Passage Graves (16 page)

Chapter 41

WEDNESDAY 10:45 p.m.

Isle of Ronaldsay, Scotland

The helicopter flew over the Scottish countryside so quickly the cabin shuddered.
Rotors blew the grass in every direction, like tufts of hair whipped by a blow dryer. Spotlights illuminated the passage grave below.

“Isbister,” the pilot’s voice sounded over Thatcher’s headphones. “A
lso called Tomb of the Eagles.”

“It’s so small,”
she said. It looked to be one-fourth the size of Maeshowe. Almost benign.

The helicopter hovered over the tiny ruin, then flew back over the island. I
ts light thrust through the night fog, and she caught sight of farmhouses a few miles away. She held her breath, knowing exactly what to expect.

“Fifty-three dead,” the pilot said. “No survivors. It happened immediately following sunset, approximately 2010 hours. The lethal wave covered an oblong span of
six miles across the land. Fortunately, the passage grave faces the sea, so most of the noise was directed out over the water.” He paused for a moment, then finished. “It could have been worse.”

It could’ve been worse
. She kept telling herself that, over and over.

W
hite plastic sheets hid rows of bodies on the ground below. NCEC officials moved through the devastation like ants working fruitlessly to contain a biohazard they would never find. Their flimsy protective suits seemed a ridiculous precaution. Sound was the killer, and thin synthetic rubber could never protect them from the noisy death emitted by a passage grave.

The helicopter lifted abruptly northward, mixing her anxiety with motion sickness. She looked a
t her watch with renewed panic.

Chapter 42

WEDNESDAY 11:27 p.m.

Stenness Basecamp

Orkney Island, Scotland

“Where have you been?” Hummer waited at the bottom of the basecamp elevator. His arms were crossed tightly over his chest. Lee stood beside him, dwarfed by the enormity that was Hummer. He had a smug grin on his face as he waited intently to see her humiliated.

Thatcher stepped off the lift. Her face flushed.

Lambasting leaders in front of their subordinates was one of Hummer’s favorite tactics of discipline. She cleared her throat. “I was working with our lone survivor. He’s the specialist who was studying Maeshowe.”

Hummer maintained his engulfing stance. “You were not given clearance to leave.”

She met his eyes. “I know, but—”

She stopped short, noticing that behind the normal frigidity of his glare was suffocating fear, a subtle outward manifestation of emotion sh
e had never seen in him before.

“Were you successful?” he asked.

“No.” Thatcher tried not to lower her eyes.

“Leave without
permission again and your career is over.”

Thatcher drew her he
ad back. The threat was over the top, even for Hummer, but she kept her mouth shut.

The outline of terror pinched at the edges of his eyes as he nodded. Hummer, a
s a wavering giant, was unnerving.

“Into the conference room, n
ow.” He turned down the corridor with Thatcher and Lee at his heels. They walked through the empty helm into the conference room where Donovon and Marek were waiting. Hummer took the seat at the head of the table. Thatcher took the seat to his left beside Donovon, and Lee sat at Hummer’s right next to Marek.

A large monitor at the front of the room boasted an image of Maeshowe during the passage grave’s last explosion. Dust and debris funneled outward. Particles floated in the air,
making the sound wave visible as it tumbled through the arch doorway.

The
digital countdown clock above the conference room doorway displayed the hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds remaining until the next explosion. The smallest increment was nothing but a blur as each fraction of a second quickly passed.

Thatcher stretched her neck, trying to loosen the boulders of tension
in her shoulders. It was a futile effort. Nothing could relieve the weight of the world. Everything was happening too quickly. She could barely absorb the devastation of Cleat and Liddel.

Hummer clasped his hands together and set them on the table. “Dr. Marek?”

Marek glanced at Thatcher. She avoided eye contact, still angered by his betrayal even though he had inadvertently saved her life.

Wetting his lips, Marek pressed
the monitor’s control pad.

T
he screen changed to show a map of the U.K.

