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Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
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“Thorne's coming here?” She was talking to herself.
“Yes,” Douglas replied warily. “Is that going to cause a problem?”
“No.”
Douglas hesitated. “Have you met Thorne before?”
“Not much of a company stooge, are you? Who does your research?” Sarah puffed on her cigarette and smiled. She remembered when she first came to Egypt as an employee of Rola Corp. “Yeah, I've met him before. I used to fuck him.” She blew smoke. “How the hell d'you think I got this job?”
Douglas rocked on his heels and rubbed his chin. A rueful smile was emerging.
There was the sound of a snigger or two, then muffled laughter. Clemmens was scratching his head again. Frankie was sporting a lopsided grin. “I'm starting to like this chick,” he said. Almost immediately he wished he hadn't said a word as Sarah clouted him upside the head.
“Cut the sexist bullshit, Fatboy,” she scowled, and walked out to supervise the next set of measurements. It was a good feint because she actually felt like crying. Thorne was coming. Finally, everything had come full circle. Things couldn't get any worse.
She crossed the sand. Watching the geo-physicists, she realized they had stopped to huddle around some readings. For geo-physicists that was tantamount to a riot. She was about to cross over to them and see what all the fuss was
about when suddenly they all started whooping and hollering. Sarah broke into a run as their cries echoed across the site. “We got another tunnel! A goddamn tunnel!”
Sarah was amazed as she took a look at their readings. “Where is it?” she demanded.
“Right beneath our feet!”
“But these readings,” Sarah remarked, confused, “are these live? Are you still hooked up?”
“Uh-huh.”
“They're spiking. They keep changing. What's going on down there?”
“Exactly what they told us to expect.”
“They? They who?”
“The people in Geneva. That's power you're seeing on those readings. Electricity, flowing underground. If we didn't know to look for it, we'd never have known it was there. It's like looking at some kind of machine.”
“I'm—I'm shocked, is what I'm saying,” Hackett said numbly. “I'm stunned. That the complexity of the situation hasn't been totally grasped.”
“What are we overlooking?” Dower wanted to know as Scott and Matheson pored over a map of the pyramids at Giza.
“Gravity. It's not something to be taken lightly. It's the basic rule of thumb for all life. Before something can reproduce, it has to withstand gravity.” Hackett was banging his balled fist into the palm of his other hand. “It's what keeps us
glued
to this planet. It's what keeps us whizzing around the sun. It's what smacked an apple into Newton's head. We can defy it temporarily. We can
escape
it; momentarily. But we can't ever hide from it. It affects everything, the entire universe. And that's big.
“Here we are, talking about the effects of an actual gravity
wave, and you're not even considering the full complexity of the implications. Instead, we sit here,
discussing
a city that not more than twenty or thirty minutes ago no one knew even existed. And your first thought is to march halfway across a frozen continent and blow it up. All I'm saying is, there might be other ways in which we could be applying our minds. Important ways. But instead, with all due respect to Dr. Scott, you have a linguist here to translate the writing on a bunch of rocks. You have strategists carping on about how best to avoid a war—and still be able to blow things up. I think I wouldn't be the first to suggest this. But even as a complexity theorist, whose job it is to discover the hidden connections to things that apparently have no connection—I just don't see the connection. It all sounds like so much panic-driven nonsense.”
Everyone around the table seemed to be shifting uneasily in their chairs. “Jon, what are you saying?” asked Dower.
“What I'm saying is, I don't think this is the time to act like a bunch of ostriches and bury your heads in the snow. Do you realize what a gravity wave could do? It could shift the orbit of this planet at a whim, add a few extra days, or take a few days away—if we managed to stay in orbit at all.”
Jon Hackett eyed the faces around the table and was met by a wall of unblinking eyes. It was as if he'd asked for a medium-rare steak at a vegetarian luncheon, and that wasn't good. Didn't they see?
“My question is, what are you going to do about
that?”
he persevered. “Are you going to build an Ark and save mankind? Do you have contingencies?”
“There's nothing we
can
do about the sun,” Dower said flatly.
“Can we contact Egypt now?” Scott insisted.
