Decipher, p.45
Decipher, page 45
The vast and imposing arches of ice that kept the ground level above in place were starting to tremble, to buckle. Their Chrysler Building-sized frames were starting to sway. Gigantic truck-sized boulders were beginning to tumble down their sides.
And their bases were starting to crack.
While Bob Pearce, frozen with agony, could hold on no longer and released the grip of his injured arm.
It was all the encouragement Gant needed. In one fluid motion he jumped out onto the middle line, swept his hunting knife up and severed the line behind him. Tumbling down he dropped the knife and reached out for Pearce, grabbing him with his first attempt.
Pearce jerked away from the line and the two men tumbled together before—
Slam! They jerked to a stop, Pearce’s safety line preventing them from moving any farther.
The two men hung there for a moment, before Gant had the presence of mind to direct Pearce’s attention to the gathering light storm above their heads. Vast crackling arms of electricity were reaching out from the sides of the twister and zapping the arches of ice, pummeling the compacted snow like a sledge-hammer.
“Cut your safety,” Gant ordered. “I’ve got you. Just cut your safety!”
Pearce didn’t move. He was frozen with terror.
Both men could feel the gathering ferocity of the storm, the sheer anger of unbridled power.
“Cut your safety, goddamnit, or we fry!”
Pearce shook. His whole body was wracked with fear. Slowly, painfully slowly, he reached for his own knife—and slit the line.
The two men tumbled uncontrollably until they swung down and slammed into the icy wall of the chasm. Gant, one hand gripped firmly around Pearce’s belt, the other gripped like a vice around the rope, shouted up at his men in the tunnel above.
“Get us out of here!”
Several sharp tugs and they began to rise up the wall at a snail’s pace, but the vision before them was of little comfort. The chaotic arms of energy were lashing out all around them now. Striking the walls of the chasm and blasting new tunnels into existence.
Above their heads, in one tremendous explosion, the energy twister suddenly expanded outward in a super-sized explosion of livid flame, shattering the ice around it and widening the hole through which it was channeling, tenfold.
Suddenly, they could see the entire base of Jung Chang start to slip inward upon them.
Mobile huts and heavy artillery units were falling into the chasm one by one, while behind them, closing in rapidly, toppled massive chunks of ice and great arches of snow …
“Run!” Scott barked as he helped drag Pearce and Gant up into the tunnel. “Run now!”
Without asking questions the two men got onto their feet and sprinted down the ice passage as fast as their feet could carry them, slamming into the walls as they went and rounding the far corner as vast sheets of ice and snow collapsed behind them with such a thunderous roar it was a miracle their eardrums didn’t burst.
But it didn’t end there. They had to keep moving, and fast—before the rest of the tunnel imploded.
With the warhead strung out from a harness attached to his belt, Michaels led the way forward, but after a couple of intersections with other crisscrossing passageways and shafts the marine suddenly found himself being pulled back viciously—at the hand of Yun.
“What the fuck d’you think you’re doing?” he demanded, but Yun didn’t even bother to answer. Instead he held everyone back as—
Whoosh! A torrent of blisteringly hot, superheated water suddenly blasted out of a side tunnel and rocketed off across the crossroads.
“There is much volcanic activity here,” Yun explained. “We must be careful.”
Up ahead, other scalding geysers were rocketing back and forth across the tunnel system.
“And just how are we supposed to get past this lot?” Hackett complained.
Yun indicated a side passage that nobody had noticed before. Only a few feet across, it was neither a direct turn right, nor a hole in the floor. In fact, its axis appeared to be a steady 45-degree slope heading straight down.
“You try climbing back up this way,” Yun said. “Getting down is much easier.”
“How much easier?” Gant wanted to know, still getting his breath back.
“We slide.”
“Are you insane?”
“Major,” Scott stepped in, “our escape route’s been cut off and if we go down that way, we boil. What other options do we have?”
