Lost City nf-5, Page 4

"It is her heart that is important," LeBlanc replied. Nevertheless, they were crawling at a tortoise pace when the road came to an end. They got out of the car and LeBlanc handed them each a shoulder harness, donning one himself. A box of supplies was strapped onto each harness.

  Thurston apologized. "Sorry to recruit you as a Sherpa. We flew in supplies for the entire three weeks we're here, but we went through our from age and vin faster than we expected and used the occasion of your visit to bring in more stuff."

  "Not a problem," Rawlins said with a good-natured grin, expertly adjusting the weight so it rode easily on his shoulders. "I used to jackass supplies to the White Mountain huts in New Hampshire before I became an ink-stained hack."

  LeBlanc led the way along a path that rose for about a hundred yards through scraggly pines. Above the tree line the ground hardened into flat expanses of rock. The rock was sprayed with daubs of yellow spray paint to mark the trail. Before long, the trail became steeper and smoother where the rocks had been buffed by thousands of years of glacial activity. Water from runoff made the hard surface slick and treacherous to navigate. From time to time they crossed crevasses filled with wet snow.

  The reporter was huffing and puffing with exertion and altitude.

  He sighed with relief when they stopped at last on a shelf next to a wall of black rock that went up at an almost vertical angle. They were close to two thousand feet above the lake, which shimmered in the rays of the noonday sun. The glacier was out of sight around an escarpment, but Rawlins could feel the raw cold that it radiated, as if someone had left a refrigerator door open.

  Thurston pointed to a round opening encased in concrete at the base of the vertical cliff. "Welcome to the Ice Palace."

  "It looks like a drainage culvert," Rawlins said.

  Thurston laughed and crouched low, ducking his head as he led the way into a corrugated metal tunnel about five feet in diameter. The others followed him in a stooping walk that was made necessary by their backpacks. The passage ended after about a hundred feet and opened into a dimly lit tunnel. The shiny wet orange walls of meta-mprphic rock were striped black with darker minerals.

  Rawlins looked around in wonder. "You could drive a truck through this thing." "

  With room to spare. "It's thirty feet high and thirty feet wide," Thurston said.

  "Too bad you couldn't squeeze Fifi through that culvert," Rawlins said.

  "We've thought of it. There's an entrance big enough for a car near the power plant, but Bernie is afraid she'd get beat up running around these tunnels."

  "Fifi has a very delicate constitution," LeBlanc said with a snort.

  The Frenchman opened a plastic locker set against a wall. He passed around rubber boots and hard hats with miners' lights on the crowns.

  Minutes later, they set off into the tunnel, the scuffle of their boots echoing off the walls. As they plodded along, Rawlins squinted into the gloom beyond the reach of his headlamp. "Not exactly the Great White Way."

  "The power company put the lighting in when they drilled through. A lot of those dead bulbs haven't been replaced."

  "You've probably been asked this, but what brought you into glaciology?" Rawlins said.

  "That's not the first time I've heard the question. People think glaciologists are a bit odd. We study huge, ancient, slow-moving masses of ice that take centuries to get anywhere. Hardly a job for a grown man, wouldn't you say, Bernie?"

  "Maybe not, but I met a nice Eskimo girl once in the Yukon."

  "Spoken like a true glaciologist," Thurston said. "We have in common a love of beauty and a desire to get outdoors. Many of us were seduced into this calling by our first awe-inspiring view of an ice field." He gestured around at the walls of the tunnel. "So it's ironic that we spend weeks at a time under the glacier, far from the sunlight, like a bunch of moles."

  "Look what it has done to me," LeBlanc said. "Constant thirty-five degrees and one hundred percent humidity. I used to be tall and blond-haired, but I have shrunk and become a shaggy beast."

  "You've been a short shaggy beast for as long as I've known you," Thurston said. "We're down here for three-week stints, and I agree that we do seem a bit mole like But even Bernie will agree that we're lucky. Most glaciologists only observe an ice field from above. We can walk right up and tickle its belly."

  "What exactly is the nature of your experiments?" Rawlins asked.

