Descent Hour Seven
Inside the subterranean boiler room beneath P4, Conrad applied a cold canteen to his scalded forehead as a dull glow from the shaft crept across the crater floor. Still smarting from the burn, he removed the canteen and noticed some singed eyebrow hairs clinging to the condensation on the outside.
“Things are certainly heating up,” Yeats was telling him. “We better move out before another blast fries both of us. Between frostbite on your hand and second-degree burns on your face, you’ve already got two strikes against you.”
“Let’s at least get a reading,” Conrad said. “You’ve got a remote heat sensor, don’t you?”
Yeats produced a small ball from his backpack. “The shell is made of the same stuff NASA uses on the outer tiles of the space shuttle,” Yeats said. “Stand back.”
Conrad watched Yeats toss it into the shaft. A minute later the numbers showed up on Yeats’s handheld computer. Conrad looked it over.
“Before your little heat-shielded sensor melted during its descent,” Conrad said, “it plunged four miles and recorded a temperature of almost nine thousand degrees Fahrenheit.”
“Mother of God,” Yeats said. “That’s as hot as the surface of the sun.”
“Or the molten core of the earth,” Conrad said. “I think this is a geothermal vent.”
“A geothermal vent?” Yeats narrowed his eyes. “Like the kind found in oceans?”
Conrad nodded. “One of my old professors discovered a hot spot like this west of Ecuador, about five hundred miles out in the water and eight thousand feet down,” he said. “There’s very little life at the bottom of the ocean because there’s no light and the temperatures are below freezing. But where there are cracks in the earth’s crust, the heat from the core escapes to warm the water. That’s how some forms of ocean life-earth-heated crabs, clams, ten-foot-long worms-survive down there.”
Conrad looked around. This geothermal chamber had to be the same kind of thing. The only question was whether the Atlanteans built P4 over an existing vent to harness its heat or possessed such advanced technology that they could tap Earth’s core-or any planet’s, for that matter-for unlimited power.
“According to Plato, Atlantis was destroyed by a great volcanic explosion,” Yeats said. “Maybe this was the cause of it.”
“Or maybe this is the legendary power source of Atlantis,” said Conrad. “The Atlanteans allegedly had harnessed the power of the sun. Most scientists naturally assumed this meant solar power. But this geothermal vent taps into Earth’s core-which is as hot as the surface of the sun. So this could be the so-called power of the sun that Atlantis possessed.”
“Could be,” said Yeats.
But Conrad could tell Yeats had another purpose in mind for P4, and it probably had little to do with its archaeological or even technological value. “You have another theory?”
Yeats nodded. “What you’re really saying is that P4 is essentially a giant geothermal machine that can channel heat from Earth’s core to melt the ice over Antarctica.”
Conrad grew very still. He hadn’t thought about it in terms quite so catastrophic. In his mind that kind of thinking was the domain of environmental alarmists like Serena. But a slow-growing angst crept over him as he remembered the bodies in the ice chasm above P4 and Hapgood’s earth-crust displacement theory. He hadn’t entertained the possibility that a natural disaster on the scale of a global shift of the earth’s crust-the culmination of a forty-one-thousand-year-old geological cycle-could be triggered by design. Yeats, on the other hand, seemed to have given this scenario some serious thought. At the very least, Conrad had to agree that there was enough heat bottled up beneath P4 to melt so much ice that rising sea levels would certainly wipe out coastal cities on every continent.
“Yes, I suppose this machinery could warm Antarctica,” Conrad said slowly. “But to what end?”
“Maybe to make the continent or planet more habitable for their species,” Yeats went on. “Who the hell cares? The point is that there must be a control room somewhere, and we’ve got to find it. Before anybody else does.”
“Right,” Conrad said, wondering why he should be so surprised that Yeats was as practical a man as he was. “That would be the central chamber we’ve been looking for, the one with the two hidden celestial shafts.”
“Then let’s get the hell out of here and go for it,” Yeats said. “Before this thing goes off again-for real.”
As they made their way back up to the gallery, Conrad was haunted by fear that he had just done what he denied ever doing-destroyed the integrity of a find. Worse, he may have destroyed himself and others with it. He could almost hear the whispers that had haunted him his entire career now chasing him up the tunnel: “Tomb Raider”…“Raper of Virgin Digs”…“Conrad the Destroyer.” Now, more than ever, they had to get back to Serena, find P4’s secret chamber, and make sure this cosmic heat valve was shut off.
Upon reaching the fork at the bottom of the Great Gallery, Conrad wasn’t surprised to find three tunnels now instead of two.
“Now don’t tell me you saw that one before too,” Yeats said.
“No, it definitely wasn’t there before,” Conrad said. “Maybe something we did in the lower chamber opened a door.”
