many crystals about two feet in diameter placed into the tiled walls about five feet up from the cobbled floor.
'They look like lights,' Collins ventured.
'Hey, the colonel is brighter than I thought,' Sarah quipped.
Collins looked at her expressionlessly.
Sarah cleared her throat and then took out a small hammer and chipped away at the clay tile around the crystal. She finally managed to pop it free and held it in her hands.
'See, it's been beveled into this shape--very efficient for amplifying light. It would have taken very little electricity to ignite this filament here.' She probed a small copper wire attached to a larger one running through the tiled wall.
'Electricity again?' Jack asked.
'Yes. These people were as active as ConEd.'
'If they were so smart, how come they didn't have a train running down here?'
Sarah didn't answer Jack's question because she was thinking. Suddenly she pushed the light crystal into his hands and then ran to the back of one of the two-ton trucks and removed a spare battery from the back. She relieved Jack of the crystal and ripped free the thicker copper line, part of which was so old that it crumbled in her hand. She laid the crystal aside, opened up her battery-operated flashlight, and emptied the batteries out, then unscrewed the lens cap. She easily popped free the two small wires and then attached them to the copper line that ran chainlike to the other crystals embedded in the walls. Then she kneeled by the battery and hesitated. She split the flashlight wires farther apart until each end could reach a battery post and then she attached them.
Jack was amazed when the crystals in line lit up like a row of Christmas lights until they disappeared down the long tunnel.
'Uh, did someone trip the house alarm?' Everett asked over the radio.
Jack smiled and raised his radio. 'Advance one, that's a negative. We had one of our electricians just throw a breaker switch,' Collins answered, just as they heard and felt a rumble from below.
'Understood. Get your team moving. We just cleared the road down here, continuing on.'
Jack clicked his radio twice and ordered everyone to the vehicles. Then he looked at Sarah with his left brow raised.
'Think you're pretty smart, don't you?'
She batted her eyelashes, smiled, and then moved off.
Jack shook his head and ran to his vehicle. He raised his radio. 'Captain, we have to push it. Things are going to start going boom pretty soon.'
'You think this is a waste of time?' Tomlinson asked Caretaker without turning around to face him.
They watched the engineers clearing the last of the debris from the entrance to the Empirium Chamber.
'I have no comment one way or the other, sir.'
'Then why don't you go eat some cheese and drink a glass of wine with the others?'
'I have no taste for such things.'
'Mr. Tomlinson, we are through the outer wall of the Empirium Chamber,' the lead engineer said as he removed his hard hat and wiped sweat from his brow. 'We have four men inside setting up some klieg lighting; we still may have a very unstable situation in there. In addition, we may have found another extensive cave system under the building. My echo-sound people tell me it goes down at least a mile and a quarter.'
Tomlinson looked from the engineer to the set of twenty-foot-tall bronze doors that had bowed when the Empirium had collapsed. He could wait no longer. He ducked his head and entered the fifteen-thousand-year-old structure.
'Is he crazy? I told him it may be unstable,' the engineer said to Caretaker as he approached the Empirium.
Caretaker's face was neutral as he looked into the blackness beyond the doorway. He had been watching Tomlinson closely ever since he had demolished his home in Chicago. The signs were small and had not been noticed by the others, but he had seen a change in the usually unflappable Tomlinson. When he spoke, his eyes moved too quickly from person to person, as if he was waiting for the first sign of disagreement from them. Caretaker believed that the pressure was mounting for the new Coalition leader. This seemingly obsessive desire to enter the old seat of the Atlantean government was just the latest. He smiled and looked at the engineer.
'
The large lights cast eerie shadows on the broken columns and marble that lay crushed beneath most of the collapsed ceiling. A few of his archaeologists and paleontologists started filtering in to look at this marvel of history.
Tomlinson had to smirk when Caretaker ran one of his hands across an overturned marble table and grimaced at the millennia of dust.
'I always said you could never trust a man that didn't like getting dirty once in a while.'
Caretaker did not bother to look at Tomlinson. 'Is that what you say? Well, here is what I say: I believe you should be working on finalizing this last assault of yours and not out sightseeing.'
'Can't you feel it? Where else but here could the power of this civilization be governed but the Great Empirium of Atlantis?'
'If we don't use the Wave soon, this just may be the only place you are allowed to govern.'
Tomlinson knew that Caretaker was right. With his new feeling of rejuvenation, he looked around one last time at the Empirium Chamber, not noticing the skeletal form at his feet or the broken marble tile that hid the secret entrance to the underground world beneath.
Fifteen thousand years of leakage had formed long stalactites that hung from the high ceiling, each dripping with water that found a way in through course rock and magma from the Mediterranean, two miles above their heads.
Sarah and the other scientists back at Group had been right: in the three hours they had been in the great tunnel, Carl and his SEAL teams had come across numerous parts of the outer islands--the three great rings that had guarded the capital. There were large and small pieces of great columns, bathhouses, petrified trees, and roadways, all interspersed with giant deposits of ancient molten rock that made the landscape they had come across look like vast lakes of rippling water. The upheaval and death throes of this civilization had been of such violence that Everett could only imagine.
The inefficient lights provided them with horrific views of the cataclysm. Skeletal remains were everywhere, half buried or crushed by the very island they had lived on. It was as if the place had folded up and over the capital, and then the whole mass had sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean.
'Captain, you have to see this,' the SEAL lieutenant said as he approached. 'This operation is done.'
Carl quickly saw the reason for his dire comment. Standing in front of them, blocking their way, were the entire outer edges of the city of Atlantis rising four hundred feet into the air. Their way was blocked.
The president was watching the C-SPAN coverage of the special UN meeting. He watched the Russian ambassador to the United Nations present their case.
As photos of the aircraft parts from the downed Boeing 777 were shown from an easel, he was reminded of the Cuban missile crisis, only this time it was the Russians who had the sympathy of the body politic. The president winced at the way his government had been set up.
'Our pull-back didn't convince anyone. All it did was corner our men into a tighter situation than before. Now we have a million refugees on the roads south from Seoul, clogging up reinforcements, and at the first sign of an offensive move, which I am compelled to order, the Chinese will rush across the border just like in 1947.'
'We have to invite the Russians and Chinese in,' Niles said, looking at the president.
'What?'
'Our KH-11 is over the Med; when we hit Crete, we have to get the Russians and Chinese to watch what's going on.'
'What makes you think they don't have a spy bird over right now and just don't care what we're doing?'
'Because if they did, they would know our evidence is linked to what's going on. They're smart enough to see
