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.”
F
ROM HIS PERCH
near the 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.”
For Conrad, the objective was clear: he had to map the city and find its Shrine of the First Sun, which was clearly a memorial to the epoch of First Time. Inside the shrine would be the Seat of Osiris, just like the one on the royal seal he had seen. If he could bring the scepter from the star chamber into the shrine and sit in the Seat of Osiris he would unlock the Secret of First Time—surely the “time and place of the most worthy.”
Holding his camera up, Conrad panned to his right and to his left,
up to the sky and down to the ground. Then he zoomed in on various structures, starting with the Sphinx-like landmark in the east and working his way toward the step-pyramid with the waterfalls in the west.
Satisfied he had captured everything he could, he replayed some of the images on the viewfinder screen to make sure once again that he wasn’t dreaming. As he did, however, he saw a dot moving across the ground. It was over by the great waterway that cut through the heart of the city.
Heart surging with fear and excitement, Conrad pointed the camera in the dot’s direction, slowly boosting the magnification. There it was, a blurry image, definitely moving. No, there were two blurry figures. He focused further. Suddenly the first one jumped into view.
It was Nimrod, the husky from Ice Base Orion. And walking beside him was Serena. A few moments later the dog dropped in his tracks and a dozen figures surrounded Serena before a chopper landed next to the group. The encounter did not look friendly.
Conrad lowered his camera only to see a swarm of military choppers buzz overhead. Before he could wave, a burst of machine gun fire came his way, raking the side of the pyramid.
He slid down the shaft as fast as he could to the star chamber, which was completely empty. Serena was gone, Yeats’s pack was gone, and the sequence of doors leading out to the gallery was wide open.
Something rattled overhead, and as Conrad looked up the shaft he had just slid down, a smoking canister dropped to the floor. Conrad’s eyes started to burn and he realized it was tear gas. He ran out of the chamber.
Once at the fork at the bottom of the gallery, he looked down the tunnel Serena must have taken to P4’s entrance. A dozen pairs of glowing green eyes were coming his way. His only choice was to drop down the shaft toward the boiler room. He landed in a torrent of water washing down the subterranean channel away from P4.
He was racing down the channel now, caught in a current of such power that there was nothing he could do except keep his head above water. What the hell had he gotten himself into now? he wondered. Then he saw the mouth of a tunnel closing in on him, and a second later he was swallowed up by the darkness.
Deep beneath the ancient city, Conrad splashed in the darkness,
gasping for air as he was swept through the underground canals. The freezing water disoriented him, and all he could hear were furious sucking sounds all around.
He bounced off a wall and spun in circles as the canal merged with another, larger tunnel. The overwhelming push of the new stream churned the raging river into a whirlpool. He glanced over his shoulder as a white curl of foam bore down on him in the darkness. He thought it would kill him, but instead the wave lifted him over a stone bank to a walkway.
Out of the water, he paused to catch his breath when another wave flooded in, the water grasping at his knees, trying to suck him back in. But it receded quickly and he was up on his feet, moving down the walkway. A cursory glance told him this tunnel was at least twice as high as those inside P4.
As he made his way through the labyrinth that crisscrossed beneath the city, Conrad was both awed and angered by the extent of the builders’ subterranean infrastructure. He could spend an eternity studying this city, he thought, and if he didn’t find a way out of here very soon he just might.
He also was angry at Serena, another one of life’s mysteries he’d felt he would never understand. She obviously didn’t trust him. Why else would she have left him back at P4 to venture off on her own? She had gone into her survivor mode and for all he knew considered him the enemy. And yet he was anxious about her safety after witnessing her capture.
A few minutes later he came to a fork in the tunnel and stopped. Two smaller aqueducts, each about forty feet high and twenty feet wide, presented themselves. Then he heard a faint rumble coming from the right aqueduct. He stared into the darkness and saw a glimmer of light. It was growing larger as the rumble grew louder. It was another surge of water coming down the pike, and in a few seconds the force would slam him against the tunnel walls and kill him.
His only way out, he realized, was to run into the left aqueduct. He dove in before a wall of water from the right pipe flooded the larger tunnel. From inside the left aqueduct, knee-deep in water, he watched the deluge roar for a full three minutes before it emptied itself out.
When it was over, he realized he was shaking. Too close, he thought as he rose to his feet. He took his first step down the aqueduct when he heard a distant splash. For a second he expected another torrent of water to wipe him out. But none came. He cocked his ear. This splashing had a rhythm to it.
