The Atlantis Gene: A Thriller (37 page)

We wait a bit, and when no sound comes, Rutger throws the switch on the box and gets behind the wheel of the car. Craig slaps me on the back. “We’re ready, Mr. Pierce.” Craig takes the passenger seat, and I sit on the bench in the back. Rutger cranks the car and drives recklessly into the mine, almost crashing into the rails at the entrance but swerving at the last minute to straddle them and then straighten the car as we plow deeper into the earth like characters out of some Jules Verne novel, maybe Journey to the Center of the Earth.

The tunnel is completely dark except for the car’s dim headlamps, which barely illuminate the area ten feet ahead of us. We drive at high speed for what seems like an hour, and I’m speechless, not that I could say a word over the racket of the truck in the tunnel. The scale is staggering, unimaginable. The tunnels are wide and tall, and much to my chagrin, very, very well made — not treasure-hunting tunnels; these are subterranean roads made to last.

The first few minutes into the mine is a constant turn. We must be following a spiral tunnel, like a corkscrew boring deep into the earth, deep enough to get under the bay.

The spiral deposits us into a larger staging area, no doubt used to sort and store supplies. I barely get a glimpse of crates and boxes before Rutger floors the car again, roaring down the straight tunnel with even more speed. We’re on a constant decline, and I can almost feel the air growing more damp with each passing second. There are several forks in the tunnel, but nothing slows Rutger down. He drives madly, swerving left and right, barely making the turns. I grip the seat. Craig leans over and touches the youth’s arm, but I can’t hear his voice over the deafening racket of the car’s engine. Whatever is said, Rutger doesn’t care for it. He brushes Craig’s arm off and bears down harder than ever. The engine screams and the tunnel zooms by in flashes.

Rutger’s putting on this little thrill ride to prove he knows the tunnels in the dark, that this is his territory, that he has my life in his hands. He wants to intimidate me. It’s working.

This mine is the biggest I’ve ever been in. And there are some giant mines in the mountains of West Virginia.

Finally, the tunnel opens onto a large, roughly shaped area — like a place where the miners had searched for direction and made several false starts. Electric lights hang from the ceiling, illuminating the space, revealing pockmarks and drill holes along the walls where blasts had started new tunnels, but were abandoned. I see a stack of the other black cord, laying in a bundle next to a table that holds another phone, no doubt connected to the surface.

The rail lines end here as well. The three mini rail cars sit in a row at the line’s termination point near the end of the room. The top part of two of them have been blown away, no doubt as they hit methane pockets along the way. The third sits quietly at the front of the other two; its flame jumps wildly as it claws for drifting pockets of oxygen in the dank space.

Rutger kills the engine, hops out, and blows out the candle.

Craig follows him out of the car and says to me, “Well, what do you think, Pierce?”

“It’s quite a tunnel.” I look around, seeing more of the strange room.

Rutger joins us. “Don’t play coy, Pierce. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I never said I had.” I direct my next words at Craig. “You’ve a methane problem.”

“Yes, a rather recent development. We only began hitting pockets in the last year. Obviously we were a bit unprepared. We had assumed that water would be the biggest danger on this dig.”

“A safe assumption.” Methane is an ever-present danger in many coal mines. I never would have expected it down here, a place with seemingly no coal, oil, or other fuel deposits.

Craig motions above us. “You’ve no doubt noticed that the mine is on a constant grade — about 9 degrees. What you should know is that the sea floor above us slopes at roughly 11 degrees. It’s only about 80 yards above us here — we believe.”

I realize the implication instantly, and I can’t hide my surprise. “You think the methane pockets are from the sea floor?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

Rutger smirks like we’re two old women, gossiping about the boogie man.

I inspect the roof of the room. Craig hands me a helmet and a small backpack. Then he clicks a switch on the side, and the helmet lights up. I stare at it a moment in wonder, then put it on, deciding to deal with the larger mystery at hand.

