Beneath the Ice (16 page)

To the right rose the Ellsworth Mountains;
to the left was the wide expanse of the Ronne Ice Shelf. Ahead lay
more ice.

Ahead lay the future.

“
You know me, buddy,” Jack was saying. He and
Perry were watching Gleason and Sarah make the final connections to
the cryobot called Hairy. The rest of the team stood nearby wearing
the clean suits. “I’ll believe just about anything you say, but
this one has me wondering. A pyramid below the ice? Ice that most
people in the know say was laid down long before anyone could have
sailed here?”

“I didn’t make it up, Jack. It’s there, and
yes, it looks like a pyramid—or ziggurat, as Dr. Curtis reminded
us.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Shape,” a voice said. Dr.
Curtis approached. “Pyramids have straight sides while ziggurats
are stepped. Usually the word
ziggurat
is applied to Mesopotamian
structures, but the term can be used more widely. A ziggurat starts
wide at the ground and each layer up is smaller until it reaches
its peak.”

“So you think one of these ziggurats is
below the ice,” Jack said.

Dr. Curtis shook his head. “I’m sorry,
Perry, but it’s too much to believe. I’ve seen strange things in my
day, including that find of yours in the Tehachapi Mountains that
still has me answering questions from universities all around the
world, but this pushes my credulity a tad too far. I have to agree
with Dr. James. It’s a mound of some sort that coincidentally looks
man-made.”

“Sensible conclusion, Dr. Curtis,” Griffin
said. “At least I have one other reasonable person around.”

“Don’t count me too far on your side, Dr.
James,” Curtis said. “I’m willing to admit that I’ve been surprised
before.”

“We all have, but not by the likes of this,”
Griffin objected. “Buildings mean humans, and it is simply
impossible to think that humans ever inhabited this region—or
anywhere in Antarctica. The largest native animal here is the
wingless midge. Anything larger than that insect could never
survive the hostilities of the land. Sure, penguins, seals, and the
like make their way to the shoreline, but nothing moves
inland.”

“But Antarctica has changed,” Perry said.
“What we see today is not the way it’s always been.”

“Everything changes, Mr. Sachs. Nothing is
stagnant.”

“Except old ideas,” Perry countered.

“Excuse me?” Griffin said, looking
injured.

“Humans have a tendency to latch onto a
truth and cling to it no matter how much evidence tells them
otherwise.”

“You mean like your faith,” Griffin said.
“My sister tells me you’re a Christian. Is that so?”

“It is.”

“That goes for me, too,” Jack said.

“And me,” Curtis said without
embarrassment.

“Really?” Griffin said, looking at Curtis.
“That surprises me. I can understand how these two might succumb to
such myths, but you’re scientifically trained. And in archaeology
at that.”

“I have found science deepens my faith,”
Curtis said. “And don’t sell these men short. You’re too
intelligent a man to be shackled by scientific chauvinism. Perry,
Jack, and Gleason are no fools.”

“Thanks, Doc,” Jack said. “I think you’re
just swell, too.”

Curtis sighed. “No matter
how much they may act it.” He returned his attention to Griffin.
“Science is the pursuit of reality. We struggle to describe what
was, what is, and what may come to be. Once we cease to test, to
reexamine, then we become the keep
ers of
the old, not the explorers of the new.”

“I don’t think you can accuse me of being a
keeper of the old,” Griffin said.

“Really?” Curtis asked. “An hour ago in the
Dome, when Perry revealed the news about poor Dr. Hearns’s find,
you pooh-poohed it out of hand. When presented with the possibility
of a human-made structure where no such structure could possibly
be, you refused to participate in a search for the truth.”

“But you said you didn’t believe it to be
what it appears,” Griffin said.

“That’s true. I don’t see how any structure,
pyramidal or not, can be there. The difference between us is I want
to ascertain the truth.”

“Science is science, and stupidity is
stupidity,” Griffin remarked.

“Sometimes it’s hard to tell the
difference,” Jack said.

