The Atlantis Trilogy Box Set- The Complete Series

by A. G. Riddle

  “I’m going to get out of here, Rutger. And when I do, I’m going to kill you. You understand me?”

  “Keep quiet, Patty-boy. Men are working here.” He moves away from the rock-covered entrance to the corridor. He shouts in German, and I hear footfalls all around the room.

  For the next few hours, I don’t know how long, I ransack the mysterious lab. There’s nothing I can use. All the doors are sealed. This will be my tomb. There has to be some way out. Finally, I sit and stare at the walls, waiting, watching them shimmer like glass, almost reflecting the light from the tubes, but not quite. It’s a dull, fuzzy reflection, the kind polished steel makes.

  Above me, I occasionally hear drilling and pickaxes striking rocks. They’re trying to finish the job. They must be close to the top of the stairs. Suddenly, the noise stops, and I hear yelling. “Wasser! Wasser!” Water—they must have hit—Then loud booms. The unmistakable sound of falling rock.

  I run to the entrance and listen. Screams, rushing water. And there’s something else. A drumbeat. Or a pulsing vibration. Getting louder every second. More screams and men running. The truck cranks and roars away.

  I strain, but I can’t hear anything else. In the absence of sound, I realize I’m standing in two feet of water. It’s seeping in through the loosely stacked rock and quickly.

  I slosh back into the corridor. There must be a door to the lab. I bang around on the walls, but nothing works. The water is in the lab now; it will overtake me in minutes.

  The tube—it’s open, one of the four. What choice do I have? I wade through the water and collapse into it. The fog surrounds me, and the door closes.

  90

  Snow Camp Alpha

  Drill Site #6

  East Antarctica

  Robert Hunt sat in his housing pod, warming his hands around a fresh cup of coffee. After the near-disaster at the last drill site, he was glad they had reached seven thousand feet without so much as a hiccup. No pockets of air, water, or sediment. Maybe the next site would be like the first four sites—nothing but ice. He sipped the coffee and considered what might account for the drilling difference at the last site.

  Beyond the pod’s door, a high-pitched sound erupted—the unmistakable whirl of a drill under low-to-no tension.

  He ran out of the pod, made eye contact with the operator, and jerked his hand across his neck. The man lunged and hit the kill switch. The man was learning, thank God.

  Robert jogged to the platform. The technician turned to him and said, “Should we reverse out?”

  “No.” Robert checked the depth. It read 7,309 feet. “Lower the drill. Let’s see how deep the pocket is.”

  The man lowered the drill, and Robert watched the depth reading climb: 7,400… 7,450… 7,500… 7,550… 7,600. It stopped at 7,624.

  Robert’s mind raced with possibilities. A cavern a mile and a half below the ice. It could be something on the surface of the ground. But what? The cavern or pocket, whatever it was, was three hundred feet tall. Its ceiling was almost a football field above its floor. The laws of gravity just didn’t work that way. What had the strength to hold up one and a half miles of ice?

  The technician turned to Robert and asked, “Start drilling again?”

  Robert, still deep in thought, waved a hand over the controls and mumbled, “No. Uh, no, don’t do anything. I need to call this in.”

  Back at his pod, he activated the radio, “Bounty, this is Snow King. I have a status update.”

  A few seconds passed before the radio crackled, and the reply came, “Go ahead, Snow King.”

  “We hit a pocket at depth seven-three-zero-nine, repeat seven-three-zero-nine feet. Pocket ends at seven-six-two-four, repeat, seven-six-two-four feet. Request instruction. Over.”

  “Stand by, Snow King.”

  Robert began preparing another pot of coffee. His team would probably need some.

  “Snow King, what is the status of the drill, over?”

  “Bounty, drill is still in the hole at max depth, over.”

  “Understood, Snow King. Instructions are as follows: extract drill, lock down site, and proceed to location seven. Stand by for GPS coordinates.”

  As before, he wrote down the coordinates and endured the redundant warning about local contact. He folded the paper with the GPS coordinates and placed it in his pocket, then stood, grabbed the two cups of fresh coffee and headed out of the pod.