“It’s reckless, Professor. There’s no telling where this leads. We could wind up plummeting into a ravine.”
“Risk is all part of the game,” Scott insisted. “You said so yourself.”
FREE-FALL
In Gant’s opinion this was the worst decision of his life, entrusting his people to the advice of the enemy. But then, what other options were there?
They each entered the tunnel with trepidation and rocketed off into the ice below at extreme speed. It took a leap of faith of incredible proportions, but since the clock was ticking, what was there to lose?
Michaels and Hillman had gone first, taking the warhead with them. Scott and Hackett had followed on after, together with Yun, while Gant had been the last to take the plunge behind the two women. Which, as it turned out, was of little strategic value. In fact, rocketing down the ice passage at speeds close to 40 mph gave nobody any particular advantage.
This was chaos in motion.
The ice was turning a deep, deep blue, Sarah noticed as the walls of the tunnel streaked by. Blue ice was formed by compression. By the sheer weight of the ice above pushing down on the ice below for thousands of years.
It was incredible. A glassy smoothness channeled out and eaten away by the swishing blast of boiling water, heated by the magma of volcanic activity below. All rushing past her face within inches as she lay on her back and let gravity take her where it may.
Her mouth was open. Her eyes transfixed. She breathed in shallow bursts and made few noises, for fear had crept in, and was keeping her vocal cords gripped.
They could feel the ground tremble as they bounced over hard ridges of ice. Michaels and Hillman felt the container buckle as the warhead struck another obstacle in its path. They heard metal locks and hinges struggle to keep its lid shut tight.
And then out they burst. Out into a tremendously wide ice cavern, its floor a rippling slope of hard glass with crazy patterns eroded into it in swathing channels.
They could hear the ice straining above as the destruction on the surface continued unabated. And as Hillman rocketed on behind the warhead, his coat tore on the razor blades of ice. Snagged for a moment and slowed him down.
Slam! A tree-sized stalactite suddenly careened down from the ceiling and exploded in front of him.
Hillman dove to one side in an effort to avoid the dagger-like rear end as it penetrated the hard cavern floor and sliced effortlessly into the depths of ice. But unlike the front end, which exploded on impact with a ferocious blast, the rear end remained intact. Upright and immovable.
Hillman breathed a sigh of relief as he shot past it. At these speeds, impacting into an obstacle like that could break his back. It could—
“Argh!”
Michaels twisted his head to see Hillman flung up into the air. Tossed like a rag doll as he connected with a shallow ice mound at high speed.
The soldier was face down and spinning. Utterly aware that he had been launched over a precipice that had been masked by the undulating ground, but which now was revealed below him to be a chasm of bottomless terror, as he was catapulated across it.
Yet he had no way of knowing if he was going to make it to the other side. No way of knowing if there even was another side.
Michaels instinctively held out his hand to try and grab Hillman, but it was a futile gesture as he rushed into and was swallowed up by a further passageway through the ice.
Scott careened out of control, smashing through a shower of tiny ice crystals which cut like shattering glass. Like a bullet from a gun he burst from the tunnel as ahead of him stalactite upon stalactite crashed to the ground and littered the ice cavern like a forest of petrified, sub-zero trees.
There was little he could do to alter his course except roll and weave and hope. Behind him, the other members of the party blasted out with a yelp and did their utmost to negotiate the way ahead.
The ground shook once more, shaking free the mighty stalactites like a volley of javelins. As each projectile struck home, and impacts ravaged the cavern floor, the way ahead was obscured by further blasts. Frozen shrapnel made of nothing but water.
It continued in a frenzy until ultimately the cavern floor could sustain no further damage. It opened up in front of them all.
The team was swallowed whole.
He couldn’t stop.
There was no way on earth Bob Pearce could stop. Over the edge he tipped, down into wherever the honeycomb of ice tunnels was suddenly redirecting him. Down into the darkness below where the sunlight was at last having difficulty in penetrating.
