Upon reaching the fork at the bottom of the Great Gallery, Conrad wasn’t surprised to find three tunnels now instead of two.
“Now don’t tell me you saw that one before too,” Yeats said.
“No, it definitely wasn’t there before,” Conrad said. “Maybe something we did in the lower chamber opened a door.”
Conrad looked up the gallery toward the upper chamber and saw several figures rappeling down.
Yeats saw them too and gripped his arm. “Fall back,” he whispered. “That’s an order.”
They cut their head torches and retreated to the new access tunnel, where they took cover on either side of the entry. Pressing his back against the wall, Conrad looked across at Yeats. His father’s silhouette was blackened by the dim glow radiating out from the bottom of the gallery.
“Team Phoenix, copy,” Yeats spoke into his radio microphone. But there was no response. “Copy me, Team Phoenix.” Again, nothing. “Goddamn it.”
Conrad pulled out his nightscope and peered around the corner. Two figures dropped down onto the landing at the bottom of the gallery. Their green eyes-night-vision goggles-bobbed up and down in the dark. Conrad pulled back and looked at his father.
“Who are they?” Conrad whispered.
“Can’t say,” Yeats said. “But they sure as hell aren’t mine. Move.”
They started down the long, dark access tunnel. This corridor was thirty-five feet tall, but it felt much smaller after the grandeur of the Great Gallery they had descended. After about 1,200 feet due south, the floor sloped sharply into a larger tunnel with a ceiling twice as high.
“Over there.” Yeats pointed his flashlight beam to the floor.
About a hundred yards ahead was either a doorway or the end of the tunnel. It was hard to tell. But then Conrad felt a blast of air. He looked up and found a shaft in the ceiling of the tunnel. There was another one in the floor, angled at the same slope.
“That could be one of those two extra star shafts that lead into the secret chamber,” he said. “I think it cuts through this corridor. I’ll have to drop a line down to be sure.”
Yeats said, “I’m going to follow this corridor for another hundred yards or so to see what’s at the end. Then I’ll come back and you can tell me what you found.”
Conrad watched Yeats disappear while he uncoiled a line down the shaft. He was peering over the edge cautiously when he heard the scrape of a boot behind him and he swung around to see a pair of green eyes glowing in the passageway.
“And who the hell are you?” Conrad asked.
The figure in the night-vision goggles raised an AK-47 machine gun. “Your worst nightmare,” he said with a thick Russian accent and fingered his radio. “This is Leonid calling Colonel Kovich. I’ve captured an American.”
“The hell you have.” Conrad kicked the AK-47 out of Leonid’s hands and picked up the broken laser sight from the floor. Leonid whipped out a Yarygin PY 9 mm Grach pistol just as Conrad painted his forehead with a red dot from the laser sight. Conrad hoped Leonid couldn’t see there was no gun attached to it. “Drop it. Now.”
The Russian dropped his gun and Conrad exhaled.
“Very good.”
A bone-handled hunter’s knife slid out of the Russian’s right sleeve and dropped into the palm of his hand. There was a click as his thumb found the button, and his arm swept up, the blade streaking for the soft flesh beneath Conrad’s chin.
Conrad, anticipating such a move the second he heard the click of the knife, blocked the arm and grabbed for the wrist with both hands, twisting it so that the Russian dropped the knife and cried out in pain. Conrad wrenched the arm around and up, still keeping that excruciating hold in place. This time the Russian screamed as muscles tore, and Conrad ran him headfirst into the wall and then plunged him into the floor shaft.
Conrad was peering into the darkness below when he heard footsteps. He grabbed the Russian’s AK-47 from the floor and looked up to see Yeats running toward him.
“Dead end,” Yeats said. “What the hell happened here?”
Conrad was about to tell him when he felt a yank at his ankle. He looked down and saw his nylon line tightening like a noose around his boot, realizing a second too late that the Russian had somehow snagged it on his way down and was taking Conrad with him.
“Hold this!” Conrad tossed Yeats the other end of the line as he plunged down the shaft in the tunnel floor. “Don’t let go!”
Tumbling through the darkness, Conrad struggled to clip his line to his harness. He could sense himself falling through one level after another, with no end in sight. He tensed up as he braced himself for something to break his fall.
Soon the line around his boot slacked off while the line around his harness stiffened. Finally, he burst into some large space. His line snapped tight and caught him in midair. He dangled helplessly.
“Dad!” he called. “Can you hear me?”
There was nothing at first, then the faintest, “Barely!”
Conrad fingered his belt for a flashlight and switched it on. The shock of what he saw took a few seconds to sink in.
He was swinging like a pendulum inside a magnificent chamber in the shape of a geodesic dome. His fingers tingled with adrenaline as he scanned the ceiling with his beam. The apex of the dome was about two hundred feet above him. Scattered across the four merging walls were numerous constellations. It looked like some kind of cosmic observatory.
He lowered his beam. Some kind of altar with a two-foot-tall obelisk in the center rose from the stone floor. And impaled on it was the Russian.
“Dad!” Conrad shouted. “I found it!”
18
Conrad cut his line and dropped twenty feet to the floor of the geodesic chamber. He looked up at the star carvings scattered across the domed ceiling almost two hundred feet above him. There was no other entrance into this chamber that he could see. Only the overhead shaft. This was a virgin find. His find. He was the first human to set foot in this chamber in more than twelve thousand years. For all he knew, he was the first human ever.
Except, that is, for the Russian impaled on the obelisk in the center of the chamber. Conrad had to push hard to lift the corpse off the obelisk and onto the floor, so that he could drag it off to the side.
Conrad wiped the Russian’s blood off his hands and slowly circled the altar with the obelisk while he waited for Yeats to find his own way into the chamber. Tingling with anticipation, he pointed his torch beam at the four rings radiating out from the altar. Then he lifted the beam until it splashed the obelisk with light.
It looked like a classical obelisk. Its height was ten times its width. Except for its rotund alike base, it resembled a two-foot-tall scale model of the Washington Monument. On every side were technical inscriptions, the only inscriptions so far inside the entire pyramid.
He’d eventually need Serena’s help to crack their meaning, he realized as he pulled out his digital camera and took pictures. For now he took special note of a series of six rings on one of the obelisk’s four sides and a sequence of four constellations-Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, and Aquarius-on another.
Most important, the obelisk looked exactly like the scepter held by Osiris in that royal seal he had seen on the floor of the geothermal chamber. Historically the king’s scepter connoted awesome power, the very power his father the general was looking for and afraid somebody else would capture.
This is the Scepter of Osiris,he thought.This is the key to P4, the geothermal vent and everything else.
Conrad leaned forward to take the obelisk when a hidden door began to rumble open-a series of doors, really. Four great granite slabs began to part from the bottom up.
Conrad stepped back as the last door opened to reveal a lone figure standing in a corridor that seemed to
