Decipher (28 page)

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Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
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Sarah fished the radio to her lips. “Yeah, this is Sarah, go ahead.”
A pause. Then: “We're at the eleven-mile marker. We're just setting up now.” A hiss. More static. A muffled noise. “Boy, this is weird.”
Sarah could feel the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She'd never felt comfortable down here, she didn't want to be down here. Hesitantly she asked: “What's weird?”
A moment later, partially cut out: “The, uh, writing on the wall stopped a couple miles back.”
“What have you got now?”
“Looks like circuitry.”
Sarah had to think for a minute. “Say again?”
“Circuitry,” Clemmens repeated. “And these massive Carbon 60 structures. The size of houses. But—
woah!
”
“Eric?” But he wasn't responding. She got nothing.
Just dead air.
It was like being inside a convoluted fist, Clemmens decided. All fingers interlocking. Each finger a massive expanse of Carbon 60. And this fist was clutching a lightning bolt. Energy was coursing throughout the C60 as if caught in a bottle.
Right where they needed to be, the tunnel opened out into some kind of chamber that was made up of interlocking swathes of C60, intercut at junctures by two-story-high oblong megaliths of horizontal layers of glowing carbon and darkened granite.
On the other side of the chamber the other two bikers had set up their laser-sighted radar packs. And one of them, Rinoli, had taken the opportunity of jumping straight back on his bike to do a lap of the chamber and race the energy wave that pulsated around the chamber walls. It moved faster and faster, but never diverted into the spiraled tunnel toward the Sphinx.
“It's like it's trapped,” Clemmens explained before realizing his radio had stopped working, he just couldn't get a signal to transmit. He hung it on his belt, concentrated on getting his relay gear switched on and sending his data back to the computer set up at the entrance. He prayed the data made it.
All set, he rode out to the other biker, who stood like a speck at the foot of the entrance to one of two other massive darkened tunnels. The air was damp, the cavernous surroundings cold and eerie. There was a breeze coming from somewhere, accompanied by a harsh breath-like sound. Rasping.
Clemmens didn't like it here, that much he knew. He pulled up alongside Christian and dismounted from his Beta Trials bike. It was a 250cc, single cylinder. Good with rough terrain and less to go wrong than some other bikes.
Christian operated his radar unit deftly. Used his flashlight to show what he meant when he said: “They're both the same, these tunnels. They both slope down at about seven degrees in a straight line.”
“Any idea on length?”
“Yeah. But this can't be right.”
“Try me.”
“Three hundred miles. One goes northeast. The other goes southeast.”
“What?”
“Each one's filled with water. And take a look—see?” He moved his flashlight along the walls of the tunnel. “No spirals. No nothing. Definitely no more Carbon 60.”
“Are these things wells? Do they just bottom out?”
“Uh-uh. They change direction. Got a profile on this one. But where the hell it goes is anyone's guess.”
The buzzing of the circling motorbike behind them was really starting to grate on Clemmens now. He spun on his heel, bellowed: “Rinoli! For chrissake, mind your equipment! Quit foolin' around!”
Rinoli reluctantly zipped up to the other flooded tunnel, cussing in Italian all the way. Clemmens licked his lips and tried his radio again, but he still couldn't get a signal.
“Just make a note of all this, will ya?” Christian nodded as Clemmens tapped the radio again. “I think it's this place,”
he said. “Something's causing interference. I'm going back to the edge of the chamber, it seemed to work fine over there.”
Christian watched him as he kicked his bike back into gear and rode across to the spiraled tunnel, all the time acutely aware of the mysterious energy pulse still making its way around the walls of the chamber.
 
Rinoli keyed his radar unit. Took another reading and relayed it over to Clemmens's unit.
And that was when he heard it.
A low deep rumble, almost out of his auditory range. He doubled forward, craning into the darkness ahead and trying to make sense of the noise.
There was a hiss. A plop. Bubbles were rising to the surface of the water. The rotten egg stench of sulfur filled the air and then there was the light: a small point. Fuzzy. Dim. In the center of the water. Far away, but getting bigger.
Rinoli couldn't help but smile at the aquabound fire-fly. What was that? Another one of those whirling firework shows? He loved those. He turned, and in his excitement, called out in Italian to warn everyone. Which, as it turned out, was entirely the wrong language if he wanted to be understood.
 
