Chapter Six
When Peri and Ronin pulled into the THS parking lot in their borrowed Silk Road vehicle, dawn was only just lighting the eastern horizon in streaks of pink and gold. The warehouse was ablaze with lights, so she guessed the team was awake and doing their thing.
All the adrenaline of their escape was long gone and Peri had managed to doze on the ride back. She rubbed her bare arms and then touched her hair. She stifled a groan. It was a hopelessly tangled rat’s nest.
They walked up the steps to the building and that’s when she realized Ronin wasn’t wearing any socks with his shoes. She was still in her pajamas and braless. They looked like survivors of a shipwreck. He held the door and waved her inside.
“What the fuck?” Dec appeared. “I got your message an hour ago. Are you two okay?”
“No thanks to Silk Road,” Ronin said darkly.
“Oh, my God.” Darcy stepped up beside her brother. “You guys look terrible.”
“Silk Road sent a team in to take the thumb drive,” Ronin said.
“We decided to leave,” Peri said. “And climb down a cliff face in the dark. In our pajamas.”
“We need to check all THS vehicles,” Ronin said. “They must have tracking devices.”
Dec nodded. “On it. And I’ll send Hale and Cal up to the cabin to get your truck and gear.”
Darcy waved an arm at Peri. “Come on. We’ll head upstairs and get you in a hot shower. I’m sure Layne will have some clothes that will fit you.”
Peri groaned. “A hot shower sounds like heaven.” She looked at Ronin.
“I have some spare gear in my locker and we have showers down here.” He reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “I’ll see you soon.”
Conscious that Dec and Darcy were watching them with raised eyebrows, Peri swiveled and held her hand out to Darcy. “I’m guessing you’ll want this.” The thumb drive rested on her palm.
“You found it.” Darcy took it, an eager light in her eyes. “I’ll see what’s on here.”
Peri took her time in the shower, and after working all the tangles out of her hair, she wasn’t even too weirded out by borrowing Layne Ward’s bra and clothes, which thankfully were dark green cargo pants and a T-shirt with the pyramid-shaped Treasure Hunter Security logo on it. The archeologist had been so gracious setting out clothes, towels, and toiletries for Peri in her sleek, spacious apartment above the THS offices.
When Peri came downstairs, she saw Darcy moving between two computers, Dec and Logan leaning over maps on the table, and Ronin sitting nearby cradling a mug of coffee. His hair was damp and he was wearing a clean set of clothes.
“Hey,” he said.
She smiled. “I feel human again.” She noticed a few scratches on his cheek and reached out to touch them. “What happened here?”
“Tree branches during our mad dash. It’s nothing. I’ve had far, far worse.”
She bet he had. On his SEAL missions and whatever undercover assignments he’d done for the CIA. Whatever he’d done for them had left him with vicious nightmares and the belief he had to hold himself apart from others. Even here with his friends, he somehow held himself off to the side.
Everyone needed someone. Peri had come into the world connected to another being who’d been a part of everything in her life. Amber might drive her nuts sometimes, but she never doubted her sister’s love and loyalty.
Ronin had come into the world with no one. Not even the mother who’d birthed him.
A part of Peri wanted to show him that he could have more in his life if he just let people in, and let her closer. Something also told her that would require patience, stubbornness, and sheer grit.
She leaned down and pressed a kiss to the scratches. His dark eyes were locked on her and she saw so much shift through them, even though he stayed motionless.
The click of heels shattered the moment. Darcy appeared, excitement on her face. “I got the data off the drive.”
Peri spun. “Really?”
“It’s data on the expedition to Antarctica,” Darcy said. “Maps, itineraries, notes.”
Peri rubbed her hands up and down her arms, feeling cold. Dec and Logan had straightened, both standing with arms crossed over their chests and staring up at Darcy’s wall of screens.
Darcy pointed. “The maps here show the location of the pyramid. In the notes, I see they were planning to fly into a seasonal camp. It would have been closed down a few months back.” Darcy’s elegant fingers flew over her keyboard.
Peri tried to focus on all the information, but all she could think about was Amber. Was she okay?
A hand touched her shoulder and squeezed. She looked up and saw Ronin wasn’t looking at her, but he’d still sensed she was upset. Focus on your sister, and not the sexy man beside you.
“After the pyramid was first discovered, Silk Road sent a very small recon team in. It looks like they did some drilling in the ice near the pyramid.” Then Darcy gasped.
“What did they find?” Dec demanded.
His sister raised her head. “They hit metal.”
“How is this possible?” Ronin said. “It’s been covered with ice for millions of years.”
“That may not be exactly correct,” a deep, male voice interjected.