  They reversed the drill out and prepared the site with ease. The three men worked efficiently, almost mechanically, and silently. From the air, they might have looked like three Eskimo versions of tin soldiers racing around on a track, lifting and stacking crates, opening large white umbrellas to cover small items, and anchoring white metal poles for the massive canopy that covered the drill site. When they finished, the two techs mounted their snowmobiles and waited for Robert to lead them.

  He rested his arm on the plastic chest that contained the cameras and looked up at the site. Two million dollars was a lot of money.

  The two men glanced back at him. They had started their snowmobiles, but one tech turned his off.

  Robert brushed some snow off the chest and opened one latch. The sound of the radio startled him. “Snow King, Bounty. SITREP.”

  Robert clicked the button on the radio and hesitated for a second. “Bounty, this is Snow King.” He glanced at the men. “We’re evacuating the site now.”

  He snapped the latch shut and stood for a moment. The whole thing felt wrong. The radio silence, all the secrecy. But what did he know? He was paid to drill. Maybe they weren’t doing anything wrong, maybe they just didn’t want the press broadcasting their business to the world. Nothing wrong with that. Getting fired for being curious would be something. He wasn’t quite that stupid. He imagined himself telling his son, “I’m sorry, college will have to wait. I just can’t afford it right now; yes, I could have, but I couldn’t stand the mystery.”

  Then again… if there was something illegal going on, and he was part of it… “Son, you can’t go to college because your dad is an international criminal, and PS: he was too dumb to even know it.”

  The other man stopped the engine on his snowmobile. Both techs stared at him.

  Robert walked over to the excess cover supplies. He picked up a closed, eight-foot-long, white umbrella and tied it to his snowmobile. He cranked the machine and drove toward the next location. The two men followed close behind.

  Thirty minutes into their trek, Robert spotted a large rock overhang rising out of the snow. It wasn’t deep enough to be a cave, but the indentation cut twenty or thirty feet into the mountain and cast a long shadow. He adjusted their vector to pass close by the overhang, and at the last second, he veered off into the darkness of the shadow. Despite riding close behind him, the two men matched his course quickly and parked their snowmobiles beside his. Robert was still seated. Neither man dismounted.

  “I forgot something at the site. I’ll be back. Shouldn’t take long. Wait here and don’t, uh, don’t leave the ravine.” Neither man said anything. Robert could feel his nervousness growing. He was a terrible liar. He continued, hoping to legitimize his orders, “They’ve asked us to minimize our visibility from the air.” He opened the white umbrella and planted it beside him, anchoring it against the snowmobile, as if he were a medieval knight locking a lance next to him and readying his horse for a charge.

  He backed his snowmobile out and returned the way they had come, back to the site.

  91

  Immaru Monastery

  Tibet Autonomous Region

  Kate yawned and turned the page. The room was cold, and she and David were wrapped in a thick blanket now.

  “Finish it on the walk out,” David said through sleepy eyes. “You’ll need to stop a lot.”

  “Okay, I just want to get to a good stopping place,” she said.

  “You stayed up reading as a kid, didn’t you?”

  “About every night. You?”

  “Video games.”r />
  “Figures.”

  “Sometimes Legos.” David yawned again. “How many pages left?”

  Kate flipped through the journal. “Not many, actually. Just a few more. I can stay awake if you can.”

  “Like I said, I’ve slept enough. And I don’t have a hike tomorrow.”

  I awake to the soft hiss of air flowing into the tube as it opens. At first, the air feels heavy, like water in my lungs, but after a few deep gulps of the damp cold air, my breathing normalizes, and I take stock of my situation. The room is still dark, but there’s a faint shaft of light drifting into the lab from the corridor.

  I step out of the tube and walk toward the corridor, surveying the room as I go. None of the other tubes are occupied, save for the ape-man, who apparently slept through the flood without incident. I wonder how many he’s slept through.