“You know as well as I,”
Perry said, “that Antarctica used to be very different. All we see
is cold and ice, but life existed here—life much larger than the
wingless midge. The fossil record shows the presence of forests of
the southern beech tree,
Nothofagus.
Fossil leaves of a plant
similar to the ginkgo biloba have been found as
well. Conifer remains are present, including one that stands
twen
ty-three feet high. On the Antarctic
Peninsula the remains of a giant, flightless bird have been
unearthed. In recent years a crested carnivore fossil was found, as
was a duck-billed hadrosaur. Evidence of small dinosaurs exists,
too, such as the
Leaellynasaura
and later marsupials. On Seymour Island, near the
Antarctic Peninsula, scientists found a fossil of an armadillo the
size of a Volkswagen.”

“That’s a long way from an established human
civilization,” Griffin said.

“My point is, life used to be here in
abundance,” Perry said.

“So what changed?” Jack asked.

“You want to take a crack at that, Dr.
James?” Perry asked. “It’s your specialty.”

“I’ll concede that complex
life used to make its home here, but that would have been when
Antarctica was part of Australia, which
was part of a single large continent, the supercontinent
Gondwana
.”

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Jack said.
“Gond-what?”

“Gondwana or
Gondwanaland,” Griffin said. “Three hundred million years ago the
continents of South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica were
part of a single land mass. The name comes from Eduard Suess, an
Austrian geologist. He wrote a book around the turn of the
twentieth century called
The Face of the
Earth.”

“The original Dr. Seuss, eh?” Jack
joked.

“Whatever,” Griffin said. “His concept is
now called plate tectonics. That’s the idea that the continents are
not stationary. There was a time when all the continents were one.
That land mass is called Pangaea. At least, that’s how the theory
goes. It’s still hypothetical.”

“As much of science is,” Curtis commented.
“That explains the need for an open mind and desire for truth.”

“Let me ask something,” Perry said. “Why is
Antarctica so cold?”

“Two reasons, primarily,” Griffin said.
“First, location: Antarctica does not receive much direct sunlight,
and most of what it does receive is reflected back into space by
the white ice. Also, there are months near darkness where very
little light reaches the surface.”

“And the second reason?” Perry prompted.

“The Antarctic Circumpolar Current.”

“The ocean makes it cold?” Jack said.

Griffin nodded. “This continent is
surrounded by ocean, like a huge island. The oceans affect weather
everywhere. At the higher latitudes the water is warmed by the sun,
and currents move that warm water around, which transfers that
energy to the climate. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current never gets
to the higher latitudes, so it remains cold—extremely cold. It is
the main reason for the freezing conditions we find ourselves
in.”

“If the continent were part of a larger land
mass, then the current wouldn’t be stuck in the circumpolar loop,
right?” Perry said.

“Right.”

“Therefore, the continent would be
warmer.”

“True,” Griffin said, “but all of this
happened hundreds of millions of years ago.”

“Perhaps,” Perry said. “Perhaps not.”

Gleason and Sarah approached, closely
followed by Gwen, who had been caught up in the work.

“We’re ready, Perry,” he said. “Just give
the word.”

“Consider it given.”

Chapter
13

Thomas Mahoney snapped
an order
to the young sailor who stood at
the state-of-the-art control console of the 420-foot Coast Guard
cutter, and the sleek vessel began a slow turn, just as it had a
few miles before. He let his gray, sun-bleached eyes trace the
water’s surface. He saw nothing new, and his frustration
increased.

“Is it just me, or is something out of
whack?” his executive officer, Ray Seager, asked.

Mahoney thought for a moment, wondering if
he had detected something wrong with the ship, something that had
slipped by him. The diesel-electric propulsion system seemed
normal. If anything was wrong with the thirty-thousand-horsepower
engines, his crew would notify him immediately. Then he caught his
XO’s meaning.

“You mean the missing plane?” Mahoney
said.

“Exactly. It doesn’t seem right.”

