Raising Atlantis (22 page)

For Conrad, the objective was clear: he had to map the city and find its Shrine of the First Sun, which was clearly a memorial to the epoch of First Time. Inside the shrine would be the Seat of Osiris, just like the one on the royal seal he had seen. If he could bring the scepter from the star chamber into the shrine and sit in the Seat of Osiris he would unlock the Secret of First Time—surely the “time and place of the most worthy.”

Holding his camera up, Conrad panned to his right and to his left, up to the sky and down to the ground. Then he zoomed in on various structures, starting with the Sphinx-like landmark in the east and working his way toward the step-pyramid with the waterfalls in the west.

Satisfied he had captured everything he could, he replayed some of the images on the viewfinder screen to make sure once again that he wasn’t dreaming. As he did, however, he saw a dot moving across the ground. It was over by the great waterway that cut through the heart of the city.

Heart surging with fear and excitement, Conrad pointed the camera in the dot’s direction, slowly boosting the magnification. There it was, a blurry image, definitely moving. No, there were two blurry figures. He focused further. Suddenly the first one jumped into view.

It was Nimrod, the husky from Ice Base Orion. And walking beside him was Serena. A few moments later the dog dropped in his tracks and a dozen figures surrounded Serena before a chopper landed next to the group. The encounter did not look friendly.

Conrad lowered his camera only to see a swarm of military choppers buzz overhead. Before he could wave, a burst of machine gun fire came his way, raking the side of the pyramid.

He slid down the shaft as fast as he could to the star chamber, which was completely empty. Serena was gone, Yeats’s pack was gone, and the sequence of doors leading out to the gallery was wide open.

Something rattled overhead, and as Conrad looked up the shaft he had just slid down, a smoking canister dropped to the floor. Conrad’s eyes started to burn and he realized it was tear gas. He ran out of the chamber.

Once at the fork at the bottom of the gallery, he looked down the tunnel Serena must have taken to P4’s entrance. A dozen pairs of glowing green eyes were coming his way. His only choice was to drop down the shaft toward the boiler room. He landed in a torrent of water washing down the subterranean channel away from P4.

He was racing down the channel now, caught in a current of such power that there was nothing he could do except keep his head above water. What the hell had he gotten himself into now? he wondered. Then he saw the mouth of a tunnel closing in on him, and a second later he was swallowed up by the darkness.

Deep beneath the ancient city, Conrad splashed in the darkness, gasping for air as he was swept through the underground canals. The freezing water disoriented him, and all he could hear were furious sucking sounds all around.

He bounced off a wall and spun in circles as the canal merged with another, larger tunnel. The overwhelming push of the new stream churned the raging river into a whirlpool. He glanced over his shoulder as a white curl of foam bore down on him in the darkness. He thought it would kill him, but instead the wave lifted him over a stone bank to a walkway.

Out of the water, he paused to catch his breath when another wave flooded in, the water grasping at his knees, trying to suck him back in. But it receded quickly and he was up on his feet, moving down the walkway. A cursory glance told him this tunnel was at least twice as high as those inside P4.

As he made his way through the labyrinth that crisscrossed beneath the city, Conrad was both awed and angered by the extent of the builders’ subterranean infrastructure. He could spend an eternity studying this city, he thought, and if he didn’t find a way out of here very soon he just might.

He also was angry at Serena, another one of life’s mysteries he’d felt he would never understand. She obviously didn’t trust him. Why else would she have left him back at P4

to venture off on her own? She had gone into her survivor mode and for all he knew considered him the enemy. And yet he was anxious about her safety after witnessing her capture.

A few minutes later he came to a fork in the tunnel and stopped. Two smaller aqueducts, each about forty feet high and twenty feet wide, presented themselves. Then he heard a faint rumble coming from the right aqueduct. He stared into the darkness and saw a glimmer of light. It was growing larger as the rumble grew louder. It was another surge of water coming down the pike, and in a few seconds the force would slam him against the tunnel walls and kill him.