Clemmens, his engine ticking over, heard Rinoli's calls, but didn't listen. He fiddled with his radio, determined to get through. “Sarah? Sarah, come in.” But the only thing getting louder was Rinoli.
Clemmens jerked his head back and to one side, growling: “What's that wop bitchin' 'bout now?”
He wasn't normally a prejudiced man. But it was a pity to utter that kind of sentiment when there was a fair chance they'd be his last words.
 
“Ion,” from the Greek meaning “traveling.” Moving water, especially superheated water, carried an electrical charge, and liked to give up this charge just as easily.
Without warning, the water behind Rinoli suddenly reared up like a geyser, disintegrating into a boiling twister of vapor and spray. The torrent exploded from the tunnel and
blasted the Italian across the chamber. The energy that came with it, all light and arcing electricity from deep down, shot out like daggers, connecting with the walls of the chamber and spinning around the room at the speed of light.
The whole place lit up for one brief moment, as if God had just taken a snapshot. And as Rinoli fried in the center of the room, convulsing on the ground, Clemmens could do nothing but let his jaw drop as the superheated water swirled around the chamber as if it were alive. It collected on the ceiling and around the walls at a colossal rate, forming into a vast hollow ball that filled the room and writhed. The noise was deafening, like being trapped on the insides of a jet engine.
And then it moved. Heading directly for Clemmens, and his spluttering motorbike.
 
They were getting ready to drill into it, the benben stone, when the call came in. A technician on the surface was watching the monitors when the tell-tale signs of another energy wave registered. Douglas's radio had crackled to life with: “Brace yourself. Got a live one comin' through.”
But before Scott or Hackett even had time to think to ask the question, rippling energy had shot up the crystal spiral in the tunnel and was ricocheting around the benben chamber.
Douglas sensed immediately that this one was different. It wasn't dissipating like the others had. It wasn't shooting down into the floor like the last time.
The benben stone was just inches away from the C60 beams arching down from the ceiling. Douglas instinctively snatched his hands off the crystal, and motioned for the others to step away.
The air became electrified, pungent with the smell of burning dust. Sarah could feel the building static charge creep across her skin and start to levitate her hair.
Then Douglas had a change of heart, because the light in the room had suddenly highlighted something he hadn't even noticed before. Something vital. A hairline fracture through the benben stone. His eyes widened. He gritted his teeth. “That's it!” he roared. “Let's do it!” He lifted his drill, hauling it into position, and pulled the trigger.
“What's going on, Sarah?” Scott asked, awe-struck by the sheer magic of the energy wave.
“This uh happens all the time,” she explained nervously, looking to Douglas for support. But it was clear that
this
had never happened before.
A low hum vibrated through the granite, followed by a high-pitched whine. Then another. And another. The artifacts in the wooden crates were coming to life. Two Arab workmen who were carrying one of the crates suddenly dropped it in fright. Screamed and fled into the darkness as the wooden packing case splintered and the vibrating object spilled out onto the floor and bumped its way along. The three other drill operators suddenly stopped what they were doing, petrified. Leaving Douglas to continue by himself.
Sarah backed up against the wall. But that only made matters worse for her as she realized it was throbbing. Undulating like solid rock should never do.
 
“This doesn't look good,” Matheson said as he leaned in close to the screen. “That crystal shouldn't be close to those three—things.” He exchanged another look with Hackett, who took a deep breath and put his mouth right up to the microphone on the vid-phone.
“Sarah,” he instructed, “I think you should try and push that stone away from those connectors.”
“What?!”
“Push the stone away from those crystal beams.”
 
