Also by Andy McDermott
The Hunt for Atlantis
The Tomb of Hercules
The Secret of Excalibur
For my family and friends
PROLOGUE
Oman
For all that the Arabian desert was traditionally supposed to be devoid of life, there was far too much of it for Mark Hyung’s liking. A cloud of flies had been hovering in wait as he left his tent just after dawn, and now, three hours later, they had seemingly called in every other bug within a ten-mile radius.
He muttered an obscenity and stopped, removing his Oakleys and swatting at his face. The flies briefly retreated, but they would resume their dive-bombing soon enough. Not for the first time, he cursed himself for volunteering to come to this awful place.
“Got a problem there, Mr. Hyung?” said Muldoon with barely concealed contempt, pausing in his ascent of the steepening slope. The bearlike Nevadan was a thirty-year veteran of the oil exploration business, tanned and leathery and swaggering. Mark knew Muldoon saw him as just some skinny fresh-out-of-college Korean kid from California, and rated him little higher than the desert flies.
“No problem at all, Mr. Muldoon,” Mark replied, replacing his sunglasses and taking out a water bottle. He took several deep swigs, then splashed some on his hand and tilted his head forward to wipe the back of his neck.
Something on the ground caught his attention, and he crouched for a better look. The object was familiar, yet so out of place it took him a moment to identify it: a seashell, a fractal spiral chipped and scuffed by weather and time. “Have you seen this?”
“Yeah,” said Muldoon dismissively. “Find ’em all over. This used to be a beach, once. Sea was higher than it is now.”
“Really?” Mark was familiar with the concept of sea level changes due to climatic shift, but until now the concept had been only abstract. “How long ago?”
“I dunno; hundred thousand years ago, hundred and fifty.” Muldoon gestured at the low bluff ahead, their destination. “This woulda been a nice resort spot. Cave-girls in the raw.” He chuckled lecherously.
Mark held in a sigh. No point making his relations with the old-guard oilman any worse. Instead, he returned the bottle to his backpack. “Shall we go?”
Sweating in the hundred-degree heat, they trudged across the sand for another half mile, finally stopping near the base of the bluff. Muldoon used a GPS handset to check their position, then spent a further minute confirming it with a map and compass as Mark watched impatiently. “The satellites are accurate to within a hundred feet, you know,” he finally said.
“I’ll trust my eyes and a map over any computer,” Muldoon growled.
“Well, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To prove that computers can do a better job than anybody’s eyes.”
“Cheaper-ass job, you mean,” Muldoon muttered. He folded up the map. “This is it. We’re two thousand yards from the spike camp, just like you wanted.”
Mark looked back. Barely visible through the rippling heat haze were the tents and transmitter mast of their encampment. Two other teams had set out at the same time, also heading for points a mile and a quarter distant, to form an equilateral triangle with the camp at the center. “In that case,” he said, taking quiet relish in his moment of authority, “you’d better get started, hadn’t you?”
It took Muldoon an hour to prepare the explosive charge.
“No way this’ll be powerful enough,” he said as he lowered the metal cylinder containing fifteen pounds of dynamite into the hole he’d dug. “You need a couple hundred pounds, at least. Shit, you’ll be lucky if any of the other stations even hear it.”
“Which is the whole point of the experiment,” Mark reminded him. He had set up his own equipment a safe distance away: a battery-powered radio transmitter-receiver, connected to a metal tube containing a microphone. “Proving that you don’t need a ton of explosives or a drilling rig or hundreds of geophones. All the simulations say this will be more than enough to make a detailed reflection map.”
“Simulations?” Muldoon almost hissed the word. “Ain’t no match for experience. And I’m telling you, the only results you’ll get will be fuzz.”
Mark tapped his laptop. “You would—without my software. But with it, four geophones’ll be enough to map the whole area. Scale it up, Braxoil will be able to cover the entire Arabian Peninsula in under a year with just a couple of dozen men.”
