James Rollins - The 6th Extinction

I’m only a glorified tech geek .

Still, his gut told him that what he’d found might be important.

“What do you mean?” Monk asked, letting out a jaw-popping yawn. He sat with his boots up on the neighboring desk.

“You’d better check this out.”

Monk grumbled under his breath — something about kids always waking him up. He shifted his feet to the ground and slid his chair next to Jason. “What did you find?”

“I’ve been looking through the other historical maps included in the folder from the British Antarctic Survey and reading through Professor Harrington’s notes on them.”

“The paleobiologist.”

“That’s right.” Jason cleared his throat, swallowing hard. “Here’s another pair of maps of Antarctica, both dating about twenty years after the Piri Reis map was drawn in 1513. One by a fellow named Oronteus Finaeus and the other by Gerardus Mercator.”

“Notice again that they both show Antarctica without ice,” Jason said. “Harrington also notes that the maps reveal mountain ranges, peaks that are currently buried deep under glaciers and should not have been visible back in the sixteenth century. Likewise, the maps include fine details about the continent, like charting Alexander Island and the Weddell Sea.”

Monk scrunched his brow. “And both of these maps were drawn centuries before the continent was ever officially discovered.”

Jason nodded. “And many millennia after Antarctica’s coastlines were ever free of ice. There’s also this map from 1739 by a French cartographer named Buache.”

“See how this chart shows Antarctica being depicted as two landmasses, separated by a river or sea. That’s true. While the continent appears to be one continuous landmass, strip away the ice and it’s actually a mountainous archipelago broken up into two main sections: Lesser Antarctica and Greater Antarctica. This detail wasn’t known until seismic mapping was done by the U.S. Air Force in 1968.”

“And this map was from the eighteenth century?”

“That’s right.” He couldn’t keep the excitement from his voice.

“But what does any of this have to do with Dr. Hess’s research in California?”

The question deflated his enthusiasm. “I don’t know, but there’s a lot more from Professor Harrington in this folder, some files dating back to World War II. Much of it highly redacted. I’ll need time to go through it all.”

“Sounds like you’re going to need a keg of coffee when we get back to Sigma command.”

Jason resigned himself to this fact. “I suppose when it comes to mysteries surrounding Antarctica, it’s better me than anyone else.”

Monk stared harder at him. “What do you mean?”

“Kat… I mean Captain Bryant… never told you?”

“There’s lots of things my wife doesn’t tell me. Most of it for my own good.” Monk pointed a finger at him. “So spill it, kid.”

Jason stared at the man’s raised hand, noting the slight unnatural sheen to its surface. It was a prosthetic, eerily lifelike, showing fine hairs on the back and knuckles. Jason knew the story of how Monk had lost the hand and respected the man all the more for it. Afterward, DARPA had replaced it with this marvel of bioengineering, incorporating advanced mechanics and actuators, allowing sensory feedback and surgically precise movements. Jason had also heard that Monk would detach the hand and control it remotely via contact points on the titanium cuff surgically attached to the stump of his wrist.

Jason would love to see such a performance someday.

“If you’re done staring…” Monk warned, a slight growl in his voice.

“Sorry.”

“You mentioned you had a connection to Antarctica.”

“I once lived there, but it’s been a while. My mom, stepdad, and sister are still there… near McMurdo Station.”

Monk squinted at him, sensing there was more to his story, adventures left untold, but he left it there. “Then with your background, maybe you should be the one to interview this Harrington guy. Find out what the Brit knows.”

Jason perked up. He always wanted to do fieldwork someday, and this might be the opening he needed. Anything to break free of motherboards, logic circuits, and code-breaking algorithms.

A door closed down the hallway, the sound echoing to them.

Monk stood up.

Jason glanced over his shoulder. “Sounds like Commander Pierce is back.”

Hopefully with something more exciting to do than look at maps .

“Kid, do you have a side arm?”

Only now did he note how tense his companion had gone. All that easygoing manner had washed out of his form.

“No…” Jason squeaked out.

“Neither do I, but that was the stairwell door. Not the elevator. Don’t think Gray needs the exercise at this late hour.”

The heavy tread of multiple boots on concrete reached them.

Monk turned to Jason, his gaze dead serious. “I’m open to any bright ideas, kid.”

Gray worked swiftly, knowing every second counted.

As he swept along the seventh-floor hallway, he collected extra magazines from the dead, making sure they matched the weapon he had swiped. He didn’t know how many others were downstairs, but he was taking no chances. In a firefight, the difference between life and death could be a single round.

“I’m heading below,” he said, pinning his cell phone to his ear with his shoulder. After finding Raffee dead, he had placed a quick call to Sigma for help.

“I’ll get units to you as soon as I can.” Kat sounded tense, but even with her husband in harm’s way, she stayed focused. “Be careful.”

“Only as careful as I need to be.”

He hung up as he reached the end of the corridor. He paused long enough to grab a hammer from a construction worker’s toolbox. Despite Kat’s efforts, he estimated it would still take law enforcement several minutes to arrive on-site.

Too late to help Monk and Jason .

Gray stepped to the fire alarm on the wall and yanked the red lever down. An alarm immediately rang out. His goal was to light a fire under the enemy, hopefully scare them into flight. Failing that, it might make them at least hurry, perhaps even make needless mistakes.

Plus the racket should help cover his own approach.

He crossed to the elevator bay, knowing the stairwell would be guarded, and entered the same cage he took to get here. He pressed one of the lower floor buttons, but as soon as he felt the cage descend half a floor, he hit the stop button. A buzzing alarm sounded as the cage came to an abrupt halt, but the noise was easily drowned out by the louder clamor of the fire system.

Using the claw-toothed hammer, he pried open the inner door of the elevator. As he’d hoped, the cage had stopped shy of the sixth floor, exposing the top half of the exterior door on that level. He reached and tugged the latch to manually release those doors. Once free, he ducked out of the cage — only to turn back and crawl beneath the stalled elevator.

The open shaft yawned below him.

With the cage above his head, he swung out onto the emergency ladder that ran down the wall to his left. Once mounted, he slid along its length, ignoring the individual rungs. He used his hands and feet to occasionally brake to control his speed, counting the floors as he fell past them. In twenty seconds, he had reached the subbasement doors marked L3.