Raising Atlantis a-1 Read online

  “It feels like we’re inside some enormous machine.”

  Yeats felt a deep and disturbing jolt inside his bowels. The news was like some sort of prophecy, both expected and alarming. “Machine?”

  “I think it’s supposed to do something.”

  There was a heaviness in the air. Yeats cleared his throat. “Do what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe disaster struck the builders before they ever got a chance to turn it on.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or maybe,” Conrad went on, “this machine caused the disaster.”

  Yeats nodded slowly as the words sunk in. Somehow he had felt it all along. He wanted to tell Conrad more. But now was not the time. Conrad would hopefully figure it out on his own anyway.

  Descending to the Great Gallery, Conrad was sorry he had left Serena behind in the upper chamber. And not just because he wanted her to see for herself how right he was about P4. He could tell from her eyes how put out and excluded she felt. He knew the sensation well and felt a twinge of guilt for not sticking up for her with Yeats. But he wasn’t about to blow his own chance to explore the lower levels and lead the way to the greatest archaeological discovery in human history.

  As soon as he reached the bottom of the gallery, however, Conrad’s mental map of the pyramid’s interior began to unravel. He faced a fork branching off into two smaller tunnels. There should have been three.

  He could hear Yeats’s heavy breathing behind him. “Well?” Yeats demanded impatiently. “Which way?”

  Conrad studied the two “smaller” tunnels. Each was more than thirty feet high. One continued along the twenty-six-degree slope of the gallery. The other dropped ninety degrees into a vertical shaft. Neither satisfied him.

  Conrad instinctively turned around and began to search for a third tunnel that would double back beneath the gallery. But he couldn’t find it.

  “What are you doing?” Yeats asked.

  Conrad patted the cold wall and said nothing. He was positive the central chamber he was looking for was on this level. And if the Great Pyramid in Giza was indeed modeled after P4, then the corridor leading to that central chamber should have been there at the bottom of the gallery.

  But it wasn’t.

  Perhaps he was assuming too much to think the ancient Egyptians got it right from the Atlanteans. Even if his initial hypothesis was correct, that didn’t mean the Egyptians had the knowledge or means to fashion an accurate copy of P4.

  “The chamber we’re looking for is on this level,” he said. “But we’ll have to access it from below.”

  “Fine,” Yeats said. “Which tunnel?”

  “Theoretically, both corridors should lead to the burial chamber,” Conrad said, hesitating.

  Yeats said, “As long as it isn’t ours.”

  “You don’t understand,” Conrad said. “The burial chamber at the bottom of the pyramid serves as a kind of cosmic dressing chamber where the king can dance and celebrate the completion of life. At the top of the pyramid is the phoenix or benben stone, symbolizing resurrection. There’s an ascension to all this.”

  “I get it,” said Yeats. “And somewhere in between, the hocus-pocus happens.”

  “At the central chamber,” Conrad said. “That’s where we can expect to find a repository of texts or technology to unlock the meaning of P4.” Conrad took another look around. “Since the access corridor isn’t here, I suspect the burial chamber will point the way.”

  “So which tunnel leads to the burial chamber?”

  Conrad could feel Yeats’s brooding stare. The reality was that he was still getting used to attacking this pyramid from the top down, when every previous experience in his life was from the bottom up.

  Conrad looked down the first tunnel. It would be natural to continue along the slope of the gallery they had just passed through. But he suspected that tunnel led to the main entrance of P4. It was probably blocked at some point to keep outsiders from entering P4 at the ground level.

  “Make up my mind, son.”

  “Door number two,” Conrad said. “We’ll take the vertical shaft.”

  “OK.” Yeats leaned over the shaft and dropped a new line.

  Conrad emerged from the bottom of the vertical shaft a half hour later, dropping into a lower north-south corridor. This, too, was more than thirty feet high. Yeats had just landed behind him when the alarm on Conrad’s watch started beeping.

  “You’ve got an appointment somewhere?” Yeats asked.