Hackett drew a finger to his lips for silence as if he were talking to a child. “Dr. Scott, uh, if I may. Admiral, did it ever occur to you that the resurrection of Atlantis may be a good thing?” Dower frowned. “Aside from the absolute latest ground-breaking technology here at CERN, the only thing to react to the sun, and on a spectacularly massive scale, is Atlantis. Did you ever stop to consider that it might have more of an idea of what's going on than we do?”
“You sound like you think it's alive,” Pearce reacted.
“It's survived twelve thousand years under the ice, and come out the other end of its slumber. It might be an automatic response, but it's still a response. Yes.”
“It didn't do any good during the last flood,” Scott pointed out. “That's why it's under all that ice.”
“The resurrection of Atlantis as a good thing?” Dower mused briefly. Then: “No.”
 
“This is McMurdo Station. Lieutenant Roebuck reporting.”
The voice was tinny. Hollow, like it was coming out of a long metal tube. A burst of interference cut deep across the screen. He wasn't in uniform, this Lieutenant Roebuck. With a sheet of paper in one hand, he wore a gray T-shirt bearing his unit crest. He had a towel slung over one shoulder, like he'd just gotten back from the gym. And in the background, next to the charts and monitors, hung the insignia of the Marine Expeditionary Force, Antarctica Unit. Penguins hugging an anchor.
Scott was puzzled. T-shirts in Antarctica? Well, at least it wasn't thin nylon tents and frostbite. If this was a foretaste of what to expect, then Scott reckoned he could handle it.
The U.S. station at McMurdo Sound was the largest permanently manned base anywhere on Antarctica. With more than 1,200 men and women in residence at any one time, Gant had described a village containing scientists, military personnel and civilians all living and working side by side. As Gant explained, there were private quarters and research facilities all ready and waiting for them.
Roebuck was ready to debrief and Gant stood by the screen adjusting the system to try and clear out the static. Houghton chose that moment to step back into the room, casually slipping his pen-phone inside his jacket. “Just the UN,” he said as he retook his seat at the table, completely unaware that Pearce was watching him closely.
“And?” Dower asked.
“It's all set for tomorrow morning at ten,” Houghton said. “We meet with the commission at the Palais des Nations to discuss an inspection team going onto the Chinese base.”
“Took long enough,” Dower growled.
“Proper channels, Admiral. Proper channels, and proper procedure, or the UN will smell a rat.”
Dower flicked a finger at Roebuck on the screen, indicating to the soldier that he could continue.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Roebuck cleared his throat as Matheson continued to paw over the set of schematics that had been placed on the table for him. Several military specialists had joined him to exchange notes as Roebuck spoke up.
“At fourteen hundred hours, GMT, we sent a warning signal to the fleet, Admiral,” he explained hesitantly. “The British Antarctic Survey issued a statement to all shipping in the area off the Larsen Ice Shelf to watch out for a fifty-mile-wide iceberg that has calved off and is heading out to the open sea.”
Houghton was aghast. “Fifty miles! Is that possible?” But he was ignored.
“Where is the Seventh Carrier Group now?” Dower asked.
Roebuck was apprehensive. “The
Nimitz
is further out. But the
Sacramento
and the
Ingersoll
have been hunting down a Chinese sub all week.”
Matheson looked up to see Gant tense. He knew about the
Ingersoll.
That was Gant's ship, the one he'd been assigned to when he led the boarding party onto
Red Osprey
. It was a Marine Expeditionary Force Destroyer attached to the Seventh Carrier Group of the Pacific Fleet. It was as fast and dangerous as it was beautiful.
Dower demanded: “Which sub?”
“We think the
Qingdao.”
“
Qingdao?
Han Class attack sub. Type 92. That's big.”
“The size of two football fields, sir. Should we warn the Chinese?”
Dower was firm. “No,” he said. “To hell with the Chinese.”
“The Chinese,” Matheson commented, standing back from the diagrams with a mystified air, “have got some real specialist drilling equipment here. If I didn't know better I'd say they got a head start in all this. It makes me think they already know about the C60.”
Still looking at the diagrams, he was completely unaware of the curious expression on Houghton's face.
“Interesting hypothesis,” Hackett ventured. “But how
would the Chinese already know there's a city down there?”
“They wouldn't,” Dower blasted. But Houghton remained quiet.
“They
may,
sir,” Gant disagreed. “The Chinese have been on a technology kick for over a decade and show no signs of slowing down. You can never tell what the Chinese know … sir.”
