Raising Atlantis Read Free

ground so hard and fast that he instantly lost consciousness.
    When Drake came to, the winds had stopped. He lay there for several minutes, then lifted his aching, throbbing head and looked out from beneath his snow-dusted parka hood.
    The command center was gone, devoured by a black abyss, a huge crescent chasm about a hundred yards wide. The cold was playing tricks on him, he hoped, because he could swear this abyss stretched out across the ice for almost a mile.
    Slowly Drake dragged himself toward the scythelike gorge.
    He had to find out what happened, who had survived and needed medical attention. In the eerie silence he could hear his freezer suit scrape along the ice, his heart pounding as he reached the edge of the abyss.
    Drake peered over and aimed a flashlight into the darkness. The beam bathed the glassy blue-white walls of ice with light and worked its way down.
    My God, he thought, this hole has to be at least a mile deep.
    Then he saw the bodies and what was left of the base.
    They were on an ice shelf a few hundred yards down. The navy support personnel in their white freezer suits were hard to distinguish from the broken fiberglass and twisted metal. But he could easily pick out the corpses of the civilian scientists clad in multicolored parkas. One of them was lying on a small ice ledge apart from the others. His head was bent at an obscene angle, framed in a halo of blood.
    Drake’s mind swirled as he took in the remnants of his first command. He had to check the other bodies to see if anyone was still breathing. He had to find some equipment and get help. He had to do something.
    “Can anybody hear me?” Drake called out, his voice cracking in the dry air.
    He listened and thought he heard chimes. But the sound turned out to be the frozen limbs of his radio officer, clinking like glass as they dangled over smashed equipment.
    He shouted into the wind. “Can anybody hear me?”
    There was no response, only a low howl whistling across the abyss.
    Drake looked closer and saw some sort of structure protruding from the ice. It wasn’t fiberglass or metal or anything from the base camp. It was something solid that almost seemed to glow.
    What the hell is that? he thought.
    An appalling silence fell across the wasteland. Drake knew then with chilling clarity that he was alone.
    Desperately he searched for a satellite phone in the debris. If he could just get a message out, let Washington know what had happened. The hope that help was on the way from McMurdo Station or Amundsen-Scott might give him the strength to set up some sort of shelter, to make it through the night.
    A sudden gust shrieked. Drake felt the ground give way beneath him, and he gasped as he plunged headlong into the darkness. He landed with a dull thud on his back and heard a sickening snap. He couldn’t move his legs. He tried to call for help but could only hear a hard wheezing from his lungs.
    Overhead in the heavens, the three belt stars of Orion hovered in indifferent silence. He noticed a peculiar odor, or rather a change in the quality of the air. Drake could feel his heart pumping in some unfamiliar but regular pattern, like he was losing control of his body. Still, he could move his hands.
    His fingers crawled along the ice and grasped his flashlight, which was still on. He scanned the darkness, moving the beam across the translucent wall. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. He couldn’t quite make out what he was looking at. They looked like pieces of coal in the ice.
    Then he realized they were eyes, the eyes of a little girl staring straight at him out of the icy wall.
    He stared back at the face for a moment, a low moan forming at the back of his throat when he finally turned his head away. All around him were hundreds of perfectly preserved human beings, frozen in time, their hands reaching out in desperation across the ages.
    Drake opened his mouth to scream, but the rumbling started again and a glistening avalanche of