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.
5
Discovery Plus Twenty-Three Days
It was freezing in the fuselage of the C-141 Starlifter transport when Conrad woke with a start. Groggy and sore, he rubbed his eyes. He was strapped in with two dozen Special Forces commandos sporting polar freezer suits and insulated M-16s.
He felt another jolt. For most of the flight they had soared through clear skies and over endless white. But now they were floating in some murky soup, and the turbulence grew worse by the second. The giant cargo containers in the rear shifted, straining their creaky tie downs with each shock.
Conrad glanced at his multi-sensor GPS watch, which used a network of twenty-seven satellites to pinpoint his location anywhere on the globe and was accurate to within a hundred feet. But the past sixteen hours aboard various military craft must have chewed up the lithium batteries, because the longitudinal and latitudinal display was blanked out. The built-in compass, however, spun wildly-NE, SE, SW, NW. They must be nearing a polar region, he realized, most likely the South Pole.
He turned to the stone-faced commando sitting next to him and shouted above the whine of the turboprop engines, “I thought military personnel were banned from Antarctica.”
The commando checked his M-16, stared ahead, and replied, “What military personnel, sir?”
Conrad groaned. This was precisely the sort of bullshit he had to put up with his entire life as the son of Griffin Yeats, a washed-out NASA astronaut who had somehow managed to march through the shadowy corridors of power at the Pentagon to become an Air Force general. Yeats firmly believed that truth should be divulged strictly on a “need to know” basis, starting with the circumstances surrounding Conrad’s birth.
According to Yeats’s official version of events, Conrad was allegedly the product of a one-night tryst between a Captain Rick Conrad and a nameless Daytona Beach stripper. When Captain Conrad died in Antarctica during a training mission, the woman dropped off their bastard child at the doorstep of the Cape Canaveral infirmary. A short time later she herself died of a drug overdose. NASA, eager to maintain the squeaky clean image of its astronauts, was only too eager to cut the red tape and let Captain Conrad’s commanding officer and best friend, Major Griffin Yeats, adopt him.
Growing up, however, Conrad began to doubt the veracity of Yeats’s story. His stepmother, Denise, certainly did. From the beginning she suspected that Yeats was Conrad’s biological father and that he used Captain Conrad’s death as a convenient cover to explain the birth of his own illegitimate son. No wonder she divorced Yeats when Conrad was eight and moved away with her daughters, ages eleven and nine, the only friends Conrad had.
Finally, after years of base hopping and misery, Conrad had become enough of a rebel to have been tossed out of several schools and to confront Yeats. Not only did Yeats deny everything, but he refused to use his government contacts to help Conrad decisively identify his biological parents. That alone gave Conrad all the reason he needed to hate the man.
But by then it was obvious that General Yeats didn’t really seem to care what Conrad or anybody else thought of him. Despite his failed career as an astronaut, Yeats went from one promotion to another until he finally got his star, and with it command of the Pentagon’s mysterious Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Thanks to the financial backing of the Reagan administration throughout the 1980s, Yeats and his team of extremist military planners invented the Internet, the global positioning system, stealth technology, and the computer mouse, among “other things.”
This mission, Conrad concluded, no doubt fell into the latter category of “other things.” But what, specifically? Conrad had long suspected that a fabulous discovery lay under the ice in Antarctica. After all, East Antarctica was an ancient continent and at one time tropical. Yeats had obviously found something and needed him. Or maybe this was merely a sorry attempt at some sort of father-son reconciliation.
Two big turbo jolts brought Conrad back to the freezing fuselage of the C-141. Without asking permission, he unbuckled his strap and stumbled toward the cockpit, grabbing an occasional strut in the fuselage for support.
The glass flight deck was deceptively bright and airy. Conrad could see nothing but white beyond the windshield. Lundstrom sat in the pilot’s seat, barking at his copilot and navigator. But the engines were whining so loudly that Conrad couldn’t catch what he said.
Conrad shouted, “Could I at least see this phenomenal discovery before you kill me?”
Lundstrom definitely looked annoyed when he glanced back at him over his shoulder. “Get back to your seat, Doctor Yeats. Everything’s under control.”
But the pilot’s eyes betrayed his anxiety, and suddenly Conrad knew where he had seen him before. Until four years ago, Conrad recalled, Lundstrom had been a space shuttle commander. His leather glove, now tightly gripped around the steering column, disguised a hand that had been badly burned and disfigured along with a third of his body in an explosion on the launch pad before his abort
ed third mission.
