by Sean Ellis
Collier sat near the front of the cabin, calmly contemplating the ring-shaped artifact he had taken from the Lemurian pyramid. Booker was curious in spite of himself. “Aren’t you supposed to join all three pieces?”
“Not yet,” was the murmured reply. Atlas made a noise from behind his gag. Collier regarded him with a perturbed expression before continuing. “When the Trinity is joined, there will be an extraordinary release of energy.”
Atlas mumbled something again, and Booker sensed that it was an accusation. Collier wasn’t telling him the whole truth, and the omission was significant.
“The joining of the Trinity will coincide with the meeting in Washington. The Great Work is about to begin again.”
The Great Work. How many times had he heard Collier use that term since his resurrection, and yet he had no idea what it meant. Probably some mysterious “divine” plan; he wouldn’t get a straight answer from Collier.
One more thing I’ll have to ask Atlas about.
Collier set the Trinity aside and donned a headset. Booker picked up one of his own and listened in as Collier instructed the pilots to take a circuitous route back to the ships. The reason for this became clear when he next opened a channel to the commander of the carrier strike group. He didn’t bother with radio protocols or brevity codes, but said simply, “I want that island completely destroyed.”
“And now we’re at war with New Zealand,” Booker muttered.
Collier threw a withering glance in his direction but said nothing. No, that wasn’t quite right. His lips were still moving, but to Booker his voice was inaudible. Son of a bitch just hit the mute button. He made a half-hearted and mostly futile attempt to read Collier’s lips, then gave up and settled back into his chair for the flight.
On the distant eastern horizon, something flashed, like lightning. Then there was another flash, and another, coming faster than he could count. A white cloud was gathering there, at the heart of the eruptions, and from it, reaching out like tentacles, were several trails of white smoke. Tomahawk cruise missiles, on their way to The Snares.
Jesus. Mira didn’t stand a chance.
Booker counted six exhaust trails, but then the flashes resumed and more tendrils of vapor appeared, chasing after the first wave.
60.
Mira followed Kiong’s lead back through the tunnels. A long swim on a single breath brought them back to the pyramid chamber where Mira located the SCUBA equipment they had used coming in. From there, it was a simple matter of following the guideline she had laid back to the big pit near the entrance. When they arrived there however, Mira’s heart fell.
Collier’s men had pulled the ropes up. They were trapped at the bottom of the hole.
Maybe trapped wasn’t the right word. Mira knew the wall could be climbed, though, without equipment, it would be an exhausting and dangerous task.
She turned to Kiong. “I don’t suppose there’s a back door.”
Kiong’s expression did not change.
“Didn’t think so. Stay here. I’ll climb up. Hopefully, they didn’t bother to take the ropes with them.”
She kicked off her swim fins and approached the wall, looking for a good spot to start her ascent. The surface was craggy igneous rock, probably basalt, hard but brittle and shot through with cracks. This presented her with plenty of handholds, but none that were especially trustworthy. She didn’t have the time or energy to check them all, so once she got moving, she let her intuition guide her. Whenever she got a very bad feeling about what looked like a perfectly good hand hold or step, she would simply pass it over. Yet, as she climbed higher, she felt a growing sense of dread that had nothing to do with the stability of the rock.
We’re running out of time.
She didn’t know exactly what that meant, but the certain realization was enough to motivate her to move faster. She scrambled up the side of the hole as quickly as if she was climbing a ladder, and came to a ledge where she had earlier set one of the intermediate pitches. There, wedged into a narrow crack in the stone, was a spring-loaded anchor, used to secure a belaying line. A piece of nylon-sheathed rope was threaded around a carabiner and secured with a knot, but a couple of inches below the knot, the rope ended in a brushy-looking fray of white fibers.
Collier’s men hadn’t pulled the ropes up, they’d cut them.
Mira sagged against the wall, feeling utterly defeated. She knew she could make the ascent on her own, but how was she going to get Kiong back to the top? She looked back down and saw the Chinese woman treading water some forty feet below. Kiong looked up and started waving.
The meaning of her gesture was clear. Go. Leave me here. Save yourself.
“That’s not going to happen,” Mira replied, defiantly. But the declaration rang hollow in her ears. Something bad was about to happen, and short of learning how to fly like Superman, there didn’t seem to be any way for both of them to make it out of the abyss in time to avoid it.
Up or down? There might be more climbing gear on the boat. She dismissed that idea. If Collier had taken the time to have the ropes cut, he certainly wouldn’t have left the remaining members of Xu’s group alive on the boat.
Maybe the ropes were salvageable. She could swim down to the bottom of the pit, find one and bring it back up.
A deep boom reverberated through the cavern, followed by a sound like rocks grinding together. An explosion. Collier had just bombed the entrance to the cavern.
Panic abruptly surged through her, a strident warning: There’s no time! You have to escape! Get out now!
No. I won’t leave her.
She pushed away from the wall, using her feet to thrust her body out into space. As she fell through the air, she straightened her legs, pointed her toes at the water, clenching the muscles of her lower torso tight and bringing her arms in close in preparation for impact with the water.
