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Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
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Matheson was incredulous. “We're looking at one hell of a machine,” he remarked, “to show up on satellite and do what it's doing. We're talking about a machine maybe the size of Atlantis itself.”
“We don't know that. But we will not sit back and do nothing while our planet is climatically destroyed. Whatever's beneath the ice does not appear to be our friend. We want it shut off. And we want it shut off—now.”
“And exactly how do you propose to do that?” Scott asked innocently.
All eyes fell on him.
“The writing's on the wall,” Dower commented.
“Pardon me?”
“There is ancient writing—on its walls, Dr. Scott. The fact that Atlantis now exists is testament to all those ancient myths and legends you're so familiar with. Whoever built Atlantis left a lot of incomprehensible writing scrawled all over it. They must have done that for a reason. We're proposing that they left us some clue, some indication as to what it was they were trying to achieve. Some indication on how to switch the damn thing off.”
“Admiral, with all due respect,” Scott said, startled, “if what you say is true it's hardly going to be like programming a fucking VCR.”
Dower took a breath. “If everything that's taking place is down purely to Mother Nature, then we surrender. There is absolutely nothing we as a species can do about it. Just like the dinosaurs, we can kiss our asses goodbye because God's about to wipe the slate clean. But … and it's an uncertain but … if there is any chance at all that the structure in Antarctica is the cause of this environmental nightmare that's unfolding, then our only option is to enter the city and turn it off. And we can do that by one of two ways. You can figure out what they wrote. Or we can install a thermonuclear device—and blow the shit out of it.
“Ladies and gentlemen, God may play dice, but we do not. We will look for any means of raising our chances of survival. And if humankind depends on it—
we will destroy Atlantis.”
 
There were stunned expressions on the faces of the scientists sitting around the table. No one knew quite how to react. Taking a thermonuclear warhead to Antarctica was problematic for two reasons. One: it was illegal under the Antarctica
Treaty. And two: the Chinese had a base sitting right above where Atlantis appeared on the map.
Dower drummed his fingers on the table. “There is one other thing,” he added quietly. “We may be able to get a dry run at this. There is the slim possibility that we may have found a second device of similar magnitude.”
Scott's ears pricked up. “What do you mean?”
“Our use of the search parameters suggested by Dr. Hackett led to the discovery of Atlantis. And with the help of Bob Pearce's abilities, and others at Rola Corp., we have detected a second site on this planet that appears to be giving off similar readings to Atlantis. If we can gain access, we might be able to get some insight into what to expect in Antarctica.”
Scott shot forward. “So where is it?”
History is a set of lies agreed upon.
 
Napoleon Bonaparte,
Emperor of Europe, 1769—1821
“For me? Aw, how sweet. I hope that thing's got coffee in it!” Sarah Kelsey yelled, holding on tightly to her navy-colored baseball cap. The battered old EH-101 helicopter veered back up into the air behind her, whipping up a sandstorm as it went.
The company guy in the gray boiler suit and the red company cap stood clutching a gray stone long-necked jug. He exclaimed: “Afraid not! But this
is
for you to take a look at. What do you make of it?” He coughed up sand as he handed over the artifact. Seemed reluctant to straighten up after ducking out the way of the rotors. Introduced himself. “Name's Eric. Eric Clemmens.” He tried to shake hands and hold on to his own hat all at the same time. His face was caked in dust. “We got a short walk,” he explained. “They won't let us land choppers near the monuments. Sand damage, you know?” Sarah understood as Clemmens pointed her in the right direction. “So what do you think?”
“Granite,” she said, turning the jug over in her hand. “Half-inch diameter neck at the top, opening out to about six inches. No striated markings, as you'd expect. This is stone, not clay, so it wasn't on a potter's wheel. It was turned on a lathe, and the internal volume drilled out.”
Clemmens was elated. “That's
exactly
what I said!”
“Any geologist or engineer could tell you that. Why? What's the problem?”
“The problem? I don't think the Egyptologists here have had any real engineers or geologists take a close look at any of the artifacts and monuments before.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because they've been busy dismissing anything that challenges their view of ancient Egypt. Like this jug.”
“We're not archeologists, Eric.”
“But they say we're wrong because there's no evidence ancient Egypt ever had lathe technology.”
Sarah was concerned. “You can't make a jug like this without a lathe.”
“Precisely, but I guess hard evidence just ain't good enough for 'em.” They crossed through a minor outer complex and headed down a long gravel track. “If it was a single jug, maybe they'd have a point. But it's not. We've got eleven more of these things. Plus sixteen diorite bowls, eight quartz bowls and a feldspar and quartz bowl. And they all show the same signs. Wanna know the screwy thing?”
