Beneath the Ice (28 page)

On the monitor, the black hole grew until
the shimmering walls of the shaft disappeared altogether.

“The nose is through,”
Sarah said. “We’ll be floating free in a
minute.”

It was a long minute. Seconds plodded
by.

Sarah’s hand was over a switch on top of the
controller. She rubbed it with slow, gentle strokes. She had
briefed Perry on the device. It looked much like a joystick for a
video game except larger. Several buttons were positioned near
where Sarah’s thumb rested. The device reminded Perry of controls
he had seen in a jet fighter. Her other hand remained free. She
drummed her fingers on the table. A few seconds later, she began to
bite her lower lip.

“Any second now,” she said.

The cable pulled tight with a snap. Sarah
pressed the red button without looking at it. Her eyes were welded
to the screen.

“And there’s our current,” Griffin said.

“Come on,” Sarah said. Then, “Props
extended, blowing negative.”

Bubbles rose before the video lens. She
pushed forward on the stick a half-second later. “Props are
responding. We have propulsion. Water ballast is clear. We have
zero buoyancy.”

Griffin leaned over her shoulder and studied
the gauges. “Fresh water,” he said.

“How can you tell?” Larimore asked.

“The gauges tell me. Buoyancy is a function
of water density. An object is more buoyant in saltwater than in
fresh.”

“Testing controls,” Sarah announced. She
moved the stick in various directions. “Everything is perfect.
Hairy is responding like a sports car.”

“I don’t see anything,” Tia said.

“There’s no light down there,” Griffin
explained. “We’re looking at a world that hasn’t seen light for a
very long time.”

“Activating stereoscopic cameras,” Sarah
said. The dim light that had been pushing valiantly against the
abysmal blackness suddenly had help. The monitor lit up and the
image sharpened.

“What did you do?” Enkian asked.

“We’ve been looking through a single camera
lens,” Sarah explained. “Because the probe was in a shaft, the only
place we could place a camera was in the nose, but most of that
area was taken up by the heating element. Hairy has stereoscopic
cameras and lights, one set on each side of its hull. The lights
give us better illumination, and having the cameras separated by
Hairy’s width gives us the advantage of binocular vision.”

“Depth below?” Perry asked.

“Two hundred meters,” Sarah said.

“I thought the lake was deeper than that,”
Larimore stated.

“It is,” Griffin explained. “It’s well over
five hundred meters at its deepest point, but we’re stationed over
the shallow end. The lake bottom slopes.”

“There’s an object below the ice, near the
waterline on the southern shore,” Enkian said. “Head there.”

“How do you know that?” Jack asked.

“I know many things.”

“I should run some
exercises before I send Hairy on an ex-tend
ed trip,” Sarah said.

“Exercise on the way,” Enkian ordered.

“How far is it?” Sarah asked.

“Don’t embarrass yourself playing games,”
Enkian said, his tone dark. “You’re here because of that object.
This place was chosen because of its proximity to it.”

Perry frowned. Enkian knew too much, more
than anyone should. Perry had even kept his closest friends out of
the loop until they were on-site. Someone up the chain of command
was talking about things meant to be secret.

Sarah looked at Perry as if he had a
choice.

“Do it,” was all he said.

Henry Sachs sat on the sofa in the living room of his
spacious home. At five thousand square feet, it was far too large
for just him and his wife, but it served its purpose. Entertaining
clients was part of his duties as president of Sachs Engineering.
Senators and generals had walked the halls of his home, but those
corridors were empty now except for the ghosts of memory.

Sachs pulled his wife of decades closer,
tightening his embrace and listening to her soft sobs. He had kept
the news from her as long as he could, but she had a right to know
about her son. “We don’t know that he was on that plane,” Sachs had
said, but the words reverberated with pessimism. He had reminded
himself of Perry’s resolve, intelligence, strength, and faith, and
he shared all of that with her. It was all hollow and as empty as
the house that shrouded them in darkness, the house where Perry had
grown up. A tree house he insisted on building himself remained in
the large oak that shaded the backyard. It had been saved in hopes
that Perry would settle down one day and provide Mom and Dad with
grandchildren to spoil. Now it was a monument to an ended life.

