The Hunt for Atlantis (35 page)

The second helicopter followed suit. Flying stones pounded its hull like hail as the avalanche smashed down, causing a huge chunk of rock to shear away from the side of the mountain, the ledge disintegrating in an enormous cloud of dust.

The Path of the Moon was gone forever, the road to the last outpost of Atlantis swept away.

Nina pressed her hands against the helicopter’s window as she watched the destruction below. Other rock slides tumbled down the mountain, the Golden Peak of Tibetan legend shaken to its core.

And everything within … lost.

“Eddie …” she whispered. Losing him once had been bad enough. Twice was almost too much to bear. Her eyes filled with tears.

Chase screamed as the blast wave ripped past, dust and grit and fragmented stone scouring his exposed skin. The noise was unimaginable, a roaring thunder shaking every bone, every organ in his body as he was swept helplessly down the shaft.

Light in the tunnel, a rising brightness …

Not daylight ahead, but fire behind, the burning fuel-air mix superheating as the collapsing cave compressed it and drove it after them.

And all he could do was skid down the slope towards the darkness ahead, while the glow from behind went from red to orange to yellow as the fire rushed after him—

A rectangle of daylight suddenly burst open before him, the snow covering the exit blown away. Chase had no time to reflect on his luck. Instead he acted entirely on reflex as he shot out of the end of the shaft onto a snow-covered pile of scree, throwing himself sideways to avoid the tongue of flame.

Snow flashed to steam as a fireball erupted from the shaft behind him. He hit the ground hard, the layer of snow doing little to cushion the impact as he slammed against the rock beneath.

But there wasn’t even time to feel the pain, because a hissing rattle from above warned him that a wave of loose stones was careening down the mountainside—

He rolled and flattened himself against the rock face, praying that the vestigial overhang was large enough to deflect the falling stones over him rather than crushing him flat.

Rocks ranging in size from a clenched fist to a man’s torso blew apart like grenades above him. Chase shielded his head as the rest of him was pounded by flying fragments. He yelled, barely hearing his own voice over the noise of colliding stones.

Eventually the tumult died down. Painfully Chase forced himself onto his knees, chunks of debris clattering off him, and took in his surroundings.

The slight lip on the rock face had saved him—less than a foot away was a boulder, split cleanly in two by the impact, which would have crushed his skull like a watermelon had it landed on him. Beyond that was a random mass of broken dark stone. Through the dust, the snowy peaks of the Himalayas stretched into the distance.

Looking down, he saw he was on a ledge overlooking a wide valley. The slope seemed shallow enough to descend without climbing gear.

Which was lucky, because the sum total of his equipment now amounted to whatever he had in his pockets. He’d even lost his flashlight.

An odd, out-of-place smell reached him: steam. Misty swirls where the fire had evaporated the snow coiled past, carried on the breeze. He looked around, and saw Starkman partly buried under lumps of stone. He ran to him. “Jason! Come on, stay with me,” he said as he threw the larger pieces aside. “Can you hear me?”

“Eddie?” Starkman’s voice was dazed. “Is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Are you hurt? Can you move?”

“I dunno, let me … ow, shit!”

“What?” Chase asked. “What is it?” If Starkman were seriously injured, there was practically nothing he could do to get him off the mountain.

“I landed on my keys …”

Chase stared at him, then started to laugh. “Oh, you bastard, you funny fucker,” he finally spluttered. Starkman joined in, wheezing. “Come on, get your lazy American arse off the ground.”

Starkman pushed himself upright. His eyepatch had been torn off, exposing a sunken eye socket behind the discolored, closed lid. “Son of a bitch,” he groaned. “That hurts …”

Chase looked up at the mountain. Smoke and dust drifted from its flanks. “Well, your boss got what he wanted,” he sighed. “The place’s been blown to buggery—nobody’ll ever get anything out of there again.”

“Yeah, but your boss got what he wanted too,” Starkman reminded him.

“He stopped being my boss the second he tried to kill me,” Chase said coldly. “Think I’ll have to have words with the bastard about that.”

“You never did take betrayal very well, did you?” said Starkman pointedly.

Chase regarded him silently for a long moment. “Not really.”

“Still not the forgiving type?”

“No. But,” he added, “there’s some things I can forget a bit more easily than others. Temporarily.”

Starkman’s good eye watched him warily. “I never touched her, Eddie. Whatever she may have told you, I never screwed around with your wife. I’d never do that to a friend.”

“You know, Jason,” said Chase, holding out his hand, “I actually believe you.”

