Parry was escorted down through the airlock first, followed by Chester. Once inside, they were taken through to the bridge where Chester was peering around at the various terminals manned by the crew. Some of the men looked up from their instrumentation panels to give him and Parry curious but fleeting glances, as if they knew they weren’t meant to show too much interest. Chester felt light-headed; he’d been plucked from a seventeenth-century farmers’ croft that relied on a generator in an outhouse for its electricity, to a state-of-the-art nuclear submarine stuffed to the gills with electronics. And it belonged to the world’s leading superpower, no less.
It was all rather unreal, as if he was in a film. Except in a film you couldn’t get a sense of how rank it smelt, with so many men in an enclosed space. It reminded Chester of when he and his parents had joined a long-haul flight on their way home from their holidays one summer.
Two people in dark blue suits suddenly appeared. ‘Homeland Security,’ the young woman announced, flashing a badge to Parry.
‘Watch the birdie,’ the man accompanying her said, as he aimed a device at Chester and Parry in turn.
‘Facial recognition. They’re making sure we are who we are,’ Parry said to Chester, as the man scrutinised a screen on the back of the device and turned to his colleague.
‘Both positive,’ he said.
‘Me too?’ Chester asked Parry. ‘But how do they know who I am?’
Parry was about to answer when the woman held something up. Chester recognised it immediately.
‘It’s one of Danf—!’ he began to exclaim, catching himself before he uttered the name of the man he most reviled in the world. ‘It’s a Purger,’ he corrected himself quickly.
‘Yes. Nothing like having your own technology turned on you, is there?’ Parry said.
‘Please don’t talk. Focus on this point here,’ the woman snapped, indicating the small lens at top of the small cylinder with her finger.
‘Sorry,’ Chester muttered as she played the purple beam into his eyes, then Parry’s.
‘They haven’t been Dark Lighted,’ the woman confirmed, typing the result into her PDA.
‘Actually, it’s Darklit,’ Chester piped up before he knew what he was saying.
The woman shot him a frosty look as another man came up to them. ‘Commander,’ he said to Parry. From his age and insignia, Chester guessed who he was before he shook hands with them both.
‘Good to meet you, Captain,’ Parry said.
‘And you. I apologise for the inhospitable welcome. I hope our squad of marines didn’t play too rough with you,’ the captain replied. ‘Things being what they are, those procedures are now standard drill before anyone’s allowed on board. Even my crew members aren’t exempt when they return from dockside.’
‘Quite right,’ Parry said. ‘Last thing you want is a body bomber in a confined space like this.’
The man from Homeland Security was clearly concerned about the time as he glanced repeatedly at his watch.
‘Looks like you gentlemen have somewhere to be,’ the captain said.
‘Yes, the comms link is up and running, Commander,’ the man in the blue suit said.
One of the marines remained behind as the rest of the escort withdrew. Parry’s satphones and walking stick were given back to him before he and Chester were taken from the bridge and through several sections of the submarine. The blue suited man from Homeland Security ushered them into a surprisingly small cabin, which had a table in its centre on which three screens had been set up in a row, with some sort of camera mounted on top of the middle one. Parry told Chester to take a place at the table as he remained standing, talking to the blue suit in hushed tones.
With no idea why he was there or what was about to happen, Chester leant back in his chair and slipped his hands into his jeans pockets. He looked from one screen to the other, each of which was showing the United States Naval emblem against a blue background.
Taking a breath, he glanced at the marine stationed by the cabin door, who was holding his assault rifle at the ready position across his chest.
‘AR16,’ Chester said out loud, recognising the weapon from one of his videogames. The marine simply frowned at him, so Chester quickly looked away, nodding to himself and muttering, ‘Yes, AR16.’
A tone chimed from a speaker somewhere in the room, and Parry and the blue suit quickly took their places at the table beside Chester.