His only way out, he realized, was to run into the left aqueduct. He dove in before a wall of water from the right pipe flooded the larger tunnel. From inside the left aqueduct, knee-deep in water, he watched the deluge roar for a full three minutes before it emptied itself out.

When it was over, he realized he was shaking. Too close, he thought as he rose to his feet. He took his first step down the aqueduct when he heard a distant splash. For a second he expected another torrent of water to wipe him out.

But none came. He cocked his ear. This splashing had a rhythm to it.

He peered into the darkness. Someone in the distance was walking toward him. More than one, actually, because now he could hear the coarse murmur of conversation growing louder.

They were speaking Arabic.

Conrad took a step back toward the large tunnel. The splash of his boot was louder than he intended. He froze. For a second he heard nothing. Then the sound of splashing footsteps picked up its pace.

“Stop!” called one of the figures in English.

Conrad glanced over his shoulder to see two pairs of glowing green eyes bobbing in the blackness. He ran back into the large tunnel. Then a shot rang out and he ducked as a bullet ricocheted off a wall. He froze at the fork before the two aqueducts. Slowly he turned around and saw the red dot on his chest. No, two dots.

Conrad grew very still as the pair emerged from the left aqueduct in night-vision goggles. They were wearing UNACOM

uniforms, their AK-47s still trained on his chest. But these didn’t look like U.N. weapons inspectors to him.

“Radio Zawas, Abdul,” said the one on the right.

The one called Abdul tried to make the call but only got static. “We have to surface,” he said, sounding frustrated.

“These walls are blocking the signal.”

Abdul’s partner started toward Conrad when another rumble began in the distance. Conrad edged toward the right aqueduct.

“Stop!” Abdul demanded. “Where do you think you are going?”

“To the surface like you said,” Conrad replied without looking back. As he approached the mouth of the right aqueduct he could feel a cool wet breeze on his face. The distant roar grew louder. Then a bullet whizzed past his ear and he stopped and turned around.

Abdul and his companion were almost twenty yards away in the large tunnel, staring beyond him with growing curiosity.

They were saying something, but the rumble from behind was too loud for Conrad to hear them. Then, just as Conrad could feel the first drops of water spraying his back, he saw them lower their weapons and start running away.

Conrad dove into the left tunnel as a wall of water blasted out of the aqueduct behind him and flushed the soldiers away. And then the mighty flow thinned into a tiny stream, as if some automatic timer had turned off the faucet.

They were gone.

Conrad stood still, listening to the trickle of water and his heavy breathing, when he heard a splash from behind. He spun around and saw a hulking figure walking toward him in the dark, growing larger and more menacing until he emerged from the shadows and ripped off his night goggles.

“I’ve been looking for you,” said Yeats.

“Dad!” Conrad wanted to throw his arms around his father.

But Yeats instead bent down and picked up something shiny floating in the water. Conrad could see it was an Egyptian ankh from the neck of one of the soldiers. The crosslike necklace with a circle at the top was a symbol of life, but it meant little to the dead soldier now. Yeats held the ankh up to the light of his headtorch.

“At least you’re starting to screw things up for somebody else now, Conrad,” he said.

26

Dawn Minus Twelve Hours

SERENA FELT HOT AND UNCOMFORTABLEinside the Z-9A jet helicopter as it jerked haphazardly across the plateau. The Egyptian pilot was having some trouble keeping the overloaded chopper steady, and each dip brought spews of profanity from the UNACOM soldiers in back. Meanwhile, Jamil’s stench was offensive in the cramped space. She could feel his cruel eyes fixed on her breasts with each lurch of the chopper.

“You are enjoying the ride, no?” he asked in Arabic.

“Not so much as you,” she said. “Maybe if your pilot lets me take the stick.”

Jamil looked at her, eyes burning with rage. “You dare talk back to me?”

She said nothing. She focused on the spectacular views of the city and waterways below, wondering what had happened to Conrad and who these UNACOM soldiers really were and what they wanted.

She had known that Colonel Ali Zawas was in Antarctica on behalf of the United Nations, and these men clearly reported to him and were no doubt taking her to him now. Perhaps their UNACOM assignments were merely covers to position themselves.

