Only after reaching the bottom of the abyss and beholding the protruding summit of a pyramid did Kovich realize that the Americans had pushed him and his twenty Russian comrades over the brink. And how could he ever forget the horror on his men’s faces when they saw the hundreds of human bodies frozen in the walls of this ice tomb?
Truly their commanding officer had finally led them down to hell.
The shiny white exterior of the pyramid didn’t even show up on their radio-echo scans from a few feet away. It was obvious the Americans had developed a super-secret, indestructible stealth material that could render their fleets and bombers both invisible and invincible.
As if that were not enough, a message played in Kovich’s head over and over again: “Wait, there’s more!” the voice repeated, like some terrible American infomercial. “Much, much more!” As a special bonus at the bottom of hell, the Americans had left what looked like an RV parked atop the pyramid summit along with another hole that beckoned them farther.
Here at this “habitat” Kovich left the two American observers who had accompanied them down, along with five of his men. He and the rest of his team proceeded down the seven-foot-tall shaft and didn’t reach the other end for a good half hour.
They emerged inside what seemed to be a massive stone oven the size of an Olympic stadium. And inside this chamber were four American soldiers-two men and two women-who surrendered their weapons but refused to say a word.
As a final bonus, there seemed to be no way out of this tomb. When attempts to reach Vlad and the rest of the crew at Ice Base Orion on the surface failed, Kovich feared the worst.
He had been duped, he concluded. This was a trap. They had been lured into this mass grave so they could be killed. Meanwhile, the Americans would monitor their slow descent into madness with hidden cameras and use the results in their training videos for new recruits.
Finally, one of his men found an open passageway.
Kovich left a few men to guard the Americans and took the rest down a low, square tunnel to a plateau overlooking what looked like a gigantic Moscow metro tunnel plunging toward the center of the earth. It was at least one hundred meters tall, he guessed, and could swallow Russia’s GUM retail mall, the biggest in the world. Running along its shiny walls and floor and ceiling were sunken channels about forty feet wide and twenty feet deep.
“Look, sir!” shouted one of his soldiers, pointing into the abyss. “There’s more!”
Peering over the ledge, Kovich could only rub his disbelieving eyes. For inside one of the channels were two lines daring him to descend even farther.
Something rose up inside Kovich’s bubbling psyche, bursting through the swirling images of fast food, bikinis, Ginsu knives, and self-improvement CDs. That something was the stark realization that he and his men were going to die. They would never make it back to the surface again.
With chilling clarity, Kovich made the last strategic decision of his life: if they weren’t leaving this tomb, then neither were the Americans.
17
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.