As soon as she felt the slap of the water against her, she threw her arms and legs wide to avoid spearing too deep and hitting the submerged rocks below. A few quick strokes brought her back to the surface where she found Kiong still treading water. The blind woman turned slowly and regarded her with a sad, accusatory expression.
I told you to go. Now we’re both going to die.
“Like hell we are.” Mira grabbed Kiong’s hand. “There’s another way out of here. Show me it!”
Mira didn’t know if Kiong understood, but before she could make a move, there was another detonation. A strip of daylight appeared overhead as the ceiling of the cavern split apart, and Mira heard the warning again, louder and more urgent.
Without waiting for Kiong’s guidance, Mira plunged her head under the water and dove deep as the cavern above began to disintegrate and collapse in upon itself. The water afforded some protection from the rain of debris, slowing the rate at which the huge chunks of stone fell, but she knew that the basketball-sized rocks striking her back and legs now were merely the leading edge of a cave-in that would either crush them or pin them against the bottom until they drowned.
Her fingers found the monofilament line that led through the tunnel back to the pyramid chamber. Below the surface, the detonations felt like a physical assault, hammering at her gut, but she pushed onward, swimming into the tunnel. In the beam of her headlamp, she could see cracks appearing in the rock of the tunnel.
She felt something pushing at them, like a submerged current, and looked back to see that the tunnel was collapsing behind them, propelling the water and anything in it forward, like a bean squirting from a husk.
Collier wasn’t holding back; he intended to reduce what was left of Lemuria to rubble. She doubted the pyramid cavern would provide any shelter, but there was no turning back. She began kicking harder, riding the wave of destruction until it threw her out of the tunnel and once more onto the slopes of the pyramid.
She had just managed to drag Kiong up onto the steps when a deafening roar filled the cavern. Mira felt the air pressure change, the atmosphere heating as some
invisible force began compressing the air, and then suddenly the wall behind them burst apart in a Niagara-sized torrent.
She grabbed Kiong again and tried to bound up the steps, but she couldn’t outrun the inrushing water. The surge caught them from behind, hammered them against the pyramid, but at the same time, it accomplished what Mira had been unable to do, lifting—or more precisely, heaving—them to the top of the pyramid. She managed to snare one of the upright pillar supports for the gazebo-like structure at the apex, and as the water raged and rose around her, she pushed Kiong toward the opening to the stairs and then hurled herself in after.
Mira fell, straight down the central shaft, but instead of hitting hard stone at the bottom, she splashed into another pool of water. The pyramid’s interior was filling up quickly as the ocean poured down through the opening at the top. She found Kiong, thrashing frantically, panicking, unable to make sense of the tumult she was surely watching through Mira’s own eyes. Mira hugged the woman close as the deluge continued to come down on their heads and the water kept rising, lifting them higher…higher….
Mira knew that she had only postponed the inevitable. The pyramid and the cavern in which it was situated were both well below sea level. The cavern had probably already been completely flooded. The bottleneck at the apex of the pyramid was limiting the rate at which it was being inundated, but because of its shape, that rate was now quickening exponentially. Mira barely had time to draw one last deep breath before sea water replaced the last bit of air and they were disgorged from the pyramid’s interior into the now submerged cavern.
Except there wasn’t a cavern anymore. Instead of a dark dome of stone, Mira saw daylight overhead. The explosions had opened cracks in the rock ceiling and the rush of water through those fissures had been enough to collapse it completely, creating an enormous sinkhole.
Mira’s despair turned upside down. She began kicking furiously for the surface, and felt Kiong doing the same. It seemed to take forever, the water getting clearer, the surface always closer but just out of reach. Then, just when she thought her lungs might burst, she broke through in a splash.
For several seconds, she and Kiong simply embraced, savoring fresh air and their escape from what would surely have been their tomb. Then the moment of elation passed, and Mira got a look at what was left of North East Island. She guessed that they had come up in the inlet, directly above the place where she had initially begun her search, and where they had left the tour boat anchored. There was no trace of the boat now, and the island was barely recognizable. Scorched earth and shattered rock under a pall of smoke. Some areas were still on fire, but most of what still stood above the waterline was already charred and lifeless. The water was full of floating black and white shapes; an entire colony of penguins probably killed instantly by the concussive force of whatever bomb or missile Collier had sent.
He killed everything on the island, she thought, then corrected herself. Except us.
Kiong let out a low moan and Mira hugged her close again. “It’s okay. We’re alive.”
And Collier doesn’t know it.
That thought brought some comfort, but it also underscored her ignorance about his intentions. He was clearly in the grip of a powerful delusion; maybe he always had been, or maybe the Trinity was twisting his mind to ensure that he completed its dark purpose. Whatever the reason, he believed that he was some kind of holy instrument, sent to cleanse the world of the “evil” that had been passed down from the time of the Ascendant Ones.
What had he said in the Oval Office? Thousands of people had already begun waking up to their psychic potential, millions more who had not yet learned of it? Collier thought of them all as Nephilim, the bastard children of fallen angels. Evil. Beyond redemption.
