t leaving this tomb, then neither were the Americans.
I
NSIDE THE SUBTERRANEAN BOILER ROOM
beneath P4, Conrad applied a cold canteen to his scalded forehead as a dull glow from the shaft crept across the crater floor. Still smarting from the burn, he removed the canteen and noticed some singed eyebrow hairs clinging to the condensation on the outside.
“Things are certainly heating up,” Yeats was telling him. “We better move out before another blast fries both of us. Between frostbite on your hand and second-degree burns on your face, you’ve already got two strikes against you.”
“Let’s at least get a reading,” Conrad said. “You’ve got a remote heat sensor, don’t you?”
Yeats produced a small ball from his backpack. “The shell is made of the same stuff NASA uses on the outer tiles of the space shuttle,” Yeats said. “Stand back.”
Conrad watched Yeats toss it into the shaft. A minute later the numbers showed up on Yeats’s handheld computer. Conrad looked it over.
“Before your little heat-shielded sensor melted during its descent,” Conrad said, “it plunged four miles and recorded a temperature of almost nine thousand degrees Fahrenheit.”
“Mother of God,” Yeats said. “That’s as hot as the surface of the sun.”
“Or the molten core of the earth,” Conrad said. “I think this is a geothermal vent.”
“A geothermal vent?” Yeats narrowed his eyes. “Like the kind found in oceans?”
Conrad nodded. “One of my old professors discovered a hot spot like this west of Ecuador, about five hundred miles out in the water and eight thousand feet down,” he said. “There’s very little life at the bottom of the ocean because there’s no light and the temperatures are below freezing. But where there are cracks in the earth’s crust, the heat from the core escapes to warm the water. That’s how some forms of ocean life—earth-heated crabs, clams, ten-foot-long worms—survive down there.”
Conrad looked around. This geothermal chamber had to be the same kind of thing. The only question was whether the Atlanteans built P4 over an existing vent to harness its heat or possessed such advanced technology that they could tap Earth’s core—or any planet’s, for that matter—for unlimited power.
“According to Plato, Atlantis was destroyed by a great volcanic explosion,” Yeats said. “Maybe this was the cause of it.”
“Or maybe this is the legendary power source of Atlantis,” said Conrad. “The Atlanteans allegedly had harnessed the power of the sun. Most scientists naturally assumed this meant solar power. But this geothermal vent taps into Earth’s core—which is as hot as the surface of the sun. So this could be the so-called power of the sun that Atlantis possessed.”
“Could be,” said Yeats.
But Conrad could tell Yeats had another purpose in mind for P4, and it probably had little to do with its archaeological or even technological value. “You have another theory?”
Yeats nodded. “What you’re really saying is that P4 is essentially a giant geothermal machine that can channel heat from Earth’s core to melt the ice over Antarctica.”
Conrad grew very still. He hadn’t thought about it in terms quite so catastrophic. In his mind that kind of thinking was the domain of environmental alarmists like Serena. But a slow-growing angst crept over him as he remembered the bodies in the ice chasm above P4 and Hapgood’s earth-crust displacement theory. He hadn’t entertained the possibility that a natural disaster on the scale of a global shift of the earth’s crust—the culmination of a forty-one-thousand-
year-old geological cycle—could be triggered by design. Yeats, on the other hand, seemed to have given this scenario some serious thought. At the very least, Conrad had to agree that there was enough heat bottled up beneath P4 to melt so much ice that rising sea levels would certainly wipe out coastal cities on every continent.
“Yes, I suppose this machinery could warm Antarctica,” Conrad said slowly. “But to what end?”
“Maybe to make the continent or planet more habitable for their species,” Yeats went on. “Who the hell cares? The point is that there must be a control room somewhere, and we’ve got to find it. Before anybody else does.”
“Right,” Conrad said, wondering why he should be so surprised that Yeats was as practical a man as he was. “That would be the central chamber we’ve been looking for, the one with the two hidden celestial shafts.”
“Then let’s get the hell out of here and go for it,” Yeats said. “Before this thing goes off again—for real.”
As they made their way back up to the gallery, Conrad was haunted by fear that he had just done what he denied ever doing—destroyed the integrity of a find. Worse, he may have destroyed himself and others with it. He could almost hear the whispers that had haunted him his entire career now chasing him up the tunnel: “Tomb Raider”…“Raper of Virgin Digs”…“Conrad the Destroyer.” Now, more than ever, they had to get back to Serena, find P4’s secret chamber, and make sure this cosmic heat valve was shut off.
Upon reaching the fork at the bottom of the Great Gallery, Conrad wasn’t surprised to find three tunnels now instead of two.
“Now don’t tell me you saw that one before too,” Yeats said.
“No, it definitely wasn’t there before,” Conrad said. “Maybe something we did in the lower chamber opened a door.”