That was hyperbole, and both men knew it, but Muldoon’s disgusted expression still said it all. Traditional oil surveys were massive affairs involving hundreds or even thousands of men, laboriously traversing vast areas to set up huge grids of microphones that would pick up the faint sonar echoes of explosive sound waves bouncing off geological features deep underground. Mark’s software, on the other hand, let the computer do the work: from just four geophones, three at the points of the triangle and the fourth in the center, it could analyze the results to produce a 3-D subterranean map within minutes. Hence Muldoon’s displeasure: long, labor-intensive—and very well-paid—surveys would be replaced by much smaller, faster, and cheaper operations. Not so good for the men who would have to find a new line of work, but great for Braxoil’s bottom line.
If it worked. As Muldoon had said, everything was based on simulations; this would be the first proper field test. There were hundreds of variables that could screw things up.
Muldoon carefully inserted the detonator into the cylinder, then moved back. “Okay, set.”
“How far back should we stand?” Mark asked. “Behind the radio?”
Muldoon let out a mocking laugh. “You stand there if you want, Mr. Hyung—I won’t stop you. Me, I’m gonna go all the way up there!” He indicated the top of the bluff.
Mark’s own laugh was more nervous. “I’ll, ah … defer to your experience.”
The two men climbed the hillside. The bluff wasn’t tall, but on the plain at the southern edge of the vast desert wasteland called the Rub‘ al-Khali—in English, the Empty Quarter—it stood out like a beacon. As they climbed, Muldoon’s walkie-talkie squawked with two messages. The other teams had also finished planting their explosives.
Everything was ready.
After reaching the top, Mark gulped down more water, then opened his laptop. His computer was linked wirelessly to the unit at the foot of the bluff, which in turn was communicating with the main base station at the camp and, through it, the other two teams. The experiment depended on all three explosive charges detonating at precisely the same moment; any lack of synchronization would throw off the timing of the arrival of the reflected sonar waves at the four geophones, distorting the geological data or, worse, rendering it too vague for the computer to analyze. “Okay, then,” he said, his mouth drier than ever. “We’re ready. Countdown from ten seconds begins … now.”
He pressed a key. A timer on the screen began to tick down.
Muldoon relayed this through his radio, then dropped to a crouch. “Mr. Hyung,” he said, “you might want to put down the computer.”
“Why?”
“’Cause you can’t cover both ears with only one hand!” He clapped both palms to his head. Mark got his point and hurriedly fell to his knees, putting down the laptop and jamming his fingers into his ears.
The charge exploded, the noise overpowering even with his eardrums protected: a single bass drumbeat deep in his chest cavity. The ground beneath him jolted. He had involuntarily closed his eyes; when he opened them again, he saw a plume of smoke rising from the base of the bluff. In the distance, two more eruptions rose above the shimmering haze in seeming slow motion. After a few seconds, the thunderclaps of the other blasts reached him.
&nbs
p; A fine rain of dust and tiny pebbles hissed down around the two men. Mark picked up the laptop again, blowing dirt off the screen. The first results were coming through, the geophones confirming that they were receiving sonar reflections. It would take a few minutes to gather all the data, then longer for the computer to process it, but things looked promising so far.
Muldoon peered down the slope. “Too close to the surface,” he grumbled as he wiped sand from his face.
Mark stood beside him, examining the incoming data intently. “It’s working just fine.” He flinched as another tremor passed beneath his feet. “What was that?”
“Can’t be the other charges; they weren’t powerful enough …” Muldoon sounded worried. Mark looked up, concerned. The shuddering was getting worse—
The ground under his feet collapsed.
Mark didn’t even have time to cry out before the breath was knocked from him as he dropped down the slope amid a cascade of stones and dust. All he could do was try to protect his face as he bounced off the newly exposed rocks, pummeled from all sides.
Then something hard hit his head.
