The Atlantis Legacy - A01-A02 (6 page)

The pope said nothing, and Serena knew in an instant that the Vatican was enlisting her help as a linguist and not as an environmentalist. All of which meant the Americans had found something in Antarctica. Something that would require the expertise of archaeologists and linguists. Something that had clearly rattled the Vatican. The only reason the pope was reaching out to her was because he had no other
choice. The Americans obviously weren’t consulting with him. But perhaps they should have, she suddenly realized.

“You have something to show me, don’t you, Your Holiness?”

“I do.” With gnarled fingers, the pope unfurled a copy of a medieval map across his desk. It was dated 1513. “This was discovered in the old Imperial Palace in Constantinople in 1929. It belonged to a Turkish admiral.”

“Admiral Piri Reis,” she said. “It’s the Piri Reis World Map.”

“You recognize it, then.” The pope nodded. “So you’ve undoubtedly seen this too.”

He passed across an old U.S. Air Force report. It was dated July 6, 1960, code-named Project Blue Book.

“No, I haven’t,” she said with interest, picking up the slim report. “Since when does the Vatican have access to classified American military intelligence?”

“This old report?” the pope said. “I’d hardly call it classified. But the addendum is.”

She thumbed through the pages, written by the chief of the cartographic section of Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts. The conclusion of Air Force officials was that the Antarctic portions of the Piri Reis World Map did accurately depict the Princess Martha Coast of Antarctica and the Palmer Peninsula.

Her eyes lingered on the last page, where Lieutenant Colonel Harold Z. Ohlmeyer of the Eighth Reconnaissance Technical Squadron wrote:

Then came the Pentagon addendum, dated 1970 and handwritten in bold strokes by USAF Colonel Griffin Yeats. She knew that this was
Conrad’s father, and it made the hair on her neck stand on end. The note said:

“Sonchis,” she repeated, closing the report.

“Any significance?”

“There was an Egyptian priest named Sonchis who allegedly provided Plato with his detailed account of Atlantis.”

“Admiral Reis’s map states it is based on even earlier source maps going back to the time of Alexander the Great.”

“You’re saying what exactly, Your Holiness?”

“Only an advanced, worldwide maritime culture that existed more than ten thousand years ago could have created these source maps.”

Serena blinked. “You believe that Antarctica is Atlantis?”

“And its secrets are buried under two miles of ice,” he said. “What we are dealing with is not just a lost ancient civilization, but the lost Mother Culture your friend Doctor Yeats has been searching for, one possessing scientific knowledge that we have yet to comprehend.”

“If this turns out to be real it will throw many things into question,” Serena replied, “including the Church’s interpretation of the Genesis account in the Bible.”

“Or uphold it,” the pope said, although he didn’t sound hopeful. “But should that be the case, we are all the worse for it.”

“You’ve lost me, Your Holiness.”

“God has shown me a prophecy about the end of time,” he said. “But I have not revealed it to the Church because it is too terrible to contemplate.”

Serena sat on the edge of her seat. Her usual concerns aside, this pope certainly seemed to have control of his senses and be of sound mind. “What did you see, Your Holiness?”

“I saw a beautiful rose frozen in ice,” the pope said. “And then the ice cracked, and out of the crack came fire and a war waged by the sons of God against the Church and all mankind. In the
end the ice melted and tears rolled off the petals of the rose.”

Serena recalled the sixth chapter of Genesis, which said that the “sons of God”—fallen angels, according to church tradition—ruled the Earth in an ancient epoch of time. Their offspring, born of women, did so much evil that God destroyed them and the entire human race in the Great Flood, save for Noah and his family. But Serena also recalled that apocalyptic visions, whether from the Bible or from the mouths of young Portuguese shepherds, do not detail the future in high-definition clarity. Instead they synthesize it and set it against a unified, timeless backdrop of symbols that require interpretation.

“So Your Holiness feels that this vision, the myth of Atlantis, and the current American military activities in Antarctica are altogether one and the same?”

“Yes.”

She tried to mask her doubt, but each element alone strained credulity. “I see.”

“No, you don’t,” he said. “Look closer.” The pope held a rolled-up parchment in his hand. “This is one of the source maps we believe Admiral Reis used. The map, really.”

Serena slowly reached forward and took the map from the pope’s hand. As soon as she clutched it in her own, she felt a jolt of anticipation surge through her veins.

“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.”

ICE BASE ORION

T
HE COMMAND CENTER OF
I
CE
B
ASE
O
RION
was 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.

The
Gemini
and
Apollo
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.