Henry Sachs grieved in a way he never could
have imagined. He hurt with a pain that could not be described. The
ache was so deep he was sure his soul had shriveled like a grape
left on the vine. He also knew that the woman he held grieved far
more deeply than he could. It was what mothers did.

The phone rang, but Sachs ignored it. He
didn’t want to talk to people. No one had words that could bring
relief. None would sympathize in a way that would ease the
pain.

It rang again. And again. The wireless phone
sat on the table, refusing to be ignored. Sachs snapped it up.
“What?”

“Please hold for the president,” a sweet
voice said.

A moment later: “Henry?”

Sachs was surprised but too crushed to care.
“Yes, Mr. President.”

“There’s a military transport waiting for
you at the airport. I want you to come for dessert.”

“Thank you, Mr. President, but there’s no
need. I appreciate the kindness but . . . but we’re just not up to
it.”

“I understand, but you should come anyway.
If you leave now, we can have pie by midnight.”

Something wasn’t right. Pie? “Sir, I don’t
understand.”

“A driver will be at your door in the next
five minutes.”

“But sir—”

“Henry, come to Washington.”

“
I’m worried about running aground,” Sarah
said. “The bottom is rising pretty fast.”

“Keep going,” Enkian said.

Sarah sighed. “I’m pushing against the
current, which makes the device more difficult to control.”

“I said, keep going.”

Sarah nodded and held in
check what she really wanted to say.
She
was sure this Enkian jerk had a very short fuse, and if he
did
n’t, his long-haired associate
certainly did.

She pushed the stick forward, and it
resisted. The control system was designed to give real-time
feedback and sensory response. Sarah felt as if she were piloting
the cryobot from inside. She focused on the readouts before her.
The cameras were good, but no matter how high-tech, they were
two-dimensional. After the initial exposure, the images lost
clarity. Blackness was pierced by high intensity lights.

The lake bottom was rising, and she pulled
the stick more. As the depth decreased, the force of the current
subsided. Griffin had remarked that such was to be expected.

“She needs to stay off the bottom,” Perry
said. “If she doesn’t, she might foul the line.”

Sarah took a quick look at him. He seemed
composed, firm, and focused, but she could see the stress in his
eyes. She didn’t know the man well, but he was unlike anyone she
had met. He had showed courage and determination, but his most
attractive quality was his concern for those around him. She could
tell having his team in the grips of a gun-toting mob was weighing
on him.

“She’s doing fine,” Enkian said.

A gauge reading grabbed Sarah’s attention.
“Odd.”

“What?” Perry asked.

“My readings show that the bottom is rising,
so I’ve decreased Hairy’s depth. We sound off the ice above. That
distance, the distance between Hairy and the ice lid above, should
be decreasing, but it’s not.”

“It’s following the slope of the lake
bottom?” Perry asked.

“No,” Sarah answered. “It’s rising. In fact,
it looks like . . . well, it looks like there is an airspace above
the water and below the ice.”

“Let’s see,” Enkian ordered. “Take it up,
but don’t damage the device against the ice.”

Sarah hated taking orders from the man. He
had no hand in designing the cryobot, had done no work or planning
to make all this happen. He had just shown up with his thugs. She
pulled back on the stick. A moment later, the camera broke the
surface of the water. Instead of an eerie and dark underwater
scene, the monitor now showed a cavern with a ceiling of ice in the
distance.

“Wow,” Gleason said. “It looks like a frozen
Carlsbad Cavern.”

“Not nearly as large,” Perry said, “but much
larger than I expected.”

“Turn to your left,” Enkian said. He seemed
unimpressed with the ice cavern. “Quickly.”

Sarah pushed the stick to her left, and
Hairy’s propellers redirected the view.

“There it is,” Enkian said.

“I don’t believe it,” Dr. Curtis remarked
quietly. “It can’t be.”

“It is,” Enkian said. “Just as the
prophecies said.”

Sarah turned to see Griffin’s jaw drop, then
she looked at Perry, who stared at the image with unblinking
eyes.