The first of his senses to recover, oddly, was taste. A dry, salty taste filled his mouth, caking his tongue.
Mark coughed, then spat out a mouthful of sand. The back of his head throbbed where the stone had hit him. He tried to sit up, then decided it was probably a better idea to remain still.
A muffled sound gradually resolved itself into words, a voice calling his name. “Mr. Hyung! Where are you? Can you hear me?”
Muldoon. He actually sounded genuinely concerned, though Mark’s faculties had already recovered enough for him to realize that the sentiment was professional rather than personal. Muldoon’s job was to look after the specialist; an injury on his watch would look bad on his record.
“Here,” he tried to say, but all that came out was a faint croak. He spat out more revolting dust, then tried again. “I’m here.”
“Oh, thank Jesus.” Muldoon clambered over loose stones toward him. “Are you hurt?”
Mark managed to wipe his eyes. He grimaced at the movement; he was going to have some real bruises tomorrow. “I don’t think so.” He turned his head to see the slope down which he’d tumbled. “Wow. That’s new.”
Muldoon looked up, surprise on his face as he registered the change in the landscape. The landslide had exposed a large opening in the side of the bluff, a deep cave. “Lucky you didn’t fall straight down into it. It’d probably have killed you.” He held out a water bottle. “Here. Can you move?”
Mark gratefully took the bottle and swallowed several large mouthfuls, then gingerly moved his legs. “I think I’m okay. What about the computer?”
Muldoon held up the screen, which in addition to being cracked was no longer attached to the rest of the machine. “I don’t think the warranty’ll cover it.”
“Damn,” Mark sighed.
Muldoon helped him up. “Sure you’re okay?”
“My knee hurts, but I think I’m fine apart from that.”
“I dunno.” Muldoon examined the back of his head. “You’ve got a big cut there, and if you were knocked out you might have a concussion. We should call for the chopper to come pick you up, get you to the hospital in Salalah.”
“I’m fine,” Mark insisted, even as he spoke wondering why he wasn’t taking Muldoon up on his offer of an immediate trip out of the desert. “Can you see the rest of the laptop? I might be able to recover the data on the hard drive.”
Muldoon snorted but turned to hunt for it. Mark looked the other way, toward the cave entrance. It was hard to believe that the relatively small explosive charge could have opened up such a large hole.
Unless the gap had been there all along …
That thought was brushed aside as he spotted the rest of the broken laptop just inside the cave entrance. “Here,” he told Muldoon, limping toward it. It looked battered, but unless the hard drive had actually been smashed open it ought to be salvageable.
He crossed into the shadow of the cave and picked up the computer. Eyes adjusting to the low light, he examined the casing. It was more or less intact, dented but not actually broken. The experiment might not be a total loss after all.
Cheered slightly by the thought, Mark glanced deeper into the cave …
And was so surprised by what he saw that he dropped the laptop again.
Muldoon clapped Mark on the back. “Well, son, I had my doubts about you … but you’re gonna make us all very rich.”
“Not quite how I’d planned, though,” said Mark.
“Doesn’t matter how a man gets rich, just that he does!”
Muldoon had joined him in the cave, and had been equally stunned by what lay within—though he had recovered from his amazement rather more quickly, radioing the rest of the survey team to demand a rendezvous right now. One of the other men had a digital camera; once they, too, had overcome their astonishment and obtained photographic proof of their discovery, they had all returned to camp to send the images back to Houston via satellite.
Mark couldn’t help thinking events were moving too fast for comfort. “I still think we should inform the Omanis.”
“You kidding?” said Muldoon. “First rule of working out here: never tell the Arabs about anything until the folks at home have okayed it. That’s why the company has all those high-powered lawyers—to make sure our claims are one hundred percent watertight. And that’s just for oil. For this … Jesus, I don’t even know where to start. We’re gonna be famous, son!” He laughed, then ducked into the tent housing the communications gear.