“You offering a truce, Eddie?”

“For now.” Starkman took his hand; Chase pulled him up. “I think we both want the same thing—to get that bastard Frost for what he’s done. And I’ve got to rescue Nina.”

“You stopped being paid to protect her at the same time Frost stopped being your boss.”

“Money stopped being the reason I was protecting her a while ago,” Chase told him, getting a raised eyebrow in response.

They both looked around at a new noise. Early morning light glinting from their windows, Frost’s helicopters rounded the mountain, rotor noise booming down the valley as they sped into the distance. Chase stared after them, then turned back to Starkman, holding out his hand again. “Even with Qobras dead, do you still have access to the Brotherhood’s resources?”

“Some of them,” replied Starkman. “What do you have in mind?”

“I fancy a trip to Norway. You interested?”

“Definitely.” They shook hands. “Fight to the end, Eddie?”

“Fight to the end.”

Starkman looked around. “Just one slight problem—we’re stuck in the Himalayas with no transport and no equipment.”

Chase managed a half-smile. “Good thing I looked at a map before coming here.” He pointed down the valley. “If you’re up for a yomp, there’s a village that way. We should be able to reach it by tonight.” The half-smile became a full one. “I know a girl there …”

Norway

The stark beauty of Ravnsfjord stretched out below her as the Gulfstream descended, but Nina barely noticed it.

Her mind was elsewhere, thinking back over the events of the past days. Despite all Kari’s efforts to help, she still felt a sadness, an underlying core of loss. The resurgent grief she’d felt on seeing the bodies of her parents, Chase’s death … and the destruction of Atlantis itself, every last trace of the civilization finally wiped out by Qobras. All buried, irretrievable, the search that had defined her existence brought to an abrupt end.

In a way, her life as she had known it was over. Everything in her world had changed.

“Are you all right?” Kari asked.

“Hmm? Yes, I’m fine. Why?”

“You looked a little … distant.”

“Did I?” Nina considered it. “I suppose I did. I was just thinking.”

“About what?”

“About how I found what I’d been looking for all these years, I found Atlantis … but now it’s gone. Everything’s different. And I don’t… I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”

Kari smiled. “What you’re going to do, Dr. Nina Wilde, is take your place with us. You’re one of us, and we always look after our own.”

“I haven’t really thanked you for that. For everything you’ve done.”

“You don’t need to thank me. And you haven’t lost Atlantis.”

“How so?”

“Because now we can build a new Atlantis. We don’t have to look to the past anymore, because we’ll be creating the future.”

Nina cocked an eyebrow. “Just out of interest, when are you going to tell me exactly how you’re going to be creating this future? I still don’t see how a sample of eleven-thousand-year-old DNA can change the world.”

“It will, trust me.” Kari leaned closer. “I think you’re ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“It’s time I showed you what we’re going to do. How we’re going to remake the world.”

The plane made its final turn, dropping towards the long runway.

Chase gave Starkman a dubious look. “If you had this operation planned all along, why didn’t you just bloody do it and save everyone a lot of trouble?”

“We didn’t know for sure what Frost was doing. And Giovanni didn’t want to risk an attack unless it became absolutely necessary,” Starkman explained. “It would have exposed the Brotherhood—there would have been no way to keep the organization secret anymore.”

“I think the time for sneaking about’s over.” Chase rose from his seat and walked across the aircraft’s hold to peer out of a porthole. The plane, a twin-prop C-123 Provider cargo aircraft, had crossed the Norwegian coast a few minutes earlier, and was now cruising north over the snow-streaked landscape.

They would soon be making a steep descent, however.

Chase looked back at the other passengers in the hold. Twelve of Qobras’s—now Starkman’s—men, all members of the Brotherhood, assembled following the four days it took the two survivors of the Golden Peak to return to Europe.

He just hoped twelve men was enough.

“Far,” said Kari, entering Frost’s office above the biolab with Nina at her side. Frost was at his desk, the vista of Ravnsfjord spread out behind him through the windows. “I think it’s time. Nina’s ready.”

Frost’s expression suggested to Nina that he wasn’t himself sure, but he said nothing.

“What is it you want to tell me?” she asked. “What’s the big secret? Kari’s been very mysterious about it.”

“The big secret, Dr. Wilde …” Frost began. Kari gave him a look. “I mean, Nina. If that’s all right with you?”

“Fine by me,” Nina said with a grin.

Frost smiled back, then stood up. “The big secret, as you say, is that… well, today we are going to change the world. Forever.”

