Raising Atlantis

4

The command center of Ice Base Orion was a low-ceilinged module crammed with consoles and crew members watching their flickering monitors in the shadows. But to Major General Griffin Yeats it was a triumph of Air Force logistics, erected in less than three weeks in the most alien terrain on planet Earth.

“Thirty seconds, General Yeats,” said Colonel O’Dell, Yeats’s neckless executive officer, from the shadows of his glowing console.

An image of Antarctica hovered on the main screen. The ice-covered continent was an eerie blue from the vantage point of space, a great island surrounded by a world ocean and an outer ring of landmass, the navel of the Earth.

Yeats stared at the screen incredulously. He had seen that very picture of the Southern Hemisphere once before, from the window of an Apollo spacecraft. That was almost a lifetime ago. Still, some things never changed, and a sense of awe washed over him.

“Satellite in range in fifteen seconds, sir,” O’Dell said.

The video image blurred for a moment. Then a gigantic storm cloud jumped into view. Yeats saw what looked like the legs of a spider swirling clockwise around Antarctica. There were twelve of these legs or “strings of pearls”-low-pressure fronts endemic to the region.

“That’s one hell of a storm,” Yeats said. “Give me the specs.”

“Looks like we’ve got four separate storms merging into a double-low, sir,” O’Dell reported. “Almost four thousand miles wide. Big enough to cover the entire United States.”

Yeats nodded. “I want the runway cleared again.”

The room got quiet, only the low hum and soft beeps of the computers and monitors. Yeats was aware of the stares of his officers.

O’Dell cleared his throat. “Sir, we should warn six-nine-six.”

“Negative. I want radio blackout.”

“But, sir, your-Doctor Yeats is on board.”

“We’ve got forty men on that transport, Colonel. And a fine pilot in Commander Lundstrom. No transmissions. Buzz me on their approach.”

“Yes, sir,” said O’Dell with a salute as Yeats marched out of the command center.

The floor-to-ceiling window in General Yeats’s quarters framed the yawning ice gorge outside, offering him a skybox seat of the excavation. Pillars of bluish, crystal plumes billowed out of the abyss. And at the bottom was everything he and Conrad had been searching for.

Yeats poured himself a Jack Daniel’s and sat down behind his desk. He hurt like hell and wanted to howl like the katabatic winds outside. But he couldn’t afford to let O’Dell or the others see him at less than his best.

He propped his right boot on the desk and pulled his pant leg back to reveal a scarred and disfigured limb, his parting gift from his first mission to this frozen hell more than thirty-five years ago. The pain throbbed a few inches below the knee. Goddamn tricks the cold played on him down here.

But damn if it didn’t feel good to be in charge again, he thought, catching a dim reflection of himself in the reinforced plexiglass window. Even now, in his sixties, he still cut a commanding figure. Most of the baby faces on the base had no idea who he used to be way back when. Or, rather, who he was supposed to have been.

Griffin Yeats should have been the first man on Mars.

The Gemini and Apollo space veteran had been tapped for the job in 1968. The Mars shuttle, as originally formulated by rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun in 1953 and later revised by NASA planners, was scheduled to depart the American space station Freedom on November 12, 1981, reach the red planet on August 9, 1982, and return to Earth one year later.

If only politics were as predictable as the orbit of the planets.

By 1969 the war in Vietnam had sapped the federal budget, and the moon landing had temporarily satiated Americans’ appetite for space exploration. With congressional opposition to the mission mounting, President Nixon rejected the Mars mission and space station program. Only the space shuttle would get the green light. It was a catastrophic decision that set the Mars program back for decades, left the space shuttle all dressed up with no place to go, and cast a rudderless NASA adrift in the political backwaters of Washington without a clear vision.

It also killed Yeats’s dreams of greatness.

The desk console buzzed and broke Yeats’s trance. It was O’Dell in the command center. “Sir, we think we’ve picked them up on radar. Twenty minutes to landing.”

“Where are we with the runway?”

“Clearing it now, sir, but the storm-”

“No excuses, Colonel. I’ll be there in a minute. You better have an update.”

Yeats took another shot of whiskey and stared outside. At the time Nixon decided to scrap the Mars mission, Yeats was here in Antarctica, in the middle of a forty-day stay in a habitat specifically designed to simulate the first Martian landing. They were a crew of four supported by two Mars landing modules, a nuclear power plant, and a rover for exploring the surrounding territory.

Antarctica was as cold as Mars, and nearly as windy. Its snowstorms packed the same kind of punch as Martian dust storms. Most of all, the continent was almost as remote as the red planet, and in utter isolation a crew member’s true character would reveal itself.

For Yeats it was an experience that would forever change his life, in ways he never imagined. Four men walked into that mission. Only one limped out alive. But to what? To roam the subbasement corridors of the Pentagon as a creaky relic of the old space program? To raise an orphaned boy? To lose his wife and daughters as a result? Everything had been taken away from him.

Today he was taking it back.