  “We’re under the base of P4.” Conrad pulled back his left glove and tilted his wrist to reveal the blue electroluminescent backlight of his multi-sensor watch face. In addition to a built-in digital compass, barometer, thermometer, and GPS, it included an altimeter graph. “We’ve descended almost a mile and a half. I set the alarm for my target altitude.”

  Yeats pulled out his own USAF standard-issue altimeter. “You were off by more than a quarter mile,” Yeats said. “We’re barely a mile down.”

  Conrad looked at his altimeter doubtfully. His father wasn’t cutting him any slack now. Not an inch. Much less a quarter mile. This might as well be the first human landing on Mars as far as Yeats was concerned, Conrad realized, and NASA allowed no margin for error. As Conrad rolled it over in his head, he concluded Yeats was right. If anything, P4 was more significant to humanity than Mars. It was certainly closer. Palpably so.

  “So which way now?” Yeats pressed. “North or south?”

  Conrad cut his line and instinctively turned to the north. “This way.”

  After about 1,200 feet, the floor sloped suddenly and almost doubled the height of the ceiling. Fifty yards ahead was the entrance Conrad was looking for. He could feel his blood starting to really pump.

  “This is it,” he said.

  They entered a vastly larger space. The beams of their head torches disintegrated into nothingness as the floor beneath their boots sloped at a slight grade. Engulfed in darkness, and feeling very cold, Conrad sensed that this cavity was in some ways many times larger than the upper chamber they had left at the top of the Great Gallery. Yet the emptiness beyond the torchlight beams also felt compressed in some way. This was definitely uncharted territory, he realized, and could feel the tension in his gut.

  “I’m tossing out a flare-thirty-second delay,” Yeats said. “Three, two, one.”

  Conrad could hear Yeats heave the stick into the dark. Mentally he counted down as he pulled out his digital camera to capture whatever image would burst forth. A few seconds later the chamber exploded with light.

  Conrad shielded his eyes as he panned what fleetingly resembled a stone crater with his camera. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he began to see that’s exactly what they were standing in. They were on the rim of a titanic crater almost a mile in diameter. But it was only two hundred feet high.

  The flare sputtered and died. Once again Conrad and Yeats were in darkness.

  Yeats said, “Show me what you’ve got.”

  “Right here.”

  Conrad replayed the footage on the flat display screen on the back of his camera. It glowed bright in the darkness.

  “Stop,” said Yeats.

  Conrad paused the screen. There was something in the center of the crater. A circle or hub of some sort.

  “Can you zoom?”

  “A little.”

  Conrad, fingers tingling with adrenaline, magnified the image until it filled the display. But the picture was still too blurred to make it out clearly.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Conrad and Yeats marched in unison toward the center, careful not to lose their balance on the sloping floor. Conrad could feel his heart pounding. He’d never experienced any sort of chamber like this in Egypt or the Americas, nothing even remotely similar in size or configuration.

  At the half-mile mark Yeats called a halt.

  Conrad lowered his flashlight beam to the floor and found something about ten yards in front of them. Carved across the polished
stone floor were four rings radiating from an oval cartouche in the center, like some magnificent seal.

  Yeats let out a low whistle. “Finally, inscriptions for Mother Earth.”

  “Not quite,” said Conrad, breathing hard. Part of him wanted to run back and get her. Another part refused to admit he couldn’t figure this out by himself. “It’s an icon or symbol.”

  “Then even you should be able to decipher it.”

  Conrad walked to the center of the floor, where a familiar-looking hieroglyphic was inscribed inside the oval cartouche. It was of a god or king seated inside some sort of mechanical device. He resembled a bearded Caucasian and wore what looked like an elaborate head ornament known as an Atef crown. And he held some sort of scepter in his hand. It looked like a small obelisk.

  “This figure looks familiar,” Conrad heard himself saying, “but I can’t put my finger on why.”

  Conrad looked again at the cartouche on the floor. The image inscribed inside was similar to the symbols he had seen depicting the gods of Viracocha in the Andes and Quetzalcoatl in Central America. But this otherworldly symbol awakened something primeval and terrifying inside him, and suddenly he knew why.