It doesn’t seem
right,
Mahoney thought. They had received
word of a missing C-5 overdue at McMurdo Station. The
Healy,
an icebreaker and
scientific platform, was pressed into search duty. It made sense.
No one knew the cold waters better than an icebreaker captain and
his crew. This was Mahoney’s second year as CO, and although far
from home, he loved the duty. Most days the
powerful ship cleared channels for supply ships or
aided
researchers in scientific
exploration. Cutting through ten-foot-thick sea ice was a
combination of skill, experience, and brute force. The captain and
thirty-one-member crew provided the former, the
Healy’s
mass and engines provided
the rest.

“What’s bothering you, Commander?” Mahoney
asked. Off the bridge he would have referred to his XO and longtime
friend by first name, but never in front of other crewmen.

“Everything, Captain.” Mahoney was taller
than Seager by two inches and weighed a good fifteen pounds more.
Those pounds wanted to settle just above his belt, which annoyed
him. “We’ve been at this for ten hours now and have found nothing,
not a single piece of wreckage, not the tiniest pool of fuel or oil
on the surface. I don’t think she’s out here.”

“Neither do I,” Mahoney admitted. “It would
take the world’s worst pilot to overshoot McMurdo and fall into the
sea without a distress signal or radio communication.”

“I suppose it could have been mechanical
failure,” Seager said.

“What kind of mechanical failure could cause
an aircraft to fly past its intended landing area and drop into the
sea? The crew would have be asleep at the wheel. And weather isn’t
a consideration. The sky was clear and the katabatic didn’t hit the
coast until the craft had been overdue by two hours. I agree,
something isn’t right.”

“So what do we do?”

“We follow our orders, Commander,” Mahoney
said with crisp, military diction. “We search until we’re told to
stop.”

The Sachs Engineering
building rose from the concrete and asphalt of downtown Seattle
like a stately redwood, reflecting the late afternoon sunshine back
to the cloud-adorned blue sky. Below Henry Sachs’s twelfth-story
office’s window, commuters clogged the narrow streets. It made no
difference to Henry; he wasn’t planning on returning home until
just before bedtime. With his wife Anna vis
iting her sister in Florida, there was little need to rush
home. Instead, he settled in his large leather chair.

Henry Sachs was not given to ornamentation
or fine art. A simple metal desk in a quiet room was all he needed
to lose himself in his work. His office, however, was far from
Spartan. Rich red-oak paneling covered the walls, leather chairs
and a sofa marked off a casual meeting area, and halogen ceiling
lights bathed the umber carpet in the purest white light. Paintings
hung proudly from walls, displaying projects his firm had erected
over the years—at least the ones that carried no top-secret
classification.

He sat behind a desk made
of quilted maple. The desk was his pride and joy. Not because it
was one of a kind but because of the artist who made it—his son,
Perry. In fact, Perry was responsible for the whole office. Henry
had been overseas for extended business and when he returned, he
found his office made over in
Architectural Digest–
fashion. “Happy
birthday,” Perry had said. The thought still brought tears of joy
to Henry’s eyes, tears he was quick to hide from others.

On Henry’s desk were several file folders, a
thin computer monitor and keyboard, and a family picture. He picked
up the picture and studied it. The photo had been taken at a local
restaurant, where Perry had taken Henry and Anna to celebrate forty
years of marriage.

On the glass pane that protected the
picture, Henry saw the pale reflection of his face. He had grown
older. He acknowledged the fact, but he refused to allow it any
seat in his mind. The reflection that stared back was of a man with
white hair combed back in easy waves, a deeply tanned face, and a
mouth comfortable with smiling. Just beyond the glass was the
picture of his wife—dark hair, dancing blue eyes, a petite nose,
and lips parted to reveal a row of white teeth. She was stunning
when he met her, and she still made his heart leap when he looked
at her.

He missed his wife.

He missed Perry, too. His son’s image, a
younger version of himself dressed in black coat over gray shirt
and tan pants, gave Henry pause. He was proud of his son in more
ways than he could count, but seeing his picture filled him with
concern. It was a nebulous sensation that something was wrong. He
had the vague feeling that Perry was in danger. There were no facts
to justify the fear, but it was there nonetheless.