  "We're conducting a three-year study on how glaciers move and what they do to the rock they slide over. Hope you can make that sound more exciting when you write your article."

  "It won't be too hard. With all the interest in global warming, glaciology has become a hot subject."

  "So I hear. The recognition is long overdue. Glaciers are affected by climate, so they can tell us to within a few degrees what the temperature was on earth thousands of years ago. In addition, they trigger changes in the climate. Ah, here we are, Club Dormeur."

  Four small buildings that looked like trailer homes sat end to end within a bay carved from the wall.

  Thurston opened a door to the nearest structure. "All the comforts of home," he said. "Four bedrooms with room for eight researchers, kitchen, bath with shower. Normally, I've got a geologist and other scientists, but we're down to a skeleton crew consisting of Bernie, a young research assistant from Uppsala University and me. You can dump those supplies here. We're about a thirty-minute walk from the lab. We've got phone connections between the entrance, research tunnel and lab room. I'd better let the folks at the observatory know we're back."

  He picked up a wall phone and said a few words. His smile turned into a puzzled frown.

  "Say again." He listened intently. "Okay. We'll be right there."

  "Is there anything wrong, professor?" LeBlanc said.

  Thurston furrowed his brow. "I just talked to my research assistant. Incredible!"

  "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" LeBlanc said.

  Thurston had a stunned expression on his face. "He says he's found a man frozen in the ice."

  TWO HUNDRED FEET below the surface of Lac du Dormeur in waters cold enough to kill an unprotected human, the glowing sphere floated above the gravelly bottom of the glacial lake like a will-o'-the-wisp in a Georgia swamp. Despite the hostile environment, the man and woman seated side by side inside the transparent acrylic cabin were as relaxed as loungers on a love seat. The man was husky in build, with shoulders like twin battering rams. Exposure to sea and sun had bronzed the rugged features that were bathed in the soft orange light from the instrument panel, and bleached the pale, prematurely steely gray hair almost to the color of platinum. With his chiseled profile and intense expression, Kurt Austin had the face of a warrior carved on a Roman victory column. But the flinty hardness that lay under the burnished features was softened by an easy smile, and the piercing coral-blue eyes sparkled with good humor.

  Austin was the leader of NUMA's Special Assignments Team, created by former NUMA director Admiral James Sandecker, now vice president of the United States, for undersea missions that often took

  place secretly outside the realm of government oversight. A marine engineer by education and experience, Austin had come to NUMA from the CIA, where he had worked for a little-known branch that specialized in underwater intelligence gathering.

  After coming over to NUMA, Austin had assembled a team of experts that included Joe Zavala, a brilliant engineer specializing in underwater vehicles; Paul Trout, a deep-ocean geologist; and Trout's wife, Gamay Morgan-Trout, a highly skilled diver who had specialized in nautical archaeology before attaining her doctorate in marine biology. Working together, they had conducted many successful probes into strange and sinister enigmas on and under the world's oceans.

  Not every job that Austin undertook was filled with danger. Some, like his latest assignment, were quite pleasant and more than made up for the bumps, bruises and scars he had collected on various NUMA assignments. Although he had known his female companion only a few days, he had become thoroughly entranc
ed by her. Skye Labelle was in her late thirties. She had olive skin and mischievous violet-blue eyes that peered out from under the brim of her woolen hat. Her hair was dark brown, bordering on black. Her mouth was too wide to be called classical, but her lips were lush and sensual. She had a good body, but it would never make the cover of Sports Illustrated. Her voice was low and cool, and when she spoke it was obvious she had a quick intelligence.

  Although she was striking rather than pretty, Austin thought she was one of the most attractive women he had ever met. She reminded him of a portrait of a young raven-haired countess he had seen hanging on the wall of the Louvre. Austin had admired how the artist had cleverly caught the passion and unabashed frankness in the subject's gaze. The woman in the painting had a deviltry in her eyes, as if she wanted to throw off her regal finery and run barefoot through a meadow. He remembered wishing he could have met her in person. And now, it seemed, he had.

  "Do you believe in reincarnation?" Austin said, thinking about the museum portrait.