The rock on the ceiling is dry — a good sign. The unspoken danger is that if a methane pocket exploded, and that pocket was large enough to stretch to the seafloor, you’d get an extremely large explosion, followed by a flood of water that would collapse the entire mine almost instantly. You would either burn, drown, or be crushed to death. Maybe a combination. One spark — from a pick ax, from a falling rock, from the friction of the car wheels on the rails, could send the whole place up.

“If the gas is above, between this shaft and the sea, I don’t see another way. You’ll have to close her off and find another way,” I say.

Rutger scoffs. “I told you Mallory, he’s not up to it. We’re wasting our time with this gimp American coward.”

Craig holds a hand up. “Just a minute, Rutger. We’ve paid Mr. Pierce to be here; now let’s hear what he has to say.”

“What would you do, Mr. Pierce?”

“Nothing. I’d abandon the project. The yield can’t possibly justify the cost — human or capital.”

Rutger rolls his eyes and begins wandering around the room, ignoring Craig and me.

“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” Craig says.

“You’re looking for treasure.”

Craig clasps his hands behind his back and walks deeper into the room. “You’ve seen the size of this dig. You know we’re not treasure hunters. In 1861, we sank a ship in the Bay of Gibraltar — The Utopia. A little inside joke. We spent the next five years diving at the wreckage site, which was a cover for what we’d found below it — a structure, nearly a mile off the coast of Gibraltar. But we determined that we couldn’t access the structure from the seafloor, it was buried too deep, and our diving technology simply wasn’t advanced far enough, couldn’t be advanced far enough, quickly enough. And we were frightened of drawing attention. We had already lingered far too long at the site of a sunken merchant ship.”

“Structure?”

“Yes. A city or a temple of some sort.”

Rutger walks back to us and turns his back to me, facing Craig. “He doesn’t need to know this. He’ll want more pay if he thinks we’re digging for something valuable. Americans are almost as greedy as Jews.”

Craig raises his voice. “Be quiet, Rutger.”

It’s easy to ignore the brat. I’m intrigued. “How did you know where to sink the ship, where to dig?” I ask.

“We… had a general idea.”

“From what?”

“Some historical documents.”

“How do you know you’re under the diving site?”

“We used a compass and calculated the distance, accounting for the pitch of the tunnel. We’re right under the site. And we have proof.” Craig walked to the wall and grabbed the rock — no, a dingy black cloth, which I thought had been rock. He pulls the blanket to the floor, revealing… a passageway, like a bulkhead in a massive ship.

I move closer, shining my headlamp into the strange space. The walls are black, clearly metal, but they shimmer in a different, indescribable way, almost as if they are alive and reacting to my light, like a mirror made of water. And there are lights, twinkling at the top and bottom of the passageway. I peer around the turn and see that the tunnel leads to some sort of door or portal.

“What is this?” I whisper.

Craig leans over my shoulder. “We believe it’s Atlantis. The city Plato described. The location is right. Plato said that Atlantis came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean and that it was an island situated in front of the straits of the Pillars of Heracles—”

“Pillars of Heracles—”

“What we call the Pillars of Hercules. The Rock of Gibraltar is one of the Pillars of Hercules. Plato said that Atlantis ruled over all of Europe, Africa, and Asia and that it was the way to other continents. But it fell. In Plato’s words: ‘there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all the warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea.’”

Craig paced away from the strange structure. “This is it. We’ve found it. You see now why we can’t stop here, Mr. Pierce. We’re very, very close. Will you join us? We need you.”

Rutger laughs. “You’re wasting your time, Mallory. He’s scared to death; I can see it in his eyes.”

Craig focuses on me. “Ignore him. I know it’s dangerous. We can pay you more than $1,000 per week. You tell me what it’s worth.”

I peer into the tunnel, then inspect the ceiling again. The dry ceiling. “Let me think about it.”

CHAPTER 82

Snow Camp Alpha
Drill Site #5
East Antarctica

“What’s our depth?” Robert Hunt asked the drilling tech.

“Just passed 6,000 feet, sir. Should we stop?”

“No. Keep going. I’ll report in. Come get me at 6,500 feet.” They had hit nothing but ice for over a mile — the same as the last four drilling sites.

