authority on megalithic architecture and the son of the general leading the expedition. Serena didn’t have a prayer. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“What happens when you come across some inscription down there?” she asked simply. “Who’s going to figure it out? You?”
Not only had he failed to extract any meaningful information from her, Conrad thought with a sinking feeling, but she also had directed their conversation to precisely this point. The point that Yeats had just predicted this would all come to. And somehow, Serena knew as much.
“Granted, I’m no linguist, but here and there I’ve picked up a thing or two.”
“Like a venereal disease?” she shot back. “For all you know, Conrad, the only reason you’re here is because they thought they couldn’t get me.”
The thing that bothered Conrad the most was that she said it with absolute humility. It wasn’t a boast, but a plausible probability. Then Conrad realized she was playing to the security camera near the ceiling. She had been talking to Yeats all along.
“You’re unbelievable, you know that?” he told her. “Absolutely unbelievable.”
She flashed him a warm smile that could melt the ice caps. “Would you have me any other way?”
9
“Damn Yeats,”cursed Admiral Hank Warren.
The short, powerfully built Warren scanned the blacked-out silhouettes of his carrier group’s battle formation with his binoculars from the bridge of the aircraft carrier U.S.S.Constellation. They were twenty miles off the coast of East Antarctica, and Warren’s mission was to keep his battle group undetected until further orders.
To that end, all radars and satellite sets were turned off. Only line-of-sight radios capable of millisecond-burst transmissions were allowed. Extra lookouts with binoculars were posted on deck to sweep the dawn’s horizon for enemy surface ship silhouettes and submarine periscope feathers.
The idea was to get the battle force in close to the coast without betraying their position and then strike at the enemy without warning. A nuclear-powered carrier was good at that. But who the hell was the enemy down here? He and his battle force were freezing their asses trying to avoid detection, and the only enemy they were intimidating was the penguins.
Meanwhile, an unidentified aircraft using a U.S. Navy military frequency had placed a distress call before disappearing from radar. And if the crew of the Constellation heard it, then others had heard it too.
All he knew was that this had something to do with that crazy bastard Griffin Yeats, and that made him even more uneasy.
Way back when, Warren had done some time with the U.S. Naval Support Task Force, Antarctica. It was his rescue team that found Yeats wandering in a stupor back in ’69 after forty-three days in the snow deserts, the sole survivor of a training mission for a Mars launch that never happened. The nut insisted on dragging three NASA supply containers with him even though the navy had its own. Not a care about the three bodies he left behind. Only later did Warren’s team learn that the containers Yeats dragged out with him were radioactive. But that’s the kind of man Yeats was, unconcerned with the havoc he wreaked in other people’s lives if they got in the way of his own agenda. When Warren filed a complaint, all he got was the “classified” and “need to know” bullshit.
Now, more than thirty-five years later and bearing the rank of admiral, Warren was still in the dark when it came to Yeats. And it frustrated him to no end. His crew had just picked up a short-burst distress call from what appeared to be some black ops flight calling itself 696, which apparently crashed on approach to some phantom landing strip. Yeats’s fingerprints were all over this debacle, and Warren was personally going to see to it that the man got the early retirement he deserved.
“Conn, Sonar,” shouted the sonar chief from his console.
“Conn, aye.” Warren had the conn for the morning watch. It was important for the crew to see him in command and even more important for him to feel in command.
“Lookouts report unknown surface vessel inbound at two-zero-six,” the sonar chief reported. “Range is under a thousand yards.”
“What!” the admiral blurted. “How the hell did we miss it?”
Warren lifted his binoculars and turned to the southwest. There. A ship. The letters across the bow said MV Arctic Sunrise. It was a Greenpeace ship, and on board was a guy pointing a video camera with a zoom lens at the Constellation.
“Helmsman, get us out of here!”
“Too late, sir,” said a signalman. “They’ve marked us.”
The signalman pointed to a TV monitor.
“This is CNN, live from the Arctic Sunrise.” The reporter was broadcasting from the bow of the Greenpeace ship. “As you can see behind me, the U.S.S.Constellation, one of the mightiest warships ever made, is cruising off the coast of Antarctica, its mission shrouded in secrecy. But first, CNN has captured on video large cracks in this Antarctic ice shelf, which suggest that the collapse of the shelf is imminent.”
A scruffy college type, the kind who wouldn’t last a week at Annapolis, came on-screen to say, “Scientists consider the rapid disintegration of this and other ice shelves around Antarctica a sign that dangerous warming is continuing.”
Footage appeared of an iceberg that had split off the coast a few weeks ago. The reporter’s voice-over noted that the towering ice cube covered two thousand square miles, with sheer walls rising almost two hundred feet above the waterline and had an estimated depth of one thousand feet.
“And now a bizarre new twist to the global warming phenomenon has surfaced regarding accusations of unauthorized nuclear tests by the United States in the interior snow deserts of Antarctica.”
The CNN report concluded with a long shot of the Constellation ’s ominous profile on the ocean horizon at dawn.
“Aw, hell,” said Warren. MSNBC and the other network news shows would soon give out the same information. It couldn’t get any worse. “Damn you, Griffin Yeats.”
10
Serena sat on her bunk, listening to the whirring of the two fans pumping air and God knew what else into the cold brig. She shivered. Images she had trained herself to suppress had resurfaced after seeing Conrad. Now, as she hugged her body to keep warm, the memory of their last time together came flooding back.
It had been March, six months after they first met at the symposium of Meso-American archaeologists in La Paz, Bolivia’s capital. She was still a nun then, and they were seeing each other almost daily, working side by side on a research project in the lost city of Tiahuanaco high in the Andes.
Conrad Yeats was intelligent, attractive, witty, and sensitive. He was almost more spiritual than her colleagues from Rome, and what attracted her to him most was the purity of his calling. Some found his unorthodox theory of a Mother Culture threatening, but to her it made a wild kind of sense, based on her own studies of world mythologies. She and Conrad were approaching the same conclusion from different ends, he from archaeology and she from linguistics.
On the last night of their field studies program he invited her to join him for a “revelation” on Lake Titicaca, about twelve miles away from Tiahuanaco.
It was a curious place for good-byes, she thought as she strolled the shore. Locals and tourists alike were
