Decipher (49 page)

Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher

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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 couldâ

“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 re-directing 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 â¦

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!

96:2â6
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 â¦”

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 â¦ don't â¦ 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 âhere' 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 menâwhere 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 â¦

“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 ânot many' or âthe few,' maybe on account of their ancestors surviving the Great Flood, I don't knowâanyway, 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. ââAnd 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: “KahâDooâRoo â¦”

The others eyed the linguist keenly, while he scratched his head. What did it mean?

Scott repeated the jumble of syllables to himself. “Kahâdooâroo â¦ ? Kahâdooâroo â¦ ?”

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 â¦ we did it!”

“To hell with the path-marker,” Pearce exploded excitedly, “what about those crystals? What about those rocks Ralph brought back?”

Quickly Scott set the computer to work decoding the set of glyphs it had in store already. The results were forbidding. He read them out loud:

“Within these walls lies the powers of the heavens eternal. A people dead. A spirit alive.

“Beyond these walls lie â¦”

“Is that word Nazareth?” November probed quietly.

“Not Nazareth,” Scott corrected. “Nasaruâit means âto protect' â¦

“Beyond these walls lie the means to protect the sons of sons, the daughters of daughters. The children of we who were first.

“Read them aloud. Spoken like thunder. For they shall make men quake.

“Read them aloud. Spoken like thunder. If you have the means to understand.

“Behind these walls sit hope and terror.

“But upon these walls sit knowledge and power.

“Understand them. Proclaim them. Use them!