Perhaps these soldiers had been lying in wait all along to relieve the Americans of whatever they found beneath the ice.

Jamil seemed to know about the Scepter of Osiris. How?

The few answers she had gleaned thus far were grim: the Americans at Ice Base Orion were dead, along with the Russian weapons inspectors, and now Zawas and his arsenal controlled the city, until American reinforcements arrived. By then, however, it would be too late to stop Zawas from accomplishing his mission, whatever that might be, much less the impending worldwide geological cataclysm.

The chopper banked right, and in a flash she saw the great water channel below and beyond it, at the end of an acropolis, a gigantic step-pyramid looming like a dark fortress. The Temple of the Water Bearer is how Jamil referred to it as he spoke to the pilot, and indeed it lived up to its name. Two Niagara-like waterfalls tumbled down its sides, and some sort of encampment was set up in the promontory in between.

They descended along the temple’s flattened eastern face between the two huge waterfalls and touched down on a landing pad on the promontory below. Those waterfalls, Serena realized as the door slid open and the soldiers emptied out, had been responsible for the low rumble she had been hearing ever since she emerged from P4 into the city. It was the power of those vibrations that made her feel uneasy and provided a constant sense of foreboding.

She climbed out and surveyed her surroundings. Two ramparts of narrow steps wound to the ground on either side.

In the center sat crates of equipment. In back was an iron gate, before some sort of entrance to the temple. Meanwhile, a tower and antiaircraft gun stood atop the summit overhead.

There must have been a second helipad up there, because she could make out the blades of another chopper hanging over the side. She looked over the ledge. Down below were dune buggies, and even a Navy SEAL–type of rubber raft with an outboard motor tied at the base of the falls. Whoever these people were, they were well financed and well prepared.

The makeshift iron gate opened, and a man sauntered across the promontory. Like the other soldiers, he wore a camouflaged United Nations uniform. The only difference was that he was bareheaded and wore no badges or rank, yet she recognized him immediately.

He was Colonel Ali Zawas, an Egyptian air force colonel and scion of Egypt’s most prominent family of diplomats. He was born and raised in New York City until he graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy and moved back to Cairo. More American than Egyptian. She had seen him several times before at the United Nations, once at the American University in Cairo. But he was always in dress uniform at formal functions, not in the menacing field fatigues he now sported.

He also normally had dark, wavy hair, which was now shaved off.

Zawas paused in the center of the promontory before the group of soldiers. Jamil moved in smartly and saluted. Zawas waved it off. He was a handsome man with deep-set eyes. There was a brief exchange in Arabic. Serena couldn’t quite catch all of it, but the contempt on Zawas’s face was enough.

His eyes traveled over the men casually, and fixed on her. He stood there staring at her in the silence, then said something to Jamil, who walked over, grabbed Serena by the arm, and propelled her in front of him. She fought to control the panic that surged inside her, for fear would not help her now, and schooled herself to play it cool.

She kept her head down, but Zawas lifted her chin, and she looked into the dark eyes. “If you’re an Atlantean,” he said in English, “then this is indeed paradise. But I take it you are an American.”

She shook her head and said in a low voice, “No, Colonel, I’m from Rome.”

It took a moment for her Australian accent to register, and then she saw the shock of recognition. Then a broad, genuine smile crossed his face. “Sister Serghetti, it is you,” he said. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“It’s Doctor Serghetti, Colonel, and I was going to ask you the same question,” she said, looking around at his troops. “You don’t really expect me to believe you are acting on behalf of the United Nations?”

Zawas smiled. She realized he was amused that she was the one demanding answers. “Consider us representatives of certain Arab oil producers who have the most to lose from the discovery of alternative energy sources.” He took her arm and said casually over his shoulder, “Get to work, Jamil.”

Jamil gave them enough time to get clear then shouted something unintelligible that was drowned out in the immediate uproar as the soldiers began to break out equipment. Drills, seismic meters, metal detectors, explosives.

They reached the steps leading up to the iron gate and the entrance to the temple, and Zawas paused, turning to look at her, a slightly quizzical frown on his face.