“This is it?” Conrad asked.
Lundstrom nodded. “If only we can find the strip.”
“The strip?” asked Conrad when a thunderous bolt of turbulence almost knocked him out of his chair. If he hadn’t strapped himself in, he realized, his head would now be part of the instrument panel.
“The runway,” Lundstrom explained. “Bulldozed out of the ice.”
“We’re making a white-on-white approach?” Conrad stared at the swirling snow outside the flight deck windshield. Strobe lights and boundary flares were useless against the glare of a whiteout. With the sky overcast, there were no shadows and no horizons. And flying over a uniformly white surface makes it impossible to judge height or distance. Even birds crash into the snow. “You guys are borderline lunatic.”
The radio crackled.
“Six-nine-sixer, this is Tower.” A gruff, monotone voice came in. “Repeat. This is Tower calling six-nine-sixer.”
“This is six-nine-sixer,” said Lundstrom, grabbing the microphone. “Go ahead, Tower.”
The controller on the other end said, “Winds fifteen cross and gusting to forty knots, visibility zero-zero.”
Conrad could tell Lundstrom was doing the math, wondering whether to go for it or go into holding and pray for a miracle.
“Winds shifting to dead cross, gusting to sixty knots, sir,” shouted the navigator.
Conrad grabbed the microphone back. “Trying to land this tin crate on a giant ice cube is suicide and you know it.”
“Search-and-rescue teams standing by,” the controller said. “Over.”
Conrad looked hard into the mist as Lundstrom brought them in. Visibility was nil in the fog and blowing snow. Suddenly the curtain parted again and a row of black steel drums appeared on approach dead ahead. The strip itself was marked in Day-Glo signboards.
“We’re coming in too low,” he said.
“Commence letdown,” Lundstrom ordered.
The copilot gently throttled back, working to keep the props in sync.
The radio popped. “Begin your final descent at the word ‘now,’” the controller instructed.
“Copy.”
“You are right on the glide slope.”
“Copy,” said Lundstrom when a nerve-wracking dip shook the plane from front to back. Conrad tightened the straps of his seat harness and held his breath.
“You are now below the glide slope,” the controller warned. “Decrease your rate of descent and steer two degrees left.”
“Copy.” Lundstrom gently tugged the steering column and Conrad could feel the C-130 level off.
“You are now back on the glide slope,” the controller said. “Coming right down the pike at two miles to touchdown…”
Conrad could still see nothing out the windshield but a white wall.
“…right on at one mile to touchdown…
“…right on at one-half mile…
“…one-quarter mile…
“…touchdown.”
Conrad and Lundstrom stared at each other. They were still floating.
“Tower?” repeated Lundstrom.
An eternity of silence followed, then a slamming crunch. The commandos toppled like dominos over one another and then dangled
weightlessly from their weblike seats. The tie-downs in the rear snapped apart and the cargo shifted forward.
Conrad heard the crack and looked back to see several metal containers fly through the main cabin toward the cockpit. He ducked as something whizzed past his ear and struck Lundstrom in the head, driving the pilot’s skull into the controls.
Conrad reached for the steering column just as the ice pack smashed through the windshield and everything collapsed into darkness.
I
T WAS THE BLEEPING SOUND
of the C-130’s homing beacon that finally brought Conrad back to consciousness. He blinked his eyes open to a flurry of snow. Slowly the picture came into focus. Through the broken fuselage he could see pieces of the transport scattered across the ice sheet.
He glanced at Lundstrom. The pilot’s eyes were frozen open in terror, his mouth gaping in a fixed scream. Then Conrad saw a metal shard protruding from Lundstrom’s skull. He must have died on impact.
Conrad swallowed hard and gasped for breath. The Antarctic air seemed to rush inside and freeze his lungs. He felt punchy, light-headed. This is no good, he told himself, no good at all. His internal, core temperature was dropping. Hypothermia was setting in. Soon he’d lose consciousness and his heart would stop unless he took action.
He fumbled for his seat buckle, but his fingers wouldn’t move. He glanced down. His right hand was frozen to the seat. His fingertips were white with frostbite. He knew that meant the blood vessels had contracted and the tissue was slowly dying.
Conrad surveyed the cockpit, trying not to panic. Using his numb but gloved left hand, he grasped a thermos from behind Lundstrom’s corpse. He worked it until the top popped open. Then he poured the hot coffee over his right hand, watching a cloud of steam rise over his sizzling hand as he peeled it away from the chair. He looked at his
seared palm. It was bloody red and blistered, but he was too numb with cold to feel any pain.
He dragged himself over to the copilot and put an ear to his lips. He was breathing, just barely. So was the navigator. Conrad could hear a few low groans from the commandos in back.
