The Atlantis Legacy - A01-A02 by Thomas Greanias Page A
Authors: Thomas Greanias
Tags: thriller
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this Antarctic ice shelf, which suggest that the collapse of the shelf is imminent.”
A scruffy college type, the kind who wouldn’t last a week at Annapolis, came on-screen to say, “Scientists consider the rapid disintegration of this and other ice shelves around Antarctica a sign that dangerous warming is continuing.”
Footage appeared of an iceberg that had split off the coast a few weeks ago. The reporter’s voice-over noted that the towering ice cube covered two thousand square miles, with sheer walls rising almost two hundred feet above the waterline, and had an estimated depth of one thousand feet.
“And now a bizarre new twist to the global warming phenomenon has surfaced regarding accusations of unauthorized nuclear tests by the United States in the interior snow deserts of Antarctica.”
The CNN report concluded with a long shot of the Constellation ’s ominous profile on the ocean horizon at dawn.
“Aw, hell,” said Warren. MSNBC and the other network news shows would soon give out the same information. It couldn’t get any worse. “Damn you, Griffin Yeats.”
10
DISCOVERY PLUS TWENTY-FOUR DAYS, SIXTEEN HOURS
S ERENA SAT ON HER BUNK, listening to the whirring of the two fans pumping air and God knew what else into the cold brig. She shivered. Images she had trained herself to suppress had resurfaced after seeing Conrad. Now, as she hugged her body to keep warm, the memory of their last time together came flooding back.
It had been March, six months after they first met at the symposium of Meso-American archaeologists in La Paz, Bolivia’s capital. She was still a nun then, and they were seeing each other almost daily, working side by side on a research project in the lost city of Tiahuanaco high in the Andes.
Conrad Yeats was intelligent, attractive, witty, and sensitive. He was almost more spiritual than her colleagues from Rome, and what attracted her to him most was the purity of his calling. Some found his unorthodox theory of a Mother Culture threatening, but to her it made a wild kind of sense, based on her own studies of world mythologies. She and Conrad were approaching the same conclusion from different ends, he from archaeology and she from linguistics.
On the last night of their field studies program he invited her to join him for a “revelation” on Lake Titicaca, about twelve miles away from Tiahuanaco.
It was a curious place for good-byes, she thought as she strolled the shore. Locals and tourists alike were bustling about and drinking beers at the lakeside taverns as the sun began to set.
Then a tanned and handsome Conrad showed up in an elegant reed boat, like some Tiahuanacan visage come to life. The boat came from the lake’s island of Suriqi. It was a fifteen-footer made from bundled totora rushes, wide amidships and narrow at either end with a high curving prow and stern. Tight cords held the bundles of reeds in place.
“Look familiar?” he asked as he beckoned her aboard. “Just like the boats made from papyrus reeds that the pharaohs used to sail the Nile during the Age of the Pyramids.”
“And I suppose, Doctor Yeats, that you can explain how these strikingly similar designs could arise in two such widely separated places?” she asked, playing along.
It was just one of the many mysteries of Lake Titicaca, he said in his best tour guide twang and offered to take her to the middle of the lake to show her his “revelation.”
She had a pretty good idea what that revelation was and smiled. “There’s nothing you can show me in the middle of the lake that you can’t show me here.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he told her.
She shouldn’t have gone with him. The sisters had a policy of traveling in pairs and never being alone with a man in a room with the door closed. It wasn’t out of fear or paranoia but for appearances’ sake. There must not be a hint of impropriety that would harm the cause of Christ.
But Conrad, as usual, was too persuasive to
A scruffy college type, the kind who wouldn’t last a week at Annapolis, came on-screen to say, “Scientists consider the rapid disintegration of this and other ice shelves around Antarctica a sign that dangerous warming is continuing.”
Footage appeared of an iceberg that had split off the coast a few weeks ago. The reporter’s voice-over noted that the towering ice cube covered two thousand square miles, with sheer walls rising almost two hundred feet above the waterline, and had an estimated depth of one thousand feet.
“And now a bizarre new twist to the global warming phenomenon has surfaced regarding accusations of unauthorized nuclear tests by the United States in the interior snow deserts of Antarctica.”
The CNN report concluded with a long shot of the Constellation ’s ominous profile on the ocean horizon at dawn.
“Aw, hell,” said Warren. MSNBC and the other network news shows would soon give out the same information. It couldn’t get any worse. “Damn you, Griffin Yeats.”
10
DISCOVERY PLUS TWENTY-FOUR DAYS, SIXTEEN HOURS
S ERENA SAT ON HER BUNK, listening to the whirring of the two fans pumping air and God knew what else into the cold brig. She shivered. Images she had trained herself to suppress had resurfaced after seeing Conrad. Now, as she hugged her body to keep warm, the memory of their last time together came flooding back.
It had been March, six months after they first met at the symposium of Meso-American archaeologists in La Paz, Bolivia’s capital. She was still a nun then, and they were seeing each other almost daily, working side by side on a research project in the lost city of Tiahuanaco high in the Andes.
Conrad Yeats was intelligent, attractive, witty, and sensitive. He was almost more spiritual than her colleagues from Rome, and what attracted her to him most was the purity of his calling. Some found his unorthodox theory of a Mother Culture threatening, but to her it made a wild kind of sense, based on her own studies of world mythologies. She and Conrad were approaching the same conclusion from different ends, he from archaeology and she from linguistics.
On the last night of their field studies program he invited her to join him for a “revelation” on Lake Titicaca, about twelve miles away from Tiahuanaco.
It was a curious place for good-byes, she thought as she strolled the shore. Locals and tourists alike were bustling about and drinking beers at the lakeside taverns as the sun began to set.
Then a tanned and handsome Conrad showed up in an elegant reed boat, like some Tiahuanacan visage come to life. The boat came from the lake’s island of Suriqi. It was a fifteen-footer made from bundled totora rushes, wide amidships and narrow at either end with a high curving prow and stern. Tight cords held the bundles of reeds in place.
“Look familiar?” he asked as he beckoned her aboard. “Just like the boats made from papyrus reeds that the pharaohs used to sail the Nile during the Age of the Pyramids.”
“And I suppose, Doctor Yeats, that you can explain how these strikingly similar designs could arise in two such widely separated places?” she asked, playing along.
It was just one of the many mysteries of Lake Titicaca, he said in his best tour guide twang and offered to take her to the middle of the lake to show her his “revelation.”
She had a pretty good idea what that revelation was and smiled. “There’s nothing you can show me in the middle of the lake that you can’t show me here.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he told her.
She shouldn’t have gone with him. The sisters had a policy of traveling in pairs and never being alone with a man in a room with the door closed. It wasn’t out of fear or paranoia but for appearances’ sake. There must not be a hint of impropriety that would harm the cause of Christ.
But Conrad, as usual, was too persuasive to
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