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Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
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“These times!” Hackett yelled as he stepped down off the Dolphin to the roar of busy aircraft. “These are predictions!” He strode across the flight deck to where Tom Dower stood in a windswept parka. “They show exactly when the sun's next gravity waves will be unleashed!”
Dower snatched the piece of paper from the physicist and inspected it while the wind howled so fiercely and bitterly, it sliced through the thickest thermal layers like a dagger into butter. It reduced their conversation to bellowing.
“Add eight minutes to each time for earth's expected impact times!” Hackett added.
“It says here that the next expected gravity pulse is in five hours!” Dower hollered back.
“Exactly so.” Hackett brought his watch up to show the Admiral. “In fact I have my alarm all set. So warn the fleet! Warn the government!”
Crewmen stepped out of their way as they hurried along to where two waiting V-TOL aircraft sat on the forward section of the deck. Black fuel pipes stretched out from the extra gray tanks on the sides. Boxes were being hoisted up inside.
“A word of caution, Admiral,” Hackett added. “Sarah has hit the nail on the head—there is a serious risk of earth-crust displacement. Are you prepared for such an eventuality? Do you have a back-up plan? God told Noah to go build an Ark. Are you making arrangements to safeguard mankind's future?”
“We are aware of the possibility of an ECD event, Jon,” Dower confirmed, “and we've dismissed such a notion. Our best minds say it's an invention of flawed thinking. There's no possibility of that happening. The earth's crust simply does not rest on a sea of molten lava. It has nothing to
slip
on. It's a theory that has no supporters.” The Admiral rested a hand on Hackett's shoulder, guiding him to the boarding steps.
“And the back-up plan? For saving humanity?”
“You're it,” Dower said, patting him on the back. “So don't screw up. The Chinese are the worry, Dr. Hackett. The
Chinese and that city out there. And whatever power source they found that's still lighting up our security screens like a Christmas tree.”
Hackett ducked his head as he climbed up into the light gray HV-22A Osprey V-TOL. At the top he turned back to take one last look at the Admiral.
“Albert Einstein was a supporter of earth-crust displacement, y'know? Albert Einstein!”
Dower waved him off and headed for the entrance at the base of the towering command block five stories high at the side of
Truman's
vast, Empire State Building-length flight deck.
As Hackett took his seat, pulling the life-vest over his head and letting November help strap him in, he was caught mumbling to himself. “Y'know, I don't think they have the faintest concept of what's going on here. The powers-that-be are so fixated with their own political destruction, they'll find any way they can to make it happen rather than spend time looking for a solution.”
November grimaced as she tugged the strap tight. “And this comes as a surprise to you?” she said cynically.
Hackett eyed the girl sharply. “Never lose your sense of wonder and amazement. Never be blase. Because then, one day, when the really big and truly important things do come along, you'll be in a position to appreciate them.”
“I'll bear that in mind.”
She sat back as Hackett jammed his face up at the window and peered out at the turbo-props which were pointing straight up at the sky and starting to spin.
November glanced back at Scott and Sarah who were sitting together across the other side of the cabin, while across the aisle Matheson gripped the arm-rests. “Here we go again,” he was chanting. “Antarctica, here we come …”
With the first light of dawn a black cloud came from the horizon; it thundered within where Adad, lord of the storm, was riding. In front over hill and plain Shullat and Hanish, heralds of the storm, led on. Then the gods of the abyss rose up; Nergal pulled out the dams of the nether waters, Ninurta the war-lord threw down the dykes, and the seven judges of hell, the Annunaki, raised their torches lighting the land with their livid flame. A stupor of despair went up to heaven when the god of the storm turned daylight to darkness, when he smashed the land like a cup. One whole day the tempest raged, gathering fury as it went; it poured over the people like the tides of battle; a man could not see his brother nor the people be seen from heaven. Even the gods were terrified at the flood, they fled to the highest heaven, the firmament of Anu; they crouched against the walls, cowering like curs.
 
The Epic of Gilgamesh, c.
3000 B.C.E.
Translated by N. K. Sanders, 1987
They flew in low over the Ross Sea, the sun hovering in the sky. With sunset due in four weeks, the light was already starting to dim, becoming a kind of forever twilight. Winter was encroaching fast, and the sea was starting to freeze over at a colossal 22 square kilometers per minute. But the ice was thin, a mere 16 inches in most places, resulting in cracking and shifting plates and an all-enveloping fog called sea-smoke. Deep-sea heat from undercurrents traveling straight down from the tropics was rising to the surface and venting through the openings in the ice in great plumes, expending enough energy to power a 100-watt light-bulb for every square meter of sea-smoke.