He peered into the darkness. Someone in the distance was walking toward him. More than one, actually, because now he could hear the coarse murmur of conversation growing louder. They were speaking Arabic.
Conrad took a step back toward the large tunnel. The splash of his boot was louder than he intended. He froze. For a second he heard nothing. Then the sound of splashing footsteps picked up its pace.
“Stop!” called one of the figures in English.
Conrad glanced over his shoulder to see two pairs of glowing green eyes bobbing in the blackness. He ran back into the large tunnel. Then a shot rang out and he ducked as a bullet ricocheted off a wall. He froze at the fork before the two aqueducts. Slowly he turned around and saw the red dot on his chest. No, two dots.
Conrad grew very still as the pair emerged from the left aqueduct in night-vision goggles. They were wearing UNACOM uniforms, their AK-47s still trained on his chest. But these didn’t look like U.N. weapons inspectors to him.
“Radio Zawas, Abdul,” said the one on the right.
The one called Abdul tried to make the call but only got static. “We have to surface,” he said, sounding frustrated. “These walls are blocking the signal.”
Abdul’s partner started toward Conrad when another rumble began in the distance. Conrad edged toward the right aqueduct.
“Stop!” Abdul demanded. “Where do you think you are going?”
“To the surface like you said,” Conrad replied without looking back. As he approached the mouth of the right aqueduct he could feel a cool wet breeze on his face. The distant roar grew louder. Then a bullet whizzed past his ear and he stopped and turned around.
Abdul and his companion were almost twenty yards away in the large tunnel, staring beyond him with growing curiosity. They were saying something, but the rumble from behind was too loud for Conrad to hear them. Then, just as Conrad could feel the first drops of
water spraying his back, he saw them lower their weapons and start running away.
Conrad dove into the left tunnel as a wall of water blasted out of the aqueduct behind him and flushed the soldiers away. And then the mighty flow thinned into a tiny stream, as if some automatic timer had turned off the faucet. They were gone.
Conrad stood still, listening to the trickle of water and his heavy breathing, when he heard a splash from behind. He spun around and saw a hulking figure walking toward him in the dark, growing larger and more menacing until he emerged from the shadows and ripped off his night goggles.
“I’ve been looking for you,” said Yeats.
“Dad!” Conrad wanted to throw his arms around his father.
But Yeats instead bent down and picked up something shiny floating in the water. Conrad could see it was an Egyptian ankh from the neck of one of the soldiers. The crosslike necklace with a circle at the top was a symbol of life, but it meant little to the dead soldier now. Yeats held the ankh up to the light of his headtorch.
“At least you’re starting to screw things up for somebody else now, Conrad,” he said.
S
ERENA FELT HOT AND UNCOMFORTABLE
inside the Z-9A jet helicopter as it jerked haphazardly across the plateau. The Egyptian pilot was having some trouble keeping the overloaded chopper steady, and each dip brought spews of profanity from the UNACOM soldiers in back. Meanwhile, Jamil’s stench was offensive in the cramped space. She could feel his cruel eyes fixed on her breasts with each lurch of the chopper.
“You are enjoying the ride, no?” he asked in Arabic.
“Not so much as you,” she said. “Maybe if your pilot lets me take the stick.”
Jamil looked at her, eyes burning with rage. “You dare talk back to me?”
She said nothing. She focused on the spectacular views of the city and waterways below, wondering what had happened to Conrad and who these UNACOM soldiers really were and what they wanted.
She had known that Colonel Ali Zawas was in Antarctica on behalf of the United Nations, and these men clearly reported to him and were no doubt taking her to him now. Perhaps their UNACOM assignments were merely covers to position themselves. Perhaps these soldiers had been lying in wait all along to relieve the Americans of whatever they found beneath the ice. Jamil seemed to know about the Scepter of Osiris. How?
The few answers she had gleaned thus far were grim: the Americans at Ice Base Orion were dead, along with the Russian weapons
inspectors, and now Zawas and his arsenal controlled the city, until American reinforcements arrived. By then, however, it would be too late to stop Zawas from accomplishing his mission, whatever that might be, much less the impending worldwide geological cataclysm.
The chopper banked right, and in a flash she saw the great water channel below and beyond it, at the end of an acropolis, a gigantic step-pyramid looming like a dark fortress. The Temple of the Water Bearer is how Jamil referred to it as he spoke to the pilot, and indeed it lived up to its name. Two Niagara-like waterfalls tumbled down its sides, and some sort of encampment was set up in the promontory in between.
