But down deep, doubts were starting to form as to whether he could still pull the coals of final victory out of the fire.
The security guards were waging war with a vengeance. In their minds, they were fighting not only for their own lives but for the lives of their families who were waiting on board the Ulrich Wolf. Hugo himself was in the thick of the fighting in front of the control center, directing his forces and tightening the noose on the American assault team. His arrogance while issuing orders reflected his supreme confidence and optimism. His battle strategy was going exactly as he'd planned it. Hugo was in the enviable position of a commander who could dictate the terms of the fight.
He was flushing his enemy into one concentrated area for annihilation, as he had promised his brother Karl.
He spoke into an intercom mike inside his battle helmet. "Brother Karl?"
There was a moment or two of slight static before Karl responded. "Yes, Hugo."
"The intruders are contained. You and Elsie and the others can leave for the hangar as soon as the engineers set the nanotech systems on automatic."
"Thank you, brother. I'll soon meet you at the aircraft."
Two minutes later, as Hugo was ordering his two remaining armored Sno-cats to charge the American team, a security guard rushed to him behind the barricade and shouted, "Sir, I have an urgent message from the aircraft hangar!"
"What is it?" Hugo yelled above the gunfire.
But in that instant, Sergeant Mendoza squinted at the head behind the crosshairs inside his sniper scope and gently pulled the trigger of his Eradicator. The guard dropped dead at Hugo's feet, neither hearing nor feeling the bullet enter his right temple and exit the left. The message he had urgently wished to report, on the destruction in the aircraft hangar by a strange vehicle, died with him.
Garnet's Marines linked up with Sharpsburg's Delta team and took cover, as the four Sno-cats withdrew from chasing Jacobs and attacked them in a double column from the rear. They came on oblivious to the two antitank weapons aimed at them by the Marines, who at less than a hundred yards couldn't miss. The lead Sno-cats went up in an explosion of fire and flying debris and bodies, forming an effective roadblock that prevented the remaining vehicles from striking the already beleaguered Americans.
Cleary realized quickly that the reprieve had only short-term benefits and was temporary. It would be only a question of time before the security guards wised up to the fact that no more antitank shells were being fired because the supply was exhausted. Then the armored Sno-cats would attack, and there would be no stopping them. When Jacobs and his team hit the barricade from the flank, hopefully the advantage would swing to their side.
In Washington, the battlefield reports from the men under fire made it evident that the assault force was in deep trouble. It was becoming more obvious by the minute that Cleary and his men were being shot to pieces. The President and the Joint Chiefs could not believe what they heard. What had been launched as a daring mission had turned into a slaughter and a disaster. They were shocked by the growing realization that the mission had failed, and that the entire inhabited world was in jeopardy of vanishing, a nightmare they found impossible to accept.
"The aircraft carrying the main force," the President said, his thinking becoming disoriented, "when…?"
"They won't be over the compound for another forty minutes," answered General South.
"And the countdown?"
"Twenty-two minutes until the currents are right for the ice shelf to break off."
"Then we've got to send in the missiles."
"We will be killing our own men as well," cautioned General South.
"Do we have another option?" the President put to him.
South looked down at his open hands and slowly shook his head. "No, Mr. President, we don't."
Admiral Eldridge asked, "Shall I alert the commander of the Tucson to launch missiles?"
"If I may suggest," said the Air Force chief of staff, General Coburn, "I think it best that we send in the Stealth bombers. Their aircrews are more accurate in guiding their missiles to a target than an unmanned Tomahawk launched from a submarine."
The President quickly made his decision. "All right, alert the bomber pilots, but tell them not to fire until ordered. We never know when a miracle might happen and Major Cleary can force his way into the control center and halt the countdown."
As General Coburn issued the order, General South muttered under his breath, "A miracle is exactly what it will take."
43
Streets ran off the square between buildings that protruded from the ice. They were not on the massive scale of much later civilizations, but their architectural characteristics were unlike any Pitt and Giordino had ever seen in their travels. There was no telling how many acres or square miles the city covered. What they saw was only a fraction of the magnificence that was the Amenes.
Rising up from one end of the square, an immense, richly ornate structure with triangular columns supported a pediment decorated with fleets of ancient ships in relief over a frieze carved with intricate sculptures of animals mingling with people wearing the same dress found on the mummies at St. Paul Island. The basic design of the colossal building was unlike any still standing from the ancient world. It would have been obvious to the eye of an architect that its basic structural form had been passed down through the millennia and copied by later builders of the great temples of Luxor, Athens, and Rome. The columns, however, were triangular, and looked foreign when compared to the much later round, fluted Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns.
A large entrance yawned beyond the columns. There were no stairs. The upper levels were reached by gradually sloping ramps. Spellbound, Pitt and Giordino exited the Snow Cruiser and walked past the columns. Inside the main chamber, a vast corbeled triangular roof soared above the ice-covered, rock-hewn floor. In huge niches along the walls were stone statues of what must have been Amenes kings, powerful-looking creations with round eyes and narrow faces carved out of granite rich in quartz that shimmered as they walked past them. Sculptured heads of men and a few women were set in the floor, staring upward through their thin coating of ice, with Amenes inscriptions engraved above and below them.
In the center of the great chamber, a life-size sculpture of an ancient ship, complete with banks of oars, full sails, and crews, stood on a pedestal. The sight was nothing less than spectacular. The sheer artistry, craft, and technical mastery of stone gave it an eerie mystique that mocked modern sculpture.
"What do you make of it?" asked Giordino reverently, as if he were standing in a cathedral. "A temple to their gods?"
"More likely a mausoleum or a shrine," said Pitt, gesturing at the heads rising from the floor. "These look like memorials, perhaps to revered men and women who explored the ancient world and those who were lost at sea."
"It's amazing the roof didn't collapse after the comfit's impact or the later accumulation of ice."
"Their builders must have worked under exceptionally high standards that were possible only under a structured culture."
They gazed in fascination down a network of windowless corridors whose interior walls were beautifully painted with scenes of spectacular seascapes that began with calm waters and progressed to waves whipped by hurricane furies beating against rocky shorelines. If modern men and women looked to the heavens for their God, the Amenes had looked to the seas. Their statuaries were of men and women, not stylized versions of gods.
"A long-lost race who discovered the world," Giordino said philosophically, "And yet there are no artifacts lying around, and no sign of the inhabitants' remains."
Pitt nodded at the network of narrow passages carved into the ice. "No doubt recovered by the Nazis who discovered it, and later taken by the Wolfs to their museums on board the Ulrich Wolf."