The V-TOLS plowed through it all, leaving eddies in their wake. In the lead plane, Sarah craned her neck past Scott to see the approaching station out the window—a series of brightly colored, haphazardly placed buildings on the shores of Ross Island.
As they banked in for a descent she could make out two separate airstrips. But as the sea-smoke cleared she could see something else of far greater import. Across the snow and ice, a vista that stretched for hundreds of miles, dense black patches had settled like mottled bruising, or spots on a Dalmatian. The obvious culprit was—
“Erebus,” Sarah breathed. “Look, it's smoking!”
The active volcano sat 3,794 meters above Ross Island. With the trans-Antarctic mountains behind it in a broad band, it was 600 degrees Celsius at the crater and was known to harbor bacteria and algae that fed off the steam it produced.
Around the volcano the ice was bulging, disfigured where the ice underneath was melting and building up a reservoir, like a giant blister waiting to burst. There were similar odd warped patches way off in the distance, evidence of volcanic activity that hadn't even penetrated to the surface. It was clear that Antarctica was in trouble. Yet that still wasn't what bothered Sarah the most.
“The albedo's all shot,” she fretted. Scott was none the wiser. “The reflectivity of the ice,” she explained. “Usually
it's extremely high down here. Bounces sunlight straight back into space, cooling the planet. But all this volcanic ash is settling on top, absorbing the sunlight, encouraging heat to build. Encouraging a flood. Y'know, if all the ice on Antarctica were to melt, the average sea level would rise by about sixty meters, nearly two hundred feet. The ice cap's five kilometers thick in some places. We better hope earth-crust displacement's a myth.”
 
The vicious cross winds sweeping across McMurdo Sound made for a bumpy landing and caused the V-TOLS to tail around as their landing gear slipped on the ice.
They were met on the ground by a team of ASA support staff. The Antarctic Support Associates, a company operating out of Denver, Colorado, were like the local sheriff's office. If anyone stepped out of line, the ASA ran them out of town.
A huge Caterpillar-tracked, purpose-built truck sat waiting to ferry them all down to their accommodation block. Someone had painted
Ivan the Terror Bus
on its cab door. It chugged menacingly as its engine ticked over.
“Christ almighty!” Scott gasped, as he stepped down off the plane to be smacked in the face by such devastating cold, he nearly doubled over.
“Just get on the bus, quickly now! Quickly!” one of the ASA men commanded. “Hey, we got ladies … Cool.” He counted everyone off on his checklist one by one.
“What
is
that smell?” Hackett demanded, covering his face.
“Fuel oil,” another ASA man explained nonchalantly, leaning up against one of the hundreds of black and gray barrels stacked to the side of the airstrip. “You get used to it.”
“Couldn't you stack those barrels someplace else?”
“This? This ain't fuel. This is piss and shit.”
November choked. “Pardon me?”
“These are barrels of frozen piss and shit,” the ASA man told them. “We can't leave diddly here. By law we have to ship everything back home.” November looked like she was going to vomit as she climbed up inside the bus. “Nah, the fuel's all off down the hill someplace!” he called after her.
A further ASA man hung his head around the door into
the back of the vehicle. “Ladies and gentlemen, these are the ground rules. Any of you get drunk, you get sent home. You get into a fight, you go home. If you are in possession of prescription drugs without informing the staff—you go home. You trek out onto the sea-ice without telling anyone—you go home. You grow plants not indigenous to Antarctica—guess what? You go home.
“Crime is low, we want to keep it that way. The only thing we seem to have a problem with is the theft of bicycles and coats that aren't stock issue red. So tie 'em down if you have 'em. We have no judge, no police and no jail. Any trouble—and you go home. Other than that,” he grinned, “welcome to McMurdo!”
Scott raised his finger like a schoolchild. “Actually,” he said, “there's been a change of plan. We're kind of on a time-limit. I don't think we'll be staying here that long.”
“You do any of that crap and you won't be,” the ASA man replied.
Hackett was confused. “Do you even know who we are?”
“Sure,” he snapped. “Like all the other eco-warriors on block six, you're here to save the planet. Best of luck!” He slammed the door shut behind him.
Outside, the other V-TOL was unloading as the first ASA man got on his cab CB. “Okay, we got six ‘beakers' comin' down at ya. Dave, you got some hot food for these fine folks?” A garbled response came back with an affirmative.
“Excuse me, what are ‘beakers'?”
