CHAPTER 4
Two Miles Below Immari Operations Base Prism
Antarctica
David Vale couldn’t stop looking at his dead body. It lay there in the corridor, in a pool of his blood, his eyes still open, staring at the ceiling above. Another body lay across him—that of his killer, Dorian Sloane. Sloane’s body was a mangled mess—David’s final bullets had hit Sloane at close range. Occasionally a piece of the carnage would peel off the ceiling, like a slowly disintegrating pi?ata.
David looked away from the scene. The glass tube that held him was less than three feet wide, and the thick wisps of white fog that floated through it made it feel even smaller. He glanced down the length of the giant chamber, at the miles of other tubes, stacked from the floor to a ceiling so high he couldn’t see the end. The fog was thicker in those tubes, hiding the inhabitants. The only person he could see stood in the tube across from him. Sloane. Unlike David, he never looked around. Sloane simply stared straight at David, hate in his eyes, his only movement the occasional flexing of his jaw muscles.
David briefly looked into his killer’s glaring eyes, then resumed studying his tube for the hundredth time. His CIA training didn’t cover anything like this: how to escape from a hibernation tube in a two-million-year-old structure two miles below the surface of Antarctica. There was that class on escaping from tubes in one-million-year-old structures, but he had missed that day. David smiled at his own lame joke. Whatever he was, he hadn’t lost his memories—or his sense of humor. As the thought faded, he remembered Sloane’s constant stare, and David let the smile slip away, hoping the fog had hidden it from his enemy.
David felt another pair of eyes on him. He looked up, then around, then up and down the chamber. It was empty, but David was sure there had been someone there. He tried to lean forward, straining to see deeper into the corridor with the dead bodies. Nothing. As he panned around, something alarmed him—Sloane. He wasn’t staring at David. David followed Sloane’s gaze into the vast chamber. Between their tubes, a man stood. At least, he looked like a man. Had he come from outside or inside? Was he an Atlantean? Whatever he was, he was tall, easily over six feet, and dressed in a crisp black suit that looked like a military uniform. His skin was white, almost translucent, and he was clean-shaven. His only hair was a thick stock of white atop his head—which might have been a little oversized for his body.
The man stood there for a moment, looking from David to Sloane and back again, as if he were a betting man, touring the stables, sizing up two thoroughbreds before a big race.
Then a rhythmic noise cut the silence and began echoing through the chamber: naked feet slapping the iron floor. David’s eyes followed the sound. Sloane. He was out. He hobbled as best he could toward the dead bodies—and the guns beside them. David looked back at the Atlantean just as his own tube slid open. David leapt free, stumbled on his barely responsive legs, and then trudged forward. Sloane was already halfway to the guns.