Everyone turned, and Peri watched a good-looking man stride in. He had a tanned, handsome face, and a wide, charming smile. The tall woman beside him moved with an athletic stride. Her short, dark hair suited her tough face, and she looked like she could take every man in the room down and not break a sweat doing it.
The woman stopped and pressed her hands to her hips. “You had to call me in on my days off?”
“I actually called Zach, not you,” Dec said.
The woman snorted. “Since I was busy with Zach, you call him in, you call me in.”
Ah, so the man who looked like a handsome adventurer who should be hacking vines off ancient jungle temples, or dusting sand off buried tombs, was Dr. Zachariah James. That made the woman Morgan Kincaid, one of THS’s best security specialists.
“Zach and Morgan, this is Peri Butler,” Ronin said.
Peri shook hands with the couple. “Nice to meet you.”
“I hear your sister got mixed up with Silk Road and is missing,” Zach said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Peri inclined her head. “Thanks for helping.” She glanced at Morgan. “Sorry to ruin your days off.”
Morgan waved a hand. “Your sister needs help, and to be fair, any time I can help ruin Silk Road’s day is a good one.”
“I’m not sure what I can do, but I’ll do anything to help,” Zach said. “I’ve unfortunately seen what Silk Road is capable of. I hope Dec, Ronin, and the others help you find your sister.”
They all sat down around the conference table. Zach stood at the head, talking quietly with Darcy as she tapped on her tablet.
“So, Silk Road, led by Peri’s sister, Amber, has gone to Antarctica, and not returned,” Darcy said.
Morgan was still standing and leaned a hip against the table. “What the hell is in Antarctica that would interest Silk Road? They going after penguins, now?”
Zach shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Darcy tells me Layne mentioned a link with the Nazis and Antarctica. She’s correct. Hitler was very interested in Antarctica. There were rumors that the Nazis were planning on building, or possibly even did build, a secret base there.”
“A base in Antarctica?” Dec shook his head. “Doesn’t sound credible.”
Zach smiled. “Did you know that just last year, Russian scientists discovered a secret, abandoned Nazi base in the Arctic?”
“What?” Peri breathed.
“It was set up on an island, ostensibly to gather strategic weather reports. But from the items and preserved papers recovered, it appears the Germans called the base Treasure Hunter.”
Silence filled the room.
“You think they were really on the hunt for ancient artifacts?” Ronin said.
Zach shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but it seems highly likely.”
“Okay…” Peri said slowly. “And you said they wanted to build a base in Antarctica, too? To find artifacts?”
“Artifacts of power. It was an obsession of Hitler’s. He wanted to find powerful artifacts and then use them to create weapons to win the war.”
“Artifacts of power?” She looked around the table, but no one seemed surprised by Zach’s declaration. “There’s nothing in Antarctica but ice.”
Zach smiled again. “I specialize in megalithic cultures. The cultures that built vast temples and structures with large blocks of stone. They left behind ruins like Stonehenge, the megalithic temples on Malta, Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, just to name a few. There are megalithic structures all across the globe. It’s my belief that there were advanced cultures that were destroyed by floods at the end of the last ice age.”
Shock reverberated through Peri’s body. “Are you talking about Atlantis? Atlantis isn’t real.”
“Not the mythical Atlantis,” Zach said. “But the civilization that probably spawned the myth.”
Peri looked around the room. No one looked shocked.
Morgan nodded. “We’ve seen some of the artifacts they’ve left behind. We can’t conclusively prove that they are advanced technology, but they are something.”
“Generally, what we’ve found has been appropriated by the government,” Dec said with a growl.
“He means taken,” Darcy added.
“By government agencies that don’t even have names,” Dec finished.
Peri looked up at Ronin and he nodded.
“Okay,” Peri said. “Even if I wanted to believe that there were pre-flood civilizations with advanced technologies, and that Hitler, and now Silk Road were after any artifacts left behind, it doesn’t change the fact that Antarctica has been covered by ice for millions of years. No civilization could have built anything there.”
“Well, that may not be true,” Zach said, pressing his hands against the table. “First, I need to tell you about a map. The Piri Reis map.”
“What is it?” Peri asked.
“It is a world map made by an Ottoman general in 1513,” Zach said.
“I’ll get an image up on the screen,” Darcy said.
“And?” Peri prompted.
“It shows the coastline of Antarctica…without its ice sheet on it.”
***
There was silence in the room. Ronin studied the map Darcy had put up on the screen, unable to believe it. It looked old, with sailing ships drawn on it crossing the oceans, and lines radiating out across the parchment.
“Piri Reis apparently used older maps he’d acquired to compile his map,” Zach said. “Which suggests that the Antarctic coastline was mapped, without ice, sometime during human history.”
