"Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Antarctica."
All three gazed intently at the crude coating of white talc Pitt had dabbed on the polished rock and then wiped clean, outlining the etched features. It now bore a distinct similarity to the South Polar continent.
"What does all this mean?" Pat asked, confused.
"What it means," explained Pitt, gesturing toward the mummies sitting mute in their throne chairs, "is that these ancient people walked on Antarctica thousands of years before modern man. They sailed around and charted it before it was covered with ice and snow."
"Nonsense!" Hatfield snorted. "It's a scientifically proven fact that all but three percent of the continent has been covered by an ice sheet for millions of years."
Pitt didn't say anything for several seconds. He stared at the ancient figures as if they were alive, his eyes moving from one face to the next as if trying to communicate with them. Finally, he gestured toward the ancient, silent dead. "The answers," he said with steadfast conviction, "will come from them."
<<24>>
Hiram Yaeger returned to his computer complex after lunch carrying a large cardboard box with a basset hound puppy inside that he'd saved from the city pound just hours before it was scheduled to be put to sleep. Since the family golden retriever had died from old age, Yaeger had sworn that he had buried his last family dog and refused to replace it. But his two teenage daughters had begged and pleaded for another one and even threatened to ignore their school studies if their retriever wasn't replaced. Yaeger's only consolation was that he wasn't the first father to be coerced by his children into bringing home an animal.
He had meant to find another golden retriever, but when he'd looked into the sad, soulful coffee-cup eyes of the basset and seen the ungainly body with the short legs, big feet, and ears that dragged on the floor, he'd been hooked. He laid newspapers around his desk and allowed the puppy to roam free, but it preferred to lie on a towel in the open box and stare at Yaeger, who found it next to impossible to steer his concentration away from those sad eyes.
Finally, he forced his attention on his work and called up Max. She appeared on the monitor and scowled at him. "Must you always keep me waiting?"
He reached down and held up the puppy for Max to see. "I stopped off and picked up a doggy for my daughters."
Max's face instantly softened. "He's cute. The girls should be thrilled."
"Have you made progress in deciphering the inscriptions?" he asked.
"I've pretty much unraveled the meaning of the symbols, but it takes a bit of doing to connect them into words than can be interpreted in English."
"Tell me what you have so far."
"Quite a lot, actually," Max said proudly.
"I'm listening."
"Sometime around 7000 B.C., the world suffered a massive catastrophe."
"Any idea of what it was?" inquired Yaeger.
"Yes, it was recorded in the map of the heavens on the ceiling of the Colorado chamber," explained Max. "I haven't deciphered the entire narrative yet, but it seems that not one, but two comets swept in from the far outer solar system and caused worldwide calamity."
"Are you sure they weren't asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I've never heard of comets orbiting in parallel."
"The celestial map showed two objects with long tails traveling side by side that collide with the earth."
Yaeger lowered his hand and petted the dog as he spoke. "Two comets striking at the same time.
Depending on their size, they must have caused a huge convulsion."
"Sorry, Hiram," said Max, "I didn't mean to mislead you. Only one of the comets hit the earth. The other circled past the sun and disappeared into deep space."
"Did the star map indicate where the comet fell?"
Max shook her head. "The depiction of the impact site indicated Canada, probably somewhere in the Hudson Bay area."
"I'm proud of you, Max." Yeager had lifted the basset hound onto his lap, where it promptly fell asleep. "You'd make a classic detective."
"Solving an ordinary people crime would be mere child's play for me," Max said loftily.
"All right, we have a comet crashing to the earth in a Canadian province about 7000 B.C. that caused worldwide destruction."
"Only the first act. The meat of the story comes later, with the description of the people and their civilization that existed before the cataclysm and the aftermath. Most all were annihilated. The pitiful few who survived, too weakened to rebuild their empire, saw it as their divine mission to wander the world, educate the primitive stone-age inhabitants of the era who endured in remote areas, and build monuments warning of the next cataclysm."
