There was Conrad, of course. But clearly her mission here involved much more than protecting the unspoiled Antarctic environment from the Americans.
Something momentous had been found down here, she realized, just like the pope said. Something that could turn history—and the Judeo-Christian tradition—
on its head. In spite of all this, however, she felt exhilarated. Of all the candidates His Holiness could have chosen to be his eyes for this historic event, he had chosen her.
She heard the door unlock with a buzz and turned.
When the MP opened the door of the brig and ushered Conrad in, Serena was sitting on the edge of her bunk, sipping diesel tea from a Styrofoam cup. Conrad noted the silver bride of Christ band on her left ring finger that signified her spiritual union to the one and only Son of God. That would be Jesus to her, unfortunately, and not some disreputable scoundrel like Conrad Yeats. He wondered why she was still wearing it. Probably to keep his likes at bay.
“Conrad.” Serena managed a smile. “I figured they’d send you. You always did have odd ideas for a secret rendezvous.”
Conrad saw she was down to her wool sweater now, her black hair falling softly over her shoulders. Underneath she was probably wearing polypropylene inner liners to move sweat away from her skin, or acrylic thermal underwear. As for what was wrapped under that, Conrad didn’t have to imagine, and he realized he was the one sweating.
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“What’s so odd?” He reached over and touched her face. “You’re still cold.”
“I’m fine. What happened to you?”
He looked at his bandaged hand. “Occupational hazard.”
“Like Yeats? I would have put you and me together before I ever thought I’d see you with your father.”
“Like you and yourGQ boys in the next—”
“Cell?” She smiled. “Worried about some competition, Conrad?” she asked.
“Don’t be. If I were the last woman on earth and you were the last man, I’d become a nun again.”
Conrad stared into her soft brown eyes. It was the first time they had been alone, face-to-face, in five years, and Conrad secretly felt she looked more beautiful than ever. He, on the other hand, felt old and worn down. “What are you doing here, Serena?”
“I thought I might ask you the same question, Conrad.” He was itching to tell her about the ruins beneath the ice, that his theories were true. But he couldn’t. After all, they had never dealt with the ruins of their own lives on the surface.
“You’re not just here to save the environment,” Conrad stated. “When you came through that air lock, you weren’t surprised to see me.”
“You’re right, Conrad,” she said softly and put a warm hand to his face. “I missed you and had to see you.”
Conrad pulled back. “You are so full of it, and you know it.”
“Oh, and you’re not?” The floor began to rumble. Serena sat back in her bunk and glanced at her watch. She’s timing the shakers, he thought to himself.
Suddenly she said, “When were you going to inform the rest of the world about your discovery?”
Conrad swallowed hard. “What discovery?”
“The pyramid under the ice.”
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Conrad blinked in disbelief but said nothing. Still, there was no use fighting the fact that somehow she knew as much or more than he did about this expedition.
“So what else did God tell you?”
“I’d say the team has been drilling exploratory tunnels in the ice around the pyramid,” she said. “And I’d bet that by now your cowboy father has probably found a door.”
There was a minute of silence. They were no longer locked in their typical give-and-take banter but were fellow truth-seekers. Conrad was glad she was there and angry at the same time. He was worried about her safety and yet felt threatened by her presence, as if somehow she was standing in his way.
“Serena,” he said softly. “This isn’t some oil platform that you can chain yourself to in order to protest the production of fossil fuels. A few dozen soldiers have already died on this expedition, and it’s practically a miracle you and I are even talking.”
A cloud of sober reflection passed over Serena’s face. She was processing her own thoughts. “I can take care of myself, Conrad,” she said. “It’s you I’m worried about.”
“Me?”
“Your father hasn’t told you everything.”
“What else is new?” Conrad shrugged. “Passing along a piece of information for him is like passing a kidney stone. So he’s hiding something. So are you, Serena.
A lot more. Look, neither the United States nor the Vatican is going to be able to keep a lid on something this big.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Conrad, I know you’re not this naive, so it must be denial,” she said. “Tell me, how did Yeats lure you down here? Did he promise you credit for the find of the ages? Maybe more help in finding your true parents?”
“Maybe.”
“Trust me, Conrad,” she said, the pain of personal experience in her eyes,
“there are some answers you don’t want to know.”
“Speak for yourself, Serena.”
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“Conrad, this isn’t about you and this isn’t about me. It’s about the world at large and the greater good. You have to consider other people.”
“I am considering them. This is an unprecedented development in human history. And I want to share it with the world.”
“No, you want to magnify the great name of Doctor Conrad Yeats,” she said.
“To hell with the rest of the world. But why should you care? It’s the information about Earth that’s more important than the planet or its people. Isn’t that how it goes with you? You haven’t changed a bit.”
“If you’re referring to our relationship, you knew exactly what you were doing then, Miss High and Mighty. You just didn’t want to take responsibility for your actions.”
“I was pure as the driven snow, Conrad. But you pissed on me. Just like you’re going to piss on this planet.”
“Hey, it’s not like we actually did anything.”