They descended along the temple’s flattened eastern face between the two huge waterfalls and touched down on a landing pad on the promontory below. Those waterfalls, Serena realized as the door slid open and the soldiers emptied out, had been responsible for the low rumble she had been hearing ever since she emerged from P4 into the city. It was the power of those vibrations that made her feel uneasy and provided a constant sense of foreboding.
She climbed out and surveyed her surroundings. Two ramparts of narrow steps wound to the ground on either side. In the center sat crates of equipment. In back was an iron gate, before some sort of entrance to the temple. Meanwhile, a tower and antiaircraft gun stood atop the summit overhead. There must have been a second helipad up there, because she could make out the blades of another chopper hanging over the side. She looked over the ledge. Down below were dune buggies, and even a Navy SEAL–type of rubber raft with an outboard motor tied at the base of the falls. Whoever these people were, they were well financed and well prepared.
The makeshift iron gate opened, and a man sauntered across the promontory. Like the other soldiers, he wore a camouflaged United Nations uniform. The only difference was that he was bareheaded and wore no badges or rank, yet she recognized him immediately.
He was Colonel Ali Zawas, an Egyptian air force colonel and scion of Egypt’s most prominent family of diplomats. He was born and raised in New York City until he graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy and moved back to Cairo. More American than Egyptian. She had seen him several times before at the United
Nations, once at the American University in Cairo. But he was always in dress uniform at formal functions, not in the menacing field fatigues he now sported. He also normally had dark, wavy hair, which was now shaved off.
Zawas paused in the center of the promontory before the group of soldiers. Jamil moved in smartly and saluted. Zawas waved it off. He was a handsome man with deep-set eyes. There was a brief exchange in Arabic. Serena couldn’t quite catch all of it, but the contempt on Zawas’s face was enough.
His eyes traveled over the men casually, and fixed on her. He stood there staring at her in the silence, then said something to Jamil, who walked over, grabbed Serena by the arm, and propelled her in front of him. She fought to control the panic that surged inside her, for fear would not help her now, and schooled herself to play it cool.
She kept her head down, but Zawas lifted her chin, and she looked into the dark eyes. “If you’re an Atlantean,” he said in English, “then this is indeed paradise. But I take it you are an American.”
She shook her head and said in a low voice, “No, Colonel, I’m from Rome.”
It took a moment for her Australian accent to register, and then she saw the shock of recognition. Then a broad, genuine smile crossed his face. “Sister Serghetti, it is you,” he said. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“It’s Doctor Serghetti, Colonel, and I was going to ask you the same question,” she said, looking around at his troops. “You don’t really expect me to believe you are acting on behalf of the United Nations?”
Zawas smiled. She realized he was amused that she was the one demanding answers. “Consider us representatives of certain Arab oil producers who have the most to lose from the discovery of alternative energy sources.” He took her arm and said casually over his shoulder, “Get to work, Jamil.”
Jamil gave them enough time to get clear then shouted something unintelligible that was drowned out in the immediate uproar as the soldiers began to break out equipment. Drills, seismic meters, metal detectors, explosives.
They reached the steps leading up to the iron gate and the
entrance to the temple, and Zawas paused, turning to look at her, a slightly quizzical frown on his face.
“I didn’t recognize you at first,” he told her. “It’s been so long, and you’re usually not so dirty on those magazine covers.”
“Sorry to have disappointed you.”
“Not at all. I find it quite becoming.”
She studied him closely. Handsome, shrewd, even gentle if he wanted to be, she was sure of that.
“And why is that?”
“It brings you down to earth.” He smiled faintly, opened the front gate, and led her inside.
The chamber was sparsely furnished. Table, chairs, computers, a cot. As he closed the door, he took her backpack from her and dropped it on a chair.
“Please, sit down.”
He politely pulled out a chair for her, and she sat down. He seated himself on the opposite side of the table.
She wasted no time. “So that’s what you think you’ll find down here?” she asked him. “An alternative energy source?”
“Not just any source, Doctor Serghetti, but
the
source,” he told her. “The legendary power of the sun itself that the Atlanteans are said to have harnessed. What else did you think General Yeats and Doctor Yeats were after?”
