Raising Atlantis

Part One Discovery

1 Discovery Minus Six Minutes

2 Discovery Plus Twenty-One Days

3 Discovery Plus Twenty-Two Days

4 Discovery Plus Twenty-Three Days, Six Hours 5 Discovery Plus Twenty-Three Days

6 Discovery Plus Twenty-Three Days, Seven Hours 7 Discovery Plus Twenty-Four Days, Fifteen Hours 8 Discovery Plus Twenty-Four Days, Sixteen Hours 9 Discovery Plus Twenty-Four Days, Sixteen Hours 10 Discovery Plus Twenty-Four Days, Sixteen Hours Part Two Descent

11 Descent Hour One

12 Descent Hour Three

13 Descent Hour Four

14 Descent Hour Five

15 Descent Hour Five

16 Descent Hour Six

17 Descent Hour Seven

18 Descent Hour Eight

19 Descent Hour Nine

20 Descent Hour Nine

21 Descent Hour Nine

Part Three Dawn

22 Dawn Minus Fifteen Hours

23 Dawn Minus Fifteen Hours

24 Dawn Minus Fourteen Hours

25 Dawn Minus Thirteen Hours

26 Dawn Minus Twelve Hours

27 Dawn Minus Eleven Hours

28 Dawn Minus Six Hours

29 Dawn Minus Two Hours

30 Dawn Minus One Hour

Part Four Doomsday

31 Dawn Minus Forty-Five Minutes

32 Dawn Minus Twenty-Five Minutes

33 Dawn Minus Twenty Minutes

34 Dawn Minus Fifteen Minutes

35 Dawn Minus Two Minutes

36 Dawn

37 Dawn Plus One Hour

38 Dawn: The Day After

39 Dawn: Day Two

40 Dawn: The Third Day

The Facts Behind Raising Atlantis

The #1 Bestselling Ebook

“RAISING ATLANTIS

pulls you into an astonishing world of scientific fact and fiction, suspense, and good old-fashioned adventure.

Thomas Greanias is a superb writer who knows how to tell a tale with style and substance. Thoroughly entertaining.”

—NELSON DeMILLE

“RAISING ATLANTIS

is a wonderfully honed cliff-hanger—an outrageous adventure with a wild dose of the supernatural.”

—CLIVE CUSSLER

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

AnOriginal Publication of POCKET BOOKS

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Copyright © 2005 by Thomas Greanias All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

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For Laura

Acknowledgments

For publishing this novel and getting it into the hands of more readers around the world than any first novel deserves, I’m forever grateful to my agent, Simon Lipskar, who believed in me from the beginning, and to my editor, Emily Bestler, who made it all possible.

For making the original eBook a number one best seller on Amazon, I thank the board of Atlantis Interactive, Inc., and the tens of thousands of subscribers to @lantisTV from all seven continents—including Antarctica.

For graciously lending me their ears and world-class expertise in the field of archaeology, I owe a great debt to Thomas R. Pickering, former under secretary of state for political affairs at the U.S. State Department and notable lay archaeologist; Dr. Zahi Hawass, director general of the Giza Pyramids for the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities and the world’s foremost authority on the Great Pyramid; and Dr. Kent Weeks, professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo and director of the Theban Mapping Project. Thank you, gentlemen, for your time and encouragement. All errors and embellishments in this fiction are mine and mine alone.

For expanding my perspective on the geopolitics of Antarctica, I must also thank the State Department’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs; the U.S. Center for Polar Archives, Washington, D.C.; the U.S. Naval Support Force, Antarctica; the crew of the aircraft carrier U.S.S.Constellation; and members of various government agencies who have asked not to be named as sources of sensitive information.

For keeping my feet firmly planted on unstable ground, I am indebted to the research of Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson, Paul Richards of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and UC Berkeley geophysicist Raymond Jeanloz.

For their imaginative investigations of the lost continent of Atlantis and the astronomical alignments of the Giza Pyramids and temples of South America, I must acknowledge the contributions of authors Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, Colin Wilson, Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval. For enlightenment into the international and spiritual ramifications of archaeology, I am grateful to William J.

Fulco, S.J., Ph.D., at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

For the encouragement to write a damn good novel, I thank my friend and mentor, James N. Frey, the finest fiction coach in America. For telling it like it is, however awful, I thank überpollster and pal George Barna of the Barna Research Group. For all those lunches, I thank Doug Lagerstrom.

Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Laura Greanias, executive news editor of theLos Angeles Times and my unofficial editor. Though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the sea, I will always love you.

Nothing lasts long under the same form. I have seen what once was solid earth now changed into sea, and lands created out of what was ocean. Ancient anchors have been found on mountaintops.

—Pythagoras of Samos,

Greek mathematician (c.582–c.507B.C .) In a polar region there is continual disposition of ice, which is not symmetrically distributed about the pole. The earth’s rotation acts on these unsymmetrically deposited masses, and produces centrifugal momentum that is transmitted to the rigid crust of the earth. The constantly increasing centrifugal momentum produced this way will, when it reaches a certain point, produce a movement of the earth’s crust over the rest of the earth’s body, and this will displace the polar regions toward the equator.