“That’s quite a big challenge.”

“Indeed it is. But it’s a challenge I have been working on all my life—and thanks to you, it can now be accomplished. Your discovery of Atlantis made it possible.”

“But everything was destroyed,” said Nina. “Maybe we can recover some relics from under the sediment at Atlantis itself, but all the intact structures we found, all the artifacts they contained … they’re gone.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Frost said.

“It doesn’t? But…”

“The DNA samples I recovered from the bodies of the last king and queen are worth more than any amount of gold or orichalcum. They are what will change the world. Save the world, even.”

“How?” Nina asked. “Are you using them to create some sort of vaccine or something?”

“Something,” replied Frost, smiling again, this time with an air of mystery. “Come with me and I’ll show you.” He rounded his desk, and was about to join Nina and Kari when his intercom beeped. Clearly irritated at the interruption, he pushed a button to answer the call. “What is it?”

“Sir,” said Schenk’s voice from the speaker, “the control tower just informed me that a plane has requested permission for an emergency landing. They have engine trouble, and can’t make it to Bergen.”

“Where are they now?”

“About ten minutes out, coming from the south.”

Frost’s lips tightened. “Very well, give them permission to land. But… watch them.”

“Yes, sir.” Schenk closed the line.

“Sorry about that,” said Frost, joining Nina and Kari.

“No problem,” Nina told him. “I mean, if you’re going to save the entire world, you might as well start with just one plane, right?”

“Indeed.” Frost smiled. “Come, follow me. I’ll show you how.”

“They’ve given us emergency landing permission,” Starkman told Chase over the noise of the engines. “Ten minutes.”

“Any problems?” asked Chase.

“Norwegian ATC keeps wanting to know why they don’t have our flight plan. The pilot’s stalling them, but I think they’re getting suspicious.”

“So long as they don’t get suspicious enough to send fighters after us, it won’t matter.” Chase turned to the other men in the cabin. “All right! Ten minutes, lads! Better get ready to jump!”

Frost led the two women into the containment area, passing through another airlock and proceeding deeper into the underground facility.

“In here,” he said. The door at the end of the corridor was solid steel with no view of the room beyond, unlike the transparent aluminum entrances to the other labs. The logo of a trident was painted on the metal. He pushed his thumb against a biometric reader beside it. The heavy door slid open. “Please, you first.”

Nina wasn’t sure what she was looking at as she entered. A few pieces of scientific equipment she vaguely recognized, but most of the gleaming hardware was a mystery. The banks of supercomputers at the rear of the large lab were among those that were easy to identify, towering blue cabinets hooked up to liquid cooling systems. In one corner of the lab was an isolation chamber; it had windows, but they were blacked out.

“This,” began Frost with an air of theatricality, “is where my life’s ambition has finally been fulfilled. Everything else in my business empire merely supports what has been done in this room. For thirty years I have been using the resources of the Frost Foundation to search the entire world, to identify the genetic lineage of every group of people on the planet.”

“Looking for the Atlantean gene?” Nina asked.

“Precisely. Only about one percent of the world’s population carries what I would consider to be a ‘pure’ form of the genome—we are members of that one percent.”

“One percent of the world … that’s, what, sixty-five million people?”

“Equivalent to the population of the United Kingdom, yes. But they are spread out all across the planet, in every ethnic group. Then there are those who have an impure form of the genetic markers—either from dilution over time due to interbreeding with those who do not possess it, or from natural mutation. These people make up around fifteen percent of the population.”

“Nine hundred and seventy-five million,” Nina said immediately.

Frost smiled. “You’re definitely one of us. One of the traits of the Atlantean genome is an innate skill with logical systems like mathematics.”

“Considering what you’ve found out,” added Kari, “we now think it’s almost certain that the descendants of the ancient Atlanteans were entirely responsible for the development of the numerical and linguistic systems all around the world.”

“Even after the sinking of Atlantis itself, the Atlantean survivors were still the driving force in human civilization,” said Frost. “They were the leaders, the inventors, the discoverers. They devised the systems that allowed humanity to thrive and expand—language, agriculture, medicine. But ironically …” his expression darkened, “in doing so, they sowed the seeds of their own subjugation. Before they brought civilization to the world, the survival of the human race was entirely in the hands of natural selection. Those who were weak perished. But by reducing the threat from external forces of nature, the Atlanteans made it possible for the weak to thrive.”

“I don’t know if I’d put it quite like that…” Nina began.