The ASA man turned to find himself face to face with Major Gant. The marine had traveled in on the other plane, much to the surprise of everyone else. The ASA man grimaced. “Beakers—y'know. It's slang for scientists. All the support staff use it.”
Gant was furious. “I am a serving officer in the United States Marine Corps, mister!”
The ASA man shrugged and got back on his radio. “Yeah, scratch that, Dave.” He eyed Gant mildly. “Expect six beakers … and an asshole.”
Gant pushed past and climbed aboard. November leaned forward. “What are you doing here?”
“You didn't think they were going to send you guys in alone and unsupported, did you?”
Hackett spoke from over the back of the Major's seat. “Actually, yes we did.”
Gant shrugged it off as a third ASA man climbed up into the driving seat, shifted
Ivan
into gear and hauled them all down into McMurdo's city limits. And it was as they swung around that November noticed the ship, sitting on the horizon, out across the frozen sea.
“Which ship is that?” she asked innocently.
“I don't know its name,” Gant revealed. “It's Chinese. It's been sitting there all day.”
“It can't get us here, can it?”
“Honey,” the Major explained, “we could be hovering over their base, four hours' flying time from here, and they could still get us. The range on their missiles is that good.”
November sat back with a start, leaving the Major to his thoughts. Piss and shit.
 
“One, the North Face. ‘Himalayan Hotel' dome tent. Orange.”
“Check.”
“One Quallofil-insulated sleeping bag.”
Matheson nodded once more and checked the items off the list as they were handed to him across the counter.
“One BAD Bags duffel bag. One pair of Vuarnet sunglasses. One Silva compass. One Yema watch. One camp rest sleeping pad. One fleece pullover. One pair of fleece pants. One fleece hat, headband and neckband. Blue. One Red Gore-Tex wind parka and pair of pants. One Gore-Tex one-piece jumpsuit. Red. One Thermolite and Thermoloft insulated jacket.”
“Check.”
“Two sets of Duofold Thermax thermal underwear. Two pairs of Duofold Thermax liner socks. Two pairs of Damart Thermax thermal underwear. Two pairs of Fox River Hollofil socks. One pair of Surefoot Insulator insoles. One The Masque neoprene face mask. One pair of Grandoe Gore-Tex gloves. One pair of Steiger Designs overmits. One pair of Gore-Tex boots. One pair of mukluks.”
“Check.”
“Sign here, sir, and you're all set,” the ASA clerk advised.
Matheson put pen to paper and collected up his things,
eyeing Gant apprehensively. He was collecting very little. “You're not taking any of this stuff?”
“I have much of my own gear,” he replied. “Some manmade stuff, but mine is mostly better than this.” Matheson was curious. “Sealskin and caribou hide clothing,” Gant explained. “Like the Inuit use. It's the best.”
And Gant headed off to their block leaving Matheson to stare blankly back at the ASA clerk. “Got any caribou skin?”
Scott slapped the oversized photographs from the node down on the table in triumph. “There aren't sixteen letters,” he announced. “There are sixty.”
While the others excitedly gathered around the work surface of the makeshift lab, Hackett seemed less than enthusiastic as he glanced at his watch, then out through the window. “We got twenty-three minutes,” he said, “till the next gravity pulse.”
“Don't worry about that,” November urged him. “Worry about this.”
Scott took up a red marker and circled what he'd come to call the Atlantis glyph, the circle and the cross inside it. “This glyph never changes position on any surface that I studied. Neither do these other four.”
“That's the Giza glyph,” Pearce noted. “And that's the South America one.”
“Right. And I'm guessing these other two are also major sites.”
“But where?”
Scott turned on Gant who sat brooding in one corner. “Major—think maybe the powers-that-be could spare some satellite time to hunt down two other megalithic structures with C60 deposits beneath them?” Gant shrugged. “You never know,” Scott persisted. “It might just save planet Earth.”
Gant got to his feet and ambled over to the table. “What do these sites look like?”
Scott indicated the two glyphs as Sarah added, “The C60 hunt began in China. I'm guessing one of those glyphs matches the layout of Wupu, in China.”
“Okay, but what about the fifth one?”
“The North Pole,” Hackett murmured darkly.
Matheson was intrigued. “You sure about that?”
Hackett seemed amused. “I can't be certain, no, it's just a guess. But if I was going to build a global network of megalithic structures that respond to electro-magnetism, and I'd already put one at the South Pole, and three strung around the equator, or close to it, logic tells me the fifth is probably going to be at the North Pole.”
Scott turned on Gant. “Is that enough information for you?”