—Albert Einstein,

U.S. physicist (A.D. 1879–1955)

Part One

Discovery

1

Discovery Minus Six Minutes

East Antarctica

LIEUTENANTCOMMANDERTERRANCEDRAKEof the U.S. Naval Support Force, Antarctica, paced behind a snow dune as he waited for the icy gale to pass. He badly needed to take a leak. But that would mean breaking international law.

Drake shivered as a blast of polar air swept swirling sheets of snow across the stark, forsaken wasteland that seemed to stretch forever. Fantastic snow dunes calledsastrugi rose into the darkness, casting shadows that looked like craters on an alien moonscape. Earth’s “last wilderness” was a cold and forbidding netherworld, he thought, a world man was never meant to inhabit.

Drake moved briskly to keep himself warm. He felt the pressure building in his bladder. The Antarctic Treaty had stringent environmental protection protocols, summed up in the rule: “Nothing is put into the environment.” That included pissing on the ice. He had been warned by the nature geeks at the National Science Foundation that the nitrogen shock to the environment could last for thousands of years.

Instead he was expected to tear open his food rations and use a bag as a urinal. Unfortunately, he didn’t pack rations for reconn patrols.

Drake glanced over his shoulder at several white-domed fiberglass huts in the distance. Officially, the mission of the American “research team” was to investigate unusual seismic activity deep beneath the ice pack. Three weeks earlier the vibes from one of those subglacial temblors had sliced an iceberg the size of Rhode Island off the coast of East Antarctica. Floating off on ocean currents at about three miles a day, it would take ten years to drift into warmer waters and melt.

Ten years, thought Drake. That’s how far away he was from nowhere. Which meant anything could happen out here and nobody would hear him scream. He pushed the thought out of his mind.

When Drake first signed up for duty in Antarctica back at Port Hueneme, California, an old one-armed civilian cook who slopped on the mystery meat in the officers’ mess hall had suggested he read biographies of men like Ernest Shackleton, James Cook, John Franklin and Robert Falcon Scott—Victorian and Edwardian explorers who had trekked to the South Pole for British glory. The cook told him to view this job as a test of endurance, a rite of passage into true manhood. He said a tour in Antarctica would be a love affair—exotic and intoxicating—and that Drake would be changed in some fundamental, almost spiritual way. And just when this hostile paradise had seduced him, he was going to have to leave and hate doing so.

Like hell he would.

From day one he couldn’t wait to get off this ice cube.

Especially after learning upon his arrival from his subordinates that it was in Antarctica that the old man back in Port Hueneme had lost his arm to frostbite. Everyone in his unit had been duped by the stupid cook.

Now it was too late for Drake to turn back. He couldn’t even return to Port Hueneme if he wanted to. The navy had closed its Antarctica training center there shortly after he arrived in this frozen hell. As for the one-armed cook, he was probably spending his government-funded retirement on the beach, whistling at girls in bikinis. Drake, on the other hand, often woke up with blinding headaches and a dry mouth.

Night after night the desertlike air sucked the moisture from his body. Each morning he awoke with all the baggage of a heavy night of binge drinking without the benefits of actually having been drunk.

Drake shoved a bulky glove into his pocket and felt the frozen rabbit’s foot his fiancée, Loretta, had given him.

Soon it would dangle from the rearview mirror of the red Ford Mustang convertible he was going to buy them for their honeymoon, courtesy of his furloughed pay. He was piling it up down here. There simply was no place to blow it. McMurdo Station, the main U.S. outpost in Antarctica, was 1,500 miles away and offered its two hundred winter denizens an ATM, a coffeehouse, two bars, and a male-female ratio of ten-to-one.

Real civilization was 2,500 miles away at

“Cheech”—Christchurch, New Zealand. It might as well be Mars.

So who on earth was going to see him paint the snow?

Drake paused. The gale had blown over. At the moment, the katabatic winds were dead calm, the silence awesome. But without warning the winds could come up again and gust to a deafening 200 mph. Such was the unpredictable nature of Antarctica’s interior snow deserts.

Now was his chance.

Drake unzipped his freezer suit and relieved himself. The nip of the cold stung like an electric socket. Temperatures threatened to plunge to 130° below tonight, at which point exposed flesh would freeze in less than thirty seconds.

Drake counted down from thirty under his foggy breath. At T minus seven seconds he zipped up his pants, said a brief prayer of thanks, and looked up at the heavens. The three belt stars of the Orion constellation twinkled brightly over the barren, icy surface. The “kings of the East,” as he called them, were the only witnesses to his dirty deed. Wise men indeed, he thought with a smile, when suddenly he felt the ice rumble faintly beneath his boots before fading away.

Another shaker, he realized. Better get the readings.

Drake turned back toward the white domes of the base, his boots crunching in the snow. The domes should have been a regulation yellow or red or green to attract attention. But attention was not what Uncle Sam wanted. Not when the Antarctic Treaty barred military personnel or equipment on the Peace Continent, except for “research purposes.”