“I would,” Frost insisted. “And the process has accelerated out of control over the last fifty years. Within four years, the world’s population is predicted to reach seven billion. Seven billion people. That is an unsustainable figure. And eighty-four percent of them do not possess the Atlantean genome. That means more than four-fifths of the entire population of the world is useless.”

Nina was startled by the bluntness of his words. “What do you mean, useless?”

“I mean exactly that. All those billions provide nothing of value to humanity. They don’t innovate, or create, or even think. They just exist, breeding and consuming.”

“How can you say that?” Nina protested. “That’s—that’s just…”

“Nina,” said Frost, leaning closer, “just look at your own country. You can’t have failed to see it. America is dominated by the indolent, the stupid, the wilfully ignorant masses who do nothing but consume. Democracy does nothing but perpetuate the system, because it allows the masses to take the path of least resistance and continue to avoid work, avoid thought, and achieve nothing. And those who should be leading them out of that state have become corrupted by greed, wanting to do nothing more than exploit them—for money!” He sounded almost disgusted by the word. “That is not the role of a leader! The Atlanteans knew that for society to advance, the people had to be led, not left to indulge their gluttony.”

“But the Atlanteans fell into the same trap,” Nina reminded him. “Remember Critias? ‘They appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power.’ And the gods destroyed them for it.”

“A mistake that will not be repeated.”

“It’ll always be repeated! Atlantean or not, everybody’s still human. ‘The human nature got the upper hand,’ as Plato put it.”

“We will learn from the past.”

“How?” Nina demanded. “You’re going to do—what? Change the world with a DNA sample from an eleven-thousand-year-old corpse?”

“That is exactly what we’re going to do!” said Frost. He gestured at the supercomputers. “Until now, these machines have been working on simulations, coming up with a million, a billion variations of the same thing. But without a sample of pure, untainted Atlantean DNA to use as a base, there was no way to know which was the right one. Even our DNA has been changed by time to some degree, and we are the closest there is in the modern world to pure-blooded Atlanteans. But now …” He looked at the black-windowed chamber. “Now, I know exactly what those changes are. And I have been able to take them into account.”

“Into account for what?” asked Nina.

“For a way to restore the world to how it used to be—how it should always have been. A world where the Atlanteans retake their place as the rightful rulers of humanity, to lead them to new heights without being held back by the useless, unproductive masses.” He walked across the lab, Kari following. Nina went with them almost against her will, unable to take in what Frost was saying. Had he gone mad? He sounded nearly as crazy as Qobras!

“This,” said Frost, indicating a glass-sided cabinet with thick rubber seals, “is what the discovery of the true Atlantean DNA has finally let me create. It was one of the variants the computers had simulated—but until now there was no way to know if it was the right one.”

Nina peered into the cabinet. Inside was a line of glass and steel cylinders filled with a colorless liquid.

She was certain it wasn’t water.

“What are they?” she asked uneasily.

“That,” Frost told her, “is what I call Trident. Poseidon’s most powerful weapon. Each of those cylinders holds in suspension a genetically engineered virus.”

Nina jumped back from the glass. “What?”

“It’s perfectly safe,” Kari assured her. “At least to us.”

“What do you mean, to us?”

“We are immune,” said Frost, “or rather, the virus is harmless to us. It’s been engineered so that it cannot attack the unique genetic sequence contained in Atlantean DNA, even if the sequence has been mutated. But to anyone who does not possess that DNA sequence … it is one hundred percent lethal.”

Nina felt as though the air was being drawn out of the room. “Oh my God,” she gasped. “Are you insane? No, don’t answer that—you are insane!”

“No, Nina, please listen,” implored Kari. “I know this is hard for you to accept, but deep down, if you look past all your social programming, you know we’re right. The world is a mess, and it’s getting worse—the only way to stop it from passing the point of no return is for us to restore the rule of the Atlantean elite.”

“Thinking that mass murder is a bad thing is not social programming!” Nina spat. “Are you seriously telling me you’re planning to wipe out eighty-four percent of the human race? That’s almost five and a half billion people!”

“It’s necessary,” said Frost. “If we don’t do it, then humanity will be choked by its own waste. The worthless will outnumber us by hundreds to one, and consume every available resource until they are all gone. This way, those fit to rule will be able to rebuild the world as it should always have been. The Frost Foundation will unite the survivors worldwide.”

Nina slowly backed away. “With you in charge, huh? You are out of your fucking mind. You’re talking about people, not waste! When were you planning to start your little apocalypse?”