The Mongol Objective (2 page)

He envied his wife and son right now. Lydia and Alexander—warm, surrounded by familiar books, those timeless friends. And here he was, in one of the most inhospitable places in the world. And in a cave of all places. But if this find proved to be what he thought it was, everything would change. The archaeological equivalent of a meteor impact, finding evidence of an advanced civilization existing in Antarctica during prehistoric times would rock the academic world and shake the pillars of all major institutions. A civilization that could build such an immense statue, a guardian standing upon the field of an ancient city, with other monuments perhaps still preserved, frozen. And its libraries! Dare he even begin to hope? To dream that they could discover books containing all that lost knowledge?

“This could be Atlantis,” Ben Tillman said, reaching out a gloved hand to the closest thorny spike of the head’s crown. Free of ice, it was a greenish-blue color, oddly metallic. Tillman was dressed in a heavy parka and a woolen hood that all but concealed his face. Icicles hung from his mustache.

“Could be,” Andy Bellows said excitedly, rubbing his mittened hands together in the steam from his breath.

“Impossible,” Henrik Tarn said. The anthropologist who had been brought in two days ago was the tallest of the group. Almost comically tall, Caleb had thought when he first met the bony, long-armed man with a narrow face and dark, button-like eyes. “Plato was very specific about his location of the legendary submerged island: ‘beyond the pillars of Gibraltar, past the Aegean.’”

“But,” Caleb countered, gazing now in wonder at the hint of curvature, a giant eye protruding from the ice, “Plato could have been right and that’s where it
was
, but during a cataclysmic event, the earth’s axis flipped, the crustal plates shifted, entire continents shook free and—”

“—and Atlantis could have shifted to the South Pole,” Tarn supplied. “Yes, yes, I’ve heard that hokey theory about how the Earth’s crust is like the skin of an orange and can shift over the core. But it’s nonsense.”

“Then how do you explain this?”

Tarn shrugged, hugging his shoulders. “I’m not yet convinced. We need to dig, expose more of the structure.”

“What about sonar readings? Would they do it for you?” Caleb asked. Then louder into the microphone, “Orlando, when can we get that imaging equipment out here?”

The speaker crackled. “In the morning, I think. The colonel here said he’ll contact Fort Erickson and have them haul out the sensor equipment once the storm clears.”

Tarn grunted. “We’ll see.”

Caleb knelt closer to the head, reaching out to tentatively touch one of the spiked protrusions. “Definitely sun-worshippers. This is similar to the prevalent Greek depictions of Helios, the sun god. I’m dying to see the rest of this statue. Maybe . . . maybe just a touch . . .” He started peeling off his right mitten.

“Don’t be an idiot!” Phoebe shouted over his earpiece. “At those temperatures, your skin will fuse to it and burn right off.”

Reluctantly, feeling like he had just been scolded by a grade-school hall monitor, Caleb pulled his hand away and slipped his mitten back on.

Phoebe’s voice admonished, “You weren’t seriously about to touch it, were you?”

“Sorry, got caught up in the excitement. Thinking back to my dive under the Alexandrian harbor, where I had that psychic vision after touching one of the statue heads.”

“Well, try it without physical contact, dummy. Or else wait.”

“But we’ve already tried it,” Tillman said. “A couple trance sessions on the plane, and another in the station. Didn’t see squat.”

Tarn made a scoffing sound. “Self-induced daydreams and fanciful imaginations are no substitute for sound fieldwork.”

“Say what you’d like,” Caleb said, “but we saw this thing, exactly in this position. Orlando can tell you; he was one of the first to draw it when we started actively looking for the remnants of a past civilization.” He had to cut himself off before saying too much, indicating the real subject of their search, being the origin of the Emerald Tablet, the powerful but inscrutable tome that was once safeguarded under the Pharos. The tablet was the one artifact Caleb had kept for himself, believing its power so great that he needed to hide its existence even from his wife and the other Keepers.

Caleb thought for a moment. The questions they had asked on the plane had been broad, maybe too general. The very existence of the Emerald Tablet, hidden now in a vault under his own lighthouse back at Sodus Point, indicated that its creator, the legendary Hermes-Thoth, was a member of some pre-Egyptian, pre-Sumerian civilization, a race that not only pre-dated them, but may have actually given birth to those cultures—to their language, their myths, their very existence. One that had left no records other than those shrouded in legend.