“It's a start,” Gant agreed. There was a vid-phone hooked up to a computer across the far end of the lab. He dialed up Dower immediately.
Scott snatched up his pen and tapped it on the desk. “Anyway,” he said, “those five symbols don't change position. But on this node photograph I realized that the other eleven symbols all appear to rotate randomly, for no real reason.”
“What do you mean?” Sarah asked.
“Well, it's like writing the letter ‘a.' But one moment it's the right way up, the next minute you've written it on its side. A sentence or so later it's upside down. Some early languages do this, and it doesn't affect the way you read them. But those languages don't match what we've got here. Of course, some languages did it because of the way you had to read them. English is left to right. Arabic is right to left. But earlier languages were
boustrophedon
—literally meaning ‘as the ox plows.' The first line would be read right to left, the next line underneath would be left to right, then right to left. Your eye would have to zig zag down the page.”
“These are spirals.”
“Yeah. So I'm guessing it's a straight line. Just pick a spiral and follow it. But from which end do I start?”
“But what does it mean?” Hackett wanted to know. “Eleven letters rotating in five different ways, making fifty-five letters, plus five vowels. Fascinating I'm sure, but what do they mean?”
Scott was stunned. “Did you say vowels?”
“Sure.”
“Why? What made you say vowels?”
“Because there are five of them.”
Scott thought it over. “I dunno, maybe they
are
vowels. In many ancient languages, like Egyptian, vowels were omitted. They were something the reader automatically filled in. Maybe that's what these five symbols represent. The spaces where you fill in the vowels.”
“But what vowels?” Hackett insisted. “And sixty letters—do you have any comprehension of just how big a language would be if it had sixty letters in its alphabet? The possible permutations of letter sequences are almost endless.”
“What's he talking about?” November asked innocently.
“Somebody give me a language.”
“Italian,” Gant said coldly, turning from the vid-phone in the corner of the hollow-sounding room.
“How many letters has it got?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Okay, so for the possible number of permutations of a twenty-one-letter sequence, each one different from the next, you need to know the factorial of twenty-one. Which is one times two times three times four times five … all the way up to twenty-one.” He totted it up in his head. “That's roughly fifty-one billion
billion
twenty-one-letter-long sequences. You want to figure in repeated letters as well. That takes it up to five billion billion …
billion.
”
“What you're describing,” Scott replied, “is Temurah.” Sarah looked puzzled. “Temurah is used in Kabbala for calculating the possible number of anagrams of a word in a certain number of letters.”
“And what's Kabbala?”
“Kabbala means ‘tradition.' It follows the notion that there are secret messages hidden in the Bible. Temurah is the art of anagrams and assumes you can decode these secrets by messing with the word of God.”
“My point is,” Hackett added, “well, shit … anybody see a calculator laying around here anywhere?” Matheson tossed him a little black Casio. Hackett punched in the numbers. “The factorial of twenty is 2,432,902,008,176,640,000. That's the number of permutations twenty-letter sequences
in an alphabet of twenty letters has. In sixty, that's … a complete mystery because, uh, this little device can't even work out that much.” He threw the calculator down on the table, displaying the ERROR message for all to see. “Where, Richard, do you even
start
trying to determine what each letter means in a sixty-letter alphabet?”
Scott shrugged simply. “Like I've been trying to tell everybody since the start, I have no idea. Why the sudden jitters, Professor?”
Hackett shifted uncomfortably, looking out the window at all the ice and snow. “I didn't realize this place was so damn empty.”
November was confused. “People think there are hidden messages in the Bible?” Scott nodded. “What about the messages that are already there? Didn't they think to just read it?”
“Guess not. Oh, it doesn't stop there. Notariqon was a skill Kabbalists used to look at the end and beginning letters of words to find a hidden message, while Gematria was based purely on the Hebrew texts because, as you know, all Hebrew letters are numbers. So they theorized that all words that came to the same number were connected in some way.” Scott seemed indifferent to the theory. “They concluded there were seventy-two names for God.”
“What's the point?”
Scott tried to explain. “In the sixteenth century, Bruno used a set of concentric wheels with a hundred and fifty sectors on them. Each wheel contained thirty letters made of the twenty-three Latin letters, and then a mixture of Greek and Hebrew letters that represented sounds that aren't in Latin. And what he did was to rotate these wheels and form triplet combinations in an attempt to discern the first perfect language of mankind. What he got was a load of old nonsense, but it actually became useful in the new art of cryptography.”
“And we've been writing secret messages to each other ever since,” Pearce noted.