Conrad reached for the transmitter. “This is six-nine-sixer,” Conrad said breathlessly, leaning over the microphone. “Requesting emergency assistance.”
There was no answer. He adjusted the frequency.
“This is six-nine-sixer, you bastards,” he repeated.
But no matter which frequency he dialed, he was unable to break through. After several minutes of empty hissing, the transmitter finally went dead.
Nobody could hear him, he realized.
Conrad worked his way through the cockpit debris, searching for a backup radio. But he couldn’t find one. Surely they had to have a beacon, an EPIRB signal at the least. But perhaps Lundstrom and his team didn’t want to be found in a case like this.
The only thing he discovered was a single flare, and that from his own pack. A lot of good it would do him.
What a sorry way to die, he thought, staring at the flare in his gloved fist. You survive an airplane crash only to turn into a Popsicle. God, how he hated the cold. It was all he ever knew as a child, and to die in the snow was the last way he wanted to go. It would signify he had not traveled as far from home as he once dreamed. And he would never reconcile with his father.
How’s that for irony? he thought as he scanned the temperature reading on his multisensor watch. The digital thermometer displayed −25° F. Then he took a closer look and realized he had missed a digit. −125° F.
Conrad slumped to the floor with the rest of the crew, his eyelids starting to get heavy. He fought to stay awake, but it was a losing battle, and he had begun to drift off into unconsciousness when suddenly the plane started to shake and he thought he heard a dog barking.
He opened his eyes, dragged himself over to his backpack on the floor, and managed to sling it over his shoulder. He then fumbled for
his flare, his fingers working slowly, slid down through a hole in the fuselage, and fell onto the ice.
The thud sharpened his senses.
Conrad staggered to his feet and looked across the barren ice. But there was nothing to see. If anything, the snow was coming down even harder. Then, out of the mist, a huge tractorlike vehicle appeared.
It looked like one of those big Swedish Hagglunds. Its two fiberglass cabs were linked together and ran on rubber treads that left wide waffle tracks in the snow.
Conrad quickly broke his flare and started waving his hands. His arms felt heavy and he couldn’t feel the flare in his fist.
The Hagglunds plowed to a stop in front of him. The forward cabin door opened. A white Alaskan husky jumped out and ran past Conrad to the wreckage. Conrad heard clanking and saw the white boots of a large figure emerge from the Hagglunds and descend the rungs of the small ladder to the ice pack.
Conrad could tell from the towering frame and crisp, spare movements that it was his father. Stiff in a white freezer suit with charcoal under his goggles to block the snow glare, Yeats marched toward him, his powerful strides crunching deeply into the snow.
“You broke my radio blackout orders, son.” Yeats stood there like a statue, snow flying all around him. “You blew our twenty.”
“It’s good to see you, too, Dad.”
Yeats took the flare from Conrad’s hand, dropped it into the snow, and ground it under his boot. “You’ve attracted enough attention.”
A geyser of anger suddenly erupted inside Conrad. Anger at Yeats and at himself for letting his father reach out across time and pull him back into this personal frozen hell.
“Lundstrom’s dead along with half your men.” Conrad gestured with his frostbitten hand toward the plane.
Yeats spoke into his radio. “S-and-R teams,” Yeats barked. “See what you can salvage from the cargo hold before the storm buries us alive.”
Conrad glanced back at the wreckage and men, which would soon be forgotten under the merciless snow. Then the husky trotted out with a wristwatch in his mouth. Its face was smeared with frozen
blood. Conrad felt the husky brush past his leg and looked on as it ran for the Hagglunds.
“Nimrod!” Yeats called out after the dog. But the husky was already scratching at the door of the forward cab.
“Nimrod’s the only one here with half a brain.” Conrad marched toward the Hagglunds. But when he reached the forward cab and grasped the door handle, Yeats blocked it with a stiff arm.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Yeats demanded.
Conrad cracked open the icy cab door, letting Nimrod jump into the warm cab first. “Don’t piss in your pants, Dad. In this cold, something might fall off.”
Conrad glanced at his bandaged hand as he followed Yeats down an insulated corridor inside the mysterious Ice Base Orion. A medic in the infirmary had dressed the hand as best he could. But now that it was thawing, it hurt like the living daylights.
Classical music was piped in through hidden speakers. Only the thin polystyrene walls separated them from the furious storm raging outside. Eight inches and what sounded like the faint strains of Symphony No. 25 in G Minor.
“Mozart,” Yeats said. “Some bullshit experiments proved that classical music has a positive effect on the cardiovascular system. A decade from now it will be blues or rap or whatever turns on the geeks.”
