The warmth generated by thermal heaters placed beneath the banks of high-tech equipment welcomed Drake as he stepped inside the command center. He had barely closed the thermal hatch when his radio officer waved him over.
Drake stomped over to the console, shaking off snow. He discharged his fingers on a grounded metal strip along the console edges. The sparks stung for a second, but it was less painful than inadvertently zapping the computers and frying their data. “What have you got?”
“Our radio-echo surveys may have triggered something.” The radio officer tapped his headset. “It’s too regular to be a natural phenomenon.”
Drake frowned. “On speaker.”
The radio officer flicked a switch. A regular, rhythmic rumble filled the room. Drake lowered his parka hood to reveal a tuft of dark hair standing on end. He tapped the console with a thick finger and cocked his ear. The sound was definitely mechanical in nature.
“It’s the UNACOMers,” Drake concluded. “They’re on to us. That’s probably their Hagglunds snow tractors we’re picking up.” Already Drake could picture the impending international flap. Yeats was going to go ballistic. “How far away, Lieutenant?”
“A mile below, sir,” the bewildered radio officer replied.
“Below?” Drake glanced at his lieutenant. The humming grew louder.
One of the overhead lights began to swing. Then rumbling shook the ground beneath their feet, like a distant freight train closing in.
“That’s not coming from the speaker,” Drake yelled. “Lieutenant, raise Washington on the SAT-COM now!”
“I’m trying, sir.” The lieutenant flicked a few switches. “They’re not responding.”
“Try the alternate frequency,” Drake insisted.
“Nothing.”
Drake heard a crack and looked up. A small chunk of ice from the ceiling was falling. He stepped out of the way. “And the VHF band?”
The lieutenant shook his head. “Radio blackout.”
“Damn!” Drake hurried to the weapons rack, removed an insulated M-16 and moved to the door. “Get those satellite uplinks online!”
Drake opened the hatch and burst outside. The rumbling was deafening. Breathing hard, heaving with each long stride, he ran across the ice to the perimeter of the camp and stopped.
Drake raised his M-16 and scanned the horizon through the nightscope. Nothing, just an eerie green aura highlighted by the swirling polar mist. He kept looking, expecting to soon make out the profile of a dozen UNACOM Hagglunds transports. It felt like a hundred of them. Hell, maybe the Russians were moving in with their monster eighty-ton Kharkovchanka tractors.
The ground shook beneath his feet. He glanced down and saw a jagged shadow slither between his boots. He jumped back with a start. It was a crack in the ice, and it was getting bigger.
He swung his M-16 around and tried to outrun the crack back to the command center. There were shouts all around as the tremors brought panicked soldiers tumbling out of their fiberglass igloos. Then, suddenly, the shouts were silenced by a shriek of wind.
Freezing air rushed overhead like a wind tunnel. The katabatic blast knocked Drake off his feet. He slipped and fell flat onto the ice pack, the back of his head slamming the ground so hard and fast that he instantly lost consciousness.
When Drake came to, the winds had stopped. He lay there for several minutes, then lifted his aching, throbbing head and looked out from beneath his snow-dusted parka hood.
The command center was gone, devoured by a black abyss, a huge crescent chasm about a hundred yards wide. The cold was playing tricks on him, he hoped, because he could swear this abyss stretched out across the ice for almost a mile.
Slowly Drake dragged himself toward the scythelike gorge. He had to find out what happened, who had survived and needed medical attention. In the eerie silence he could hear his freezer suit scrape along the ice, his heart pounding as he reached the edge of the abyss.
Drake peered over and aimed a flashlight into the darkness. The beam bathed the glassy blue-white walls of ice with light and worked its way down.
My God, he thought, this hole has to be at least a mile deep.
Then he saw the bodies and what was left of the base. They were on an ice shelf a few hundred yards down. The navy support personnel in their white freezer suits were hard to distinguish from the broken fiberglass and twisted metal. But he could easily pick out the corpses of the civilian scientists clad in multicolored parkas. One of them was lying on a small ice ledge apart from the others. His head was bent at an obscene angle, framed in a halo of blood.