Conrad said, “Come on, Lundstrom, riding the space shuttle couldn’t have been this bumpy.”
Lundstrom said nothing and returned his attention to the steering column.
Conrad scanned the weather radar and saw four swirling storms converging into a double-low.
“We’re flying into that?”
“We’re going to slip between the back side of one low and the front side of the other before they merge,” Lundstrom said. “McMurdo advises us that back side winds of the first low won’t exceed a hundred knots. Then we ride the front side of the other low, tailwinds of about a hundred and twenty knots pushing us downhill all the way to the ice.”
“In one piece?” McMurdo, Conrad knew, was the largest American station on the continent. “I thought McMurdo had a big airstrip. Why can’t we land there and try again here tomorrow? What’s the rush?”
“Our window is closing fast.” Lundstrom tapped the radar screen. “Tomorrow those two lows will have merged into one big nasty mother. Now get back to your seat.”
Conrad took a seat behind the navigator. “I am.”
Lundstrom glanced at his copilot. Conrad could see their reflections in the windshield. Apparently they had decided he might as well stay.
Lundstrom said, “Your file warned us that you were trouble. Like father, like son, I suppose.”
“He’s not my real father, I’m not his real son.” At least at this moment Conrad hoped not. Like most Americans he had suspected the existence of a database with information about him somewhere in Washington. Now Lundstrom had confirmed it. “Or wasn’t that information in my file?”
“That along with some psychiatric evaluations,” Lundstrom said, obviously enjoying this exercise at Conrad’s expense. “Nightmares about the end of the world. No memories before the age of five. You were one screwed-up kid.”
“Guess you missed the joys of being breastfed milk tainted with LSD and other hallucinogens,” Conrad said. “Or having full-blown flashbacks when you were six. Or kicking the asses of little Air Force brats who said you were a screwed-up kid.”
Lundstrom grew quiet for a moment, busying himself with the controls.
But Conrad’s interest was piqued. “What else does my file say?”
“Some shit you pulled the first time we went to war with Iraq in the 1990s.”
Conrad was still in grad school back then. “Ancient history.”
“That’s what I heard,” said Lundstrom. “Something about Soviet MiGs and the Ziggurat at Ur.”
Conrad nodded. Four thousand years ago Ur was the capital of Sumer in the land of Abraham. Today it was buried in the sands of modern-day Iraq. “Something like that.”
“Like what?” Lundstrom seemed genuinely curious. Apparently Conrad’s file didn’t include everything.
“The Iraqis had a nasty habit of building military installations next to archaeological treasures as shields for protection,” Conrad said. “So when U.S. satellites detected two Soviet MiG-21 attack jets next to the ruins of the ancient Ziggurat at Ur, the Pentagon concluded the Iraqis were parking the MiGs there to avoid bombing.”
Lundstrom nodded. “I remember hearing that.”
“Well, they also suspected Hussein himself was holed up inside the ziggurat,” Conrad went on. “So I gave them the targeting information they needed to launch a Maverick missile at the site.”
“A Maverick? That was first-generation bunker buster. You’re shitting me.”
“Only a Maverick could burrow its way beneath the pyramid and destroy it from the inside out and make the explosion look like an Iraqi mishap.”
“So you’d wipe an eternal treasure from the face of the earth just to kill some despot du jour?” Lundstrom actually seemed shocked. “What the hell kind of archaeologist are you?”
“The kind you nice people apparently need,” Conrad said. “So now why don’t you tell me-”
Suddenly a throbbing whine alerted the crew. Lundstrom gripped the controls. The copilot checked his instruments.
The navigator shouted, “Side winds at two-fifty G have shifted around to eighty G!”
“Wind sheer,” said Lundstrom, adjusting the yoke. “Damn, she’s stiff. Looks like we found the jet stream.”
Conrad braced himself against his seat as the plane hit heavy turbulence and the gyros began to wander and go wild.
“Gyro’s tumbling,” called the navigator.
Lundstrom shouted, “Give me a celestial fix.”
The navigator swung to the overhead bubble sextant that protruded out the topside skin of the plane and tried to read their location from the stars. But he shook his head. “Soup’s too thick to extrapolate a reading.”
“Ever heard of GPS?” Conrad shouted over the din.
“Useless with the EMP.”