"Why did they expect another threat from space?"
"From what I can gather, they foresaw the return of the second comet that would finish the job of complete destruction."
Yaeger was nearly speechless. "What you're suggesting, Max, is that there really was a civilization called Atlantis?"
"I didn't say that," Max stated irritably. "I haven't determined what these ancient people called themselves. I do know that they only vaguely resembled the tale passed down from Plato, the famed Greek philosopher. His record of a conversation that took place two hundred years before his time, between his ancestor, the great Greek statesman Solon, and an Egyptian priest, is the first written account of a land called Atlantis."
"Everyone knows the legend," said Yaeger, his thoughts spinning into space. "The priest told of an island continent larger than Australia that rose in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean west of the Pillars of Hercules, or the Strait of Gibraltar, as we know it today. Several thousand years ago, it was destroyed and sank beneath the sea after a great upheaval, and vanished. A riddle that has puzzled believers, and is scoffed at by historians to this day. Personally, I tend to agree with historians that Atlantis is nothing more than an early saga of science fiction."
"Perhaps it was not a total fabrication after all."
Yaeger stared at Max, his eyebrows pinched. "There is absolutely no geological basis for a lost continent to have disappeared in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean nine thousand years ago. It never existed. Certainly not between North Africa and the Caribbean. It's now generally accepted that the legend is linked to a catastrophic earthquake and flood caused by a volcanic eruption that took place on the island of Thera, or Santorini as it is known today, and wiped out the great Minoan civilization on Crete."
"So you think Plato's portrait of Atlantis, in his works Critias and Timaeus, is an invention."
"Not portrait, Max," Yaeger lectured the computer. "He told the story in dialogue, a popular genre in ancient Greece. The story is not related in the third person by the author, but presented to the reader by two or more narrators, one who questions the other. And, yes, I believe Plato invented Atlantis, knowing with glee that future generations would swallow the con, write a thousand books on the subject, and debate it endlessly."
"You're a hard man, Yaeger," said Max. "I assume you don't believe in the predictions of Edgar Cayce, the famous psychic."
Yaeger shook his head slowly. "Cayce claimed he saw Atlantis fall and rise in the Caribbean. If an advanced civilization had ever existed in that region, the hundreds of islands would have produced clues.
But to date not so much as a potsherd of an ancient culture has been found."
"And the great stone blocks that form an undersea road off Bimini?"
"A geological formation that can be found in several other parts of the seas."
"And the stone columns that were found on the seafloor off Jamaica?"
"It was proven they were barrels of dry concrete that solidified in water after the ship carrying them as cargo sank and the wooden staves eroded away. Face facts, Max. Atlantis is a myth."
"You're an old poop, Hiram. You know that?"
"Just telling it like it is," said Yaeger testily. "I prefer not to believe in an ancient advanced civilization that some dreamers believe had rocket sh
ips and garbage disposals."
"Ah," Max said sharply, "there lies the rub. Atlantis was not one vast city populated by Leonardo da Vincis and Thomas Edisons and surrounded by canals on an island continent, as Plato described it.
According to what I'm finding, the ancient people were a league of small seafaring nations who navigated and mapped the entire world four thousand years before the Egyptians raised the pyramids. They conquered the seas. They knew how to use currents, and developed a vast knowledge of astronomy and mathematics that made them master navigators. They developed a chain of coastal city-ports and built a trading empire by mining and transporting mineral ore they transformed into metals, unlike other people of the same millennium who lived at higher elevations, led a nomadic existence, and survived the disaster.
The seafarers had the bad luck to be destroyed by the giant tidal waves and were lost without a trace.
Whatever remains of their port cities now lies deep underwater and buried beneath a hundred feet of silt."
"You deciphered and collected all that data since yesterday?" asked Yaeger in undisguised astonishment.
