wooden crates and suiting up for battle. Quinn noted that the big one, called Sven, had a tattoo on his bicep—the eagle and fouled anchor emblem of the Navy SEALs.
“What the hell is going on here?” Quinn demanded.
“Just doing our job,” said Sven. “I suggest you stick to yours, Quinn.”
Next to him, the bull-necked man named Klaus locked eyes with Quinn as he tested the bolt action on a Heckler & Koch MP-5 machine gun. On his hip Klaus wore a Desert Eagle pistol in a Velcro holster, and he had a survival knife strapped to his boot.
Two others were swapping weapons and ammunition as they drew them out of the packing crates. They spoke Russian to one another and ignored the newcomer.
Quinn stepped forward. “Nobody told me we were going to war.”
One of the Russians—tagged Boris—looked up and said something to his friend, Mikkel. Both chuckled. Then Boris slapped a magazine into his machine gun and looked up at Quinn. He wore a cruel half-smile that didn’t reach much beyond his thin lips. His eyes were watery blue and as cold as the ice outside.
“Perhaps you should’ve asked, comrade,” said Boris, with no trace of a Russian accent.
Quinn took in the machine guns, the pistols, the Kevlar vests.
“You fellows ought to know that it’s against The Antarctic Treaty of 1961 for any nation to bring this kind of military shit up here. Nobody cares about a few handguns—even rifles—but this heat you’re packing is a violation of international law.”
“Well, Weyland Industries is no nation,” said Sven as he strapped his tight, well-muscled physique into a bulletproof vest. “And I don’t remember signing any treaty.”
Before they moved deeper into the pyramid, Lex faced her party.
“The ambient temperature in here is a lot warmer than ground level,” she said. “You can take off your jackets.”
Happy to shed their bulky gear, Sebastian and his partner Thomas, along with Miller, Weyland, Max Stafford, Connors, and Adele Rousseau, dumped their stuff in a huge pile.
Lex shed her coat until she was clad only in a bright red, cold-weather pantsuit. Donning her backpack, Lex activated a strobe light and dropped it on the stone floor nearby. Its constant flashing would act as a beacon to lead them back to their gear.
She looked up to find Sebastian watching her.
“Why don’t you leave crumbs of bread for us to follow, like in the fairy tale,” he teased.
Lex smiled. “The birds would eat them and we’d be lost forever.”
“I don’t think you’ll find many birds down here, and I doubt bats are fond of bread.”
As the others repacked and rearranged their belongings, Lex moved a few feet into the next corridor, Sebastian at her side.
“Leaving the bones behind?”
“Thomas will take care of that end of things,” Sebastian replied. “He’s the type of archaeologist who’s half coroner. Anyway, Weyland ordered him to remain in the sacrificial chamber and catalog everything.”
“Weyland’s good at giving orders.”
“Thomas won’t mind. That blond Amazon, Adele, is staying behind with him. They could get acquainted.”
“And in such a romantic place.”
They walked along in silence for a moment, their flashlights stabbing the darkness in front of them.
“What about you?” Lex asked. “What kind of archaeologist are you, Dr. De Rosa?”
Sebastian fingered the Pepsi cap hanging from his neck. “I love old things. There’s a special kind of beauty to an object made a long time ago—something timeless, immortal.”
“Speaking of beautiful… look at the way they catch the light.” Lex gestured to the ceiling of the wide hallway, where the stone was encrusted with a forest of shimmering, blue-tinged stalactites.
As she moved the flashlight beam across the frozen surface, the icicles seemed to change color, from cool blue to azure to purple. Weyland hobbled down the corridor and stood at Lex’s side, leaning on his ice pole and looking up.
“Must be some kind of mineral impurities in the water,” Sebastian deduced.
“That’s what I thought at first,” said Miller. “But it’s not.”
“Not an impurity?”
“Not
Sebastian was surprised. Miller held up his spectrometer. “I ran a quick test on another patch of this stuff, back there.”
He consulted the liquid plasma screen. “We’ve got your tricresyl phosphate, zinc alkyl, dithiophosphate, diethylene gluycol, polypropylene ether… and some trace elements.”
“Which makes it what exactly?” Lex asked.
It was Sebastian who answered. “Hydraulic fluid,” he said. “Or near enough.”
Everyone stared at the archaeologist, surprised.
“I own a ’57 Chevy. It’s my hobby.” He shrugged and gave Lex a little smile. “Like I said, pretty much anything old.”
Weyland turned to Miller. “So what do you make of it?”
“I don’t know. But I can’t imagine that the ancients used hydraulic fluid.”
“Coincidence?”
Miller opened his mouth to reply, but Sebastian spoke first. “I doubt it, Mr. Weyland. If five thousand years of human history have taught us anything, it’s that coincidence is for the birds.”
Once his men were settled, Quinn took a break and slept for three hours. When the alarm in his watch went off—too soon—Quinn climbed out of his sleeping bag and went outside to check the pit.
He was relieved to find that the rigid, cherry-red “apple” tent over the hole was still intact, and the pulley seemed in working order, with no trace of ice on the gears. Quinn checked the readout on the depth meter. The pulley had spooled out over 2,011 feet worth of steel cable, which meant that the underground team had reached the bottom of the tunnel hours ago, some time after the storm had begun.
He sat down, yanked off his gloves and cranked the radiophone, which was hardwired to the team underground. But they didn’t bother to answer.
Quinn wasn’t surprised. Charles Weyland had become obsessed with security since they’d discovered the hole in the ice. He’d ordered a complete communications blackout with the outside world, not that they were hearing much with this storm, anyway. Then that ex-Navy SEAL and his four buddies from who-knows-where had dropped their disguise as “security” and started throwing guns around like a special forces platoon arming for a mission.
He concluded that this whole job was beginning to stink worse than roadkill on a hot Texas highway.
After determining that everything inside the apple tent was secure, Quinn stepped outside. The wind hit him like a baseball bat, with snow pelting his parka so hard that the individual flakes stung like shrapnel. He tied his hood and pulled his hat down to cover his face. Quinn estimated the katabatic gusts in excess of seventy miles per hour, which was very, very bad.
As he walked through town, Quinn could barely make out the black shape of the mess hall against the white curtain of snow.
“Hold it right there. Identify yourself,” a voice demanded, the cry muffled by the falling snow.
“It’s Quinn. Quinn, goddamn it!”
He lowered his hood and stepped forward, to find himself staring down the barrel of the largest handgun in the world. Quinn angrily tore off his hat so the man could recognize him.
Klaus holstered the Desert Eagle.
“What the hell are you doing?” Quinn barked. “I don’t like guns shoved in my face.”
“Orders,” said Klaus with a defiant shrug. He pulled Quinn into the relative shelter of the doorway and leaned close so he could be heard. “Weyland wants this area secured.”