  “This pyramid is dedicated to Osiris.” Conrad’s voice wavered.

  “So what?” said Yeats. “I thought most of these pyramids were dedicated to some god.”

  “You don’t understand,” Conrad said excitedly. “This seal suggests P4 was built by the King of Eternity himself, the Lord of First Time.”

  “First Time?”

  “The Genesis epoch I told you about back at Ice Base Orion, the time when humanity emerged from the primordial darkness and was offered the gifts of civilization from the gods,” Conrad said. “Ancient Egyptian texts say these gifts or technologies were introduced through intermediaries or lesser divinities known as ‘The Watchers’ or Urshu.”

  Yeats paused. “So you think the Urshu were the Atlanteans who built P4?”

  “Maybe,” Conrad said. “I’m sure Serena has her own interpretation. But there’s no denying that we’ve found the mother lode.” Conrad could hear the triumph in his voice. “The Mother Culture.”

  “First Time,” Yeats said.

  “First Time,” Conrad echoed and spoke the phrase in his best Ancient Egyptian:“Zep Tepi.”

  As soon as the words fell out of his mouth, they seemed to swirl around the chamber, spinning out from the center of the crater floor like some centrifugal force. The floor started to shake.

  Suddenly the cartouche split open and Conrad stumbled backward as a pillar of fire shot up from the floor and through a circular shaft in the ceiling.

  “Whoa!” he shouted and slipped flat on his back. He started to slide across the bottom of the crater floor toward the fiery hole.

  Yeats grabbed his arm and held him back. “Easy, easy, easy.”

  Then the fire burst disappeared and the rumbling stopped. All that remained was a crater like shaft where the cartouche had split open.

  Conrad felt a tug as Yeats pulled him up on his feet. “Now where on earth do you think that goes, son?”

  Conrad leaned over and peered down the fiery shaft. For a flickering second he glimpsed a glowing tunnel that seemed to descend to the very bowels of the earth. But the residual heat from the blast burned his forehead and he quickly pulled away.

  “From the looks of it,” Conrad said, gingerly touching his forehead to see if it was still there, “I’d say the pit of hell.”

  16

  Descent Hour Six

  It was the vodka.

  It had to be the vodka, Colonel Ivan Kovich swore, when he first beheld the pyramid at the bottom of the ice chasm. That or some experimental hallucinogenics the Americans had slipped into his drink at their base on the surface.

  Whatever it was, he decided, it was part of an American plot to drive the Russian people insane. It had started with the imperialist capitalist bankrolling of the Communist revolution in 1917. It had moved into full gear with the installation of Stalin and the gulags, and then the slaughter of twenty million during World War II. It culminated in the humiliating disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 and rise of the golden arches of American hamburger stands in Moscow.

  Now that the United States was the world’s undisputed superpower, Kovich was convinced, the Americans were simply keeping the Russians alive for their own cruel pleasure, starving their bodies of nutrients with Big Macs and their souls with TV shows like Baywatch.

  It was from this hell that Kovich had sought refuge in the spare, unspoiled beauty of Antarctica, only to stumble across a veritable Four Seasons Resort in the snow in the form of Ice Base Orion. With state-of-the-art computers, plush sleeping quarters, toilets that flushed, and a stockpile of food, the only thing lacking was a swimming pool and health spa.

  The concierge of Hotel Orion, Colonel O’Dell, was pleasant enough during the inspection. But the American grew increasingly nervous when Russian dosimeters detected radiation, and Kovich suggested a survey of the gigantic ice chasm over which the base was perched.

  Kovich was convinced he was on the verge of discovering a rogue nuclear testing facility, mostly because Russia itself had one at the other end of the planet in the Arctic Circle.

  Only after reaching the bottom of the abyss and beholding the protruding summit of a pyramid did Kovich realize that the Americans had pushed him and his twenty Russian comrades over the brink. And how could he ever forget the horror on his men’s faces when they saw the hundreds of human bodies frozen in the walls of this ice tomb?

  Truly their commanding officer had finally led them down to hell.