“Six passage graves have ‘awakened’—for lack of a better term. These are the graves that currently manifest signature sound.”

“Six?” Thatcher gasped in disbelief. “I thought there were two?”

Six white dots lit up at
various places around the map.

“About twenty minutes ago, we learned that Newgrange in Ireland and Camster south of us on the Scottish mainland are also emitting deadly noise,” he explained. “Add Bryn Celli Ddu and Tinkinswood in Wales, and Isbister and Maeshowe in Scotland, all with fatalities, and that’s six.”

Thatcher sunk in her chair.

“We are measuring con
tinuous subsonic noise at all six sites,” Marek continued. “Although the graves initially exploded at different times, they seem to be building at internal acoustic velocity rates that suggest all six graves will go off simultaneously in less than 48 hours. I expect the soundwaves to align to the explosion pattern of the ‘mother grave,’ Maeshowe.”

“‘The mother grave?’” Lee pursed his lips together.

Hummer removed his glasses from his coat pocket, put on the bifocals and leaned forward in his chair, examining the screen.

Marek pointed
as a few more graves lit up in blinking red.

The majority
of red dots were scattered throughout Scotland and Ireland, one was a few miles north of London.

“We have to anticipate that between now and the next explosion, more graves will ‘awaken’ and match Maeshowe’s pattern of eruption.”

“Is there any way to know which ruins will ‘wake up’?” Hummer asked.

Marek licked his lips
nervously. “That’s the million dollar question. I mean, I arbitrarily picked these locations you see in red, but there are 313 passage graves within the British Isles alone.”

Thatcher’s mouth fell open
.

Marek changed the screen. Over 300 blinking red dots appeared across the map. “These are ‘silent monuments’—forgive me for creating all this new terminology, but we have to call them something.”

Thatcher felt panic arise in her stomach. The already insurmountable problem was worsening by the second. “How many graves need to ‘awaken’ before—?”

“The end? Bye-bye? Kablooey?” Marek
finished her sentence. He changed the screen so only the six current graves were blinking. “Maeshowe’s explosion intervals double exponentially every 77 hours. The closest metrics we have to measure her blast are the moment magnitude scale or the Richter scale. I’ve been able to trace the evolution of the noise backwards, as well as estimate its forthcoming potential.”

“
So when did the graves start to elicit sound?” Hummer asked.

“Two Sundays ago at 1600 hours. Precisely at 1600 hours.”

Thatcher placed her elbows on the table and cradled her forehead. That was only a few hours before David identified his father’s body.

“
Maeshowe’s first explosion wasn’t big enough to harm anyone. The second explosion, last Wednesday around 9 pm, knocked off a few sheep, as reported by Dr. David Hyden during his time with the NCEC. The soundwave that killed the people of Stenness was Maeshowe’s third detonation. The wave that killed Ballistics and Golke was the fourth.”

“What should we anticipate for the fifth?” Hummer asked.

“Each detonation gets bigger, badder, louder, and deadlier. I’d estimate Stenness basecamp can only withstand one more explosion. This sound wave will easily cover the Orkney Islands. We’ll be lucky if the noise doesn’t reach the coastal edges of mainland Scotland.”

“
What about the other graves?” Thatcher asked. “The ones in Ireland and Wales?”

“I’m still working on
those estimates,” Marek said, shrugging. “Just with these six graves, and
only
these six, we’re talking complete devastation to the northern United Kingdom by the sixth explosion. Goodbye to Europe by the seventh. Russia, China, and Africa are wiped off the map by the eighth. North and South America in the ninth. Worldwide devastation by the tenth.”

Thatcher shook her head.

“Unless everyone on the planet is able to find significantly deep subterranean shelter, we’ll be dead in 13 days,” Marek finished.

Thatcher focused
on the map. Her eyes connected the six random dots of the ‘awakened’ monuments. “Marek, can you light up all the graves again? All 313 of them?”

Marek clicked the remote. The screen refreshed with all the gra
ves blinking in red.