The screens were blank except for the words Transmission Status with a countdown clicking away the seconds. As the countdown hit zero, the title changed to ENCRYPTION LEVEL ONE, then there was a moment of digital static as random blocks of colour flashed over the displays. The picture finally settled down to show a scene very similar to the one in Chester’s cabin – a desk or table top with three chairs arranged along it. A man holding several files of papers wandered into view.
‘Bob Harper,’ Parry said. ‘Good to see you after so long, you old devil!’
As the man leant towards where the camera was mounted on top of the middle screen, Chester saw that he was balding and wore wire-rimmed glasses.
‘You too, Parry,’ Bob replied, but not as warmly as Chester might have expected if they were really such old friends. But Chester could tell that Bob had other things on his mind as he opened one of the files and extracted several documents, which he arranged very precisely on the tabletop. Then he looked up again. ‘Right, that’s me locked and loaded. And a very good afternoon to you all,’ he said, with more enthusiasm than before. He squinted at the blue suit on Parry’s right, then Chester. ‘And you must be, er, Chester Rause.’
‘Rawls,’ Parry put him right. ‘How are the kids, Bob?’
There was a slight lag between the picture and the sound, which meant that Bob’s lips had stopped moving but his words were still being relayed. ‘Well, thank you. With one at MIT and the other a Wall Street attorney, I’ve given them notice that they can provide for their old pa when I finally hang up my spurs. And you know Debbie would send you her love if I was able to tell her we were talking. When you’re next over this side of the pond, you must come to stay with us again, Parry.’ Bob rubbed his chin in a troubled way. ‘After all this has gone away.’
‘That’s a definite,’ Parry said.
No one spoke for a moment as Bob cast an eye over his documents. ‘We’ve got a frosty but sunny day here in Washington. What’s the weather doing where you are, Parry?’
‘Oh, other than it’s the middle of the night here, Bob, do you need to ask? This is England; inevitably it’ll rain before morning,’ Parry replied drily.
But Bob wasn’t listening. From the noise in the background, Chester could tell other people had entered the room. A well-built man, younger than Bob and wearing a charcoal-grey suit, came into view. He inspected the screens and the table to make sure everything was as it should be, then moved out of the way to allow someone else to take the central seat.
Chester’s mouth gaped open, his eyes nearly popping out of his head.
It was true that in the last year he’d spent a great deal of time underground, but it would have been impossible for him not to recognise the man on the screen in front of him.
One of the most famous people alive on the planet, and certainly the most powerful.
‘Is that …?’ Chester tried to ask, but no sound came from his throat.
He shot a glance at Parry, who gave him a quick nod.
‘Good day, gentlemen,’ the US President greeted them while scanning one of Bob’s briefing notes on the table. When he finally looked up, he ran his eyes over the blue suit and Parry, his gaze coming to rest on Chester.
‘Hi,’ the President said.
Chapter Five
Drake’s face was sickly white, but the creases under his eyes and around his mouth were blood red. And although his arm with the wounded shoulder was in a sling and he had numerous dressings on his burns, none of these were troubling him as much as his mouth, which he was now reachi
ng inside as he probed his swollen gums. Despite the fact that the pain was making him wince as he touched them, he chuckled to himself.
‘A man walks into a dentist’s and sits in the chair.’ It was difficult to understand what Drake was saying because his fingers were in the way, but he went on regardless; ‘The dentist says, “What can I do for you, sir?” The man replies, “You’ve got to help me; I think I’m a moth.”’
Drake paused for a moment as he pushed against a tooth in his lower jaw and felt it shift in his gum. ‘The dentist says, “But you can see I’m a dentist, and you need a doctor. So why did you come in here?” Drake had taken his hand from his mouth and was examining the blood on his fingertips. ‘The man replies, “Well, your light was on.”’
Jiggs gave a chuckle. ‘That’s an old one,’ he said, as he took hold of Drake’s good arm and wrapped a cuff around it. He was using an ancient sphygmomanometer, a blood pressure meter, that he’d found in the medical bay. ‘I can always tell when things are at their worst because you start with the jokes.’ Jiggs smiled. ‘Remember that time Parry was away, and Sparks, Danforth and I had to drive you sixty miles across Scotland to the nearest hospital, through the heaviest snowfall that winter, because your appendix had ruptured? What were you – maybe sixteen years old? Even though you were in terrible pain, you told non-stop jokes the whole damned way.’