Sarah said she did as she peered into the camp and familiarized herself with the layout as they went. The last thing she needed was to get lost.
“How fast does a modern drill work?” Clemmens asked with a shrug. “Tungsten carbide.”
That was easy. They worked for an oil company, after all. “For fine work on stone? Say around 900 rpm. Cuts into stone about one ten-thousandth of an inch per revolution.”
“Close enough. But the inner surface of this jug shows all the signs that it was drilled a
tenth
of an inch per revolution. At that rate it would have to have had a metric ton of pressure behind it. And on a jug this small? That kind of pressure would have blasted it apart. By my reckoning, whoever made this jug used a drill that operated five hundred times faster than the ones we use in this company.”
“Are you serious?”
“Sarah, it gets screwier with the feldspar and quartz bowl. The drill seems to have cut through the quartz portion faster than the feldspar.”
“That doesn't make any sense,” she protested. “Quartz is harder than feldspar.”
“We use a lot of vibration in drill bits to get them to cut quicker,” Clemmens said. “For the Egyptians to have cut through a denser, harder type of rock faster, I'm guessing they used vibration like an art form. Some kind of oscillation technique's my guess. Maybe even sonic.”
“Sound waves?”
Clemmens shrugged. He knew it was conjecture. “We got a specialist in, to give a preliminary date to the bowls. The guy studied the ground strata where they were found. It was a grave-robber tunnel. And he wound up giving us a date of over 4000 B.C.”
“And that's a problem, how?”
“The grave-robber tunnel appears to wend its way over to
the pyramids, though it's filled in now. But if a grave-robber tunnel was constructed in 4000 B.C., just what were they robbing? The pyramids didn't exist until 2500 B.C.”
In some areas, Arab workmen in long white cotton galebeyas were already hard at work shifting chunks of concrete without even breaking a sweat. Heavy machinery was busy clearing away rubble. Generators and night-lights were housed next to steel chain-link fences and store houses. Portakabins and trailers marked the nerve center. And then there were the pyramids.
“Tell me about the Carbon 60,” Sarah said. “What's the story on that?”
“We found a few smashed pieces in a little cloth sack, along with the pots. There's evidence of a fire down there, and some kind of close-quarter battle. Scorchmarks. Extremely violent. But so far—no bodies.”
“Maybe the grave robbers were discovered?”
“The fire indicates it started somewhere further down the tunnel—from the
pyramid
end. Whoever caught them had to be in one of the monuments, and went after them as they were on their way out.”
They arrived near the front gate. Sarah was about to respond when she shortened her stride.
A crowd had gathered. Military police were guarding the entrance to the site, and were unhappy with the situation. One of them was a little too eager in raising the butt of his rifle.
Sarah felt her heart miss a beat as they approached. “What's going on?”
“Never mind,” Clemmens muttered as they headed in.
She could hear machinery. Heavy and loud just behind the sheer cliffs of devastation that marked the demolition zones within the camp. Plumes of oily blue smoke were shooting up into the sky marking their tracks in the distance. But that was nothing compared to the shouts of the crowd. There were about a hundred of them, Sarah guessed, mostly westerners. Some even had placards. About one third were media types with cameras and microphones. There was no choice but to bite the bullet and jostle their way through.
“Hey, do you mind? I'm trying to get to work, here!” Sarah shoved the large guy in front out of the way. But the
mere mention of work caused the crowd to turn like a shoal of fish. She exchanged a brief look with Clemmens.
“That was a really bad move,” he mouthed.
“We demand access!” the protesters were shouting. “We have a right to know!”
Sarah struggled with more bodies. It was like an Ecobattle with a bunch of students, but for the life of her she couldn't figure out what they were complaining about. Reporters hurled questions at her about Thorne. When did they expect him? Was Rola Corp. facing a board of inquiry at the Senate? But Sarah didn't know what they were talking about. She ignored them all until a middle-aged woman with long silvery hair, tied back in a pony-tail, emerged from the mass to confront her. She wasn't a ringleader as such, but she certainly had influence. The crowd eased back, but they remained loud. Her eyes were deep and penetrating. Sarah had never seen eyes like them before.
“You will help us,” she said. Her voice cut through the din like a knife.
Sarah tried to ignore her but found that she couldn't.
The woman added: “Cayce was right.”
Sarah frowned. She tried to respond, but didn't know how.
“You'll see,” the woman concluded. Her face was engaging, enigmatic.
Sarah remained transfixed but in a flash she was being herded off. The soldiers had cut a path through the crowd and Clemmens was bundling her into the camp. “Come on!” he was yelling, and within seconds they were through.
