floor beneath their boots sloped at a slight grade. Engulfed in darkness, and feeling very cold, Conrad sensed that this cavity was in some ways many times larger than the upper chamber they had left at the top of the Great Gallery. Yet the emptiness beyond the torchlight beams also felt compressed in some way. This was definitely uncharted territory, he realized, and could feel the tension in his gut.
“I’m tossing out a flare-thirty-second delay,” Yeats said. “Three, two, one.”
Conrad could hear Yeats heave the stick into the dark. Mentally he counted down as he pulled out his digital camera to capture whatever image would burst forth. A few seconds later the chamber exploded with light.
Conrad shielded his eyes as he panned what fleetingly resembled a stone crater with his camera. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he began to see that’s exactly what they were standing in. They were on the rim of a titanic crater almost a mile in diameter. But it was only two hundred feet high.
The flare sputtered and died. Once again Conrad and Yeats were in darkness.
Yeats said, “Show me what you’ve got.”
“Right here.”
Conrad replayed the footage on the flat display screen on the back of his camera. It glowed bright in the darkness.
“Stop,” said Yeats.
Conrad paused the screen. There was something in the center of the crater. A circle or hub of some sort.
“Can you zoom?”
“A little.”
Conrad, fingers tingling with adrenaline, magnified the image until it filled the display. But the picture was still too blurred to make it out clearly.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Conrad and Yeats marched in unison toward the center, careful not to lose their balance on the sloping floor. Conrad could feel his heart pounding. He’d never experienced any sort of chamber like this in Egypt or the Americas, nothing even remotely similar in size or configuration.
At the half-mile mark Yeats called a halt.
Conrad lowered his flashlight beam to the floor and found something about ten yards in front of them. Carved across the polished stone floor were four rings radiating from an oval cartouche in the center, like some magnificent seal.
Yeats let out a low whistle. “Finally, inscriptions for Mother Earth.”
“Not quite,” said Conrad, breathing hard. Part of him wanted to run back and get her. Another part refused to admit he couldn’t figure this out by himself. “It’s an icon or symbol.”
“Then even you should be able to decipher it.”
Conrad walked to the center of the floor, where a familiar-looking hieroglyphic was inscribed inside the oval cartouche. It was of a god or king seated inside some sort of mechanical device. He resembled a bearded Caucasian and wore what looked like an elaborate head ornament known as an Atef crown. And he held some sort of scepter in his hand. It looked like a small obelisk.
“This figure looks familiar,” Conrad heard himself saying, “but I can’t put my finger on why.”
Conrad looked again at the cartouche on the floor. The image inscribed inside was similar to the symbols he had seen depicting the gods of Viracocha in the Andes and Quetzalcoatl in Central America. But this otherworldly symbol awakened something primeval and terrifying inside him, and suddenly he knew why.
“This pyramid is dedicated to Osiris.” Conrad’s voice wavered.
“So what?” said Yeats. “I thought most of these pyramids were dedicated to some god.”
“You don’t understand,” Conrad said excitedly. “This seal suggests P4 was built by the King of Eternity himself, the Lord of First Time.”
“First Time?”
“The Genesis epoch I told you about back at Ice Base Orion, the time when humanity emerged from the primordial darkness and was offered the gifts of civilization from the gods,” Conrad said. “Ancient Egyptian texts say these gifts or technologies were introduced through intermediaries or lesser divinities known as ‘The Watchers’ or Urshu.”
Yeats paused. “So you think the Urshu were the Atlanteans who built P4?”
“Maybe,” Conrad said. “I’m sure Serena has her own interpretation. But there’s no denying that we’ve found the mother lode.” Conrad could hear the triumph in his voice. “The Mother Culture.”
“First Time,” Yeats said.
“First Time,” Conrad echoed and spoke the phrase in his best Ancient Egyptian:“Zep Tepi.”
As soon as the words fell out of his mouth, they seemed to swirl around the chamber, spinning out from the center of the crater floor like some centrifugal force. The floor started to shake.
Suddenly the cartouche split open and Conrad stumbled backward as a pillar of fire shot up from the floor and through a circular shaft in the ceiling.
“Whoa!” he shouted and slipped flat on his back. He started to slide across the bottom of the crater floor toward the fiery hole.
Yeats grabbed his arm and held him back. “Easy, easy, easy.”
Then the fire burst disappeared and the rumbling stopped. All that remained was a crater like shaft where the cartouche had split open.
Conrad felt a tug as Yeats pulled him up on his feet. “Now where on earth do you think that goes, son?”
Conrad leaned over and peered down the fiery shaft. For a flickering second he glimpsed a glowing tunnel that seemed to descend to the very bowels of the earth. But the residual heat from the blast burned his forehead and he quickly pulled away.
“From the looks of it,” Conrad said, gingerly touching his forehead to see if it was still there, “I’d say the pit of hell.”
16
It was the vodka.
It had to be the vodka, Colonel Ivan Kovich swore, when he first beheld the pyramid at the bottom of the ice chasm. That or some experimental hallucinogenics the Americans had slipped into his drink at their base on the surface.
Whatever it was, he decided, it was part of an American plot to drive the Russian people insane. It had started with the imperialist capitalist bankrolling of the Communist revolution in 1917. It had moved into full gear with the installation of Stalin and the gulags, and then the slaughter of twenty million during World War II. It culminated in the humiliating disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 and rise of the golden arches of American hamburger stands in Moscow.
Now that the United States was the world’s undisputed superpower, Kovich was convinced, the Americans were simply keeping the Russians alive for their own cruel pleasure, starving their bodies of nutrients with Big Macs and their souls with TV shows like Baywatch.
It was from this hell that Kovich had sought refuge in the spare, unspoiled beauty of Antarctica, only to stumble across a veritable Four Seasons Resort in the snow in the form of Ice Base Orion. With state-of-the-art computers, plush sleeping quarters, toilets that flushed, and a stockpile of food, the only thing lacking was a swimming pool and health spa.
The concierge of Hotel Orion, Colonel O’Dell, was pleasant enough during the inspection. But the American grew increasingly nervous when Russian dosimeters detected radiation, and Kovich suggested a survey of the gigantic ice chasm over which the base was perched.
Kovich was convinced he was on the verge of discovering a rogue nuclear testing facility, mostly because Russia itself had one at the other end of the planet in the Arctic Circle.