Looking back at the monitor, Sarah studied
the rock formation that had captured everyone’s attention and
blinked.

“You were right, Perry,” Jack said. “It’s a
pyramid under the ice.”

“Not a pyramid,” Enkian
said. “Something far more impressive—a ziggurat.
The
ziggurat.”

“You can’t mean—” Dr. Curtis said.

“Bring the probe up,” Enkian ordered.
“Prepare the other cryobot. I want it working in the next
hour.”

“That’s impossible,” Perry said.

Sarah couldn’t see her captor’s expression,
but she heard it in his voice. “Make it possible.”

Chapter
25

Perry was breathing
hard
, his body trying to suck more oxygen out of the
thin, icy air. His back hurt, but it was only a tingle compared to
the pounding in his head. Recent events had kept him from drinking
the water and taking the pain relievers he needed to ward off the
altitude sickness that always seemed to be at arm’s
length.

Despite being winded, despite the jackhammer
rattling in his skull, he kept working. Enkian had been serious
about loading the larger cryobot in place and having it done in the
hour. It was not an easy task. Perry had allowed a full day to make
the switch, but Enkian cared nothing for Perry’s schedule.

Additional rigging was attached to the
aluminum support frame, and larger guides had to be installed to
allow for the greater circumference of the new probe. Despite the
cold in the Chamber, sweat began to bead on Perry’s brow. Gleason
and Jack were working just as hard, with Dr. Curtis, Griffin, and
Gwen helping what little they could.

Guards hovered over each worker, offering no
help and saying nothing. Wherever Perry moved, two armed men went
with him. He tried to enlist them to help him carry a large bracket
that would hold the cryobot until it was ready to be lowered. The
gunmen just stared.

“It’s your boss’s project, you know,” Perry
had said. “He might give you a bonus.” The men just raised the
barrels of the machine guns a few inches.

Perry looked up from his place by the shaft
and saw Enkian and Tia standing over Sarah and giving her orders
about the position and direction of Hairy. He struggled to
reconcile what he had seen on the monitor with everything he
previously believed. He had known they were looking for an
enigmatic object below the ice, one never before detected, but
actually seeing it had quaked his soul.

“We need to name this,” Jack said.

“You and your penchant to name things,”
Gleason said with a slight shake of the head.

Jack ignored him. “Hairy II seems so
impersonal.”

“It’s an impersonal object,” Gleason
replied.

“You see there?” Jack retorted. “That’s your
problem. You’re too academic. Did you ever name a car? What’d you
call your first set of wheels, Perry?”

“Ford.”

Jack shook his head. “I’m
immersed in a romantic black hole.” He looked at the now-vertical
cryobot which looked much like an upside-down rocket. “I dub
thee
Slick.”

“Slick like ice?” Gleason asked.

“I had a dog named Slick,” Jack said. “It’s
the best I can do. I don’t do my best work under the gun—if you
catch my drift.”

“
Wait a minute,” Dr. Curtis said. He
stepped to the monitor and looked at the even rows of stones, one
laid upon another. Hairy was close, and Sarah had, at Enkian’s
order, zoomed in the cameras for a tighter shot. He studied the
image and then began to mutter. “Enkian and Tia . . . Tia and
Enkian.” He stopped and turned to Tia. “What’s your last
name?”

“Why?”

“Humor an old academic,” Curtis said. “It’s
not like you’re going to let us out of here alive anyway. Besides,
I doubt it’s your real name.”

She looked at Enkian, who was smiling. He
nodded.

“Matteo.”

“Enkian and Tia Matteo,”
Curtis repeated. “Why does that
sound
so familiar . . . Enki and
Tiamat!”

Perry watched his friend closely. He also
watched Enkian, whose wan smile unnerved Perry.

“That’s right, Dr. Curtis,” Enkian said.
“You’re good at puzzles.”

“I know those names,” Perry said, “but I
can’t place them. What am I missing?”

“They’re the names of Babylonian gods,”
Curtis said. “In the Babylonian pantheon, they are the top
dogs.”