James Rollins - The Eye of God - A Sigma Force Novel

“Monk informed me of your plans. I agree with you. Kat will expedite a fast evacuation and get you to California as quickly as possible. But I wanted to inform you about what has transpired during your absence.”

He then told her everything, none of it good news.

“Sixteen hours?” she said with dismay as he finished. “It’ll take us at least two hours just to get back to Ulan Bator.”

“I’ll tell Monk to head straight for the airport. There will be a jet fueled and waiting for you and that Eye.”

“Could someone also transmit the latest data from the SMC to my laptop? I want to review everything en route to California. Also I’ll need a secure channel to speak to personnel out there while I’m flying.”

“It’ll be done.”

She detailed her final preparations and passed the phone back to Monk, leaving him to work out the logistics.

Jada stepped away, hugging her arms around herself, chilled and scared. She stared up at the blaze of the comet across the night sky.

Sixteen hours.

It was a frightening, impossible time frame.

Still, a deeper terror settled through her, born of a nagging sense that she was still missing something important.

8:44 P.M.

Duncan stood at the edge of the meadow, trying to hold the gyroscopic case between his palms, keeping his fingertips away from its surface. Still, that dark electric field pushed against him, pulsing very faintly with tiny waves, giving off that feeling of holding something with a beating heart.

He shivered—but not from the cold.

Gooseflesh covered his arms.

C’mon already, guys, he thought as he listened to Monk murmuring over the satellite phone, likely making plans to leave here.

He was more than happy about that.

And getting rid of this thing.

Trying to shake the nervous feeling, he paced along the edge of the forest. His toe hit a root poking out of the soil. He stumbled a few steps, feeling stupid—until something worse happened.

The bottom half of the gyroscopic case dropped open between his palms. Jada must have forgotten to latch it after closing it. He never thought to even check.

In slow motion, he watched that perfect sphere of crystal—holding the very fire of the universe—drop away. It fell out of the bottom of the open housing, hit the ground, and rolled into the porcupine grass of the meadow.

He chased after it.

If he lost this . . .

He snatched it one-handed, like nabbing a basketball before it bounced out of bounds. The shock of grasping the sphere bare-handed, without its case as insulation, felled him to his knees. The black energy lit his hand on fire, his fingers spastically clenched around the curved surface. He could no longer tell where the energy field ended and the crystal began. It felt as if his fingers were melting into the sphere.

Still kneeling, he lifted the object high, ready to cast it away in revulsion—but a spark of fire inside drew his eye. He stared through the sphere, seeing a view of the Wolf Fang through its crystal heart.

Only now the tip of the peak lay shattered, frosted with a haze of rock dust. The lower forest burned, smoking heavily, the edges still raging with flames.

He lowered the crystal—and all was fine.

Back up again—and the world burned.

That can’t be good.

Standing up, he swiveled around. No matter where he cast the Eye, it opened a view into a fiery apocalypse. Facing north, he spotted the likely source of this destruction: a distant smoking crater.

“What are you doing?” Jada asked, startling him as she came up behind him.

Too shocked to speak, he shifted the sphere toward her. He pointed through it toward the Wolf Fang.

Frowning at his apparent foolishness, she leaned against his shoulder and peered through the crystal. She stood that way for several breaths, surely as shocked as he was.

“So?” she finally said, turning toward his face.

“Don’t you see it?”

“See what?”

“The mountain, the forest. Everything destroyed.”

She looked at him as if he were crazy. “I don’t see anything like that.”

What?

Duncan turned his attention back to the fiery destruction glowing in the heart of the crystal Eye, an apocalypse apparently only he could see.

Here was confirmation that it wasn’t only the Eastern Seaboard at risk. The entire globe was threatened.

Realizing this, he came to only one firm conclusion.

We’re screwed.

FOURTH

FIRE & ICE

Σ

25

November 20, 1:02 A.M. IRKST

Lake Baikal, Russia

Gray huddled with the others on the frozen ferry pier. It was pitch dark under a clear sky, the night bitterly cold compared to Ulan Bator some three hundred miles due south. They were all bundled in parkas with fur-fringed hoods, looking not much different from the sole native who was also crossing to Olkhon Island at this very late hour.

Normally a boat transported visitors to the island from this tiny lakeside village of Sakhyurta, crossing the mile-wide strait that separated Olkhon from the mainland. But in winter, the only way to reach the island oddly enough was by way of public bus.

Not that there was any man-made bridge.

The bus would cross directly over the ice. Apparently, in winter the deep strait froze solid enough to support vehicles. He could even make out the road along the black ice, frosted with a dusting of dry, windblown snow.

Rachel eyed their transportation with a skeptical eye. No one else looked any more confident. Even Kowalski was in a darker sulk than usual.

“I’ve had my fill of trips over ice,” the big man grumbled. “Ever hear of Grendels.”

Gray ignored him. After the team’s gear was stored, he waved everyone aboard. With the passengers all seated, the driver closed the door, ground the gears, and set off over the ice. It was early enough in the season to make Gray polish his fogged window and watch their passage with a twinge of trepidation. By January, the massive lake would entirely freeze over, allowing hardy individuals to trek from one side of the lake to the other.

It hadn’t reached that level of freeze yet. Farther out on the lake, he saw waves churning across its surface. He had read up enough on this body of water to know it was a geological marvel, the deepest lake on the planet, formed by filling a gap between tectonic plates that were slowly pulling apart, enlarging the lake until eventually it would be a new ocean.

That is, if the planet were still intact by then.

He checked his watch. He had spoken to Painter after landing in the nearby city of Irkutsk in Russia, where he learned of the new tighter timetable. Even now, they were down to roughly twelve hours. He imagined Monk was lifting off right about now from Ulan Bator, on his way to California with Dr. Shaw and Duncan.

The plan was for her to study the gyroscopic Eye out there, while he attempted to retrieve the cross here. Maybe she could figure out some solution on her own, but Gray was their fail-safe—assuming he could find that saintly artifact.

But both he and Dr. Shaw were severely constricted by time.

She had a seven- to eight-hour flight back to the States, eating up precious hours. He was in no better position.

He couldn’t begin his search until sunrise. It was too dark to accomplish anything now, and worse, they had no concrete lead on where to even start. The island was forty-four miles long and thirteen wide. The eastern half was all steep mountains, fringed in fir forests, rising to its highest peak, Mount Zhima. The rest of the terrain was a mix of sand dunes, grassy steppes, and patches of larch woods.