November had her hand over her mouth as she watched Sarah approach Douglas in his attempt to tackle the crystal. But Douglas leaned forward, putting his back into his drilling, not listening to a word Sarah was saying. And that was when Sarah felt it.
At first she felt light-headed. Then incredibly heavy, as if she were sitting on a roller-coaster.
Douglas was equally stunned. His entire face seemed to warp for a moment, stretch out of shape and snap back. It was as if, in an instant, reality had decided to take a raincheck. Sarah's stomach heaved. She was going to be sick, she knew it. “Did you feel that?” she whispered.
In Geneva, Scott nodded. Swung Hackett's phone line around. Hackett, Matheson and Pearce were all pale on the screen. “I know,” Hackett said. “We felt it here too.”
“Was that an earthquake?” Matheson was asking.
Hackett's eyes were darting around the ceiling. The building was starting to shake. “No,” he explained, “but this is.” Equipment clattered to the ground behind him.
“A gravity wave?” Scott queried.
Hackett nodded his agreement. “The biggest one yet, for us to be able to perceive it.”
Scott shifted his attention frantically back to Sarah. But already her situation was changing.
 
Lightning bolts shot out of the Carbon 60 strip in the floor, arced to the benben stone, then shot down the hole directly beneath it. Seconds later a rod of pure blackness rose from the hole in its place and clamped itself into a recess that had gone unnoticed on the underside of the benben stone.
Douglas fought against it, but no amount of human effort was going to overcome that kind of force. He dropped his drill as a tantalizing shard of Carbon 60 broke off from the benben stone and skittered across the floor, covered in rippling energy. Douglas shot out a hand in an attempt to reach it.
Utterly terrified, Sarah blinked back tears of pure panic as she screamed: “Leave it! Leave it!” but Douglas either couldn't hear, or wouldn't.
The whole room distorted for a moment, like a picture on a sheet of rubber. Sarah felt her gut tumble end over end as white-hot shafts of electricity blasted out of the stone and connected with the beams overhead.
She could smell burning, charring flesh, could hear the sizzling and popping of fat under somebody's skin. Could see Douglas being exploded back across the chamber as the device in the center, the stone, assembled itself and activated.
She was aware of the images being projected onto her eye. And the voice, urgent in her ear. “Get out!” it said. “Get out now!”
 
Sarah followed her instincts without question. And ran for her life.
For in the sky the stars and Orion will shed their light no longer, the sun will be dark when it rises, and the moon will no longer give its light … I shall make … human life scarcer than the gold of Ophir … I am going to shake the heavens [and] the Earth will reel on its foundations, under the wrath of Yahweh Sabaoth, the day when his anger ignites.
 
Isaiah 13:5
“Apocalypse” from Greek meaning, “to uncover,” “to reveal.”
Well, it had been revealed and quite honestly Eric Clemmens wished it hadn't. Soaked through, he could feel his body cooking away under his coveralls. He caught a glimpse of himself in a side mirror. His bloodied, blistered skin hung from his face in puffy sheets. This went beyond third-degree burns. He had to get out of there. Pain or no pain, there just wasn't time to scream.
He shifted down a gear in an effort to boost his speed, but the torrent of boiling water that had swept him from his bike had flooded the tunnel ahead to such an extent that the going was difficult. Every so often he could feel the back or front end of the bike slide out from under him, forcing him to ease off.
Behind him, Christian was in an even worse state. One eye blinded, he throttled back and went for it. But when the tunnel seemed to warp and twist, neither man could be sure of their senses. They wobbled, stayed upright.
But stability was the least of their worries. Because in their mirrors, larger than life, glowing like the ferocious, fiery tongue of a dragon, came crashing forth a second tumbling, chaotic spew of fire, electricity and seething water.
Pulsating past them in violent energy bursts, light streaked through the Carbon 60 spiral, swirling in a chaotic pattern that served only to disorient them further.
And that was when Christian finally panicked. Kicking yet more speed out of his machine in a bid to outrun the impending flow, he locked a brake and twisted the front wheel—and found himself shooting off at an angle. Caught in one of the spiraled ruts, but afraid to reduce speed, he found himself rapidly rising up the side of the tunnel at over 100 miles an hour.
He jerked at the handlebars, trying to jump the front wheel over the lip of limestone, but it was no use. He was already too high. He could feel the weight of the bike on top of him, and that helpless sense of falling.
Clemmens plowed on, bumping his way over the ruts of
undulating stone. The hot breath of sheer fury snorted down his. neck. A blinding light was in the mirrors, a blast furnace of heat on his back.
He was aware of it gaining. Catching him. Matching his every move. He was aware too of some event taking place at his periphery and rising sharply. Steeply.
He looked up. Saw Christian crashing down on him, and closed his eyes.
It was just a twisted heap of metal when all was said and done. With two half-full gas tanks, which exploded in a frenzy as the raging torrent of destruction engulfed it and rocketed down the tunnel.
Ahead of it, the pool of water that was collected along the floor of the tunnel parted, as if Moses were paying a visit. Crept up the walls like an honor guard, using the spirals as tracks and formed a watery tube through which the chaos could travel much faster.
 
