Polar Shift (29 page)

While Joe covered him, Austin checked out the main tent. There were broken eggshells in the rubbish bin, evidence of a recent breakfast. They peeked into the smaller tent, then made their way to the sheds. All the buildings were unlocked except one. They pounded the padlock with a boulder. The lock stayed intact, but the nails holding the clasp in the rotting wood gave out. They opened the door and stepped inside. A musky animal smell greeted their nostrils. The shaft of light coming through the open doorway fell on the fur-covered creature stretched out on the table.

“This isn't something you're likely to see at the Washington Zoo,” Zavala said.

Austin bent over the frozen carcass and examined the stubby trunk and undersize tusks. “Not unless they've opened a prehistoric wing. This is the carcass of what looks like a baby mammoth.”

“The state of preservation is incredible,” Zavala said. “It looks freeze-dried.”

After inspecting the frozen animal for a few minutes, they went back outside. Austin noticed boot prints in the permafrost leading to a path that ran alongside the river. They set the paraglider up for a takeoff from a low hill and flew along the winding path of the river, reasoning that Maria Arbatov couldn't have been far from the waterway when she was shot. Austin saw three bodies lying near a fork in a narrow canyon. He circled the immediate area but saw no sign of ivory hunters, and set the paraglider down near the edge of the gorge.

They climbed down the side and made their way to three bodies. The three men had been shot. Austin's jaw hardened, and all traces of warmth vanished from his light blue eyes. He thought about Maria Arbatov's harrowing escape down the river and vowed that whoever did this would be made to pay.

Zavala was bending over scuff marks in the gravelly sand. “These guys didn't care about covering their tracks. The trail should be easy to follow.”

“Let's go pay them our respects,” Austin said.

Moving stealthily with guns in hand, they followed the footprints along the winding canyon. Rounding a corner, they came upon a fourth body.

Zavala knelt by the side of the dead man. “Knife wound between the shoulder blades. Strange. This gentleman wasn't shot like the other people. I wonder who he is.”

Austin rolled the corpse over and stared at the unshaven features. “Not the kind of face you'd see at a chamber of commerce meeting.”

The ground around the dead man showed evidence of a scuffle, and prints led away from the body. Austin thought he saw the smaller boot prints of a woman in with the others. Moving even more quietly, they made their way along the gorge and eventually came to a place where the footprints ended and the banking had been broken down.

They climbed from the ravine, and picked up the trail again in the permafrost. Although the countryside was open and they could see for miles, there was no sign of life except for a few wheeling seabirds. The trail led to a shallow valley that brought them to the cave entrance.

“Someone has been doing some mining,” Zavala said.

“Nice call, Sherlock.” Austin picked up a jackhammer, attached to a portable compressor, that had been lying on the ground near the entrance.

Zavala's sharp eyes examined the charred rubble around the hole. “Okay, Watson. Someone did a little blasting here too.”

Austin said, “We've been here less than an hour and I'm already starting to dislike Ivory Island.”

He crawled into the hole and came out a minute later shaking his head. “Suicide. We don't know how far it goes. We don't even have a flashlight.”

They made their way back to the paraglider, called the icebreaker and asked Ivanov to send in a party to collect the dead and to bring in electric torches. Austin suggested that his men be armed. Knowing the captain's interest, Austin said he was hopeful that Karla was still alive. The captain said Maria Arbatov had been treated and was doing well. They wished each other good luck and clicked off.

Minutes later, the paraglider took off from a low hill with all the grace of a drunken gooney bird. They gained altitude and wheeled high over the island. Austin had thoroughly examined the charts, but still he was surprised at the size of the island. There was a lot of territory to cover with an aircraft that moved with a cruising speed of twenty-six miles per hour.

Austin marked their takeoff point as a center, and then he flew in an expanding spiral that allowed for an overlapping search of a large area. They saw only the featureless permafrost. Austin was about to head back to the beach to rendezvous with the boat party when Zavala shouted in his ear.

Austin followed Zavala's pointing finger and saw a well-defined track leading up the side of the volcano. They flew toward the volcano and saw that the trail was not a natural feature but rather a series of switchbacks cut into the side of the mountain. Austin suspected that man had a hand in the track's creation.

“Looks like a road,” Austin said.

“That's what I thought. Want to take a look?”

The question was unnecessary. Austin had already brought the paraglider around, and they were soaring toward the lip of the caldera.

T
HE SUBTERRANEAN CITY WAS
laid out in a grid pattern under the domed roof of an enormous cavern. The ancient metropolis was cut off from the sun and should have been in complete darkness, but it shimmered in a silvery green light that emanated from every building and street.

“What makes everything glow so brightly?” Schroeder asked as he limped along a street with Karla at his side.

“I studied light-emitting minerals as part of a geology course,” Karla said. “Some minerals glow under the influence of ultraviolet rays. Other types emit light from radiation or chemical change. But if we're right, and this is an old volcano, maybe there's a thermoluminescent effect caused by heat.”

“Could this be an old magma chamber?” Schroeder said.