Conrad looked up the gallery toward the upper chamber and saw several figures rappeling down.
Yeats saw them too and gripped his arm. “Fall back,” he whispered. “That’s an order.”
They cut their headtorches and retreated to the new access tunnel, where they took cover on either side of the entry. Pressing his back against the wall, Conrad looked across at Yeats. His father’s
silhouette was blackened by the dim glow radiating out from the bottom of the gallery.
“Team Phoenix, copy,” Yeats spoke into his radio microphone. But there was no response. “Copy me, Team Phoenix.” Again, nothing. “Goddamn it.”
Conrad pulled out his nightscope and peered around the corner. Two figures dropped down onto the landing at the bottom of the gallery. Their green eyes—night-vision goggles—bobbed up and down in the dark. Conrad pulled back and looked at his father.
“Who are they?” Conrad whispered.
“Can’t say,” Yeats said. “But they sure as hell aren’t mine. Move.”
They started down the long, dark access tunnel. This corridor was thirty-five feet tall, but it felt much smaller after the grandeur of the Great Gallery they had descended. After about 1,200 feet due south, the floor sloped sharply into a larger tunnel with a ceiling twice as high.
“Over there.” Yeats pointed his flashlight beam to the floor.
About a hundred yards ahead was either a doorway or the end of the tunnel. It was hard to tell. But then Conrad felt a blast of air. He looked up and found a shaft in the ceiling of the tunnel. There was another one in the floor, angled at the same slope.
“That could be one of those two extra star shafts that lead into the secret chamber,” he said. “I think it cuts through this corridor. I’ll have to drop a line down to be sure.”
Yeats said, “I’m going to follow this corridor for another hundred yards or so to see what’s at the end. Then I’ll come back and you can tell me what you found.”
Conrad watched Yeats disappear while he uncoiled a line down the shaft. He was peering over the edge cautiously when he heard the scrape of a boot behind him and he swung around to see a pair of green eyes glowing in the passageway.
“And who the hell are you?” Conrad asked.
The figure in the night-vision goggles raised an AK-47 machine gun. “Your worst nightmare,” he said with a thick Russian accent and fingered his radio. “This is Leonid calling Colonel Kovich. I’ve captured an American.”
“The hell you have.” Conrad kicked the AK-47 out of Leonid’s hands and picked up the broken laser sight from the floor. Leonid
whipped out a Yarygin PY 9 mm Grach pistol just as Conrad painted his forehead with a red dot from the laser sight. Conrad hoped Leonid couldn’t see there was no gun attached to it. “Drop it. Now.”
The Russian dropped his gun and Conrad exhaled.
“Very good.”
A bone-handled hunter’s knife slid out of the Russian’s right sleeve and dropped into the palm of his hand. There was a click as his thumb found the button, and his arm swept up, the blade streaking for the soft flesh beneath Conrad’s chin.
Conrad, anticipating such a move the second he heard the click of the knife, blocked the arm and grabbed for the wrist with both hands, twisting it so that the Russian dropped the knife and cried out in pain. Conrad wrenched the arm around and up, still keeping that excruciating hold in place. This time the Russian screamed as muscles tore, and Conrad ran him headfirst into the wall and then plunged him into the floor shaft.
Conrad was peering into the darkness below when he heard footsteps. He grabbed the Russian’s AK-47 from the floor and looked up to see Yeats running toward him.
“Dead end,” Yeats said. “What the hell happened here?”
Conrad was about to tell him when he felt a yank at his ankle. He looked down and saw his nylon line tightening like a noose around his boot, realizing a second too late that the Russian had somehow snagged it on his way down and was taking Conrad with him.
“Hold this!” Conrad tossed Yeats the other end of the line as he plunged down the shaft in the tunnel floor. “Don’t let go!”
Tumbling through the darkness, Conrad struggled to clip his line to his harness. He could sense himself falling through one level after another, with no end in sight. He tensed up as he braced himself for something to break his fall.
Soon the line around his boot slacked off while the line around his harness stiffened. Finally, he burst into some large space. His line snapped tight and caught him in midair. He dangled helplessly.
“Dad!” he called. “Can you hear me?”
There was nothing at first, then the faintest, “Barely!”
Conrad fingered his belt for a flashlight and switched it on. The shock of what he saw took a few seconds to sink in.
He was swinging like a pendulum inside a magnificent chamber in the shape of a geodesic dome. His fingers tingled with adrenaline as he scanned the ceiling with his beam. The apex of the dome was about two hundred feet above him. Scattered across the four merging walls were numerous constellations. It looked like some kind of cosmic observatory.
He lowered his beam. Some kind of altar with a two-foot-tall obelisk in the center rose from the stone floor. And impaled on it was the Russian.
“Dad!” Conrad shouted. “I found it!”