Everything seemed to funnel, in a blur, down into a single passageway ahead.
Pearce became aware of November, sliding up next to him amid the streaking view of ice whizzing by. When he glanced over he struck the tunnel wall and rebounded back out at an oblique angle.
He could feel his arm crunch painfully before he finally shot out and bumped his way along the ground of a mammoth ice cavern, its frozen floor a series of pits and scoops, as if some giant of a man with a hot spoon had helped himself to huge, rounded servings of ice.
The ground was flatter here. Indeed, his coat ripped open and his bare skin scraped occasionally against pebbles and flint, and sharp-edged rocks that lay strewn through the thin ice.
He bumped to a stop, spinning around before finally hitting his head on something that was solid and immovable and ice-like …
Yet was not ice.
kudurru
Read, in the name of thy Lord! Who created man from congealed blood! Read, for thy Lord is most generous! Who taught the pen! Taught men what he did not know!
96:2—6
The Qu’ran
Translated by E. H. Palmer, 1965
TIME TO SOLAR MAXIMUM: 13 HOURS, 37 MINUTES
It was two feet high and needle-shaped.
A miniature version of those gigantic monuments in Egypt that had been erected in honor of the Pharaohs. Square of base with a pyramidal summit. It was covered in tiny symbols, the Atlantis glyphs, which wrapped around in one continuous ribbon.
It was warm to the touch, too. Having melted all the ice around it, its base disappeared into the gray shingle of solid ground beneath it. Yet the object itself appeared like crystal, shimmering as though electricity were passing through it at some molecular level.
It was two feet in height. And it was made from solid Carbon 60.
“Oh, man,” Pearce groaned as he prised his head away from the hard surface of the object, and tried to sit up. Groggily he rubbed at his injury before realizing that Scott sat bolt upright nearby, staring at him. No, not staring at him but past him.
He twisted around to see what he’d collided with. And his jaw hung open. “Jesus …”
Scott scrambled over as Pearce wiped his blood off the object. It was difficult to clean it completely, as some of his blood had dripped into the indented glyphs. He licked his finger to try and help with the cleaning, but Scott held his hand back.
“Don’t,” he said gently. “The blood helps.”
Pearce shrugged. That was not what he expected to hear as Scott crouched down by the artifact and pulled out his palm-top computer.
Sarah stood on the other side of the cavern and rubbed her aching bones. She had a large flashlight hung on her belt and flipped it on, but she needn’t have bothered. “Why is it so light down here?” she wondered aloud.
November got to her feet. “The ice is so honeycombed with shafts,” she reasoned, “that sunlight probably reaches all the way down here.”
But Hackett had another idea. “That crystal stump,” he pointed out, “is glowing. I bet there are others.”
“I … don’t … give a fuck,” Matheson groaned in a heap on the floor.
“Here,” Yun offered, helping the engineer to his feet.
Matheson eyed the man warily. “Well, I guess you did say you’d get us down here.”
“Wherever ‘here’ is,” the Chinese soldier replied. “This is not where the tunnel came out before.”
“Why am I not surprised to hear you say that?” Gant observed as he strode past, yanking open the fastenings on his caribou hide parka and pulling the hood down. “Is it me or is it unusually warm down here?”
Hackett took a temperature reading. “It’s warm,” he agreed. “About minus two.”
Suddenly there was a scraping noise and the sound of a heavy fall echoed around the cavern. Gant spun on his heel, growling: “My men—where are they?” He searched the ice with his eyes. “Hillman? Michaels?”
They could hear a muffled voice. Solitary. Trapped somewhere behind a thick wall of ice. It was followed by a sharp hammering.
“Where the hell are you?” Gant yelled.
“Up there!” Yun realized quickly.
“Hillman? Is that you?”
There was another muffled response.
“What did he say?” November asked, craning her neck to hear.
Then Gant twigged. “He said: stand back!”