Drake’s mind swirled as he took in the remnants of his first command. He had to check the other bodies to see if anyone was still breathing. He had to find some equipment and get help. He had to do something.
“Can anybody hear me?” Drake called out, his voice cracking in the dry air.
He listened and thought he heard chimes. But the sound turned out to be the frozen limbs of his radio officer, clinking like glass as they dangled over smashed equipment.
He shouted into the wind. “Can anybody hear me?”
There was no response, only a low howl whistling across the abyss.
Drake looked closer and saw some sort of structure protruding from the ice. It wasn’t fiberglass or metal or anything from the base camp. It was something solid that almost seemed to glow.
What the hell is that? he thought.
An appalling silence fell across the wasteland. Drake knew then with chilling clarity that he was alone.
Desperately he searched for a satellite phone in the debris. If he could just get a message out, let Washington know what had happened. The hope that help was on the way from McMurdo Station or Amundsen-Scott might give him the strength to set up some sort of shelter, to make it through the night.
A sudden gust shrieked. Drake felt the ground give way beneath him, and he gasped as he plunged headlong into the darkness. He landed with a dull thud on his back and heard a sickening snap. He couldn’t move his legs. He tried to call for help but could only hear a hard wheezing from his lungs.
Overhead in the heavens, the three belt stars of Orion hovered in indifferent silence. He noticed a peculiar odor, or rather a change in the quality of the air. Drake could feel his heart pumping in some unfamiliar but regular pattern, like he was losing control of his body. Still, he could move his hands.
His fingers crawled along the ice and grasped his flashlight, which was still on. He scanned the darkness, moving the beam across the translucent wall. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. He couldn’t quite make out what he was looking at. They looked like pieces of coal in the ice. Then he realized they were eyes, the eyes of a little girl staring straight at him out of the icy wall.
He stared back at the face for a moment, a low moan forming at the back of his throat when he finally turned his head away. All around him were hundreds of perfectly preserved human beings, frozen in time, their hands reaching out in desperation across the ages.
Drake opened his mouth to scream, but the rumbling started again and a glistening avalanche of ice shards crashed down upon him.
2
DISCOVERY PLUS TWENTY-ONE DAYS
NAZCA, PERU
CONRAD YEATS SCALED THE SIDE of the plateau under the blazing Peruvian sun and looked across the plains of Nazca. The empty, endless desert spread out hundreds of feet below him. He could pick out the gigantic figures of the Condor, Monkey, and Spider etched on the baked expanse that resembled the surface of Mars. The famous Nazca Lines, miles long and thousands of years old, were so enormous that they could be seen only from the air. So could the tiny dust cloud swirling in the distance along the Pan-American Highway. It settled near the van he had parked off to the side. Conrad pulled out his binoculars and focused below. Two military jeeps pulled up to the van and eight armed Peruvian soldiers jumped out to inspect it.
Damn, he thought, how did they know where to find me?
The woman on the o
pposite line adjusted her backpack and said in a flat French accent, “Trouble, Conrad?”
Conrad glanced at her cynical blue eyes framed by a twenty-four-year-old baby-smooth face. Mercedes, the daughter of a French TV mogul, was his producer on Ancient Riddles of the Universe and helped him scout locations.
“Not yet.” He put the binoculars away. “And it’s Doctor Yeats to you.”
She pouted. Her ponytail swung out the back of her Diamond-backs baseball cap like an irritated thoroughbred’s tail flicking flies. “Doctor Conrad Yeats, world’s greatest expert on megalithic architecture,” she intoned like the B-actor announcer for their show. “Discarded by academia for his brilliant but unorthodox theories about the origins of human civilization.” She paused. “Adored by women the world over.”
“Just the lunatics,” he told her.
