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Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
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“The weather?” Rafferty snorted coldly. “We get another one of those—gravity waves, did you call them?” Hackett nodded. “We get another one and there's a fifty-fifty chance we'll go down. We're not the size of an aircraft carrier. We can't ride a fifty-foot wave. It took four years to build this ship, and she can cut through ice like nothing else. But the wrong conditions—and she'll go down in four minutes.” He stuck his hands on his hips. Then adjusted his standard-issue baseball cap. “Just so you all know. Antarctica's like nowhere else on earth, including the North Pole. With or without gravity waves.”
Ensign Varez was a stocky Hispanic from the fifty-first state of Puerto Rico. He grinned to himself excitedly as the communications desk lit up like a Christmas tree. Addressed his CO: “Captain! Satellite communications just came back online, sir.”
“What have we got?”
“Uh—everything. GPS. Direct lines to DC. Seattle. NORAD. Switzerland. The works.”
“Good.” He looked to Gant. “You boys work fast.”
“Well, of course,” Gant chided stiffly. “There are two whole carrier groups down here now.”
“Excellent,” Hackett said briskly. “Now maybe we can download the updates of my data from CERN to the labs downstairs—”
“Below decks,” Rafferty corrected.
Hackett shrugged. “Wherever.”
But the mood hadn't lightened any for Major Gant. Checking in with Cheyenne Mountain, NORAD was disappointed to report that all efforts to locate the Chinese base via satellite had failed. And of the few satellites they could bump into position, the closest,
VX-17,
wasn't going to be in prime position for another thirty-two hours.
Hackett and Pearce exchanged glances, as the CIA man
shook nervously. He licked his lips. Tensed. “You got a room all set up for this?”
Gant said he did. And marched him off into the bowels of the ship.
 
At 13:06 GMT,
Polar Star
entered international waters becoming the primary responsibility of the
Harry S Truman
battle group, comprising the Fifth Carrier Group Nimitz Class aircraft carrier
USS Harry S Truman
CVN 75, with the eighty-seven planes of Carrier Air Wing Five. Running alongside were the
USS Bunker Hill CG 52,
and the
USS Mobile Bay CG 53.
While farther out to sea, with some vessels even beyond visibility and tucked over the horizon, were the ships of Destroyer Squadron 15: the
Vincennes,
the
Thach,
the
Curtis Wilbur,
the
Rodney M. Davis
, the
O'Brien,
the
John S. McCain
and the
Fife.
Seven ships in all. And a formidable arm of the
Truman
battle group.
And this was the
second
battle group. The
Nimitz
herself, first of the Nimitz Class, was already in position with her own fleet, patrolling Antarctic waters: It was equally large, and equally committed to carrying out its duties.
To give some idea of the scale of the mounting situation at the South Pole, Gant explained. Antarctica, which was twice the size of America, had around five thousand people living and working on its shores at any one time. In contrast, the ship's company of the USS
Nimitz
numbered 3,350, while its onboard Air Wing numbered 2,480 men and women. A total of 5,830 people. Just the arrival of the
Nimitz
alone had doubled Antarctica's population overnight. The
Truman
had exactly the same complement. And when counting the number of people combined aboard the other eighteen ships, the population of Antarctica had multiplied by a factor of 10.
And that was just the Navy. The Marines had sent their people, as had the Army and the Air Force, all per Presidential decree. It was going to be busy at the South Pole, if nothing else.
But despite all the technical wizardry and know-how, despite all the gadgets and toys, they were blind on mainland Antarctica. They couldn't even confirm whether an entire Chinese base still existed or not. And so finally it all boiled
down to this. To one man. Robert Ellington Pearce, of Phoenix, Arizona. Serial Number A170044938-W9 of the Central Intelligence Agency. A crypto-historian by desire, but a psychic by trade, for want of a better word. And in possession of an extraordinary talent.
The ability to view installations remotely and report on their layout, contents and status with startling accuracy.
By the power of thought alone.
Bob Pearce stood on the snow barefoot. And took a look around.
“What do you see?”
There was no one else with him. So to keep some sort of rational perspective welded to the situation, he had a cellular phone pressed against his ear. He was looking at his feet when he reported back. Wiggled his toes. “Snow,” he said. “Ice. It's very cold here.”
“What do you see of the base?” Gant insisted on the other end of the line.
Pearce jerked his head up.
Directly in front of him, a matter of inches away, the charred remains of a Chinese soldier lay slumped over his machine-gun nest. Some sort of blast had erupted behind him and taken the back of his head with it. His face was frozen solid, contorted. But his entire back half was a blackened, twisted lump.
Smoke rose in stacks from behind twisted, jagged wreckage. An overturned drilling mast had crashed across a mobile cabin, itself a mass of flaking debris. This was what was left of
Jung Chang
.
“It's destroyed,” Pearce reported. “It's devastated.”
Darkened debris littered the surrounding snow like ground pepper on a plate of mashed potatoes. There was a hand still clutched to a magazine a few feet off. Half a torso. And a birthday card, flapping in the breeze.
“The weather's fine here,” Pearce realized.
“Can you get further into the base?”
“Just a moment. I gotta get past this, uh, thing,” he said, giving another lump of frozen charcoal-covered flesh a wide berth. Pearce could feel his stomach churning over. As he drew closer, the smell of burning and death grew thick and pungent, stung his nostrils and caused him to gasp involuntarily.
 