“That's possible. I just don't know. But there's one thing that I'm absolutely sure of.”

“What's that, my dear?”

She gazed with awe at the glimmering edifices that stretched off in every direction. “We are strangers in a strange land.”

After leaving the mural tunnel that led to the city, they had walked under a huge corbel arch down a broad ramp to an open plaza with a step pyramid built of huge blocks at the center. The processional motif, including the domesticated woolly mammoths, was continued on the exterior levels of the pyramid, although the colors were less bright than in the access tunnel. Karla surmised that it was a temple or platform for priests or speakers to address people gathered in the plaza.

A paved boulevard about fifty feet wide led into the heart of the city. They had strolled along the thoroughfare like a couple of tourists bedazzled by the bright lights of Broadway. The buildings were much smaller than Manhattan's skyscrapers—three stories at the most—yet they were architectural wonders, considering their probable age.

The promenade was lined with pedestals. The statues they once supported lay in unrecognizable heaps of rubble, as if they had been pushed off their perches by vandals.

Schroeder rested his sore ankle, then he and Karla explored a couple of buildings, but they were as empty as if they had been swept clean with a big broom.

“How old do you think this place is?” Schroeder said as they plunged deeper into the city.

“Each time I try to date it, I become tangled in contradictions. The fact that the murals show humans and mammoths coexisting places them in the Pleistocene period. That was a time span that ran from 1.8 million to ten thousand years ago. Even if we go with the most recent date of ten thousand years, the high level of civilization here is astonishing. We've always assumed that mankind didn't evolve from its primitive state until much later. The Egyptians' civilization is only around five thousand years old.”

“Who do you think built this wonderful city?”

“Ancient Siberians. This island was connected to an arctic continental shelf that extended out from the mainland. I didn't see any pictures of boats, indicating that this was pretty much a landlocked society. From the looks of it, this was a rich city.”

“Since it was such a flourishing society, why did it end?”

“Maybe it
didn't
end. Maybe it simply moved somewhere and became the basis of another society. There is evidence that Europeans as well as Asians populated North America.”

As Schroeder mulled the implications of Karla's analysis, excited voices could be heard shouting from behind them in the direction of the city gate. He squinted back along the boulevard. Pinpoints of light were moving in the area around the plaza. The ivory hunters had also blundered into the city.

“We're sitting ducks out here in the open,” Schroeder said. “We can lose them easily if we get off this lovely avenue.”

He slipped into an alley that connected with a narrow side street. The buildings were smaller than on the main boulevard; none was taller than one story. They appeared to serve more of a residential function than the grander, more ceremonial structures lining the main drag.

As a former soldier, Schroeder had accurately sized up the defensive situation. The city was a huge maze of hundreds of streets. Even with the omnipresent halo of light that shimmered over the city, as long as they kept alert and on the move through the labyrinth their pursuers would never catch them. At the same time, Schroeder was aware that they could only run for so long. Eventually, they would run out of food and water. Or luck.

His goal was to get to the far side of the city. He had hopes, supported by the relatively good quality of the air, that there might be another way out. The people who built this subterranean metropolis seemed to have done so with logic and reason. Thus it would be logical and reasonable that they had more than one way to get in and out. They were more than halfway across the city when Karla cried out in alarm.

She dug her fingers into Schroeder's arm. He slipped the automatic rifle off his shoulder. “What is it?” He glanced around at the silent façades as if he expected to see the leering faces of the ivory hunters in the windows.

“Something ran down that alley.”

Schroeder followed her pointing finger with his eyes. Although the buildings produced their own light, they were built close together, and the narrow spaces between them were in deep shadow.

“Something or some
one
?”

“I—I don't know.” She laughed. “Maybe I've been underground too long.”

Schroeder had always trusted his senses above his analytical skills. “Wait here,” he said. He approached the alleyway with his finger tight on the trigger. He edged up to the alley, stuck his head around the corner and flicked the flashlight on. After a few seconds, he turned and came back. “Nothing,” he said.

“Sorry. It must have been my imagination.”

“Come,” he said, and, to Karla's surprise, he headed toward the alley.

“Where are you going?”

“If there is something out there, it's better that we sneak up on it rather than the other way around.”

Karla hesitated. Her first impulse had been to flee in the other direction. But Schroeder seemed to know what he was doing. She hurried to catch up.

The alley led to another street similarly lined with buildings. The street was deserted. There were only the squat little structures with their windows staring like vacant eyes in the strange half-light. Schroeder checked his internal compass, and again started in a direction he hoped would take them to the far side of the city.

After they had walked for a few blocks, Schroeder stopped suddenly and raised his rifle. He lowered the weapon after a second and rubbed his eyes. “This strange light has me crazy. Now it's
my
turn to start seeing things. I saw something run from one side of the street to the other.”

“No. I saw it too,” Karla said. “It was large. I don't think it was human.”

Schroeder started off again. “That's good. We haven't had much luck with humans lately.”

