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Antarctica
“Back up a second,” Dane Maddock said, holding up his hands, palms out. “Jimmy’s in trouble?”
Jade frowned, evidently irritated at the interruption of her narrative, and for a few seconds, the only sound was the soft murmur of Ivan’s engine vibrating through the vehicle, and crunch of the heavy-duty monster-truck sized tires compressing ice crystals on the frozen road that linked the airstrip to the permanent installation of McMurdo Station.
Ivan was not “some dude” as Bones had suggested. That mystery had been cleared up as soon as the large red and white all-terrain all-weather multi-passenger vehicle had pulled up beside them. Painted in big block letters on the front fender of the enormous shuttle were the words: “‘Ivan’ the Terra Bus.”
Jade finally glanced over at Kismet. “Maybe you should field this one.”
Kismet nodded. “As near as we can put together, when you asked your friend, Mr. Letson, to look into the mystery of that plane wreck you found in South Africa, it tripped some kind of silent alarm and put both you and him on Prometheus’ radar.”
A few days earlier, Maddock and his crew of underwater treasure hunters had found the sunken wreckage of what appeared to be an old Boeing 314 Clipper—an enormous flying boat built just before World War II. What made the discovery unusual was the fact that there was neither a record of such a plane crashing there, nor of the plane’s actual existence. Only a handful of planes from that line had been built, and all of them were accounted for. Jimmy had made a few discreet inquiries, none of which had really helped much, and that had seemingly been the end of that.
Except, immediately afterward, Jimmy had gone incommunicado. Then a group of mysterious killers had made, not one but several attempts on their lives as they slowly pieced together the story of the mystery clipper’s final flight. The trail had led them to Antarctica where they had discovered the strange orb in the frozen pyramid their new traveling companion Rose Greer had dubbed ‘the Outpost,’ but until Jade and Kismet had arrived, swooping down out of the sky to scatter the attacking enemy, Maddock did not know who was behind it all. Nor had he realized that Jimmy had been caught up in the web as well.
Now he had a name to attach to the killers who had pursued him. Prometheus.
“Jimmy’s safe by the way,” Jade added. “He’s with Professor. They’re the ones who figured out that Prometheus was coming after you down here. Since we were close, Tam asked us to come bail you out. Lucky, yeah?”
Dane Maddock wasn’t a big believer in luck. He faced Kismet. “You seem to be the expert on Prometheus. Who or what are they?”
Kismet took a moment to consider his answer. “Jade has told me about some of your... ah, adventures? So I know that you’ll understand what I mean when I say that there are... things. Objects. Artifacts and relics, and such, that are powerful.”
“Oh, brother,” Bones said, wagging his head. “You would not believe some of the crap we’ve seen.”
“I think I might at that,” Kismet said. “The short answer to your question is that Prometheus is a secret society dedicated to controlling those objects of power. Not just controlling them, but erasing them from history. They think they’re doing us all a favor. That human society isn’t ready for the truth about... Well, everything. Gods and devils, aliens...You name it, they want to keep it a secret. They chose Prometheus the Titan—the god of foresight—as their mascot, because he tried to protect mankind from the games played by the gods. That’s what they think they are doing.”
“Sounds very paternalistic,” Maddock said. “And arrogant.”
“I don’t know,” Bones countered. “People are pretty stupid. I mean, I don’t trust our government with some of the stuff we’ve found, and ours is better than most.”
Kismet gave an ambivalent shrug. “You’re not wrong about their arrogance. They recruit only the best and brightest. The intellectual elite. Which makes them particularly formidable. And their wall of secrecy is all but impenetrable.”
“You evidently penetrated it.”
Kismet grimaced. “I have a... call it an inside source. But even so, I’ve only scratched the surface. What I do know is that in the last few years there’s been a schism. One faction supports the original mission, the long game. The other side has more of a use-it-or-lose-it philosophy. The latter group is weaker but desperate enough to go for the nuclear option.”
“Do you mean that literally?” Bones asked.