“What they eventually started doing was to wrap a ribbon around a cylinder in kind of a spiral. Then write a message vertically down the side of the tube, so when the ribbon was
stretched back out you were left with a series of random letters along the length of the ribbon. Then you just filled in a junk message around it.”
“A cylinder and a ribbon?” Sarah seemed intrigued. Like it had jogged a memory of some description. “There was a geologist, a French guy named, what was that … ? Béguyer. Yeah. Béguyer de Chancourtois, in the 1800s. He arranged elements in a spiral around a tube—twenty—four elements, I think it was. Then he noted down the periodicity of their properties—y'know, which elements were intrinsically similar. What he found was that similar elements recurred after every seventh element. It was one of the first attempts at building a periodic table.”
For Hackett that seemed to be ringing some bells too, but Matheson was already putting his own ideas forward. “Maybe we should be cutting out the spirals on these photographs and sticking them around a tube.”
“Isn't that already what they
did
in Giza?” Pearce indicated.
“John Newlands,” Hackett interrupted. “English chemist. He did similar work on the elements in the nineteenth century and agreed there was a numerical pattern to them. Only he used music as the analogy. There are seven notes in a musical scale, and on the eighth note you step up to a new octave. But there was a more complex structure to the rhythm that Meyer discovered in the same year.” Hackett smiled convincingly. “There were peaks at the eighth and the sixteenth elements. Then the rhythm shifted to eighteen elements apart instead of seven. It was like a wave was passing through the periodic table … Sixteen minutes, by the way.”
“A wave passing through the periodic table?”
“Oh yeah,” Sarah agreed. “In chemical theory, it means you can predict where the next stable elements will occur. In theory there's some kind of Atlantis, an element that runs parallel to the conventional periodic table, and remains to be discovered. Somewhere around atomic number one hundred and fifteen or one hundred and eighty.”
“Orichalc,” Pearce commented.
Sarah blinked. “I'm sorry?”
“Plato. When he first described Atlantis, he described
walls covered in precious metals. Gold, silver. And the one most prized of all was a mysterious gleaming reddish-gold metal he called Orichalc. It was said to shimmer like fire.”
“C60 in its purest form is reddish-gold,” Sarah pointed out.
“Orichalc isn't a stone, it's a metal.”
“In South America,” Scott mused, “according to local legend, when the four founding gods had completed their mission, before they left they wrapped all their power and knowledge up into a gift that was both feared and respected. The gift was a stone. The stone of Naczit.”
“Moses, when he went onto the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments, saw the stone they were written on be inscribed by the finger of God. The stones shimmered blue,” November reminded them gently. “And the radiance from the stones was such that it burnt Moses's face and for the rest of his life he was forced to wear a veil to hide the scars.”
“Ancient stones and ancient metals,” Scott remarked as he eyed the photographs again. He rubbed his hand over his mouth. “Periodicity. Step sequences. What am I missing?”
Gant was on his feet. This was all way above his head and frankly it was irritating the shit out of him. “They're redirecting a satellite for you,” he said. “I'm going to make sure they're refueling the planes properly. And I'm putting in another call to the Chinese, to let them know we're coming.”
“Which Chinese?” Sarah demanded.
“Anyone that's listening. That ship for starters.”
“And if no one answers?”
“Then we better pray they don't shoot us down. Coz we're going in regardless.”
As he reached the door, Hackett glanced out the window to see an immense gray U.S. amphibious landing craft smash through the waves toward the shore and beach on the ice shelf a short distance off. The front end came crashing down but the ice was smashing for no one.
“What the hell is that?” the physicist asked, startled as a squad of marines manhandled a flat black coffin-sized box out of the craft and started marching it toward the base on the double.
“Ah,” Gant explained knowingly. “That'll be our tactical nuclear warhead.”
He zipped up his parka and went out to meet them while Hackett sidled up next to Pearce and November. “I hope for our sakes,” he said, “Orichalc doesn't turn out to be uranium, or we're never getting out of Atlantis alive.”
 
“Just what do you think you're doing?” November demanded angrily.
“Storing the bomb,” Gant replied frostily, directing the marines in through the front door with the box.
“In the chapel?”
“You got a better idea? The Chinese would never live down the international controversy of firing upon fine upstanding Americans who were simply engaged in prayer.”
Inside, on a pew near the front by the altar, and just to one side of the stained glass penguin, Hackett and Scott turned to see the soldiers struggle with the device before dropping it roughly to the ground. “Didn't I see this on
Planet of the Apes
one time?” Hackett remarked.

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