Karla's nostrils picked up a familiar musky odor. The shed housing the baby mammoth had the same smell. Schroeder's nostrils had picked up the scent as well.

“Smells like a barnyard,” he said.

The fragrance of mud, animals and manure became stronger as they made their way through an alley to another street. The street ended in a plaza similar to the public square they had encountered at the entrance to the city. The plaza was rectangular, about two hundred feet to a side. Like the earlier square it was dominated by a step pyramid about fifty feet high. But what caught Karla's eye was the immediate area around the pyramid.

Unlike the first plaza, whose pavement was made of the same glowing stone as the rest of the city, this space looked as if it were covered by a thick dark growth of weeds or grass. Karla's first impression was that she was looking at an untended garden similar to something she might see in a public park. That didn't make sense given the lack of sunlight. Drawn by her natural curiosity, she started toward the pyramid.

The vegetation began to move.

Schroeder's aging vision had trouble seeing details in the half-light, but the movement caught his eye. The training ingrained long ago came into play. He'd been taught that the best insurance when faced with a potential threat was a lead curtain. He stepped in front of Karla, and he brought his rifle to his hip. His finger tightened on the trigger as he prepared to saturate the square with a lethal spray.

“No!” Karla shouted.

She put her hand in front of his chest.

The plaza undulated, and from the moving mass came a sound of snorts and squeaks and heavy bodies starting to stir. The image of vegetation disintegrated, to be replaced by large furry clumps the size of large pigs.

Schroeder stared at the strange creatures milling around the square. They had stubby trunks and upturned tusks, and their hides were covered with fur. The significance of what he was seeing finally dawned on him.

“Baby elephants!”

“No,” Karla said, amazingly calm in spite of her unbounded excitement. “They're dwarf mammoths.”

“That can't be. Mammoths are extinct.”

“I know, but look closely.” She pointed the flashlight at the animals. A few of them glanced at the light, showing shiny round eyes of an amber hue. “Elephants don't have fur like that.”

“This is impossible,” Schroeder said as if he were having a hard time convincing himself.

“Not entirely. Traces of dwarf mammoths were found on Wrangel Island as recently as 2000
B.C
. That's only a blip in time. But you're right about this being unbelievable. The closest I've come to these creatures has been the fossilized bones of their ancestors.”

Schroeder said, “Why don't they run away?”

The mammoths seemed to have been sleeping when they were disturbed by the human intruders, but they weren't alarmed. They moved around the square in singles, twosomes or small groups, and showed little or no curiosity at the strangers.

“They don't think we'll hurt them,” Karla said. “They've probably never seen humans before. My guess is that they evolved from the full-grown animals that we saw in the murals. They've adjusted to the lack of sunlight and food through generations.”

Schroeder gazed at the herd of pigmy mammoths and said, “Karla, how do they live?”

“There's an air supply. Maybe it seeps down from the ceiling, or through crevasses we don't know about. Maybe they've learned to hibernate to preserve food.”

“Yes, yes, but what do they
eat
?”

She glanced around. “There must be a source somewhere. Maybe they get out into the open. Wait! Maybe that's what happened to the so-called baby that the expedition found. It was looking for food.”

“We must try to find out where they go,” Schroeder said. He made his way to the pyramid with Karla close behind. The mammoths moved aside to create a path. Some were slow to get out of the way and brushed against the humans, who had to wind their way through piles of manure. They reached the pyramid steps and began to climb. The effort put pressure on Schroeder's weak ankle, and he had to climb on his hands and knees, but he made it slowly to the flat top of the structure.

The elevation offered a total view of the square. The animals were still milling around with no rhyme nor reason to their movements.

Karla was counting the animals and figured there were about two hundred of them. Schroeder had been scanning the disorganized mob with other goals in mind, and, after a few minutes, he saw what he was looking for.

“Look,” he said. “The mammoths are forming into a loose queue over there near that corner of the plaza.”

Karla looked at where Schroeder was pointing. The herding animals had squeezed into a street as if suddenly inspired by a common purpose. Other mammoths began to follow, and soon the whole group was moving toward the same part of the square. With Karla helping him, Schroeder climbed off the pyramid and hobbled after the departing herd.

By the time they got to the corner, the entire herd had vanished from the square and was moving slowly along a narrow street that led back to the main boulevard. They tried not to startle the animals, although that didn't seem to be a danger. The mammoths seemed to have accepted the newcomers as part of the herd.

After about ten minutes, they began to see a change in the character of the city. Some of the houses on both sides were damaged. Their walls were knocked in as if hit by a rogue bulldozer. Eventually, they came to an area that looked as if it had been bombed. There were no freestanding buildings, only glowing piles of rubble intermingled with huge boulders made of a different, nonluminous mineral.

The sight revived unpleasant memories for Schroeder. He stopped to give his ankle a rest and looked around at the ruined landscape. “This reminds me of Berlin at the end of World War Two. Come. We must hurry or we'll lose them.”

Karla dodged a pile of manure. “I don't think we'll have to worry about that with the trail they're leaving.”