"The grass," Max pontificated "does not grow under my feet, nor, I might add, do I sit around and wait for my terminal innards to rust."
"Max, you're a virtuoso."
"It's nothing really. After all, it was you who built me."
"You've given me so much to contemplate, I can't digest it all."
"Go home, Hiram. Take your wife and daughters to a movie. Get a good night's sleep while I sizzle my chips. Then, when you sit down in the morning, I'll really have information that will curl your ponytail."
<<25>>
After Pat had photo-recorded the inscriptions and the strange global maps inside the burial chamber, she and Giordino were airlifted to Cape Town, where they met with Rudi Gunn in the hospital soon after his operation. Causing a scene bordering on an uproar, Gunn ignored the orders of the hospital staff and enlisted Giordino to smuggle him on an airplane out of South Africa. Giordino gladly complied, and with Pat's able assistance sneaked the tough little NUMA director past the doctors and nurses through the utility basement of the hospital and into a limousine, before speeding to the city airport, where a NUMA executive jet was waiting to fly them all back to Washington.
Pitt remained behind with Dr. Hatfield and the Navy SEAL team. Together, they carefully packed the artifacts and directed their airlift by helicopter to a NUMA deep-ocean research ship that had been detoured to St. Paul Island. Hatfield hovered over the mummies, delicately wrapping them in blankets from the ship and carefully arranging them in wooden crates for the journey to his lab at Stanford University for in-depth study.
After the last mummy had been loaded onto the NUMA helicopter, Hatfield accompanied them and the artifacts on the short flight to the ship. Pitt turned and shook hands with Lieutenant Jacobs. "Thank you for your help, Lieutenant, and please thank your men for me. We'd have never done it without you."
"We don't often get an assignment chaperoning old mummies," Jacobs said, smiling. "I'm almost sorry the terrorists didn't try and snatch them from us."
"I don't think they were terrorists, in the strict sense of the word."
"A murderer is a murderer by any other name."
"Are you headed back to the States?"
Jacobs nodded. "We've been ordered to escort the bodies of the attackers, so ably dispatched by your friends, to Walter Reed Hospital in D.C. for examination and possible identification."
"Good luck to you," said Pitt.
Jacobs threw a brief salute. "Maybe we'll meet again somewhere."
"If there is a next time, I hope it's on a beach in Tahiti."
Pitt stood in the never-ending drizzle and watched as a Marine Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft hung in the air above the ground, and the Marines climbed on board. He was still standing there when the plane disappeared into a low cloud. He was now the only man on the island.
He walked back into the now-empty burial chamber and took one final look at the global charts etched into the far wall. The floods had been removed, and he beamed a flashlight on the ancient nautical charts.
Who were the ancient cartographers who'd drawn such incredibly accurate maps of the earth so many millennia ago? How could they have charted Antarctica when it was not buried under a massive blanket of ice? Could the southern polar continent have possessed a warmer climate several thousand years ago?
Could it have been habitable for humans?
The picture of an ice-free Antarctica wasn't the only incongruity. Pitt had not mentioned it to the others, but he was disturbed by the position of the other continents and Australia. They were not where they were supposed to be. It appeared to him that the Americas, Europe, and Asia were shown almost two thousand miles farther north than they should be. Why had the ancients, who otherwise calculated the shorelines with such exactness, have placed the continents so far off their established locations in relation to the circumference of the earth? The observation puzzled him.
The seafarers clearly had a scientific ability that went far beyond the cultural races and civilizations that followed them. Their era also appeared more advanced in the art of writing and communication than others that came thousands of years later. What message were they trying to pass on across the constantly moving sea of time that was imperishably engraved in stone? A message of hope, or a warning of natural disasters to come?
The thoughts running through Pitt's mind were interrupted as the sounds of rotor blades and engine exhaust echoed through the tunnel, announcing the return of the helicopter that was to carry him to the research ship. With a sense of reluctance, he turned off his mind at the same instant he switched off the flashlight and walked from the dark chamber.