Thatcher twisted he
r finger, outlining the overall formation. “Look at their shape.”

“Holy hell.” Marek scratched his head. “How did I not see that before?”

Lee’s mouth flattened.

“It’s a bloody spiral,” Donovon said. “Like that rock inside Maeshowe.”

“When exactly is the next explosion set to happen?” Hummer interrupted. “The exact day and time?”

“Friday at 1200 hours,” Marek said.

Hummer looked to Donovon. “You also have something prepared?”

Donovon signaled to the monitor. “Marek?”

Marek changed the screen to a diagram of their acoustic weapon. The image was classified. The projected blueprint header read:  NATO WEAPON PATENT 4644XM: SONJA.

“
It was Sonja’s structural shape caught my attention.” Donovon pointed to the computer representation. “She’s got a long firing barrel attached to a concave semicircular conduction chamber where pressure is generated until the sonic pulse is discharged down the barrel.”

Hummer nodded.

Donovon signaled to Marek and the screen split in half, their acoustic weapon on the right and a diagram of a passage grave on the left. “This is a crude diagram of the combined surface configurations of all six ‘awakened’ passage graves,” he explained. “The shape is almost identical to Sonja, if the sizing was to scale, of course. Both have a long rectangular passageway or ‘firing barrel’ connected to a mounded circular conduction chamber.”

Hummer sat forward.

Marek whistled. “The graves are giant Sonjas.”

“They may look rudimentary,” Donovon said, “but their architecture is advanced. I can’t tell you how or why the graves are generating noise, but whatever ancient people built them, they knew exactly what they were doing. You might
even think the graves were even created for this purpose.”

“
How do we solve this problem?” Hummer asked. His voice was startlingly calm.

“Blow ‘em all to hell,
” Lee said. “The graves won’t explode if they’re wiped off the bloody map.”

“But there are hu
ndreds of them,” Thatcher said.

Marek nodded, agreeing with her. “Isbister generates sound and isn’t fully intact—the grave has a hole in the roof of its chamber. Unless we know how these noises are being generated, we have to assume destroying the monuments will have no effect.”

Hummer leaned forward. “Give me options.”

Donovon turned
back to the screen.

The foreboding image of Maeshowe shrunk to its appropriate size and location on the map of Stenness Valley. The passage grave continued to detonate with sound waves radiating outward from its
entrance in an oblong circle.

“We weren’t responsible for Stenness because a hill protected the village from our weapon.” Donovon drew a line between their test site and Stenness. Then he drew another line, connecting their test site and Maeshowe. “But there was no hill or land inte
rference between Maeshowe and our camp. So, the real question nobody’s asking is ‘why in bloody hell didn’t Maeshowe kill us that night?’”

“We were in its path,” Thatcher realized.

“Find the answer to that, and you have our savin’ grace,” Donovon said.

“I
t did go through our site that night,” Lee said. “It knocked us flat on our arses.”

“But it
didn’t kill us,” Donovon said. “Maeshowe exploded at precisely the same time Golke and Bailey fired off Sonja at full power.”

Thatcher
drew in a deep breath.

The room was silent.

It was sheer dumb luck that they were alive and sitting around the conference table together?

She
shook her head in disbelief. “Golke and Bailey saved our lives?”

“They fired an acoustic wave equal in magnitude to that of the passage grave,” Marek said, assembling the physics problem in his head.

Another Sonja icon lit up facing Maeshowe’s entrance. Both Maeshowe and the Sonja icons exploded.

“If we fire our weapon right as the
grave explodes,” Donovon explained, “our acoustic blast will counteract the grave’s acoustic blast.”

It was brilliant.

“They’ll cancel each other out,” Marek said.

“
We’ll create what’s known as a standing wave,” Donovon added.

On screen, Sonja’s sound waves collided with Maeshowe’s sound waves. They cancelled
into nothing.

“Sonja saved us that night,” Donovon said. “Maybe she can do it again.”