Conrad eyed the last ledge beneath the plateau summit. He was stripped to the waist. Strong and muscular, his body had been toughened and tanned from tackling the hills of the world’s geographical and political hot spots. His dark hair was too long, and he had it tied back with a strip of leather. His lean thirty-nine-year-old frame and chiseled features made him look tired and hungry, and he was. Tired of life’s journey, hungry for answers.
It was his quest for the origins of human civilization—the “Mother Culture” which had birthed the world’s most ancient societies—that drove him to the earth’s remote corners. His obsession, a nun once told him, was really his quest for the biological parents who had vanished after his birth. Perhaps, he thought, but at least the ancient Nazcans left him more clues.
Conrad grabbed the ledge overhead and gracefully pulled himself onto the summit of the flat plateau. He reached down, took hold of Mercedes’s dusty hand and pulled her up to the ledge. She fell on top of him, deliberately, and he sprawled on his back. Her playful eyes lingered on his for a moment before she looked over his shoulder and gasped.
The summit was sheered off and leveled with laserlike precision. It was like a giant runway in the sky over the Nazcan desert, and it afforded breathless views of some of the more famous carvings.
Conrad stood up and brushed off the dust while Mercedes relished the view. He hoped she was taking it all in, because her next vista would be from behind bars unless he figured out some way to elude the Peruvians below.
“You have to admit it, Conrad,” she said. “This summit could have been a runway.”
Conrad smiled. She was trying to get a rise out of him. Since the carvings could only be seen from the air, some of his wacky archaeologist rivals had suggested that the ancient Nazcans had machines that could fly, and that the particular mount on which he and Mercedes stood was once a landing strip for alien spaceships. He wouldn’t mind one showing up about now to take him away from Mercedes and the Peruvians. But he needed her. The show was all he had left to fund his research, and she was his only line of credit.
Conrad said, “I suppose it’s not enough for me to suggest that aliens who could travel across the stars probably didn’t need airstrips?”
“No.”
Conrad sighed. It was hard enough for him to contend with the sands of time, foreign governments, and goofball theories in his quest for the origins of human civilization without ancient astronauts eroding what little respect he had left in the academic community.
At one time Conrad was a groundbreaking, postmodern archaeologist. His deconstructionist philosophy was that ancient ruins weren’t nearly so important as the information they conveyed about their builders. Such a stand ran against the self-righteous trend toward “preservation” in archaeology, which in Conrad’s mind was code for “tourism” and the dollars it brought. He became a maverick in the press, a source of bitter jealousy among his peers, and a thorn in the side of Near East and South American countries who laid claims to the world’s greatest archaeological treasures.
Then one day he unearthed dozens of Israelite dwellings from the thirteenth century B.C. near Luxor in Egypt that offered the first physical proof for the biblical account of the Exodus. But the official position of the Egyptian government was that their ancient forefathers never used Hebrew slaves to build the pyramids. Moreover, only the Egyptian government had the right to announce discoveries to the media. Conrad didn’t discuss his find with them before talking to the press, thus violating a contract that every archaeologist working in Egypt had to sign before starting a dig. The head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities called him “a stupid, lazy jerk” and banned him forever from Egypt.
Suddenly, the tables had turned, and Conrad the iconoclast had become Conrad the preservationist, demanding international protection for his “slave city.” By the time Egypt allowed camera crews to the site, however, the crumbling foundations of the Israelite dwellings had been bulldozed into oblivion to make way for a military installation. There was nothing left to preserve, only a story nobody believed and a reputation in tatters.
Now he was worse off than ever. Stripped of his stature. Strapped for cash. In the arms of Mercedes and her crazy reality TV show that peddled entertainment, not archaeology, to the masses. He couldn’t go back to Egypt, and soon the same would be said of Peru and Bolivia and a growing number of other countries. Only the hard discovery of humanity’s Mother Culture could rescue him from ancient astronauts and this purgatory of cheap documentaries and even cheaper flings.
Concern clouded Mercedes’s face. “We could blow a whole day just getting a crew up here for your stand-up,” she said, brooding for a moment before her face suddenly brightened. “Much better to stick with an aerial from the Cessna and a voice-over.”