  The shiny white exterior of the pyramid didn’t even show up on their radio-echo scans from a few feet away. It was obvious the Americans had developed a super-secret, indestructible stealth material that could render their fleets and bombers both invisible and invincible.

  As if that were not enough, a message played in Kovich’s head over and over again: “Wait, there’s more!” the voice repeated, like some terrible American infomercial. “Much, much more!” As a special bonus at the bottom of hell, the Americans had left what looked like an RV parked atop the pyramid summit along with another hole that beckoned them farther.

  Here at this “habitat” Kovich left the two American observers who had accompanied them down, along with five of his men. He and the rest of his team proceeded down the seven-foot-tall shaft and didn’t reach the other end for a good half hour.

  They emerged inside what seemed to be a massive stone oven the size of an Olympic stadium. And inside this chamber were four American soldiers-two men and two women-who surrendered their weapons but refused to say a word.

  As a final bonus, there seemed to be no way out of this tomb. When attempts to reach Vlad and the rest of the crew at Ice Base Orion on the surface failed, Kovich feared the worst.

  He had been duped, he concluded. This was a trap. They had been lured into this mass grave so they could be killed. Meanwhile, the Americans would monitor their slow descent into madness with hidden cameras and use the results in their training videos for new recruits.

  Finally, one of his men found an open passageway.

  Kovich left a few men to guard the Americans and took the rest down a low, square tunnel to a plateau overlooking what looked like a gigantic Moscow metro tunnel plunging toward the center of the earth. It was at least one hundred meters tall, he guessed, and could swallow Russia’s GUM retail mall, the biggest in the world. Running along its shiny walls and floor and ceiling were sunken channels about forty feet wide and twenty feet deep.

  “Look, sir!” shouted one of his soldiers, pointing into the abyss. “There’s more!”

  Peering over the ledge, Kovich could only rub his disbelieving eyes. For inside one of the channels were two lines daring him to descend even farther.

  Something rose up inside Kovich’s bubbling psyche, bursting through the swirling images of fast food, bikinis, Ginsu knives, and self-impr
ovement CDs. That something was the stark realization that he and his men were going to die. They would never make it back to the surface again.

  With chilling clarity, Kovich made the last strategic decision of his life: if they weren’t leaving this tomb, then neither were the Americans.

  17

  Descent Hour Seven

  Inside the subterranean boiler room beneath P4, Conrad applied a cold canteen to his scalded forehead as a dull glow from the shaft crept across the crater floor. Still smarting from the burn, he removed the canteen and noticed some singed eyebrow hairs clinging to the condensation on the outside.

  “Things are certainly heating up,” Yeats was telling him. “We better move out before another blast fries both of us. Between frostbite on your hand and second-degree burns on your face, you’ve already got two strikes against you.”

  “Let’s at least get a reading,” Conrad said. “You’ve got a remote heat sensor, don’t you?”

  Yeats produced a small ball from his backpack. “The shell is made of the same stuff NASA uses on the outer tiles of the space shuttle,” Yeats said. “Stand back.”

  Conrad watched Yeats toss it into the shaft. A minute later the numbers showed up on Yeats’s handheld computer. Conrad looked it over.

  “Before your little heat-shielded sensor melted during its descent,” Conrad said, “it plunged four miles and recorded a temperature of almost nine thousand degrees Fahrenheit.”

  “Mother of God,” Yeats said. “That’s as hot as the surface of the sun.”

  “Or the molten core of the earth,” Conrad said. “I think this is a geothermal vent.”

  “A geothermal vent?” Yeats narrowed his eyes. “Like the kind found in oceans?”

  Conrad nodded. “One of my old professors discovered a hot spot like this west of Ecuador, about five hundred miles out in the water and eight thousand feet down,” he said. “There’s very little life at the bottom of the ocean because there’s no light and the temperatures are below freezing. But where there are cracks in the earth’s crust, the heat from the core escapes to warm the water. That’s how some forms of ocean life-earth-heated crabs, clams, ten-foot-long worms-survive down there.”