Sarah stumbled. Recovered. Leapt out of the benben chamber and lost her footing again. Sliding down the incline she collapsed in the water, which was sheer luck in the end because spears of jagged energy were blasting out above her head. Searing and frying everything in their path.
The water that had collected on the floor of the tunnel was warm, and getting warmer. She picked herself up and ran, but the sloshing around was harder work than she remembered. The water level was deeper, and rising fast. She stuck to the sides where the depth was shallow and ran as fast as she could, rounding the bend just seconds later and pushing on toward the exit.
The portable lights flickered, crackling as the power supply dipped, interfered with by the ever-increasing electrical charge. She could see the exit just ahead, just a few excruciating feet away. She climbed the curvature of the tunnel wall, and that was when she realized: the water was climbing with her.
Not rising, like a tide, but climbing. Lifting itself from the floor and slithering up both sides to the hissing, popping sound of ice in a cold glass of lemonade.
“Sarah!” She snapped her head around. It was Douglas. She had no idea how he'd made it out. His hair was glassy,
melted onto his scalp. He stumbled toward her, clutching his pathetic prize: the Carbon 60 shard. But the growing rumbling sound coming from the other direction also demanded attention. Sarah didn't know which way to turn.
She thrust a hand out at Douglas. “You can make it!” she screamed. “You can make it!” But the wall of water was already creeping up over her waist level.
It was now or never.
She jumped through to the exit stairwell, landed heavily on the other side, but had the foresight to turn it into a roll, taking some of the energy out of the impact.
Scrambling to her feet she shot around to face the tunnel and watched, stunned, as the water rose up past the doorway and wrapped around to join with itself on the other side.
Yet it never leaked. Never spilled so much as a drop in her direction.
She ran to the doorway and peered out. Douglas was just a few feet away. But the tunnel was getting brighter, much brighter.
Sarah bellowed: “Douglas! Get your ass in here!”
That seemed to shake him up a little, but not enough. Tripping over his own feet, he was either too shocked, or too stupid to realize he was actually walking
on
the water. Stumbling to the doorway, the searing heat of the approaching fireball growing at a seering pace, Douglas threw an arm over his eyes as Sarah shot a hand out to grab him—and nearly broke her fingers in the process.
The water was hard as crystal.
The helpless look on Sarah's face was enough to send Douglas into a panic. Lunging for the exit he found himself smacking into a wall of glass. He balled his fist, hammered on it, but it barely made a thud. “Help me!” came his muffled cries. “For God's sake! Help me!”
And then she saw it. Though she had to look twice because she could hardly believe it.
A hand was jutting out of the water. Perfectly formed with four fingers and a thumb. Human in shape. It clamped itself around Douglas's ankle and began its relentless task of pulling him under. Translucent and sparkling, it looked like crystal, yet moved with absolute human dexterity.
Douglas struggled but the sheer brute strength of the hand
was overwhelming. He staggered, and collapsed to his knees as a second hand appeared and lifted out of the water on an endless, jointless arm. And prised the C60 shard from the man's greedy fingers.
There was nothing Sarah could do but watch as the impending juggernaut of fire hit. In the blinking of an eye, everything was gone.
The water wall creaked and shuddered, as the ceaseless funnel of rage thundered past.
She didn't know if it would hold. She didn't want to stick around to find out.
She spun on her heel, and ran up the flight of spiral stone steps as if they didn't exist.
 