  There’s still about a foot of water in the corridor. Enough to notice but not enough to slow me down. I slosh toward the jagged opening. The rocks that locked me inside are almost completely gone—washed away, no doubt. A soft amber glow from above, drapes the remaining rocks, which I push aside as I step out into the room.

  The source of the strange light hangs thirty feet above me, at the top of the stairs. It looks like a bell, or a large pawn, with windows in the top. I eye it, trying to figure out what it is. It seems to stare back at me, the lights pulsing slowly, like a lion’s heart beating after it’s devoured a victim on the Serengeti.

  I stand still, wondering if it will attack me, but nothing happens. My eyes are adjusting, and with every passing second, more of the room comes into focus. The floor is a nightmarish soup of water, ashes, dirt, and blood. At the very bottom, I see the bodies of the Moroccan miners, crushed under the rubble. Above them, Europeans lie prostrate, ripped to shreds, some burned, all mutilated by a weapon I can’t imagine. It’s not an explosion, or a gun, or a knife. And they didn’t die recently. The wounds look old. How long have I been down here?

  I search the bodies, hoping to see one in particular. But Rutger isn’t here.

  I rub my face. I’ve got to focus. Got to get home. Helena.

  The electric truck is gone. I’m weak, tired, and hungry, and at that moment, I’m not sure I will ever see daylight again, but I put one foot in front of the other and start the arduous trek out of the mine. I pump my legs as hard as they’ll go and brace for the pain, but it never comes. I’m driven to get out of this place by a strength and fire I didn’t know I possessed.

  The mine flies by in a flash, and I see the light as I hike out of the last turn of the spiral. They’ve covered the entrance to the tunnel with a white tent, or a plastic sheet of some type.

  I brush the flap aside, and I’m surrounded by soldiers in gas masks and strange plastic suits. They tackle me and hold me to the floor. From the ground, I see a tall soldier stride over. Even through the bulky, plastic suit, I know who it is. Konrad Kane.

  One of my captors looks up at him and speaks through the mask in a muffled voice. “He just walked out, sir.”

  “Bring him,” Kane says in a deep, disembodied voice.

  The men drag me deeper into the warehouse, to a series of six white tents that remind me of a field hospital. The first tent has row after row of cots, all covered in white sheets. I hear screams in the next tent. Helena.

  I struggle against the men at my sides, but I’m too weak, from lack of food, from the walk out, and from whatever the tube did to me. They hold me tight, but I continue to fight.

  I can hear her clearly now, at the end of the tent, behind a white curtain. I lunge for her, but the soldiers jerk me back, walking me down the row so I get a good look at the people lying dead on the skinny cots. Horror spreads over me. Lord Barton and Lady Barton are here. Rutger. Kane’s wife. All dead. And there are others, people I don’t recognize. Scientists. Soldiers. Nurses. We pass a bed with a boy, Kane’s son. Dietrich? Dieter?

  I can hear the doctors talking to Helena, and as we move past the edge of the curtain, I see them swarming around her, injecting her with something, and holding her down.

  The men hold me as I struggle. Kane turns to me. “I want you to see this, Pierce. You can watch her die like I watched Rutger and Marie die.”

  They drag me closer. “What happened?” I say.

  “You unleashed hell, Pierce. You could have helped us. Whatever is down there killed Rutger and half his men. The ones who managed to make it back to the surface were diseased. A plague beyond anything we could imagine. It’s devastated Gibraltar and is moving through Spain.” He pulls the white curtain back farther, revealing the entire scene: Helena tossing in a bed surrounded by three men and two women working feverishly.

  I push the guards off me, and Kane holds a hand up to stop them from chasing me. I run to her, brush her hair back, and kiss her cheek, then her mouth. She’s burning up. Feeling her boiling skin terrifies me, and she must see it. She reaches out and caresses my face. “It’s okay, Patrick. It’s only the flu. Spanish flu. It will pass.”

  I look up at the doctor. His eyes dart to the ground.

  A tear wells in my eye and rolls slowly onto my cheek. Helena brushes it away. “I’m so glad you’re safe. They told me you were killed in a mining accident, trying to save the Moroccans who worked for you.” She holds my face in her hand. “So brave.”