Electromagnetic pulse? thought Conrad. Those kind of microwaves, generated by small explosions of the nuclear variety, had a tendency to knock out all sophisticated technological gear. That explained why they were flying in such an old crate. What the hell was Yeats doing down there on the ice?
Conrad said, “What about a goddamn Doppler navigation system?”
“Negative.”
“Listen to me, Lundstrom. We have to radio the tower at McMurdo for help. How far away are we?”
“You don’t get it, Conrad,” said Lundstrom. “We’re not landing at McMurdo. Our designated landing site is elsewhere.”
“Wherever ‘elsewhere’ is, we’re not going to make it, Lundstrom,” he said. “You’ve got to change course for McMurdo.”
“Too late,” said Lundstrom. “We passed our point of safe return. We’re committed.”
“Or should be,” said Conrad, “along with Yeats and your whole sorry bunch in Washington.”
The navigator shouted, “Headwinds skyrocketing-a hundred knots! Ground speed dropping fast-a hundred fifty knots!”
The plane’s four engines strained to push against the headwinds. Conrad could feel the resistance in the vibrations in the floor beneath his boots. The turbulence rose through his legs like coils of unbridled energy until his insides seemed to melt. For a dead man he felt very much alive and wanted to stay that way.
“Keep this up and we’ll be flying backward,” he grumbled.
“Headwinds a hundred seventy-five knots,” the navigator shouted. “Two hundred! Two twenty-five!”
Lundstrom paused a moment and apparently considered a new strategy. “Cut and feather numbers one and four.”
“Copy,” said the engineer, shutting down two engines.
“Ground speed still dropping,” said the navigator, sounding desperate. “Fuel’s almost spent.”
Conrad said, “What about an emergency landing on the ice pack?”
“Possible,” said Lundstrom. “But this is a wheeled bird. Not a ski bird.”
“Belly land her!” Conrad shouted.
“Negative,” said Lundstrom. “In that stew downstairs we’d probably cream into the side of a berg.”
Another side wind blast hit them so hard that Conrad thought the plane would tip over on its back and spiral down to the ice. Somehow Lundstrom managed to keep her level.
“You’ve got to do something,” Conrad shouted. “Jettison the cargo!”
“General Yeats would sooner jettison us.”
“Then we have to radio for help.”
“Negative. We have radio blackout. Radio’s useless.”
Conrad didn’t believe him. “Bullshit. This is a black ops mission. There’s no goddamn radio blackout. Yeats just wants to keep this quiet.” Conrad slipped behind the radio and tried to put on a headset. But the shaking made it difficult.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Lundstrom demanded.
Conrad slipped the headset on. “Calling for help.”
Conrad heard a click near his ear. But it wasn’t the headset. It was the sliding of a sidearm receiver. He turned to see Lundstrom pointing a shiny Glock 9 mm automatic pistol at
his head. Conrad recognized it as his own, which he was relieved of upon boarding the chopper back in Peru. “Get your ass back in your seat, Doctor Conrad.”
“I’m in my seat.” Conrad flicked on the radio switch. A low hum crackled. “You can’t kill me. You need me, Lundstrom. God knows why, but you do. And you better put my gun away. It’s been known to go off accidentally. If this ride gets any bumpier you might miss my head and put a hole through the windshield.”
Lundstrom looked outside at the raging skies. “Damn you, Conrad.”
Conrad leaned over the radio microphone, aware of the barrel of the pistol wavering behind his head as he adjusted the frequency. “What’s our call sign and frequency?”
Lundstrom hesitated. Then a huge jolt almost ejected him out of his seat. Lundstrom lowered the pistol as the turbulence rocked the cockpit. “We’re six-nine-six, Conrad,” Lundstrom shouted, reaching over to adjust the frequency.
Conrad clicked on the radio microphone. “This is six-nine-sixer. Requesting emergency assistance.”
There was no response.
“This is six-nine-sixer,” Conrad repeated. “Requesting emergency assistance.”
Again, no response.
“Look!” shouted the navigator. “Ice Base Orion.”
“Ice Base Orion?” Conrad repeated.
The mist parted for a moment, opening a window onto the wasteland below. A panorama of mountains poked up out of the ice, filling the entire horizon as far as Conrad could see. The flanks of jagged peaks dribbled whipped-cream snow into the bottom of a great valley marked by a black crescent-shaped crack in the ice. Perched on the concave side of the crack was a human settlement of domes, sheds, and towers. Conrad saw it flash by before they were swallowed up by the mist again.
“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.
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