On the surface she was met with stunned expressions. Stunned,
silent
expressions. No one wanted to know what Sarah had seen. They had their own problems to deal with, and they were many.
She could feel a pressure on her chest. It was difficult to breathe. The air had turned to syrup. It made her want to cough.
She could hear shouts and cries, and an eerie hum. She stumbled out of the marquee, making her way to the main encampment. The arc-lights flickered on and off, making her pause every so often in her stride. Several times she had to pull up short before slamming into something, a generator, rubble, a fence. The changing brightness never gave her eyes time to adjust, so it was a welcome relief when the lights finally blew, spitting glass at passersby.
There were hushed whispers. The sounds of sobbing. The ground shook and the humming sound that was ever-present, grew until it became a rumble.
She spotted a geophysics marker move first, an aluminum pole that was hammered into the ground, pinpointing where the three-mile circular tunnel was situated. She watched it shake before launching into the air over 50 feet, then clattering to the ground and clouting an unsuspecting soul around the ear. She saw the next one pop. And the next. Anything that didn't belong in this sacred ground was being suddenly and violently rejected at an alarming rate. Fences. Poles. All were tossed into the air.
And then came the glow. A menacing blueness that cut through the sand as if it wasn't there and traced the circular tunnel in deliberate, perfectly timed pulses. Rapid. Constant. Expectant.
Sarah could hear herself breathing, a labored rasping as it caught in her throat. She could feel a tingling sensation. A sparkling. The sort of thing that accompanied an almighty thunderstorm. And that was when she realized she was swamped in sand, surrounded on all sides by particles of dust that clung to the air, suspended as if hanging in some sort of laboratory solution.
The ground shook. A trembler that paid scant regard to anything that stood on the surface. Like cutlery on a snapped-back tablecloth, Sarah fell to her knees. Heard loose material clatter from the pyramids, bouncing off every step as they tumbled.
And as she checked herself for cuts and grazes, she picked up a stone to discard. Only to discover that its physical make-up was actually changing. For though it looked like a rock, it felt more like plastic.
There was a zapping sound now. A high-pitched shudder, like something ripping through the ground. And then she heard the call. Someone had seen something. She twisted around to see a rippling layer of lightning erupting across the surface of all three pyramids, like blue electric eels in a feeding frenzy, spitting and coursing over the vast expanses of limestone blocks, swirling and writhing. Blackening the surfaces, and working their way up, to collect in waves at the peak of each monument.
The buildup was constant. The lightning balls on the peaks illuminated the whole Giza plateau. The accompanying noise was shrill, earsplitting. And the culmination equally awesome.
For suddenly, three vast and formidable columns of energy, perfectly straight, and immaculately formed, shot up into the sky. One from each of the three peaks.
Like cannons aimed at the heavens, the three pyramids loosed their vicious arsenal, and screamed in primal victory. They had awakened, after millennia of slumber. And their wrath was considerable.
When it came, it came suddenly.
 
12/03/20 04:02:48 36:32N 71:00E 252:5 5:0Mb B AFGHANISTAN-TAJIKISTAN BORDER
 
There was no warning.
 
12/03/20 11:02:49 38:24N 26.64W 10:0. 4.6mb B AZORES ISLANDS
 
Despite the Solar Heliospheric Observatory, SOHO III, ACE and the CLUSTER II solar-observing satellites; despite numerous terrestrial-based solar observatories and a multitude of seismometers placed at strategic points along fault-lines; in spite of Deep Sea Tsunami Sensors that measured 12–15,000-foot columns of water above their positions, detecting changes in sea level to the nearest millimeter:
 
12/03/20 03:03:12 57:33N 119.81E 10:0 4.7Mb B AST OF LAKE BAYKAL, RUSSIA
 
Despite all that, the gravitational wave that blasted out from the sun, traveling at the speed of light, warping and twisting the fabric of space as if it were a sheet of elastic, could only be measured in retrospect. By accumulating the data of what it destroyed. By amassing the results of so much carnage.
 