“If that was true, how could any ruins or artifacts have survived?” Peri said. “They’d have been ground away beneath all that ice.”
“Now, there’s a theory,” Zach said. “It’s called crustal displacement theory. Many people believe it’s impossible, and I’m not sure I subscribe to it, myself. The idea is that some force can cause the crust of the Earth to shift in a large piece.”
Ronin frowned. “So what you’re saying is, the Antarctic land mass was likely once located farther north, and a part of it was free of ice, but crustal displacement moved it down to the pole, and the land iced over?”
“Exactly,” Zach said. “Proponents of the theory say the last crustal displacement happened at the end of the last ice age.”
Peri shook her head. “What could cause that?”
“No one knows,” Zach conceded. “A large meteorite impact, forces in the crust, something unknown. Someone theorized the mass of the polar ice itself could force the shift, but that’s been disproven. Some people believe crustal displacement also explains the existence of animals like wooly mammoths that have been found frozen in ice…but with their stomachs full of just-eaten foods from a more temperate climate.”
“If this theory is true,” Dec said. “You’re telling me a part of Antarctica was free of ice about what, 11,000 years ago?”
“Yes. And it was likely mapped by the civilization that called it home.”
Peri stood up, her chair scraping on the floor. “And that advanced civilization built cities there, and possibly left technology behind that Silk Road is after?”
Zach nodded. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
“What do you make of this, Zach?” Darcy nodded toward the screen that currently displayed the image of the pyramid protruding from the snow.
The archeologist strode up close to the image, his gaze narrowed as he studied the image.
“It could be manmade,” he said. “Pyramids are a common structure that have been built by civilizations all across the globe. Egypt, Mexico, China, Indonesia, Peru, Spain, even out in the Pacific islands. This could be the remnants of an advanced civilization in Antarctica.”
Darcy swiveled. “I’ve got some more of the information. Based on the notes on Amber’s thumb drive, I’ve confirmed that the Silk Road team flew from Punta Arenas to the currently abandoned Unity Camp at Union Glacier. It’s only active in the warmer months and finishes up by the end of January.”
“So it’s been empty for several months,” Ronin said.
“Yes. Now isn’t the ideal time for expeditions to Antarctica. The temperatures are falling, and the hours of light each day are dropping.”
Dec crossed his arms. “They landed at Unity, and from there, they would have headed straight for the pyramid.”
Peri dragged in a breath. “I don’t care what crazy theory Silk Road has, or what the hell they want to find, I just want to find my sister.”
“I know.” Dec’s gaze met Ronin’s. “We’ll start planning a trip to go in after them.”
Ronin saw Peri’s chest hitch. He realized she’d been worried they wouldn’t go. He touched her arm. “We’ll get down there and find her.”
“I’m making plans now,” Darcy said with a reassuring smile. “Luckily for us, Dec has a friend who runs a research station not too far from the pyramid location.”
Dec groaned. “Dr. Melinda Browning. She’s…a character.”
“She’s an Australian scientist, and she’s spent years down in Antarctica,” Darcy said. “Mel’s friends with our parents. She runs the Aurora Station, which is jointly run by Australia, Sweden, and Chile. It’s on the Chilean claim, but many of its supplies come via Australia.”
“Patch me through to her,” Dec said.
“I will.” Darcy tucked some hair behind her ear. “There was one more thing in the information from your sister.”
Ronin sensed something in Darcy’s tone and saw Peri tense.
“What?” Peri asked.
“It was a note she’d typed in a document. She was clearly interrupted writing it.” Darcy’s blue-gray gaze swung around the room. “She says that Silk Road is after a weapon.”
Peri gasped and Ronin ground his teeth together.
“Fuck,” Dec bit out. “As if things weren’t bad enough.”
“Any other information?” Ronin asked. “A description of this weapon? Or what it does?”
Darcy shook her head.
“This doesn’t change anything. Darce,” Dec said. “Contact Aurora Station. Everyone, get to work, we have a mission to plan.”
As everyone split off to plan the trip, Ronin saw Peri spin and stalk over to the windows. She stood there, staring out at the Denver skyline. The morning sun lit her hair up and he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a woman look so beautiful.
Nearby, Ronin heard Morgan laugh. A sound that was perilously close to a giggle. He shook his head. Morgan was the toughest woman he knew, and one of the few people he wanted beside him in a firefight. He’d never believed that Morgan would find a man who’d take the sharpness off her edges, but clearly, Zach was that man.
He watched Morgan lean into Zach. Their closeness just underscored how alone Peri looked.
Ronin had rescued a lot of people in his lifetime, but he’d rarely hugged them, offered them comfort, or had the right words to help make them feel better. He knew he should stay away from Peri.
A few seconds passed, and then he headed over to her.