“Maybe.” Mark drank more water, not wanting to get his hopes up. For a start, he was sure that Braxoil would take full control of his discovery. The Omani government would certainly also lay claim to anything found within its borders.
But still, he couldn’t help fantasizing about the potential fame and fortune.
He finished the water, then followed Muldoon into the tent. The survey team’s six other members were already inside, flicking through the digital photos on another laptop. Debate about exactly what they had found was still ongoing, but the overall consensus was much the same as Muldoon’s: it was going to make them all very rich.
“Of course,” said one of the men, a New Zealander named Lewis, “since it’s my camera, that means copyright on the photos is mine.”
“Company time, company photos, fellas,” said Muldoon.
“Yeah, but personal camera,” Lewis insisted.
“Guess we’ll have to let the lawyers work that out.”
“If anyone ever bothers getting back to us,” said a laconic Welshman named Spence. “I mean, we sent the things three hours ago.”
“What time is it in Houston?” Mark asked.
Muldoon looked at his watch. “Time somebody was in the office. Still no reply?”
Lewis switched to the laptop’s email program. “Nothing yet.”
“Check the satellite uplink,” Mark suggested. “There might be a connection glitch.”
Lewis toggled to another program. “That explains it. No connection.”
Mark raised a puzzled eyebrow. “Wait, no connection? You didn’t log off, did you?”
“You kidding? Soon as we get an answer, I want to read it!”
“Weird. As long as we’re logged in to the Braxoil network, we should be getting something. Here, let me …”
Lewis gave up his seat to the computer scientist. After a minute Mark leaned back, more puzzled than ever. “Everything’s fine at our end; we’re still transmitting. But we’re not getting anything back. Either the satellite’s down, which is pretty unlikely … or someone at the other end’s blocked us.”
Muldoon frowned. “What do you mean, blocked us?”
“I mean, canceled our access. Nothing we’re sending’s getting through, and nobody can send anything to us.”
“The hell they can’t.” Muldoon picked up the satellite phone’s handset. He entered a number, list
ened for several seconds, then jabbed with increasing anger at the buttons. “Not a goddamn thing!”
“Try the radio,” suggested an American, Brightstone. “Call Salalah. The guys there can patch us through to Houston.”
Muldoon nodded and moved to the radio, donning a pair of headphones. He switched the set on—and yanked off the headphones with a startled yelp, making everyone jump. “Jesus!”
“What?” Mark asked, worried.
“Beats the hell out of me. Listen.” He unplugged the headphones. An electronic squeal came from the radio’s speaker, the unearthly sound making Mark’s skin crawl.
“Oh, shit,” said Spence quietly. Everyone turned to him.
“You know what it is?” Mark asked.
“I used to be in the Royal Signals. That’s a jammer.”
Muldoon’s eyes widened. “What?”
“Electronic warfare. Someone’s cutting us off.”
That prompted a minor panic, until Muldoon shouted everyone down. “You’re sure about this, Spence?”
The Welshman nodded. “It’s airborne. The pitch is changing too fast for it to be on the ground.”
There was a sudden rush for the door, the eight men spreading out to squint into the achingly blue sky. “I see something!” yelled Brightstone, pointing north. Mark saw a tiny gray speck in the far distance. “Is that what’s jamming us?”
“Where are the binocs?” Muldoon asked. “Someone—”
An earsplitting roar hit them from nowhere. Mark had just enough time to see a pair of sleek, sand-brown shapes rush at him before two aircraft shot less than a hundred feet overhead, sending sand whirling around the men. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, the two planes had shrunk to dots, peeling off in different directions.
“What the fuck was that?” Muldoon yelled
Spence stared after the retreating aircraft. “Tornados! Those were Saudi Tornados!”
“But we’re forty miles from the border!”
“I tell you, they were Saudi!” They watched as the two fighters came about. One of them appeared to be turning back toward the camp. The other …