“I know what's in Atlantis. I know because I've been there before,” Hackett announced, with his feet up on the table. Scott looked over.
Hackett rifled through the documents as Scott asked: “What are those?”
“Transcripts,” he explained, “of Bob's little visitations.”
They were in
Polar Star's
Deck 2 Research Laboratory, where the team had assembled to watch Bob on the video link. Scott pulled up a chair next to Matheson. Hackett, who sat across from them, passed over the paperwork. He watched Scott sift through the pages, spreading them across the table.
Sarah's eyes were on Matheson as he gingerly attached a connecting wire to the output socket on a small plastic box-shaped unit, then hooked it up to the computer workstation bolted to the desk behind him, careful not to dislodge any more fried circuits than he absolutely had to.
“Think you can get it to work?”
“Of course I can get it to work,” Matheson responded dismissively. “I designed this thing.” He chipped away flaking particles, disgustedly. “What is this stuff all over it?”
“Blood,” Sarah revealed abruptly. “Eric Clemmens's charbroiled blood. They had to prise it from the wreckage.”
“Oh,” Matheson murmured queasily. He had been about to chew his nails. Now that didn't seem like such a good idea.
“This is unbelievable,” Scott groaned, turning the page.
“Why? Because it doesn't fit with your world view?” Hackett challenged as Matheson reached behind his chair and flipped a switch.
There was a low hum, followed by electrical chirping as a single green LED blinked insistently to let him know it
was alive. He spun around to key the computer. Hit—UP-LOAD—and: “Bingo.” He sniffed, self-satisfied. “Transferring all Giza data to the main terminal. We gotta party goin' on.”
“You cannot,” Scott insisted, “claim to know what's going on someplace else just by thinking about it.”
“He channels the energies,” Hackett reminded. “We can see him channeling the energies.”
“Jon,” Scott retaliated, “you're a scientist. How can you, of all people, accept this?”
“Richard, we still don't fully understand quantum mechanics, but what we do know is this TV monitor won't work without it. No one knows what effect superstring theory will have on our everyday lives but we know for the universe to exist, there are at least twenty-seven dimensions. We know there's no ‘nothingness.' If you sucked all the air out of a little black box, shut out all the light, extracted everything—there would still be thirty-seven fields of potential left. Thirty-seven! At the last count! Particles would continue to pop up out of nowhere sporadically, which is important because it links to another theory. Spatially, I know you're sitting there. I know your ass is in that seat. And I know we're sailing on the ocean. But think about it—this'll be important to you: where, spatially, is the past?”
“Where is the past?”
Sarah was excited. “Wow. That's a good question.”
“
Where
is the past?”
Hackett nodded. “In feet and inches, Richard, if you please.”
Scott thought about it. “The past,” he replied hesitantly, “is over two miles beneath the ice—in Antarctica.” He sat back on his haunches, feigning smug. But he knew it wasn't much of an answer.
“Okay.” Hackett attacked again. “So what is the distance between good and evil in kilometers?”
That got him.
“We don't use eighty percent of our brain,” Hackett said. “And of the part we
do
use, eighty percent of
that
is given over to processing visual stimulus. The point is, we as a species have existed for longer than our cognitive abilities to process what we perceive. It's possible our bodies can detect
things we are simply not capable of recongnizing—yet. Maybe we haven't evolved sufficiently to process that kind of data. Perhaps we need to develop a new kind of sense. You're confused when I ask ‘where is the past' because it's a different type of question, one you're not used to. Yet linguistically you can't deny it's grammatically correct.” Reluctantly Scott agreed. “Perhaps what Bob's doing simply requires asking different types of questions.”
“Are you saying he's more highly evolved than us?” Scott challenged.
Hackett refused to answer.
“Shh!” November scolded. “Can I at least hear what
Bob
has to say? Can't you just give him a break and keep the faith?”
Scott turned to face where November sat fiddling with the Giza tunnel footage on her computer. She met his gaze levelly. “He may be right, or he may be wrong,” she said. “But right now they can't even get a satellite to tell us anything useful. So what's wrong with just keeping the faith?”
“We're scientists,” Scott explained dryly. “We don't
do
faith.”
November just focused on the monitor, where Bob Pearce had a room all set up with a table and chairs, a map of Antarctica and a whole stack of grid references. There were no crystal balls, burning incense or wind chimes. It was clinical. And bright: he had a set of lights, which he sat and stared at through closed eyes. It made for bizarre viewing.
Across from him, Gant sat with pen, paper and a sheet of reconnaissance data.
Pearce stirred. “I'm uh, I'm through to the other section. I'm passing a lot of wreckage.” He threw his hand over his mouth as if he were about to be sick. “Ugh, uh, it's a … It's like a bomb went off. They're dead. They're all dead.”
“Okay, Bob, I guess it's gruesome. But we need to know about automated systems. Rack guns. Land mines—”
November was concerned. “I thought there was a ban on land mines?” she whispered.
“Yeah, right,” Matheson snorted. “On paper, maybe.”
“Northwest of the compound, on the perimeter,” Pearce announced, “automated rack gun. Operational. And, wait a
minute … yes, another gun. But it's out of ammo. Correction: looks like they never loaded it.”
Scott rubbed his hand across his chin, astounded. “What
does
he see?”
“He sees their base,” Hackett commented. “And from the sound of things, he sees it pretty well.”
Scott watched Pearce on the monitor, and that was when he noticed something equally odd happening in their own environment. A thin gray film of dust covered everything close to an open porthole. Suddenly the ship jolted as it hit rougher seas, and it was Bob Pearce on the other end of the video-link who voiced Scott's concern.
“Something's not right,” he said.
 