She knew with absolute certainty that Collier had lied to her. He wasn’t trying to preserve the dampening field, created ten thousand years earlier by the triumvirate. He was going to use the Trinity to completely eradicate anyone with the “taint” in their DNA, just as he had blasted Xu out of existence.
He had to be stopped. She had to stop him, and not just to save her own life and Kiong’s, but also the thousands, maybe millions of others who might have the potential to become a new race of Ascendant Ones.
Collier’s delusion masked a darker purpose. She realized now that the Trinity was a virus, sent to infect the earth and destroy its immune system. It had done so once by suppressing the powers of the Ascendant Ones, allowing the outcasts to rise and supplant them. No one, not Collier, not Atlas, not even the Trinity itself, had given her a good reason why the Wise Father had stepped in to defend those outcasts, but Mira was pretty sure his reasons had not been benevolent.
The Ascendant Ones were a threat to his plan, his Great Work. What that was, conquest of the earth, the enslavement of humankind, or total annihilation, she couldn’t begin to guess. What she did know beyond a shadow of a doubt was that only the Ascendant Ones—or rather their distant offspring—had any chance of stopping him.
Some chance. Stranded on a blasted island in the most remote place on earth.
As she paddled toward the smoldering shore, she spotted something else floating in the water nearby, something that roused a glimmer of hope. It was the inflatable launch they had used to reach the shore. It had survived the destruction of the island and was now adrift, slowly being pulled by the current toward the center of the sinkhole.
It wasn’t much, but she thought there might be enough fuel left in the outboard to get them back to New Zealand.
After that, she didn’t know what they would do, but she had come too far to simply give up.
61.
Washington D.C.
“Madame President!”
The stern voice snapped the president out of a drowsy state and she started in her chair, looking around quickly to identify the source of the voice. She was still in the President’s Emergency Operations Center, the hardened bunker under the East Wing of the White House where she had been more or less living since the Chinese Crisis began.
She didn’t immediately see the source of the voice. In fact, she didn’t see anyone at all. Where did everyone go?
The clock on the wall showed that it was just a few minutes before midnight, local time, and this made the president think about the famous Doomsday Clock, which adorned the cover of each issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The clock had been devised in 1947—when the United States alone had possessed atomic weapons—and for nearly seventy years, its hands had measured the perceived distance to human extinction—midnight. At its inception, even before the Soviet Union acquired nuclear technology, the clock had been set at seven minutes to midnight. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the hands had been moved to one minute until midnight.
Although she hadn’t heard any reports on the subject, she did not doubt that it was once more 11:59 on the Doomsday Clock.
In the 1960s, the seeming inevitability of nuclear Armageddon had ultimately caused both superpowers to step back from the brink. That wasn’t going to happen this time. She was not going to back down. God was on her side.
The PEOC had been built to withstand anything short of a direct nuclear strike, and while there were safer locations to which she might escape in the event that hostilities escalated to the point of a full-blown nuclear exchange, the command room presented the best balance of safety and connectivity. The PEOC wasn’t a hole in which to hide, but a fully functional operating center from which she could continue to run the country and, if necessary, execute the war. For the better part of the last week, she had lived here, night and day, surrounded by cabinet members, senior military officers and trusted aides, nearly two dozen in all. Coming and going was a complicated affair involving extensive security measures and the unsealing and resealing of vault doors designed to keep out radiation, biological agents and, not the least dangerous threat, human attackers. The vault doors were opened according to a strict schedule, and she alone had the authority to
break that routine. That meant the others had to be here, somewhere.
Where?
The voice came again. “Madame President.”
She recognized it this time, and with that recognition came understanding. “Collier?” She looked around, trying to locate him. “Where are you? Damn it, can’t you just call like a normal person?”
The television screens on the wall flickered to life, each one of them displaying the former SEAL commander’s face. “Madame President,” he repeated a third time, as if still trying to get her attention.
“I’m here.”
Collier’s projected eyes found her. “We have the means to restore the Trinity. I am en route to Washington and will be there in forty-eight hours. Less if I can manage it. It is imperative that the summit begin as soon as I arrive.”
“Have you been hiding under a rock? We’re on the brink of war.” She remembered who she was talking to, and brought herself back under control. “I’m not sure the delegates will feel safe coming here under these circumstances.”
The assassination of the Dalai Lama had sent a shock wave through the global religious community across all denominations, and while many religious leaders defiantly vowed that they would not be frightened by the threat of violence, others had begun to equivocate, expressing support for the idea of the conference, but concern over the timing.
“Recall your forces. Give the order to stand down.”
The president gaped at him for a moment, trying to make sense of the demand. “Are the Chinese standing down as well?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter? You’re the one who told me to do this.” The president’s voice rose an octave. “Put war back on the table you said. Well, now you’ve got your war, so deal with it. I won’t leave us undefended.”
“The threat of war has served its purpose. Now, we must make use of the prospect of peace. The Chinese will not attack. They will be suspicious of your evident reversal, waiting for the other shoe to drop. That will buy us the time we need to bring the world’s religious leaders together in Washington.”