Jerking the girl out of the way he shot the others a look but they were already moving as semiautomatic machine-gun fire ripped through the ice above their heads, obliterating it into a thousand pieces. Large chunks of the cavern ceiling suddenly gave way and down tumbled Hillman, impacting onto the debris below.
Stunned, the marine lay dazed for a moment before he could even bring himself to move.
“Well,” he croaked eventually. “That was unusual.”
Gant loomed over his underling. “Where’s Michaels?” he demanded. “He has the bomb.”
“He isn’t here?”
“We lost him.”
“Then I have no idea, sir. None at all.”
Bob Pearce grimaced. “Oops.”
Meanwhile, Sarah had her attention fixed on Richard Scott. The linguist was deep, deep into something. Something wonderful.
Language, like DNA, occurred in chains and had to be read in a certain direction. Language, also like DNA, had start signals and an instruction code.
Language was a beast, like any other. And beasts could be tamed, by being understood.
In the 1600s the Rosicrucians thought they understood. A secret society of anonymous members, they claimed to have found and used the ancient original perfect language of mankind. Based on the work of the infamous cabalist, Lull, they used symbols that consisted of a circle for the sun, a crescent for the moon, and a cross for the cardinal points. They were convinced that these linguistic symbols were intrinsically linked to geometry.
But they were a group who were so secret, they secreted themselves out of existence, their work reduced to so much hearsay in the face of little evidence.
Yet here, and now, Richard Scott could say with absolute certainly that although their so-called perfect language was in all probability a phony, the symbolism they had used and understood, the symbolism that had been gleaned from millennia of myth and legend, was altogether accurate.
The circle and the cross. The sun and the cardinal points.
These were the start signals that had led Scott down the road to deciphering the mysterious Atlantis instruction code. And now, all he had to do was input a number. A single number. The computer would do the rest.
On the screen of his palm-top, the computer was already whizzing through each symbol in the chain on the crystal in front of him. Pulling out each glyph that corresponded to the placement of that one single number as it repeated itself throughout the number stream found encoded within the Carbon 60 crystals back at CERN …
“What number did you choose?” Sarah asked quietly, kneeling down beside him.
“Well, I started by trying to figure out what numbers to reject first,” Scott told her.
“Such as?”
“The Maya, whose name means ‘not many’ or ‘the few,’ maybe on account of their ancestors surviving the Great Flood, I don’t know—anyway, they worshipped the god of the number four. This was the same god who they also used to represent the sun.”
“Wouldn’t that make four a great candidate for cracking this thing?”
“Ordinarily, yeah,” Scott agreed. Then he lowered his voice. “Trouble is, I can’t speak Mayan too well. If that’s the language I end up having to read, we’re all screwed and they brought the wrong guy along for the ride.”
Sarah wasn’t taking the bait. He was in too good a mood. “You’ve cracked this thing, haven’t you?”
Scott nodded. “I think so.”
“What number did you use?”
“Seven,” the anthropologist revealed. ‘‘And on the seventh day God rested.’ I’m hoping we get to do the same.”
His computer beeped. All calculations were complete. Task done.
Scott and Sarah exchanged apprehensive looks before the epigrapher commanded his computer to tell him what it had found, while the others in the group gathered together to watch.
The computer whirred. Beeped once more, before finally stringing the necessary sound files together and announcing in the odd lilt of Sarah Kelsey herself: “Kah—Doo—Roo …”
The others eyed the linguist keenly, while he scratched his head. What did it mean?
Scott repeated the jumble of syllables to himself. “Kah—doo—roo … ? Kah—doo—roo … ?”
And then it hit him.
“Jesus Christ!” the epigraphist yelped. “Jesus Christ! That’s it! Kudurru! KUDURRU! It’s ancient Sumerian! It means path-marker or boundary-marker. This is a milestone! It’s telling us what it is! We’re within the city limits! We did it! My God … we did it!”