“Then we're in for the race of our lives, Major. You ready for that?” the Admiral queried.
“Sir, yes,
sir!”
Gant barked.
Matheson rubbed his beard. Embarrassed. “Oh, please …”
Roebuck fidgeted on the screen. “Amundsen-Scott Station at the South Pole report no increased activity at
Jung Chang,”
he said, “but we've sent out a couple of SaRGE probes, sir. I really think you should take a look at what we got.”
“Are the vehicles online now?”
“One is, sir. I can transfer control of the signal if you'd prefer.”
“I prefer,” Dower confirmed. “But before we sign off, Lieutenant, I'd like you to take a look at some of the faces sitting around this table. They're our inspection team. Doctors Hackett and Scott. Engineer Ralph Matheson. Specialist Robert Pearce—”
“I understood you were sending a geologist as well,” Roebuck said. “Sarah Kelsey.”
Houghton sat up in his chair. “Uh, we will be,” he confirmed as Hackett and Scott exchanged anxious glances. “She's on another assignment right now. Preparatory work.”
Roebuck said, “Understood. Admiral, it's just accommodation space is tight. I need to know supply details. Does anybody have any special dietary requirements?”
There were meek looks all around the table.
November leaned in close to Scott. “They'll have burgers, won't they?”
“I think you can just transfer SARGE over to us now, thank you, Lieutenant.”
“Just being thorough, sir.”
A steady stream of data swept across the screen. Gant
punched in commands and a grid unfolded followed by live video feed.
He announced: “Here's the view from SaRGE.”
Matheson shot him a look.
“Stands for Surveillance and Reconnaissance Ground Equipment.”
Matheson tried to look knowledgeable, failed. Said: “Which is what?”
“Now if we told you that,” Dower said dryly, “we'd have to take you outside and shoot you.”
“So who's on the end of that camera?”
“Right now? Just Major Gant. We dropped SaRGE behind enemy lines, so to speak.”
“So it's a robot?”
“Of sorts.” He looked to Gant. “Position?”
“Elevation: five thousand seven hundred and fifty-nine feet above sea level. Approximately forty-two miles from Blue One runway and the coastline of Queen Maud Land.”
They were looking at aivista of ice and snow with huge fingers of dark granite jutting out like the frozen digits of a long dead giant. Without any familiar objects in the picture it was difficult to judge any real perspective. Dower pointed to one of the formations.
“What's that?” It looked like a vast granite skyscraper.
Gant checked the details on the readout next to the picture first. The quality was good, though there was intermittent signal breakup. Probably due to the fact that it wasn't coming direct from Antarctica, but via a myriad of military spy satellites.
“That's Rakenkniven,” he said. “The Razor. It's half as tall again as the Sears Tower. First point of contact with the Filchner Mountains and controls the access to two main valleys that lead directly into the continental interior: the Kubusdalen and the Djupedalen Passes.”
“Who named these damn things?”
“The Norwegians, sir.”
Dower studied the picture carefully. Small red cross-hairs were flashing on the screen where SARGE had detected enemy activity.
“Focus in on that,” he said. “At the base of the Razor.”
The magnification was increased several times before the targets came into full view. There were heavy vehicles on caterpillar tracks. Armored Personnel Carriers. Troops on Ski-Doos kicking up plumes of snow in their wake, and what looked like supplies. Their presence suddenly brought the sheer scale of the Razor into sharp relief. Human activity in Antarctica was clearly insignificant.
Gant shook his head respectfully. “Goddamnit, Mr. Pearce. You were right again.”
“That's what we pay him for,” the Admiral said quietly.
It was not a comment that went unnoticed by everyone else in the room. Scott zeroed in on him, while Hackett raised an eyebrow. Just what did Bob Pearce do for these people?
Pearce didn't bother answering.
There were thirty vehicles in all, painted black with bright orange markings. It didn't take long for Gant to inspect them and give a brief though subdued summary.
“That's three, no wait … four UNIPOWER, 20,000-liter combat refuelers, on modified old-style M-series eight-by-eight chassis. Hmm … They put 'em on tracks. Everything's on tracks. They're not fooling around. They've adapted everything for long-term use in the cold.”
Scott asked: “Otherwise, what would happen?”

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