Conrad looked up the gallery toward the upper chamber and saw several figures rappeling down.
Yeats saw them too and gripped his arm. “Fall back,” he whispered. “That’s an order.”
They cut their headtorches and retreated to the new access tunnel, where they took cover on either side of the entry. Pressing his back against the wall, Conrad looked across at Yeats. His father’s silhouette was blackened by the dim glow radiating out from the bottom of the gallery.
“Team Phoenix, copy,” Yeats spoke into his radio microphone. But there was no response. “Copy me, Team Phoenix.” Again, nothing. “Goddamn it.”
Conrad pulled out his nightscope and peered around the corner. Two figures dropped down onto the landing at the bottom of the gallery. Their green eyes-night-vision goggles-bobbed up and down in the dark. Conrad pulled back and looked at his father.
“Who are they?” Conrad whispered.
“Can’t say,” Yeats said. “But they sure as hell aren’t mine. Move.”
They started down the long, dark access tunnel. This corridor was thirty-five feet tall, but it felt much smaller after the grandeur of the Great Gallery they had descended. After about 1,200 feet due south, the floor sloped sharply into a larger tunnel with a ceiling twice as high.
“Over there.” Yeats pointed his flashlight beam to the floor.
About a hundred yards ahead was either a doorway or the end of the tunnel. It was hard to tell. But then Conrad felt a blast of air. He looked up and found a shaft in the ceiling of the tunnel. There was another one in the floor, angled at the same slope.
“That could be one of those two extra star shafts that lead into the secret chamber,” he said. “I think it cuts through this corridor. I’ll have to drop a line down to be sure.”
Yeats said, “I’m going to follow this corridor for another hundred yards or so to see what’s at the end. Then I’ll come back and you can tell me what you found.”
Conrad watched Yeats disappear while he uncoiled a line down the shaft. He was peering over the edge cautiously when he heard the scrape of a boot behind him and he swung around to see a pair of green eyes glowing in the passageway.
“And who the hell are you?” Conrad asked.
The figure in the night-vision goggles raised an AK-47 machine gun. “Your worst nightmare,” he said with a thick Russian accent and fingered his radio. “This is Leonid calling Colonel Kovich. I’ve captured an American.”
“The hell you have.” Conrad kicked the AK-47 out of Leonid’s hands and picked up the broken laser sight from the floor. Leonid whipped out a Yarygin PY 9 mm Grach pistol just as Conrad painted his forehead with a red dot from the laser sight. Conrad hoped Leonid couldn’t see there was no gun attached to it. “Drop it. Now.”
The Russian dropped his gun and Conrad exhaled.
“Very good.”
A bone-handled hunter’s knife slid out of the Russian’s right sleeve and dropped into the palm of his hand. There was a click as his thumb found the button, and his arm swept up, the blade streaking for the soft flesh beneath Conrad’s chin.
Conrad, anticipating such a move the second he heard the click of the knife, blocked the arm and grabbed for the wrist with both hands, twisting it so that the Russian dropped the knife and cried out in pain. Conrad wrenched the arm around and up, still keeping that excruciating hold in place. This time the Russian screamed as muscles tore, and Conrad ran him headfirst into the wall and then plunged him into the floor shaft.
Conrad was peering into the darkness below when he heard footsteps. He grabbed the Russian’s AK-47 from the floor and looked up to see Yeats running toward him.
“Dead end,” Yeats said. “What the hell happened here?”
Conrad was about to tell him when he felt a yank at his ankle. He looked down and saw his nylon line tightening like a noose around his boot, realizing a second too late that the Russian had somehow snagged it on his way down and was taking Conrad with him.
“Hold this!” Conrad tossed Yeats the other end of the line as he plunged down the shaft in the tunnel floor. “Don’t let go!”
Tumbling through the darkness, Conrad struggled to clip his line to his harness. He could sense himself falling through one level after another, with no end in sight. He tensed up as he braced himself for something to break his fall.
Soon the line around his boot slacked off while the line around his harness stiffened. Finally, he burst into some large space. His line snapped tight and caught him in midair. He dangled helplessly.
“Dad!” he called. “Can you hear me?”
There was nothing at first, then the faintest, “Barely!”
Conrad fingered his belt for a flashlight and switched it on. The shock of what he saw took a few seconds to sink in.
He was swinging like a pendulum inside a magnificent chamber in the shape of a geodesic dome. His fingers tingled with adrenaline as he scanned the ceiling with his beam. The apex of the dome was about two hundred feet above him. Scattered across the four merging walls were numerous constellations. It looked like some kind of cosmic observatory.
He lowered his beam. Some kind of altar with a two-foot-tall obelisk in the center rose from the stone floor. And impaled on it was the Russian.
“Dad!” Conrad shouted. “I found it!”