Drake nodded, then leant his head forward and shook it. ‘How about this for a snowfall?’ he said. His hair had begun to grow back after he’d trimmed it all off some months before to disguise his appearance, but a few tufts of it now sprinkled down over the surface of the table.
‘Bleeding gums … hair loss … I’m afraid they’re all symptoms of chronic radiation sickness,’ Jiggs said. He inflated the cuff around Drake’s arm, then let out some of the air as he listened with a stethoscope before taking a reading on the meter.
Drake wasn’t paying any attention to what Jiggs was doing, instead staring into the middle distance. ‘The choices I’ve made in the past have meant that I’ve had some pretty close calls, and I’m not blaming anyone for the way things have turned out.’ He wasn’t looking for a response from Jiggs, and Jiggs knew it. ‘I never anticipated a retirement trout fishing in the Cairngorms, but …’
‘Are there any trout in the Cairngorms?’ Jiggs put in.
‘You know what I mean,’ Drake replied. ‘Where was I …? But … but I always figured when my number was up, it would be quick.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘I thought I’d catch a bullet, or be blown up. So, tell me, is this how it’s going to play out for me, quietly and painfully? A repeat to fade?’
‘First the easy bit; the slug that caught you in the shoulder broke your clavicle but it’s only a minor fracture. So it’s nothing serious.’ Jiggs sighed and began to put the antiquated meter back into its wooden box. ‘As for the radiation exposure, you’ll have good and bad days. But you’ll grow weaker as the nausea and the vomiting become more frequent, and the internal bleeding intensifies. I’m afraid it’s all downhill from here.’
‘No, please tell me the worst, won’t you, doctor?’ Drake said wryly. He picked up an old bottle of iodine tablets Jiggs had also found in the medical stores. ‘Will these have made any difference?’
‘They’ll have helped to flush out some of the isotopes, but you were exposed to a massive dose of ionising radiation. Even if we were on the surface with all the facilities there, not much more could be done for you.’ Jiggs shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘So it goes,’ Drake said resignedly, taking in a breath before he continued. ‘I suppose, sooner or later, we’re all drawn to the big light, like a moth. It’s just that my big light happened to be a nuke, and it fried me.’ He began to laugh, but it turned into a coughing fit, and it was a moment before he could speak again. ‘If I’d known it would come to this, I would never have paid so much attention to my diet.’ He leant back in his chair and let out a long sigh. ‘Jiggs, old friend, really – what’s the point of carting me all the way Topsoil again? You may just as well leave me here.’
Jiggs gazed around the main area of the fallout shelter, a place constructed deep in the Earth that Will and Dr Burrows had originally discovered, and which Drake himself had been to before when he’d come to rescue Will and Elliott. ‘A very long time ago,’ Jiggs began, ‘I promised your father that I’d look out for you. I intend to keep that promise.’
He gestured towards the kitchen where he’d been preparing their meals from the fifty-year-old tinned food. ‘And, in any case, I can’t leave you here. The diet of corned beef in this place is enough to see off the strongest of us.’
‘But why take me back?’ Drake asked. ‘What difference does it make if I pop my clogs on the surface or down here?’
Jiggs wasn’t to be swayed. ‘Against all the odds and with those damned animals snapping at our heels, I’ve got you this far.’ Jiggs paused for breath. ‘So let me tell you one thing for sure; there’s no way in hell that I’m just going to desert you. We are setting off up that river together.’
After Jiggs had managed to resuscitate Drake in the wrecked Short Sunderland and stabilise him sufficiently to move him again, he’d set off for Smoking Jean. He only had the weakest signals from the radio beacons that Will and Drake had left on previous occasions to guide him, but when combined with his phenomenal sense of direction they were enough. Burning almost every last drop of the fuel in the booster rockets, Jiggs had managed to get Drake up Smoking Jean and through into the inclined seam. Once there, Drake had been so weak that he’d been only able to travel short distances under his own steam. However, the low gravity allowed Jiggs to carry both him and their kit on his back.