12/03/20 13:04:33 54:03S 132:18W 10:0 5.6Mb C PACIFIC-ANTARCTIC RIDGE
12/03/20 10:06:43 39:57N 140:31E 118.8 5:4Mb A EASTERN HONSHU, JAPAN
12/03/20 18:06:12 31:10N 87:30W 10:0 3.7Lg ALABAMA
12/03/20 01:07:33 57.78N 152:33W 33:0 3.7MI B KODIAK ISLAND REGION
 
In the Bay of Bengal, winds were whipped up. And though they barely lasted a minute, they traveled so fast, over 700 miles an hour, that they overwhelmed whole regions of India, destroying towns and villages before they could even be heard arriving.
In the Urals, seismic waves plowed through the tundra at
over 13,000 miles an hour. Yet the ground was wet this time of year, soft from thawing. And the farmers could see their furrows undulating like rumpled blankets on a trampoline.
In Canada, Alaska, and on the coasts of Chile, Japan, Hawaii and South Africa, large run-out landslides were triggered, so powerful the masses of tumbling rock traveled more than thirty miles in places, acting like fluids in a process called liquefaction. The debris moved up slopes and around bends, just like liquids should. Except in the case of Hawaii, where the run-out of debris, which included 20-ton boulders, rocketed out for over 500 miles. This, coupled with the accompanying earthquake, triggered a tsunami—a giant tidal wave that was so powerful it caused a vacuum along the sea bed and imploded rocks to such an extent that it gouged out huge grooves the size of submarines in an instant.
Across the Pacific the tsunami roared, stretching from the sea floor to the surface, hundreds of miles wide and tens of thousands of feet deep. It surged across the ocean faster than a jet plane. When it reached a point 200 miles out to sea, an uncharacteristic subduction zone earthquake increased the wave's power and doubled its length.
Off the coast of Northern California, a supertanker somehow survived the onslaught, despite the intense battering and the fact it was carried eighty nautical miles closer to shore. As the wave finally washed over its bow, the captain had the foresight to radio a warning to the Coast Guard. His crew gathered on deck, terrified, because they could see the lights of the nearest streets and houses twinkle through the wall of water as it raced off toward shore.
On land, they hadn't seen a tsunami since 1964. Over 2,000 people scattered along the beaches, stood on the sand and watched the water get sucked out to sea in seconds, leaving shoals of fish and assorted marine life beached. By the time they spotted the wall of water rearing up ominously on the horizon it was too late. Because there was one important rule of thumb to remember about tsunamis: if you were close enough to see one coming, you were never going to outrun it.
Despite undersea mountains changing its direction, and despite the shallow Continental Shelf creating friction and slowing the wave down, the trailing waves piled into the
first, one after the other, like a rug crumpling against a wall. The resulting wave reared up a further ten feet, hit the beach and wiped out everything in its path. It delivered 100,000 tons of water for every five feet of beach. It exploded concrete buildings. Tore men, women and children limb from limb, and piled inland for a further forty miles.
In the Philippines, Mount Pinatubo was erupting, oozing volcanic mudflows into the panic-stricken valleys below. While in Alaska, a Boeing 757 passenger plane on final approach to Anchorage International Airport lost all power as it entered what it thought was a layer of haze. It turned out to be volcanic ash, thrown up by Redoubt Volcano, part of the rumbling Aleutian volcanic chain.
The plane eventually crashed. There were no survivors.
Every year there were reports of approximately fifty volcanic eruptions around the world. Ten of these caused death and serious mayhem. Tonight, there were thirty-seven separate volcanoes raging across the planet at once, twelve on American soil. Of those twelve, five were on the Middle America trench, while the rest were on the Aleutian trench. And together they could be seen from space. For tonight, the Ring of Fire, a series of volcanic arcs and oceanic trenches which encircled the Pacific Basin, was ablaze.
It started in New Zealand. Went north via the Tonga and Kermadec trenches. Followed the equator with the Bougainville and Java-Sunda trenches. It was a little-known fact that volcanoes were found mostly in chains, and very rarely as singular one-off phenomena. But tonight that fact could hardly be avoided. One by one, the most volatile volcanoes blew along the chains. The Ryukyu and Izu Bonin trenches, which led across to the Aleutian trench in Alaska, smoked and rumbled. At the Peru-Chile trench where the Ring of Fire ended, villages were being evacuated as the lava flows advanced.
With the force of God's vengeance freely on loan, Mother Nature rallied her armies, and began the systematic shredding of human civilization on earth.

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