codex would be found only by the one who was destined to do so. Our warriors can guard the figurines once you have placed them; but once again I must warn you, the codex itself is fiercely protected.’ Arana looked gravely at Aleta. ‘Even more so than the figurine you discovered in Lake Atitlan, although the principle of balance remains the same.’
It was well past midnight by the time the warriors from the cordon around the village had silently assembled, their war paint gleaming in the flickering firelight.
‘It’s time we moved,’ Arana said to Aleta and O’Connor. ‘Sunrise is at 6.49 a.m., which is a little over three hours from now.’ He nodded to the warriors and four of them immediately set off along the old jungle track that led back towards the bridge and the ancient Mayan ruins.
‘Aren’t we going with them?’ Aleta asked.
‘That’s the scout party,’ O’Connor said. ‘If any of Wiley’s guerrillas are lying in wait, they’ll give us early warning.’
Aleta shivered. ‘Probably with their lives,’ she replied bitterly.
‘They’ll do that willingly,’ Arana told her. ‘Sacrifice for the greater good is part of Mayan culture.’
A spine-tingling roar carried through the mists of the jungle. One of Tikal’s few remaining jaguars was on the prowl.
‘It’s an omen,’ Arana observed, nodding to another warrior carrying a long fiery torch. They moved off in single file, ten warriors leading the way with their torches, followed by O’Connor and Aleta with the figurines. Arana and the elders completed the main body, followed by another ten warriors protecting the rear of the column.
Thirty minutes later they reached the scout party, which had propped on the outskirts of the ruins. Arana gave orders for the torches to be extinguished, and once again the scout party moved forward, more cautiously now. When they reached the edge of the Great Plaza, the lead scout suddenly stopped and the rest of the party melted off the track. O’Connor and Arana moved forward to join them, and the lead scout pointed towards the comb on top of Pyramid I. The temple was bathed in eerie moonlight and O’Connor picked it immediately. He pulled his night sight from its pouch and adjusted the focus. A man was sitting against one side of the comb, cradling an automatic rifle.
‘Another one of Wiley’s thugs,’ O’Connor muttered, turning to Arana. ‘I’ll take him from the rear side of the pyramid,’ he said, screwing a red filter onto the end of his torch. ‘When you see my signal, tell the scouts I want them to create a diversion.’
O’Connor skirted the main plaza and the side of Pyramid I that was furthest from the gunman. He quietly began to climb the weathered limestone steps, keeping his eyes on the decorative limestone comb at the top. O’Connor froze as the gunman rose to his feet. He was young, and his movements were jumpy. Never a good sign. The young gunman waved his rifle towards Pyramid IV, as if seeking reassurance, before sitting back down again, his back to the comb.
Clearly there was another thug on Pyramid IV. O’Connor resumed his stealthy climb towards the top, planning to garrotte his quarry from behind. That tactic would avoid a noisy gun battle, although the nearest police station was fifty kilometres away in Flores. O’Connor paused, took his torch from his pocket and flashed it three times towards the warriors hidden in the jungle below, the red filter ensuring the light could only be seen from a direct line. The warriors pulled on long creeper vines and the jungle began to shake. The gunman leapt to his feet, nervously traversing the base of the pyramid with his rifle. O’Connor quietly covered the last few metres. At the last moment, the young gunman turned but it was too late. In one swift movement O’Connor whipped the garrotte around his quarry’s neck. The rifle clattered onto the top limestone step as the hired mercenary flailed helplessly. He was strong, and he dragged O’Connor past the edge of the comb before he collapsed. O’Connor held the choke until he was certain the gunman was dead.
Ellen Rodriguez groped for the cell phone, thinking it was the alarm, only to find Tyler Jackson on the line.
‘Ellen, you need to listen carefully. We don’t have much time.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘We’re about to launch a missile from Vandenberg which will be vectored into a position above Iran. It will act as a lens, focusing a tomography beam to destroy the nuclear facilities at Fordo.’
‘I’m with you, Tyler, but I’m not sure I can do much to stop that.’
‘You used to work at the White House – what about the Chief of Staff, Andrew Reed?’
‘Yes, but we’re going to need some powerful arguments to stop this. The Iranians are getting close to having the bomb, and the President will have given this attack the green light.’
‘No doubt snowed by the Israeli Lobby and the hawks at the Pentagon, but he won’t have all the facts. No one has any idea what might happen as our solar system moves towards the centre of the galaxy. There’s a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, and we’re about to punch three billion watts of energy into the core of the planet when it’s in its most unstable orbit in 26 000 years. Are you on email?’
‘Yes, but I’ll have to fire up the laptop.’
‘By the time you’ve done that, the email will be there.’ Jackson attached an image of the earth’s structure and a map to the email and pressed the ‘send’ button.
‘Hang on… it’s just coming through now.’
‘If you open the first attachment, you should be able to see an image of the earth’s layers?’
‘Yes – the core, the mantle and the outer crust.’
‘Good. You’ll see from the diagram that the core has a diameter of 7000 kilometres, which consists of solid iron surrounded by molten metals. You will also see that the middle layer, or mantle, is 2800 kilometres thick and is made up of hot silicates… around 3000 degrees Celsius, but it’s the earth’s crust I’m worried about most.’
‘I’m not sure I follow.’
‘The crust runs from the top of Everest at a height of around eight kilometres down to the Mariana Trench in the deepest part of the ocean off Japan, eleven kilometres under the surface; but overall, the crust is only seventy kilometres thick. In some areas under the oceans it’s only five kilometres thick, and it’s flexible. We don’t notice it, but the earth spins at over 1600 kilometres an hour. If you’re a child playing on a merry-go-round in the park, the centrifugal force will spin you to the outside, and even throw you off, if it’s going fast enough. But in the case of the planet, that same force means the crust bulges significantly at the equator.’
‘I’m still not sure how this is an argument to stop the rocket firing?’
‘It’s the bulge at the equator that determines the position of the oceans. If a powerful enough force changes the earth’s axis, making it spin at a different slant, the position of the oceans will change. That’s what makes this Aether experiment so dangerous. If a top is spinning on a table and you give it a shove, it’ll wobble and crash… but the earth isn’t constrained by a table or anything else: if something like three billion watts of energy stirs up the molten outer core, the Chandler wobble will increase. There’ll be a series of earthquakes even more powerful than Haiti or Chile, after which the earth will stabilise – still spinning at the same speed, but on a different slant or axis.’
Rodriguez shivered at the enormity of what Tyler Jackson was saying. ‘And we will have changed the position of the equator.’
‘The position of the poles will change as well,’ Jackson argued. ‘With a magnetic pole shift, the north and south poles just flip, and that’s bad enough – that destroys navigation systems, kills migratory birds and a whole host of other things. But with a geographic pole shift, the bulging of the equator would change both the position and the depth of the oceans. London, Washington, New York, Tokyo, Sydney – they’ll all be under water. In the US sixty per cent of the population live on, or near the coast. In Japan and Australia it’s eighty per cent. It doesn’t matter where you go, most people live on or near the coast. If you open the second attachment, it contains a map that shows how the world will look after a geographic pole shift.’
Rodriguez stared in disbelief. Vast tracts of the United States, Europe, China, Japan, India, Russia and South America had disappeared from view, while new land masses around Cuba and Florida and between Australia and Papua New Guinea had suddenly appeared.
‘Has this ever happened before?’ she asked.
‘People dismiss cities like Atlantis as science fiction, but it’s not that Atlantis sank… As you can see from the map, when a geographic pole shift occurs, the position of the oceans change and whole continents disappear. They are covered in water while new land masses appear.’
‘Is there any evidence?’