Robert pulled his parka tight and walked from the massive drilling platform toward his field tent. He passed a second man on his way. He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t remember his name. The two men they had given him were quiet; no one said much about themselves, but they were hard-working and they didn’t drink — the best you could hope for in drill operators in extreme conditions. They were both dumb as a sack of hammers, but it likely wouldn’t matter.

His employer would probably give up soon. Hole number five looked like the four before it: nothing but ice. The whole continent was a giant ice cube. He remembered reading that Antarctica had 90% of the world’s ice and 70% of its freshwater. If you took all the water in the world, in every lake, pond, stream and even water in the clouds, it wouldn’t come out to even half of the frozen water in Antarctica. When all that ice melted, the world would be a very different place. The sea would rise 200 feet, nations would fall, or more accurately, drown. Low-lying countries like Indonesia would disappear from the map. New York City, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and most of Florida — also gone.

Ice seemed to be the only thing Antarctica had in abundance. What could they be looking for down here? Oil was the logical answer. Robert was, after all, an oil rig operator. But the equipment was all wrong for oil. The bore diameter was wrong. For oil, you wanted a pipe line. These bits were making holes big enough to drive a truck through. Or lower a truck. What could be down there? Minerals? Something scientific, maybe fossils? Maybe some ploy to stake a claim on the land? Antarctica was massive — 17.5 million square kilometers. If it was a country, it would be the second largest in the world — Antarctica was just 20,000 square kilometers smaller than Russia, another hell-hole he had drilled — with much more success. Antarctica had once been a lush paradise around two million years ago. It stood to reason that there would be an unimaginable oil reserve under the surface and who knows what else—

Behind him, Robert heard a loud boom.

The pylon sticking out of the ground was spinning wildly — the bit was hitting no resistance. They must have hit a pocket. He had expected this — research teams had recently found large caverns and gaps in the ice, possibly underwater fjords where the ice ran over the mountains below.

“Shut it down!” Robert yelled. The man on the platform couldn’t hear him. He ran a hand across his throat, but the man just looked dumbfounded. He grabbed his radio, and shouted, “Full stop!”

On the platform, the long pipe sticking out of the ground was starting to wobble, like a top starting to lose its balance.

Robert threw the radio down and ran toward the platform. He pushed the man out of the way and entered commands to stop the bit.

He grabbed the man, and they ran from the platform. They had made it almost to the housing pods when they heard the platform shudder, buckle, and capsize. The drilling column had broken off and spun wildly in the air. Even 200 feet away, the noise was deafening, like a jet engine roaring at full speed. The platform sank into the snow and the bit came forward, digging into the ice like a twister on the Kansas plains in Tornado Alley.

Robert and the other man lay face-down, enduring the shards of ice and snow raining down until the bit finally came to a stop.

Robert looked up at the scene. His employer wouldn’t be pleased. “Don’t touch anything,” he said to the man.

Inside the living pod, Robert picked up the radio. “Bounty, this is Snow King. I have a status update.” Robert wondered what to report. They hadn’t hit a pocket. It was something else. The bit would have chewed through any kind of rock or ground, even frozen. Whatever they had hit had taken the bit clean off. It was the only possibility.

“Copy, Snow King. Report status.”

Less is more. He wouldn’t speculate. “We’ve hit something,” Robert said.

CHAPTER 83

When Kate arrived the next morning, David was awake. And angry.

“You have to go. The boy told me we’ve been here for three days.”

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” Kate said in a cheerful tone.

She retrieved his antibiotics, pain pills, and a cup of water. He looked even more gaunt than the day before; she would have to get him something to eat as well. She wanted to touch his face, his protruding cheek bones, but he was much more intimidating now — awake.

“Don’t ignore me,” David said.

“We’ll talk once you take your pills.” She held out her hand with the two pills.

“What are they?”

Kate pointed. “Antibiotic. Pain pill.”

David took the antibiotic and washed it down with water.

Kate moved the hand with the pain pill closer to his face. “You need to—”

“I’m not taking it.”

“You were a better patient when you were asleep.”