Vents of steam trickled out of blowholes all around Bob Pearce, like steamholes in a pot of overboiled rice. The steam rose up only a few feet before it quickly turned to snow and danced away on the wind.
Huge cracks crisscrossed through the ice. And as Pearce picked his way through the debris, he became aware the ground was dipping out from under him. It was like being on the edge of an impact crater. The blowholes were getting large, and the ground was starting to look more like Swiss cheese. Exposed ice tunnels twisted away into the interior, large enough to accommodate teams of men.
He could see something beyond the twisted, shattered hulk of an Armored Personnel Carrier in front of him, smashed up, and balanced on its side. It was something dark. Vast. Stretched out across the ground. If only he could reach it.
Was that a cry? Muffled. Distant. Pearce checked all around his position. Trying to determine where it was coming from.
“Say again?” Gant demanded.
But Pearce didn't have time to answer. Carefully, he lowered himself down into a blowhole, and peered into the steep, glistening ice tunnel. And as the frosty mist wafted its way past him, up toward the surface, he spotted something moving. Something black and disheveled, clawing its way forward.
Pearce rushed to its side for a closer inspection and was shocked to discover a Chinese soldier, in mountaineering gear. His skin was black in patches. Not from burns, but from frostbite.
“My God! We've got a survivor here!” he exclaimed.
He crouched down next to the young man who couldn't have been more than twenty. “Jesus, he's just a kid,” Pearce added, disgusted. “Send in a SARGE! Now!”
“Don't get ahead of yourself, Bob,” Gant warned. “We don't even know if we can get a SARGE that deep into enemy territory.”
“They're all dead except for this kid,” Pearce insisted. “Get a SARGE in here. Drag him out, for God's sake—get a SURGEon!
There was steam rising from the delirious young soldier's mouth. A powdered, crystallized breath. He opened one drooping eyelid, and it looked for all the world like—
“I think he sees me,” Pearce gasped.
“That's impossible,” Gant replied gruffly. “You're not really there, Bob. You've projected your mind into that area. Check around you. See what he's focusing on.”
But Bob wasn't listening, because the young Chinese soldier was trying to speak now. With one finger outstretched to indicate the tunnel behind him, he was trying, with every fiber in his being, to articulate sounds. Bob Pearce leaned forward, and though he couldn't understand him, tried his best to repeat those sounds.
 
Scott ran his finger over the equipment in the lab and studied the residue as November fought back a retch. “What is that smell?” she complained.
“Close the portholes,” Scott ordered, covering his mouth and reaching for the nearest porthole to him. The ship lurched once more. But this time, worse, like it had hit a wall of bad weather. Sarah too came over to study the dust. Outside, it seemed to be raining nothing but a swirl of gray, vile, sulfurous-smelling powder.
“It's volcanic ash,” she decided. “There must be some heavily active volcanoes coming up.”
“Mount Erebus is active,” Matheson said. “It's right in McMurdo Station's backyard.”
“Great,” Sarah moaned. “This'll be fun.”
She joined Scott at the porthole, but he didn't seem to be so amused. He brushed the ash from his fingertips, saying: “Brimstone. I never thought I'd get to see the day—”
“Hey, Richard,” Hackett interrupted. “Can you speak Chinese?”
Scott turned on the physicist. “A little. Why?”
Hackett pointed at the monitor. “Because Bob's started speaking it.”
Scott came over to him and cranked the volume up, straining to hear the mumbling CIA agent.
“Yao ye heikodo!”
he seemed to be saying.
“Yao ye heikodo!”
Which left Scott cold. “It's Cantonese,” he explained. “He keeps saying ‘There's something down there. There's something down there … And it's alive.'”

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