  Skye blinked in surprise. They had been talking about glacial geology.

  "I don't know. Why do you ask?" She spoke American English with a slight French accent.

  "No reason." Austin paused. "I have another, more personal question."

  She gave him a wary look. "I think I know. You want to know about my name."

  "I've never met anyone named Skye Labelle before."

  "Some people believe I must be named after a Las Vegas stripper."

  Austin chuckled. "It's more likely that someone in your family had a poetic turn of mind."

  "My crazy parents," she said, with a roll of her eyes. "My father was sent to the U.S. as a diplomat. One day he went to the Albuquerque hot air balloon festival and from that day on, he became a fanatical aeronaut. My older brother was named Thaddeus after the early balloonist Thaddeus Lowe. My American mother is an artist, and something of a free spirit, so she thought the idea of my name was wonderful. Father insists he named me after the color of my eyes, but everyone knows babies' eyes are neutral when they are first born. I don't mind. I think it's a nice name."

  "They don't get any nicer than Beautiful Sky."

  "Merci. And thank you for all this!" She gazed through the bubble and clapped her hands in childlike joy. "This is absolutely wonderful^. I never dreamed that my studies in archaeology would take me under the water inside a big bubble."

  "It must beat polishing medieval armor in a musty museum," Austin said.

  Skye had a warm, uninhibited laugh. "I spend very little time in

  museums except when I'm organizing an exhibition. I do a lot of corporate jobs these days to support my research work."

  Austin raised an eyebrow. "The thought of Microsoft and General Motors hiring an expert in arms and armor makes me wonder about their motives."

  "Think about it. To survive, a corporation must try to kill or wound its competition while defending itself. Figuratively speaking."

  "The original 'cutthroat competition," " Austin said.

  "Not bad. I'll use that phrase in my next presentation."

  "How do you teach a bunch of executives to draw blood? Figuratively speaking, of course."

  "They already have the blood lust. I get them to think 'out of the box," as they like to say. I ask them to pretend that they are supplying arms for competing forces. The old arms makers had to be metallurgists and engineers. Many were artists, like Leonardo, who designed war engines. Weapons and strategy were constantly changing and the people who supplied the armies had to adjust quickly to new conditions."

  "The lives of their customers depended on it."

  "Right. I might have one group devise a siege machine while another comes up with ways to defend against it. Or I can give one side metal-piercing arrows while the other comes up with armor that works without being unwieldy. Then we switch sides and try again. They learn to use their native intelligence rather than to rely on computers and such."

  "Maybe you should offer your services to NUMA. Learning how to blast holes in ten-foot-thick walls with a trebuchet sounds like a lot more fun than staring at budget pie charts."

  A sly smile crossed Skye's face. "Well, you know, most executives are men."

  "Boys and their toys. A surefire formula for success."

  "I'll admit I pander to the childish side of my clients, but my sessions are immensely popular and very lucrative. And they allow me the flexibility to work on projects that might not be possible on my salary from the Sorbonne."

  "Projects like the ancient trade routes?"

  She nodded. "It would be a major coup if I could prove that tin and other goods traveled overland along the old Amber Route, through the Alpine passes and valleys to the Adriatic, where Phoenician and Minoan ships transported it to the eastern reaches of the Mediterranean. And that the trade went both ways."

  "The logistics of your theoretical trade route would have been complex."

  "You're a genius! Exactly my point!"

  "Thanks for the compliment, but I'm just relating it to my own experiences moving people and material."

  "Then you know how complicated it would be. People along the land route, like the Celts and the Etruscans, had to cooperate on trade agreements in order to move the materials along. I think trade was a lot more extensive than my colleagues would admit. All this has fascinating implications about how we view ancient civilizations. They weren't all about war; they knew the value of peaceful alliances a long time before the EU or NAFTA. And I mean to prove it."

  "Ancient globalization? An ambitious goal. I wish you luck."

  "I'll need it. But if I do succeed I'll have you and NUMA to thank. Your agency has been wonderfully generous in the use of its research vessel and equipment."