Without wasting time waiting for government transportation, Pitt flew from Cape Town to Johannesburg, where he caught a South African Airlines flight to Washington. He slept most of the way, taking a short walk to stretch his legs when the plane landed in the Canary Islands to refuel. When he stepped out of the Dulles Airport terminal, it was nearly midnight. He was pleasantly surprised to find a dazzling 1936 Ford cabriolet hot rod with the top down, waiting at the curb. The car looked like something out of California in the 1950s. The body and fenders were painted in metallic plum maroon that sparkled under the lights of the terminal. The bumpers were the ribbed type from a 1936 De Soto.
Ripple moon disks covered the wheel in front, while those in the rear were hidden by teardrop skirts. The seats in front and in the rumble seat were a biscuit-tan leather. The elegant little car was powered by a V-8 flathead engine that had been rebuilt from top to bottom to produce 225 horsepower. The rear end was fitted with a fifty-year-old Columbia overdrive gear system.
If the car wasn't enough to turn heads, the woman sitting behind the wheel was equally beautiful. The long cinnamon hair was protected from the light breeze outside the airport by a colorful scarf. She had the prominent cheekbones of a fashion model, enhanced by full lips and a short, straight nose and charismatic violet eyes. She was wearing an alpaca chunky autumn leaf brown turtleneck with taupe wool tweed pants under a taupe shearling coat that came down to her knees.
Congresswoman Loren Smith of Colorado flashed an engaging smile. "How many times have I met you like this and said, `Welcome home, sailor'?"
"At least eight that I can think of," said Pitt, happy that his romantic love of many years had taken the time out of her busy schedule to pick him up at the airport in one of the cars from his collection.
He threw his duffel bag into the rumble seat, then slid into the passenger's seat and leaned over and kissed her, holding her in his arms for a long while. When he finally pulled back and released her, she gasped, catching her breath, "Careful, I don't want to end up like Clinton."
"The public applauds affairs by female politicians."
"That's what you think," Loren said, pressing the ignition lever on the steering column and pushing the starter button. It fired on the first rotat
ion and emitted a mellow, throaty roar through the Smitty mufflers and dual exhaust pipes. "Where to, your hangar?"
"No, I'd like to drop by NUMA headquarters for a moment and check my computer for the latest word from Hiram Yaeger on a program we're working on."
"You must be the only single man in the country who doesn't have a computer in his apartment."
"I don't want one around the house," he said seriously. "I have too many other projects going without wasting time surfing the Internet and answering E-mail."
Loren pulled away from the curb and steered the Ford onto the broad highway leading into the city.
Pitt sat silent and was still lost in thought when the Washington monument came into view, illuminated by the lights at its base. Loren knew him well enough to flow with the current. It was only a question of a few minutes before he came back down to earth.
"What's new in Congress?" he asked finally.
"As if you cared," she replied indifferently.
"Boring as that?"
"Budget debates don't exactly make a girl horny." Then her voice took on a softer tone. "I heard that Rudi Gunn was shot up pretty badly."
"The surgeon in South Africa, who specializes in bone reconstruction, did an excellent job. Rudi will be limping for a few months, but that won't stop him from directing NUMA operations from behind his desk."
"Al said you had a rough time in the Antarctic."
"Not as rough as they had it on a rock that makes Alcatraz Island look like a botanical garden."
He turned to her with a reflective look in his eyes and said, "You're on the International Trade Relations Committee?"
"I am."
"Are you familiar with any large corporations in Argentina?"
"I've traveled there on a few occasions and met with their finance and trade ministers," she answered.
"Why do you ask?"
"Ever hear of an outfit calling itself the New Destiny Company or Fourth Empire Corporation?"
Loren thought a moment. "I once met the CEO of Destiny Enterprises during a trade mission in Buenos Aires. If I remember correctly, his name was Karl Wolf."