“My point exactly,” she said. “But you didn’t do much to contradict the rumors, did you?”
“I am not the bad guy here.”
“Aren’t you?” she asked. “You’re nothing but a pawn of the United States, willing to betray everything you believe in about international cooperation and the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity to satisfy your selfish curiosity.”
“I don’t want to change the world,” he told her. “I just want to understand it.
And this is our best shot yet to make sense of who we are and where we came from. You make it sound like the fruit of forbidden knowledge. One bite and we’ll all be cursed.”
“Maybe we already are, Conrad. Isn’t that what attracted you to me in the first place? I was your forbidden fruit. Just like these ruins you’ve found under the ice.”
“Try the other way around, Serena,” he said. “And my mind is made up.” Serena nodded. “Then you might as well take me down with you.” Conrad stared at her incredulously. The only reason he was here was because he was the world’s leading authority on megalithic architecture and the son of 67
the general leading the expedition. Serena didn’t have a prayer. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“What happens when you come across some inscription down there?” she asked simply. “Who’s going to figure it out? You?”
Not only had he failed to extract any meaningful information from her, Conrad thought with a sinking feeling, but she also had directed their conversation to precisely this point. The point that Yeats had just predicted this would all come to. And somehow, Serena knew as much.
“Granted, I’m no linguist, but here and there I’ve picked up a thing or two.”
“Like a venereal disease?” she shot back. “For all you know, Conrad, the only reason you’re here is because they thought they could
n’t get me.” The thing that bothered Conrad the most was that she said it with absolute humility. It wasn’t a boast, but a plausible probability. Then Conrad realized she was playing to the security camera near the ceiling. She had been talking to Yeats all along.
“You’re unbelievable, you know that?” he told her. “Absolutely unbelievable.” She flashed him a warm smile that could melt the ice caps. “Would you have me any other way?”
9
Discovery
Plus Twenty-Four Days,
Sixteen Hours
U.S.S.Constellation,
Southern Ocean
“DAMNYEATS,”cursed Admiral Hank Warren.
The short, powerfully built Warren scanned the blacked-out silhouettes of his carrier group’s battle formation with his binoculars from the bridge of the aircraft carrier U.S.S.Constellation. They were twenty miles off the coast of East Antarctica, and Warren’s mission was to keep his battle group undetected until further orders.
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To that end, all radars and satellite sets were turned off. Only line-of-sight radios capable of millisecond-burst transmissions were allowed. Extra lookouts with binoculars were posted on deck to sweep the dawn’s horizon for enemy surface ship silhouettes and submarine periscope feathers.
The idea was to get the battle force in close to the coast without betraying their position and then strike at the enemy without warning. A nuclear-powered carrier was good at that. But who the hell was the enemy down here? He and his battle force were freezing their asses trying to avoid detection, and the only enemy they were intimidating was the penguins.
Meanwhile, an unidentified aircraft using a U.S. Navy military frequency had placed a distress call before disappearing from radar. And if the crew of theConstellation heard it, then others had heard it too.
All he knew was that this had something to do with that crazy bastard Griffin Yeats, and that made him even more uneasy.
Way back when, Warren had done some time with the U.S. Naval Support Task Force, Antarctica. It was his rescue team that found Yeats wandering in a stupor back in ’69 after forty-three days in the snow deserts, the sole survivor of a training mission for a Mars launch that never happened. The nut insisted on dragging three NASA supply containers with him even though the navy had its own. Not a care about the three bodies he left behind. Only later did Warren’s team learn that the containers Yeats dragged out with him were radioactive. But that’s the kind of man Yeats was, unconcerned with the havoc he wreaked in other people’s lives if they got in the way of his own agenda. When Warren filed a complaint, all he got was the “classified” and “need to know” bullshit.
Now, more than thirty-five years later and bearing the rank of admiral, Warren was still in the dark when it came to Yeats. And it frustrated him to no end. His crew had just picked up a short-burst distress call from what appeared to be some black ops flight calling itself 696, which apparently crashed on approach to some phantom landing strip. Yeats’s fingerprints were all over this debacle, and Warren was personally going to see to it that the man got the early retirement he deserved.
“Conn, Sonar,” shouted the sonar chief from his console.
“Conn, aye.” Warren had the conn for the morning watch. It was important for the crew to see him in command and even more important for him to feel in command.
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“Lookouts report unknown surface vessel inbound at two-zero-six,” the sonar chief reported. “Range is under a thousand yards.”
“What!” the admiral blurted. “How the hell did we miss it?” Warren lifted his binoculars and turned to the southwest. There. A ship. The letters across the bow said MVArctic Sunrise. It was a Greenpeace ship, and on board was a guy pointing a video camera with a zoom lens at theConstellation.
“Helmsman, get us out of here!”
“Too late, sir,” said a signalman. “They’ve marked us.” The signalman pointed to a TV monitor.
“This is CNN, live from theArctic Sunrise.” The reporter was broadcasting from the bow of the Greenpeace ship. “As you can see behind me, the U.S.S.Constellation, one of the mightiest warships ever made, is cruising off the coast of Antarctica, its mission shrouded in secrecy. But first, CNN has captured on video large cracks in this Antarctic ice shelf, which suggest that the collapse of the shelf is imminent.”