  She jerks a hand to her mouth, trying to suppress the cough that shakes her whole body and the rolling hospital bed. She holds her swollen belly with the other hand, trying to keep herself from hitting the rails at the side of the bed. The cough continues for what feels like eternity. It sounds like her lungs are tearing apart.

  I hold her shoulders down. “Helena…”

  “I forgive you. For not telling me. I know you did it for me.”

  “Don’t forgive me, please don’t.”

  Another round of coughing racks her, and the doctors push me out of the way. They give her oxygen, but it doesn’t seem to help.

  I watch. And I cry. And Kane watches me. She kicks and fights—and when her body goes limp, I turn to Kane and my voice is flat, lifeless, almost like his voice that comes from the mask. Then and there, in that makeshift Immari hospital, I make a deal with the devil.

  The tears rolled down Kate’s face. She closed her eyes, and she wasn’t in the bed with David in Tibet. She was back in San Francisco, on a cold night five years ago, on a gurney. They were rushing her out of the ambulance and into the hospital. Doctors and nurses shouted around her, and she was yelling at them, but they wouldn’t listen to her. She grabbed the doctor’s arm. “Save the baby, if it’s between me and the baby, save—”

  The doctor pulled away from her and shouted at the burly man pushing the gurney. “OR Two. Stat!”

  They wheeled her faster, the mask was over her mouth, and she fought to stay awake.

  She awoke to a large, empty hospital room. She hurt all over. There were several tubes running from her arm. She reached quickly for her stomach, but she knew before her hands made contact. She pulled the gown back to reveal the long ugly scar. She buried her head in her hands and cried, for how long she didn’t know.

  “Dr. Warner?”

  Kate looked up, startled. Hopeful. A shy nurse stood before her. “My baby?” Kate said, her voice cracking.

  The nurse’s eyes drifted down, focusing on her feet.

  Kate crumbled back in the bed. The tears came in waves now.

  “Ma’am, we weren’t sure, there’s no in-case-of-emergency on file, should—is there anyone we should call? A… father?”

  A flash of rage stemmed the tide of tears. The seven-month romance, the dinners, the charm. The internet entrepreneur who seemed to have it all, almost too good to be true. The apparently faulty birth control. His disappearing act. Her decision to keep the baby.

  “No, there’s no one to call.”

  David hugged her tight and brushed the tears from her eyes.

  “I’m not usually emotional,” Kate said, through the sobs. “It’
s just, I… when I was in…” A dam seemed to be breaking; feelings and thoughts she hadn’t let into her mind rushed in. She felt the words forming, ready to let it spill out—a story she was ready to reveal for the first time, to a man; something unimaginable a few days ago. She felt so safe with him. It was more. She trusted him.

  “I know.” He wiped a new wave of tears from her cheek. “The scar. It’s okay.” He took the journal from her hand. “That’s enough reading for tonight. Let’s get some rest.” He pulled her down beside him, and they drifted off to sleep.

  92

  Situation Room

  Clocktower HQ

  New Delhi, India

  “Sir, we’re pretty sure we’ve found them,” the tech said.

  “How sure?” Dorian asked.

  “The two-man team on the ground, some locals told them a train came through this region.” The tech used a laser pointer to circle an area of mountains and forests on the giant screen. “The tracks are supposed to be abandoned, so it couldn’t have been cargo. And the drones spotted a monastery not far from there.”

  “How far out are the drones now?”

  The tech punched some keys on the laptop. “A few hours—”

  “How? Jesus, we were right on top of them!”

  “I’m sorry, sir, they had to refuel. They can be in the air again within the hour. But—it’s dark now. The sat image is from earlier. It will be—”

  “Do the drones have infrared?”

  The tech worked the keyboard. “No. What should—”

  “Do any of the drones nearby have infrared?” Dorian snapped.

  “Stand by.” Images from the computer reflected in the technician’s glasses. “Yes, a little farther out, but they can reach the target.”