  "It goes both ways. Your project gives NUMA a chance to test our new vessel in inland waters and to see how this submersible operates under field conditions."

  She made a sweeping gesture with her hand. "The scenery is perfectly lovely. All we need is a bottle of champagne and foie gras." Austin leaned over and handed a small plastic cooler to his companion "Can't help you there, but how about ajambon et frontage sandwich?"

  "Ham and cheese would be my second choice." She unzipped the cooler, extracted a sandwich, handed it to Austin and took one for herself.

  Austin brought the submersible to a hovering stop. As he chewed on his lunch, savoring the crusty baguette and the creamy slab of Camembert cheese, he studied a chart of the lake.

  "We're here, alongside a natural shelf that roughly parallels the shoreline," he said, running his finger along a wavy line. "This could have been exposed land centuries ago."

  "It goes along with my findings. A section of the Amber Route skirted the shore of Lac du Dormeur. When the waters rose, the traders found another route. Anything we find here would be very old." , "What exactly are we looking for?"

  "I'll know it when I see it."

  "Good enough for me."

  "You're far too trusting. I'll elaborate. The caravans that plied the Amber Route needed places to stop for the night. I'm looking for the ruins of hospices, or settlements that may have grown up around a stopping place. Then I hope to find weapons that would flesh out the full trade story."

  They washed their lunch down with Evian water, and Austin's fingers played over the controls. The battery-powered electrical motors hummed, activating the twin lateral thrusters that the sphere rested on, and the submersible continued its exploration.

  The SEAmagine SEA mobile was fifteen feet long, about the length of a mid sized Boston whaler, and only seven feet wide, but it was capable of carrying two people in one-atmosphere comfort to a depth of fifteen hundred feet for hours at a time. The vehicle had a range of twelve nautical miles and a maximum speed of 2.5 knots. Unlike most submersibles, which bobbed like a cork when they surfaced, the SEA mobile could be operated like a boat. It sat high in the water when it wasn't submerged, giving the pilot clear visibility, and could cruise to a dive site or edge
up to a dive platform.

  The SEA mobile looked as if it had been assembled from spare parts cast off from a deep submergence lab. The crystal ball cockpit was fifty-four inches in diameter and it was perched on two flotation cylinders the size of water mains. Two protective metal frames shaped like the letter D flanked the sphere.

  The vehicle was built to maintain positive buoyancy at all times and the tendency to float to the surface was countered by a midship-mounted vertical thruster. Because the SEA mobile was balanced to remain level constantly, at the surface or under it, the pilot didn't have to fiddle around with pitch controls to keep it at a horizontal attitude.

  Using a navigational acoustic Doppler instrument to keep track of their position, Austin guided the vehicle along the underwater escarpment, a broad shelf that gradually sloped down into the deeper water. Following a basic search pattern, Austin ran a series of parallel lines like someone mowing a lawn. The sub's four halogen lights illuminated the bottom, whose contours had been shaped by the advance and retreat of glaciers.

  The sub tracked back and forth for two hours and Austin's eyes were starting to glaze from staring at the monotonous gray seascape. Skye was still entranced by the uniqueness of her surroundings. She leaned forward, chin on her hands, studying every square foot of lake bottom. In time, her persistence paid off.

  "There!" She jabbed the air with her forefinger.

  Austin slowed the vehicle to a crawl and squinted at a vague shape just beyond the range of the lights, then moved the submersible in for a closer look. The object lying on its side was a massive stone slab about twelve feet long and half as wide. The chisel marks visible along its edges suggested that it was not a natural rock formation.

  Other monoliths could be seen nearby, some standing upright; others topped with similar slabs like the Greek letter.

  "Seems we took a wrong turn and ended up at Stonehenge," Austin said.

  "They're burial monuments," Skye said. "The arches mark the way to a tomb for funeral processions."

  Austin increased the power to the thrusters and the vehicle glided over six identical archways spaced thirty feet or so apart. Then the ground on either side of the archways began to rise, creating a shallow valley. The natural hillsides morphed into high cyclopean walls constructed with massive hand-hewn blocks.