Serena couldn’t say, her eyes involuntarily glancing at her pack on the chair. She considered the blueprints of the obelisk that she had hidden inside her thermos. What she really wanted to know was why Zawas seemed to believe Antarctica was Atlantis, let alone that there was some all-powerful “source” behind its power.
“So you’re here because you’re just as power hungry as the rest of them,” she said. “That’s not your reputation at the United Nations.”
“On the contrary,” he said. “I’m concerned that faltering economies in the Middle East will permit increasingly influential mullahs to sow unrest and seize power. That I must use animals like Jamil to stop the rest of his kind is but one of geopolitics’ many ironies.”
“I’ve got it all wrong then,” she said. “You’re not a terrorist. You’re really a patriot who’s simply been misunderstood.”
“You worry too much about the souls of men like me and Doctor
Yeats,” he said. “Oh, yes, I know all about him. More than you even, perhaps. If he’s still alive, we’ll find him. You, however, should be asking yourself why you’re down here. Clearly, it’s not to protect the environment, which as you can see has altered significantly since your arrival.”
“All right then,” she said, folding her arms. “Tell me why I’m here.”
“You’re here because I sent for you.”
Her mouth went dry. “You sent for me?”
“Well, maybe not you exactly, but somebody like you,” Zawas said. “I knew I would need a translator to help me find the Shrine of the First Sun. Why else do you think I tipped off the Vatican about Yeats’s expedition?”
Serena’s heart skipped a beat. What was Zawas implying? What did he know that she didn’t? “Just what exactly do you want me to translate?”
“A map.”
Zawas unrolled an old parchment across the table.
Serena looked at it and realized it was a map of the city. The inscriptions were some sort of pre-Egyptian hieroglyphics. She could see the Temple of the Water Bearer clearly marked, along with other pavilions. It was a terrestrial map that mirrored the celestial map Conrad recognized from the Scepter.
“We found it some years ago in a secret chamber beneath the Great Sphinx at Giza,” Zawas said. “Drawn by the ancient Egyptian priest Sonchis, the primary source for Plato’s story of Atlantis. Of course, we had no way of knowing whether the map depicted a real place, let alone its location, until the American discovery of P4 in Antarctica.”
She said, “So how did the Americans know the location of P4?”
“They didn’t, as far as I know,” Zawas said. “It was the seismic activity that brought them to East Antarctica. Only after they found something under the ice was the Vatican brought on board.”
“The Vatican?” Serena arched an eyebrow. “I don’t think so.”
“The Vatican has its own map of Atlantis,” Zawas said. “It originally had been stored in the Library of Alexandria during the time of Alexander the Great. Then the Romans stole it during their
occupation of Egypt. Later, after the fall of the Roman Empire, it was moved to Constantinople. When Constantinople was sacked during the Fourth Crusade, the map was smuggled to Venice. There it was rediscovered in the seventeenth century by a Jesuit priest.”
Serena felt shaky, the fury building inside her. But was she angry at Zawas for telling her this, or at the pope for telling her nothing? “I don’t believe you.”
“Why else would Rome be so eager to send you?” Zawas asked. “You didn’t really think it was to save the virginal ecosystem of Antarctica?”
“Then what for?” she asked.
“Surely it was to protect itself, its power. The Church is no more noble than the secular, imperialist American republic. It fears any sort of real divine revelation that might undermine its influence in the course of human events. And that’s what this is, Doctor Serghetti. Something older than Islam, Christianity, and even Judaism. Your superiors have every reason to be scared. And you have no reason to trust them or anybody else—only the man who bothered to tell you the truth. So come now, you will help me find the Shrine of the First Sun which contains the source.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Suffer like the rest of the world,” he replied.
“The rest?”
“Ah, you haven’t heard the news,” he told her. “McMurdo Station has lost its ice runway. And the U.S. carrier group off the continent is recovering from that tidal wave and is running at half power. My intelligence tells me American forces are at least sixteen hours away. Until they get here, I am the ultimate power in Atlantis.”
“And when they do get here?”
“It will be too late.” Zawas’s dark eyes flashed with determination. “I will have captured the technology housed in the Shrine of the First Sun, and the world’s balance of power will be shifted. The United States will be wiped out, a victim of the earth-crust displacement it unleashed itself. Atlantis, on the other hand, will be ours.”
“You’re a fortune-teller too?”
“It’s our destiny.” He leaned forward and smiled. “You see, Doctor Serghetti, this is my people’s Promised Land.”