“I can keep up,” David said between pants.
“Sure you can. Remember who you’re talking to. I was hobbling around in these tunnels a hundred years before you. You need to take it easy.”
David looked up at him. “Speaking of, you’re walking fine now.”
“Yes. Though I would trade it to go back. The tube. I walked right out in 1918. A few days in there fixed me right up. I didn’t put it in the journal, at the time all I could think about was what was happening around me. Helena… the Spanish Flu…” Patrick stared at the wall for a minute. “I think the tubes did something else. When I came out in ‘78, I could work the machines. I think it’s why I could go through the portal in Gibraltar.” Patrick eyed David. “But I still don’t understand how you could. You’ve never been in a tube.”
“True. I admit, I don’t understand it.”
“Did the Immari treat you with something?”
“No. Or, I don’t think so. But, actually, I was treated… I got blood from someone who was in the tubes — Kate. I was wounded in Tibet. I lost a lot of blood, and she… saved my life.”
Patrick nodded and paced the corridor. “That’s interesting.” He glanced over at the goo-covered wounds on David’s chest and leg. “The wounds were cleaned, but I thought they were gunshot wounds. How did you get them?”
“Dorian Sloane.”
“So he’s joined the Immari and continued the family legacy. Little devil was growing more evil by the day in 1985. He was 15 then.”
“He hasn’t slowed down. I’m ready.” David said.
Patrick led the way again, resuming a brisk, but somewhat slower pace. Up ahead, a set of double doors that had never opened before cracked and slid aside as they approached. “It’s exciting — opening passages that were closed yesterday. Listen to me, I sound like the fools who hired me during the War.”
David shook his head. “The War.”
“What?”
“It’s nothing. It’s just strange to hear ‘The War’ in reference to World War I. These days it means the war in Afghanistan.”
Patrick stopped. “The Soviets? We’re at war—”
“Oh, no, they’ve been gone since ‘89. Actually, the Soviet Union doesn’t even exist anymore.”
“Who then?”
“Al Qaeda, or actually, now it’s the Taliban, a… a radical Islamic tribe of sorts.”
“America is at war with an Afghan tribe…”
“Yeah, it’s a, uh, long story—”
The lights in the corridor flickered, then went out. Both men froze.
“Has that ever happened before?” David whispered.
“No.” Patrick took out an LED bar and snapped a switch. It cast light into the corridor and all around them. He felt like Indiana Jones striking a torch that illuminated some ancient corridor. He started to make a reference, but David wouldn’t know who Indiana Jones was.
The younger man raised his good arm to block his eyes and squinted.
Patrick paced ahead, taking each step with care. The lights in the corridor flickered again, almost coming on, before winking out. The door at the end of the corridor didn’t automatically open as they approached. Patrick extended his hand to the glass panel beside it. Sparse wisps of fog wafted out, and the pops at his hand were less intense. What was happening?
“I think there’s a problem with the power or something,” Patrick said. He thought he could work the door. He manipulated the controls and the door slid open slowly.
He held the LED bar up, casting light into the massive space. The chamber was bigger than any he had ever seen, down here or anywhere else. It looked as though it were miles long and miles wide.
Rows of long glass tubes were stacked to the ceiling, higher than he could see. They stretched into the distance, miles away, far into the darkness.
They were the same type of tubes Patrick had seen in Gibraltar so many years ago, with two exceptions: these tubes were full of bodies… and the white mist inside was changing. Clearing. The dissipating clouds inside the tubes revealed only brief glimpses of the people inside. If they were even people. They looked more like humans than the ape man in Gibraltar. Were these the Atlanteans? If not, who? And what was happening to them? Were they waking up?
Patrick’s fascination with the tubes was interrupted by a sound, deep inside the chamber: footsteps.
CHAPTER 132
The double doors to the room slid open, and Kate fought to hide her surprise when a tall, middle-aged man wearing a Nazi military uniform strode in. The man came to a halt, and stood still as stone, his back rigid. His eyes moved slowly over Kate and then the children.
Unconsciously, Kate took a step forward, placing herself between the man and her children. His lips curled slightly at the ends, as if her involuntary motion had revealed something, had told him a secret. Maybe the step had betrayed her, but his smile had done the same for him: she knew that cold smile. And she knew who the man was.
“Hello, Herr Kane,” Kate said in German. “We have been looking for you for a very long time.”
CHAPTER 133
Patrick listened as the footsteps somewhere in the darkness stopped. He and David both froze, looking at each other, waiting.
“What is this place?” David whispered.
“I’m not sure.”
“You’ve never been in here?”
“No. But I think, maybe… I have an idea,” Patrick said as he gazed at the tubes. The room was dark; the only light came from the tubes that hung in bunches on metal racks, like bananas hanging from a tree. Was it possible? Could the Immari have been right all along? “I think this could be a giant hibernation vessel. The door in Gibraltar — it was a portal to another place. Probably the structure in Antarctica. And that structure is… It’s what they thought it was.”
“Who?”
“Kane, the Immari. Their whole theory was that the structure in Gibraltar was a small outpost for the Atlantean Homeland, which they assumed was under Antarctica. They believed the Atlanteans were hibernational superhumans, waiting to return north and retake the Earth when the weather suited them.”
“Is there another possibility?”
Patrick looked around at the tubes and shook his head. “Hell if I know. I’m a coal miner from West Virginia.”
At that moment, the steps resumed.
Patrick glanced at David’s cane — the spear. The look on his face exposed his thoughts: if they walked to the footsteps, whoever it was would hear them coming.