Sarah kept trying to look back. Thought she'd caught a glimpse of the woman again, but Clemmens had a hold of her arm and was marching her up the path, deep into Rola Corp. territory. Moments later he let her free. “Who's Cayce?” she asked.
Clemmens shrugged.
“What do they want?”
“I don't know,” he grumbled. “What d'you care? They're nut-balls. Conspiracy theorists. End of the world freaks. They're insane. A pain in the ass.”
Sarah eyed him closely. “So do they have anything to worry about, Eric?”
Clemmens seemed to grimace. Steered her onward by pointing to a series of pits and leveled areas across from the Sphinx. They were foundations to a series of buildings that had been ripped from the ground. Twisted pipe-work still protruded in places. Chunks of concrete were piled to the sides.
“That's where we found the grave-robber tunnel. It's empty now, of course.” He whipped out a postcard. Passed it over. “Used to be a whole bunch of restaurants and tourist shit. We leveled it. That's roughly where they want to build the museum. Hey, have you seen pictures of what it's gonna look like?”
“Yeah. It's pretty. It's like that one they built at the foot of the Parthenon in Athens.”
“It's gonna be more than pretty. It's gonna be awesome—sunk into the ground, looking up at the Sphinx and the Pyramids. Anyways, we've been running a geophysics survey over this entire area, like you asked when you called last night. Monuments an' all.”
Sarah eyed the postcard casually. A grimy Arab stood by a rusted sign for Coke and a 7-Up vending machine. She handed it back. “Good. What did you find?”
Clemmens took a breath. “Granite under the Sphinx.”
Sarah faltered. She glanced over to the crowd still attached to the front gate before facing Clemmens again. They exchanged a look and they both knew. All bullshit aside, something strange was going on. Sarah set it down in her mind for a moment. It required focused thought, not some half-assed theory. A couple of Arab workmen sauntered past. They were chatting away cheerfully until they came across Sarah. They looked vaguely shocked when they spotted her and gabbled to themselves with a scowl. Clemmens waved them on while Sarah tried to shrug it off.
She said: “They don't get out much around here, huh?” Clemmens was silent. And then she heard it—the call to. prayer. The muezzins were wailing high up in their minarets.
“Welcome to Cairo,” Clemmens chipped in glibly.
Sarah had been to Egypt before when she was twelve. It was winter, she remembered, and she'd arrived in Alexandria on a cruise ship. People herded sheep and goats in and out of filthy, dilapidated British colonial apartment blocks. It
was a shock to learn those people also lived with the animals.
The other memory she had was animal-related too and equally squalid. She'd watched some kids play soccer on a patch of scrubland. It was near a mosque and she could still recall the faint scent of rosewater wafting across from the cart of a leathery old vendor. She'd strayed from her parents. They were bartering over a piece of cheap tourist papyrus, she remembered, when the boys noticed her. They'd grinned and kicked the ball over, hoping she might join in. Being a Westerner they must have figured she could play soccer. Being American, of course she could not. She'd grinned in return, and glanced down to kick the ball back. But it didn't take long for her to realize what she was looking at. They were playing soccer with the decapitated head of a Labrador puppy. Its gums had rotted, and the teeth that remained were white. Snarling. Obviously she screamed. The mud was thick too, she remembered. Black. Yes, Sarah had lots of memories about Egypt.
She could feel perspiration starting to build up on the back of her neck. Already it was 30°C, and it wasn't even 8 o'clock yet. This wasn't right. It was only March.
They crossed out into the open, passed more demolition areas and moved on into the arena of the pyramids. The huge, jagged-edged megaliths seemed to cut into the very sky itself. The desert beyond them stretched to infinity while the Sphinx, ever enigmatic, sat passively waiting in a vast and relentless mass of shifting amber sands, each grain accompanied by a whiff of palpable history.
Sarah had to admit, she was impressed. She chewed her gum. “Cool.”
They reached the geo-physics team, which was already hard at work.
Two operators methodically humped a set of meter-high electrodes around the site a yard at a time. Sarah recognized it immediately as an electrical resistivity survey, the type developed a couple of years ago that was able to peer through sand. Before then, sand showed up as solid rock and the ground had to be damp for the probes to function properly. It worked by passing a current directly into the ground and measuring the electrical potentials across the electrodes. In
this way they built up a picture of the subsurface geology resulting in an underground map of the area without anyone lifting a shovel.
Sarah could see the operators were already struggling in the heat and dust. “You didn't opt for a seismic survey then?” she asked.
“Are you kidding?” Clemmens did a double take before realizing he was being had. He shook his head. “Yeah, right. Blasting holes in everything with dynamite and listening to the echoes on geo-phones is really gonna go down well in this neighborhood.”

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