But then they’d received unwanted attention from the Brights and monkey-spiders, which were highly sensitive when it came to detecting wounded prey. Drake’s blood was like a magnet to them, and he’d had to pull himself together and help Jiggs fight them off time after time.
And just when they thought they’d travelled far enough up the seam to escape all the local predators, Jiggs had nearly walked into the first of the anti-personnel devices left behind by Limiters. He only spotted it because a more regular-sized spider had spun a web on the very fine tripwire strung across the route. Its presence in the seam was bad news as it meant that a patrol had been sent to the fallout shelter, and that there would doubtless be more devices planted along the way. So progress had been excruciatingly slow as Jiggs was forced to check every inch of the passage for more tripwires, and once they arrived at the shelter he’d had to conduct a complete sweep of that too.
‘You heard me, didn’t you?’ Jiggs asked Drake, who appeared to have drifted into a reverie. ‘We’re going up that river together. Okay?’
‘Yes, okay, whatever you say,’ Drake replied. He languidly raised his eyes to Jiggs, as even that small act was an effort. ‘At least I’ll be able to report back to Parry that, as far as we know, our mission was a success. And find out how he’s got on with the other Styx female.’
Jiggs nodded, as Drake turned his head slightly towards the entrance corridor where the communications room was to be found. Both Will and Chester had used the ancient telephone there to make contact with the surface before.
‘No way,’ Jiggs said instantly. ‘If you’re seriously considering using that phone through there to make a call, you can stop right now. If they haven’t cut the line, the Styx will be monitoring any traffic over it – you even as much as pick up the receiver, they’ll suss that we’re down here.’ His voice became gentler. ‘Drake, really, don’t go near it. You’re not thinking this through, are you?’
‘No, maybe not, but I haven’t got the luxury of time any longer,’ Drake said, as he rose to his feet. ‘The thought of dying is enough to make one impatient.’
‘Why don’t you catch some shut-eye while I finish the repairs to the boat?’ Jiggs suggested.
‘No, I want to give you a hand,’ Drake replied, holding up his good arm with a smile.
‘Even if it’s only one hand.’ He glanced in the direction of the bunk beds. ‘I’m not quite ready for the scrap heap. Not while I’ve still got some life left in me.’
‘No question that he’s going straight to it,’ Elliott observed, as she sought out the small form of Woody trudging deliberately towards the tower. He wasn’t the only thing moving in the place as flies and insects with bizarre appearances buzzed furiously in the air, and an army of birds had already ventured back after the tumult. These birds were clearly having a heyday as they flocked to the fields of newly turned soil to gorge themselves on the exposed grubs and worms.
Elliott, Will and Jürgen had wasted no time in following after the bushman, but it wasn’t that easy to move at any speed over the ground. Not only was it very uneven, but as the sun dried out the clods of earth, they were crumbling away and shifting like sand under their feet.
Shielding his eyes, Jürgen squinted as he tried to see the other pyramids through the sun-hazed air. ‘It’s incredible when you think that this was all solid jungle only moments ago,’ he said.
But Will’s mind was elsewhere as he tried to make sense of what they’d just witnessed. ‘So the pyramids must have been covered in the stones with the carvings on them at some point after the basic structures had been built,’ he reasoned out loud, turning to Jürgen.
‘But the oldest of the carved stones were at least three thousand years old,’ Jürgen replied.
‘Right …’ Will said thoughtfully. ‘But my dad’s theory was that the Lost City of Atlantis has been in this world all along, and he could still be right. The Atlanteans might have built on top of the original structures?’
‘That’s a possibility,’ Jürgen agreed, giving a small shrug.
‘And so the bushmen, the descendants of the Atlanteans, continued the tradition of recording their culture and history on the pyramids,’ Will went on.