They passed through another air lock into a new module and Conrad felt a weird sensation of vertigo. The upper half of the module looked exactly like the bottom half. And the ceiling area was packed with instrument panels, circuit breakers, temperature dials, and dosimeter gauges. The panel clocks, like Yeats’s wristwatch, were set on central time—Houston.
Then Conrad noted the NASA markings all around and suddenly realized that Ice Base Orion was never intended for use on Earth. It must have been designed to be an orbiting space station or a colony on one of the polar caps of Mars, where the ice would be tapped for water and life support.
“What the hell is this place you’ve built down here?” Conrad asked.
“Welcome to the most inaccessible human settlement on the planet, son.”
They turned a corner, and Conrad followed Yeats down another long corridor. Conrad could hear a low hum beneath the music as they walked. And every now and then, a shudder seemed to pass through the entire base like a train had just rumbled by.
“We’ve got a command center, biodome, mobile servicing center, an astrophysics lab, an observatory, and modules for materials processing, remote sensing, and medical research,” Yeats said.
“You forgot the drill rig,” Conrad said. “That would explain the shaking.”
Yeats pretended he hadn’t heard him and pointed in the opposite direction. “The brig is that way.”
This whole base is a brig, thought Conrad as he looked down a tunnel toward a sealed-off air lock. “Where is anybody going to go that you need to lock him up?”
“The harsh conditions here are known to send men over the edge,” Yeats said.
Conrad looked at his father. “Is that what happened to you?”
Yeats stopped and turned around abruptly in front of a door marked
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
As if anybody else was around to violate security procedures.
“Follow me through this door, son,” said Yeats, his hand resting on the release bar, “and you just might go over the edge yourself.”
Standing on a platform inside the cavernous laboratory was a pyramid about ten feet tall. A solid piece of rock with an almost reddish glow, it was marked by four grooves or rings around its sides. The rings began halfway up the slopes and grew closer together toward the top.
Conrad let out a low whistle.
“Pentagon satellites picked up a dark anomaly beneath the ice shortly after the last big quake some weeks ago,” Yeats said. “We put a survey team on the ground, but they couldn’t pick up anything solid. The anomaly appeared to be invisible to radio-echo surveys. That’s when we started drilling. We hit the stone a mile beneath the ice cap. Clearly it’s not a natural rock formation.”
No it wasn’t, Conrad thought with growing excitement as he studied the stone. The U.S. State Department’s official position was that no human had set foot on Antarctica before the nineteenth century. Yet this rock was at least as old as the ice that covered it—twelve thousand years. That strongly suggested the remains of a civilization twice as old as Sumer, the oldest known on Earth.
Conrad ran his hand across the smooth face of the stone and inserted a finger into one of the strange grooves. This find could be it, he thought, nearly trembling now, the first evidence of the Mother Culture he had been seeking his entire life.
“So where’s the rest of it?” he asked.
Yeats seemed to be holding back. “Rest of what?”
“The pyramid,” Conrad said. “This is a benben stone.”
“Benben?”
Now Yeats was just playing dumb, clearly eager to see if his investment in him was worth the cost. Conrad didn’t mind singing for his supper, but he wasn’t going to settle for crumbs.
“An ancient Egyptian symbol of the bennu bird—the phoenix,” Conrad said. “It represents rebirth and immortality. It’s the capstone or pyramidion placed on top of a pyramid.”
“So you’ve seen it before?”
“No,” Conrad said. “They’re missing from all the great pyramids of the world. We know them mostly through ancient texts. They were replicas of the long-lost original benben stone, which was said to have fallen from heaven.”
“Like a meteorite,” finished Yeats, staring at the rock.
Conrad nodded. “But a benben this size means the pyramid beneath it would have to be enormous.”
“A mile high and almost two miles wide.”
Conrad stared at Yeats. “That’s more than ten times the size of the Great Pyramid in Giza.”
“Eleven point one times exactly,” said Yeats. So his father had indeed done his homework. “Bigger than the Pentagon. And more advanced. Its exterior is smoother than a stealth bomber, which may explain why it’s been invisible to radio-echo surveys. These grooves on this capstone are P4’s only distinguishing exterior characteristic. Beyond its sheer size, of course.”
Conrad touched the benben stone again, still incredulous that civilization existed on Earth at an earlier date and at a more advanced level than even he previously imagined.
“P4,” Conrad repeated. So that’s what they were calling it. Shorthand for the Pyramid of the Four Rings. It made sense. “And it’s at least twelve thousand years old.”
Yeats said, “If it’s as old as this benben stone, then P4 is at least six billion years old, son.”
“Six billion?” Conrad repeated. “That’s impossible. Earth is only four and a half billion years old. You’re telling me that P4 could be older than the planet?”
“That’s correct,” Yeats said. “And it’s right under our feet.”