“Maybe. My source told me that orb you found—the anomaly—has been on their hit list for a while.” He glanced at Rose, who carried the strange black sphere in a backpack slung over one shoulder. “When Mr. Letson’s inquiry got flagged, the splinter faction realized somebody was looking for it and decided to make their power play.”
Bones nodded slowly, and then articulated what Maddock was thinking. “Helluva coincidence that you—the expert on Prometheus—just happened to be here on unrelated business.”
Kismet rubbed his bearded chin. “I’m not so sure it’s unrelated after all.”
“What a surprise,” Bones chuckled.
Maddock reflected on the story Jade had recounted to them. “You’re thinking that this relative of yours, Garral... Grace. He was looking for what we found?”
“It’s certainly possible, though based on what we know of Scott’s expedition, he never got anywhere close to the valley where you found the Outpost. But if there was a pre-historic civilization down here, there could well be other outposts just like it buried under the ice.”
“That’s consistent with the stories my great-grandad wrote,” put in Rose Greer. Rose, a history professor from upstate New York, had found the solution to the mystery of the Clipper wreck in the pages of a pulp novel written by her great-grandfather, David “Dodge” Dalton. and ultimately guided Maddock and Bones to the Outpost.
“It’s possible that Grace-Garral was looking for the anomaly,” Kismet said. “But I think the anomaly is part of something bigger. Garral mentioned a map. I think the anomaly might be a compass, pointing the way to something else. But we’ll know for sure when we find his remains and see the map for ourselves.”
“About that,” Maddock countered. “I’ve read about Scott’s expedition and I remember what happened with Grace. His body wasn’t found by the search parties who went looking for Scott, and that was a hundred years ago. Not only is he probably buried under fifty feet of ice, but the ice itself is constantly moving, so even if you had the exact coordinates where he died—which you don’t—he wouldn’t be there.”
Kismet nodded. “I’ve retained the services of a top-notch engineering firm to help me locate and recover Garral’s body. Their expert puts the ice cover closer to seventy-five feet and he estimates the ice has advanced about thirty miles closer to the Ross Sea. That gave us a ballpark to play in. After that, we plugged in survey data from Operation IceBridge to identify anomalous densities in the target zone at the estimated depth.”
Operation IceBridge, Kismet explained, was a NASA program designed to produce a comprehensive database of polar ice in order to accurately gauge the effects of climate change. Survey aircraft equipped with an extensive array of remote sensing technologies made repeated flights over the ice sheets, building a detailed three-dimensional model that went all the way down to bedrock—as deep as two miles in some places—or to the sea, as was the case with the Ross Ice shelf.
Maddock was impressed, and a little jealous of the resources Kismet had at his disposal. “Your guy found something?”
Kismet shrugged. “A few somethings. Unfortunately, the radar can only tell us where the anomalies are, not what they are.”
“So it might be a body,” Bones muttered, “or it might just be a big pile of penguin crap.”
“I’m afraid so,” Kismet admitted. “We’ve identified more than a dozen anomalies and prioritized them based on location and size. Our best match has an 86% probability, but there’s only one way to know for sure.”
Bones rolled his eyes. “If it’s anything like ice-fishing, count me out. Unless there’s a lot of beer, that is.”
“Sounds time-consuming,” Maddock said. “And with Prometheus breathing down our necks, time is one thing we don’t have a lot of.”
“You’re right,” Kismet said. “If they haven’t figured out where you went or that you’re with me, they soon will. We’ll probably only get one shot at this.”
There was a lurch as Ivan came to a full stop in front of the reception building.
“You can chill here...” Kismet started to say, then stopped himself. “Uh, I mean stay here. Arrange your own transportation home. Or you can head to the work site with me. It’s a couple hours by helicopter. Honestly, I don’t know what the safest option is.”
“I think we’re all in this together,” Maddock said, then glanced at Bones and Rose. The latter nodded. Bones glowered, but didn’t contradict his partner, or even offer one of his typically off-color wisecracks. Maddock took that as a vote in favor.