Conrad said, “That kind of defeats the purpose, Mercedes.”
She shot him a quizzical glance. “What are you talking about?”
“I see it’s time we perform a sacred ritual,” he told her, taking her hand. “One that will unleash a revelation.”
Conrad dropped to his knees, pulling her down next to him. Mercedes’s eyes sparkled in expectation. “Do as I do, and behold a great mystery.”
Mercedes leaned next to him.
“Dig your fingers into the dirt.”
They slowly dug their fingers through the hot, black volcanic pebbles into the cool and moist yellow clay beneath.
“This in your script?” she asked. “It’s good.”
“Just rub the clay between your fingers.”
She did, and then lifted a small clump to her nostrils and smelled it, as if to experience some cosmic epiphany.
“There you go,” he told her.
A look of confusion crossed her face. “That’s it?”
“Don’t you see?” he asked. “This ground is too soft for the landing of wheeled aircraft.” He smiled at her in triumph. “So much for your fantasies of ancient astronauts.”
He should have known his simple, scientific test wouldn’t go over well with her. Her eyes turned into steely blue slits of rage. He had seen the transformation before. That’s how she got to where she was in TV, that and her father’s money.
“The show needs you, Conrad,” she said. “You think differently than others. And you’ve got credentials. Or had them anyway. You’re a twenty-first-century astro-archaeologist, or whatever the hell you are. Don’t piss it away. I want to keep you on. But I’m under pressure to deliver ratings. So if you don’t play ball, I’ll get some toothy celebrity who plays an archaeologist on TV to take your place.”
“Meaning?”
“Give the freaks who are watching what they want.”
“Ancient astronauts?”
A serene smile broke across her baby face as she adopted a fawning, adoring gaze. He groaned inwardly.
“Professor Yeats,” she gushed, wrapping her arms around him and kissing him on the mouth.
Unable to extract himself, or come up for air, he kissed her back contemptuously, feeling her body respond to his own self-hatred. Obviously what the French dramatist Molière said about playwrights applied to archaeologists a
s well. He was the prostitute here. He started out doing it for himself, then for a few friends and universities. Hell, he might as well get paid for it.
Suddenly the wind picked up and Mercedes’s ponytail slapped him across the face. A gleaming metallic object hovered in the sky. He shaded his eyes and recognized the shape of a Black Hawk military chopper fitted with side-mounted machine guns.
Mercedes followed his gaze and frowned. “What is it?”
“Trouble.”
Conrad reached behind her and pulled out a Glock 9 mm automatic pistol from her backpack. Mercedes’s eyes grew wide. “You sent me through customs with that?”
“Nah, I bought it in Lima the other day.” He pulled out a loaded clip from his belt pack and rammed it into the butt of the pistol. He tucked the gun behind his belt. “I’ll do the talking.”
Mercedes, speechless, nodded.
The chopper descended, the wind from its blades kicking up red dust as it touched down. The door slid open, and six U.S. Special Forces soldiers in field uniforms stepped down onto the summit and secured the area before a lanky young officer in a blue USAF flight suit clanked down the metal steps to the ground and walked up to Conrad.
“Doctor Yeats?” the officer said.
Conrad looked him over. He appeared to be about his own age, a slim, easygoing man Conrad had seen somewhere before. He wore a single black leather glove on his left hand. “Who wants to know?”
“NASA, sir. I’m Commander Lundstrom. I work for your father, General Yeats.”
Conrad stiffened. “What does he want?”
“The general needs your opinion on a matter of vital interest to the national security.”
“I’m sure he does, Commander, but the national interest and my own are two different things.”
“Not this time, Doctor Yeats. I understand you’re persona non grata at the University of Arizona. And in case you hadn’t noticed, an armed goon squad is climbing up that cliff. You can come with me, or you could spend a few weeks in a Peruvian jail cell.”
The Atlantis Legacy - A01-A02 Page 2