So the latest Morpheus Initiative effort focused on just this problem: if there was an advanced civilization, one that had been eradicated in some tragic cataclysm, where could they find evidence of its existence?
Where was the Emerald Tablet created? And what, really, did it do?

A number of hits popped up through the intervening years of searching through the Morpheus Initiative’s efforts, through hundreds of trances and thousands of drawings. But the most consistent and similar image perceived among its members was this vision of an enormous half-concealed statue head, lying in this very position.

And then, almost coincidentally, came the call from Nelson Point in the South Pole. A two-time veteran, Colonel Hiltmeyer had known of the CIA’s Stargate Program, which utilized remote-viewing psychics during the Cold War (and secretly beyond). But while unaware of its previous leader’s extracurricular activities, Hiltmeyer had known enough about the Morpheus Initiative to seek its services when his research team stumbled across this potentially ancient discovery.

Now, Caleb knelt in the ice and crossed his legs.

“What are you doing?” Tarn asked. He had a shovel out and was carefully digging around the eye area.

“Just give me a minute,” Caleb said. “Bellows and Tillman, if you want to give it a try too, maybe just by being in the vicinity, we’ll get clearer visions.” He held out his hands, palms outward toward the statue, then closed his eyes.

Phoebe’s voice came through his speaker. “Orlando and I will try to RV it too. Just keep still so I can focus on the statue.”

“This is nuts,” said Tarn.

“Tell that guy to zip it,” Orlando said over the earpiece. “He’s getting annoying.”

“Hang on,” Caleb whispered, feeling suddenly dizzy. “I’m getting something. I’m in . . .

. . . a warehouse. Leaded windows. Dusty floor. Scaffolding around a partial spherical construction, still with lattice-grillwork on half of it, while heavy metal plates are fitted into position.

Looking down from the ceiling, then descending and circling around the structure, seeing teams of workers toiling with the frame, hoisting the sheets and hollowing out the eyes. Workers wearing blue jumpsuits, dust-masks and goggles. A rumbling sound and suddenly a forklift drives forward, preparing to lift the partial head onto a waiting flatbed truck.

Caleb staggered to his feet, scrambling and slipping on the ice. He tried to back up, then toppled forward, clutching one of the protruding sun-ray spikes to break his fall.

“It’s—”

. . . a partial head, the exterior sealed now, set in the back of a truck as the door slams shut, and the vision wheels around to see the back of a tall, lanky man in a black silk suit, nodding and talking on a cell phone.

“
It’s ready. Just as you specified. We’ll ship it to the research station tomorrow and have it transported to the cave by Thursday night. Hiltmeyer’s team is ready for it?”

The man listens, nods, then turns. His face—his too familiar face—pulls from the shadows . . .

“—a FAKE!” Pushing away from the statue with disgust, Caleb turned to the anthropologist.

But it was already too late.

“Damn psychics,” Henrik Tarn spat, as he pulled off a mitten and with a thin glove underneath fished out a gun from inside his coat. Aiming at Caleb, Tarn tugged at his collar and spoke into his own microphone. “We’ve got to move up the timetable.”

“What!” Caleb began, but then there came a shriek from Phoebe in his earpiece before the microphone shorted out, just as Tarn, sensing Ben Tillman foolishly rushing him, swiveled and shot him point-blank in the chest.

2.

Phoebe screamed as Colonel Hiltmeyer and another one of his staff pulled out strange-looking guns, and as soon as Tarn finished speaking, they fired.

“You’ve got to be kidding me” was all Orlando could say before the red dart thunked into his chest, the toxin spread, and he immediately slumped over. Phoebe ducked below one shot from the colonel, then dodged around a desk. No point in hiding, she rose and raced for the back room when the dart struck her leg and she hit the floor.

The red dart, embedded in her thigh, would have brought her down, if not for her artificial hip, thigh and a portion of her calf—all fitted and retro-purposed with a prosthesis after that tragic fall during the Belize expedition.

A quick thought, a plan forming:
Fake it!

She let her body go limp, flicked her eyelids, then closed them. She willed Hiltmeyer and his men to accept that she was now tranquilized like Orlando.