A scruffy college type, the kind who wouldn’t last a week at Annapolis, came on-screen to say, “Scientists consider the rapid disintegration of this and other ice shelves around Antarctica a sign that dangerous warming is continuing.” Footage appeared of an iceberg that had split off the coast a few weeks ago.
The reporter’s voice-over noted that the towering ice cube covered two thousand square miles, with sheer walls rising almost two hundred feet above the waterline and had an estimated depth of one thousand feet.
“And now a bizarre new twist to the global warming phenomenon has surfaced regarding accusations of unauthorized nuclear tests by the United States in the interior snow deserts of Antarctica.”
The CNN report concluded with a long shot of theConstellation ’s ominous profile on the ocean horizon at dawn.
“Aw, hell,” said Warren. MSNBC and the other network news shows would soon give out the same information. It couldn’t get any worse. “Damn you, Griffin Yeats.”
10
70
Discovery
Plus Twenty-Four Days,
Sixteen Hours
SERENA SAT ON HER BUNK,listening to the whirring of the two fans pumping air and God knew what else into the cold brig. She shivered. Images she had trained herself to suppress had resurfaced after seeing Conrad. Now, as she hugged her body to keep warm, the memory of their last time together came flooding back.
It had been March, six months after they first met at the symposium of Meso-American archaeologists in La Paz, Bolivia’s capital. She was still a nun then, and they were seeing each other almost daily, working side by side on a research project in the lost city of Tiahuanaco high in the Andes.
Conrad Yeats was intelligent, attractive, witty, and sensitive. He was almost more spiritual than her colleagues from Rome, and what attracted her to him most was the purity of his calling. Some found his unorthodox theory of a Mother Culture threatening, but to her it made a wild kind of sense, based on her own studies of world mythologies. She and Conrad were approaching the same conclusion from different ends, he from archaeology and she from linguistics.
On the last night of their field studies program he invited her to join him for a
“revelation” on Lake Titicaca, about twelve miles away from Tiahuanaco.
It was a curious place for good-byes, she thought as she strolled the shore.
Locals and tourists alike were bustling about and drinking beers at the lakeside taverns as the sun began to set.
Then a tanned and handsome Conrad showed up in an elegant reed boat, like some Tiahuanacan visage come to life. The boat came from the lake’s island of Suriqi. It was a fifteen-footer made from bundled totora rushes, wide amidships and narrow at either end with a high curving prow and stern. Tight cords held the bundles of reeds in place.
“Look familiar?” he asked as he beckoned her aboard. “Just like the boats made from papyrus reeds that the pharaohs used to sail the Nile during the Age of the Pyramids.”
“And I suppose, Doctor Yeats, that you can explain how these strikingly similar designs could arise in two such widely separated places?” she asked, playing along.
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It was just one of the many mysteries of Lake Titicaca, he said in his best tour guide twang and offered to take her to the middle of the lake to show her his
“revelation.”
She had a pretty good idea what that revelation was and smiled. “There’s nothing you can show me in the middle of the lake that you can’t show me here.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he told her.
She shouldn’t have gone with him. The sisters had a policy of
traveling in pairs and never being alone with a man in a room with the door closed. It wasn’t out of fear or paranoia but for appearances’ sake. There must not be a hint of impropriety that would harm the cause of Christ.
But Conrad, as usual, was too persuasive to resist.
He paddled with long, powerful strokes and they glided across the silvery surface. At 12,500 feet above sea level, Lake Titicaca was the highest lake in the world, and it felt like it. Serena thought she could almost touch the heavens.
“Now the odd thing about this lake is that it’s located hundreds of miles from the Pacific, yet it contains ocean-variety fish, seahorses, crustacea, and marine fauna,” Conrad lectured with a wink.
“And you think it’s seawater from the Genesis flood?” Serena asked.
Conrad shrugged. “When the waters receded, some got dammed up here in the Andes.”
“I guess that explains the docks in Tiahuanaco.” Conrad smiled. “Right. Why else would the ruins of a city twelve miles away have docks?”
“Unless it was once a port and the south end of this lake extended twelve miles and more than a hundred feet higher,” Serena concluded. “Which means civilization flourished here before the flood and Tiahuanaco is at least fifteen thousand years old.”
“Imagine that.”
She could. She wanted to. A world before the dawn of recorded history. What was it like? Were people really that much different from us today? she wondered.
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There must have been women like me back then, she thought, and men like Conrad. He had dropped his skeptical pose and opened up so beautifully out here. So different from his posture before the academics.
The night air was chilly, and Serena was huddled in the bow. Conrad paddled slowly. The twilight sky above was a magnificent turquoise blue, and the lake stretched on like glass for eternity.
For the longest time they were silent, gliding along the reeds with only the dip of Conrad’s paddle making soft lapping sounds like an ancient metronome. Then, when they were in the middle of the glistening waters, he pulled up his paddle and let them drift beneath the stars.
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