But why did they turn on us?
Who was behind this? Something so elaborately staged to bring them to this frozen pit of the world? And for what—not to kill them, or they would have done it already. Her thoughts raced as she heard the scrambling activity. Laptops unplugged and packed up. Coats zippered. The thudding of heavy boots.

A door whisked open, bringing with it a blast of frigid air and a new voice, somehow familiar but not enough for Phoebe to place it.

A woman’s voice. Controlled, confident. In charge, and with a note of satisfaction.

“Set the charges for ten minutes, then head back to the chopper. Leave that laptop. I need to see what’s going on down there.”

Colonel Hiltmeyer cleared his throat. “Tarn has it in hand.”

“I heard a shot.”

“Tillman, I think—dead.”

“Fine. But still, Tarn blew it. He was to keep them from remote viewing until I was ready.”

“Caleb didn’t even touch the thing, not from what I could see.”

“Doesn’t matter. He’s too good.”

Phoebe bit her lip and peeked with one eye but could only see the newcomer’s lean legs and chiseled calves, clad in tight white thermals, with shiny boots.
Who are you?

“Just go,” the woman snapped. “The chopper’s waiting. I’ll finish up here.”

“Fine. So, the tranquilizer . . . it’ll keep them knocked out for about an hour.”

“Your point?”

“Well, the detonators . . . You’re really just going to leave these two here?”

Silence.

Phoebe could almost feel Hiltmeyer shrinking away from whatever look the woman was giving him. “You know our orders. If you have a problem with them, you can stay here as well.”

“No problem, I just—”

“Then go.”

The door opened. The colonel followed his team out, and over the wind Phoebe could now hear the thrumming of the helicopter engine.

The woman turned and leaned over the desk. Phoebe inched around the leg of the table so she could get a better view, but could only see a head of short dark hair over the woman’s face as she spoke into the microphone.

#

Caleb stared at the red puddle steaming on the ice under Ben Tillman—Ben, the man Caleb had recruited directly from a seminar in Virginia. He had shown great promise, scoring high marks on the remote-visualization card tests, and once during a linked video conference call from over two hundred miles away he had drawn the exact sequence of symbols that Caleb had placed in a sealed envelope.

“Tarn! What are you doing?” He spread his arms, holding one hand out to Andy Bellows, warning him back. Andy was a hot-head, always impatient and full of Hollywood-like visions of tomb raiding and treasure hunting, never quite appreciating the hard work and finer points of the Morpheus Initiative’s process.

“This whole time, you and Hiltmeyer buried this thing to get us down here. . . .” Caleb fumed. He closed his eyes, cursing his stupidity.
I wasn’t asking the right questions.
“You’ve got someone in our group. Or you’ve hacked our servers. Found what we were drawing, the exact image and specifications of the colossal head, and then you built it and buried it where you knew it would send us running in a hurry.”

“Sorry,” said Andy Bellows, shrugging and then lowering his hands. He slid closer to Tarn, and in a forced Italian accent said, “But they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

Caleb stared weakly at Andy, then shook his head. “Damn it, kid. You don’t know what you’ve done. You don’t know who these people are.”

Then his earpiece crackled. “Hello down there, and hello Caleb. It’s been a long time, but I wonder, did you miss me?”

Under all his layers, Caleb broke out in a feverish sweat. He recalled a steamy night in Alexandria, entwined around a woman with olive skin and burning green eyes. “Nina?”

“Hi, honey.”

The air chilled, as if the wind and the cold had found a crack in the ice and rushed through to find him.

“Caleb, Caleb. How is it that you never tried to RV me after the disaster under the Pharos Lighthouse? Not even a glimpse, after all we meant to each other? Surely, with your vast abilities you would have seen me in a coma suffering the worst dreams you could possibly imagine. All the while, a part of me hoping, praying, believing that maybe you’d be my prince, that you’d come to my rescue and wake me with love’s true kiss.”

Caleb clenched his eyes shut, shaking his head. “You were in league with him, with George Waxman, all along. You killed so many of the Keepers.”

“Bygones, Caleb. Besides, I’ve watched you since then, you don’t trust your new friends either. None of the other Keepers. Even your wife.”