The Tethys Report (The Rise of the Chirons Book 1) Read online

  “There will be no murders of innocents as you put it. But remember something. You will help me because if you don’t, Jen Li will die.”

  I stood up. I was flustered with emotion. We had had many memories together. The walks through the fields in Oregon, the trip to Paris we took, the wine drunk toasting to a dying world—it was the beginning of our relationship. The kiss in Hong Kong—her hometown. That sinking city with all of its charm, all of its history, going down like Atlantis. We were there to witness and celebrate it all. All of this came down on me like a tidal wave. It probably didn’t help that I knew good ole’ Krafty—that was my name for him—would never exaggerate. Odd for a spy, I know, but it wasn’t in him to embellish much. He was telling the truth, whatever the story for sending me in was.

  “My god, what did you send her into.”

  “Sit down,” he said pulling out a pen, and writing on a piece of paper as if I were a patient and he were writing a prescription. He finished writing, tore the sheet of paper off, folded it, put it inside a manila envelope and handed it to me. Inside was a view screen, one that there were three words written on the screen: The Tethys Report. The Tethys Ocean was an ancient body of water that had once existed between all the major land groups including Antarctica hundreds of millions of years into the past. There was an obvious connection with my task but it wasn’t obvious.

  “Read this later.“

  “What’s in it?’

  “Something very important,” he said. “You’ll need it for your mission.” I was utterly astonished by this. I never knew him to do something like this. It was bizarre yet I knew that if he wrote something, it must have been very, very important indeed.

  “Now, you’ll be accompanied by a team—we’ve got the very best among the special forces—now before you say anything,” he said, raising a hand of restraint towards me. “We need the military to help us stabilize the situation.”

  “This just sounds way too crazy. What is it you’re doing exactly? And why send a geologist to save a paleontologist? You don’t need me.”

  “I do need you, and remember, if you don’t help me, she could be in very grave danger.”

  “Yes, I got that part, but I just don’t know what I can do. Although I’m trained to fight, you’ve got others who can do the same job. I look at rocks, one of my specialties is geological timing methods and rare data collection. I want to help, and I will help, but please be frank with me. What on earth would I be good for in a possible rescue operation?”

  He sat there for a while. He was weighing something in his mind. There was not even a bead of sweat behind his large glasses. I would definitely not win in a staring contest with this guy.

  “You’ll be briefed when the time comes. Now, I will have someone contact you tomorrow morning and take you to the airport. They will give you more instructions for when you get off the plane. The truth is your importance on this mission is to advise the team you’re going with. Whatever you see down there, they need to know what it is.”

  “Down there?”

  “Inside Lake Victor of course.”

  “You mean the Russian station?”

  “Yes, but there’s a—portable research vessel we have inside the lake itself. We managed to drill a hole through the ice and deliver the vessel. This of course since this year’s record warming made the ice the thinnest it’s been in millions of years. Of course you don’t need me to tell you this.”

  “So you’ve actually drilled through the Antarctic ice sheet and delivered a research vessel inside? What crazy times we live in.” Most glaciologists and other experts believed it was still impossible to drill through the two-kilometer thick ice that covered the lake. Apparently that was not the case anymore. Why hadn’t I heard anything about it? I wasn’t surprised by this because the free flow of information had become severely constrained in recent years due to the Second Cold War. Now no one could get their ideas and information out without a great deal of trouble.

  “Yes, and Jen is right now—we believe—in the research vessel somewhere below the Russian station.”

  I decided to ask a direct question: “Do the Russians really want us there?”

  He looked back at me with a blank face.

  “OK, will the Chinese interfere with us?”

  “We don’t think they know—at least not yet. Obviously, we don’t want them knowing anything.”

  Well that meant they probably knew already, which was not reassuring. They had become less restrained about publicly pursuing their goals. With the Eastern Alliance on edge, thanks in large part to us, tensions were high between the Russians and the Chinese. That capture of Taiwan despite Russian objections of being pulled into a disastrous war with the Americans added to the mutual unease.

  “So despite several possibly hostile governments, you want me to go there and report back with my expertise on what I see along with a military team, is that it?”

  “Yes, we’ll need your knowledge to help tell us what we discover—when the time comes.”

  “There’s got to be something more to this that I’m missing. Should I be worried about something?”

  “That’s all Dr. Bloom. Good day,” he said, moving back to something on his desk. I stood for a while looking at him, but I knew it was no use.

  I went back to my place. There wasn’t much to pack. I had a lover, Tip, who had stayed with me for the past few days. When I got back, my eyes seemed to tell her what my voice could not. She looked resigned in a way that only she could.

  “So you’re going, right?” she asked finally, as I was noticeably packing some things into a suitcase.

  “Yeah, I’ve got to go.”

  “Will you be back?” she said while looking at her nails. They were pink, and I knew when she colored them that way, she was happy about something—maybe she had an announcement of a job she would be getting. My leaving had interfered with that though. She seemed forlorn. To be honest, I was too. The city was dying. The water would soon sweep everything away—all the buildings, cars and even people if they didn’t get out. It wasn’t their fault, but perhaps their Buddhist nature allowed them to accept things with a certain stoic wisdom.

  “Do you need any help?” she said getting up.

  “No, don’t get up—thank you. I’m leaving you all the money that I have right now. I’m giving it to you. I can’t access the American banks here—the Internet fracturing and all. Banks can’t communicate anymore directly.”

  She perked up a little. I knew she needed the money—mostly for her family. I knew she didn’t love me, but we were fond of each other. Sometimes that’s good enough to last a long time—even a lifetime.

  I finished in less than an hour. I guess in a way, I had been ready all this time. I sent word to a friend to let the university know that I wouldn’t be coming back for teaching. It would have been OK. There were people who could cover for me, and the term was almost over. All the grades were at the office, and they could be recovered. I was lying in bed with a sense of foreboding. What would Jen say once she saw me again? I didn’t want to even contemplate the possibility that the whole thing was a lie. In fact, I knew I wanted this thing perhaps more than Krafty did.

  I thought about Jen for a little while. It was back in the days when I first worked for the government. They wanted me for my advice on how best to build bombs for the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was the only job I could find—trust me. The weird part about it was, they had the chemists and engineers to do pretty much all they wanted. What they kept getting me to work on was how best to make a reaction that would fuse with the rock to make the biggest splash—namely how to kill as many people underground as possible. They brought Jen in because they wanted to make sure that there were no important fossils in the areas they wanted to hit. Remember this was in the days when the US was majorly bombing that region, and they didn’t want to find out later they had destroyed some big historical site. Obviously, these days they didn’t care anymore.
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br />   I met her there on site. She was really unhappy from the start. Once she found out the nature of the project she was working on, she immediately tried for other positions, both in the government and without. I admired her fierce determination. She was willing to give up a fairly good wage at a government contractor for her ideals and I was mostly along for the ride.

  She was gorgeous and intelligent, and she dressed in a sophisticated way. She was also lonely out in the barren land where we were at, and so was I—she was perhaps the only woman in the entire compound.

  We had the same intellectual pursuit: figure out where life came from. It was as simple as that. I looked at the earth and the interactions with ancient life. She looked at ancient life forms themselves and tried to make sense of it. We both loved to read literature. It was our escape from the tedious nature of our work. I was perhaps the only male who had read Maupassant that she had ever known. She argued that the book A Life was romantic in its scope, but bleak in its outlook. I admitted it was beautifully rendered, but it features a jerk of a protagonist who caused misery to his lover—a dismal affair.

  In our odd asymmetries, we made a perfect fit and had many philosophical discussions about life and love. I held her hand to one of the mountain trails nearby and we made love under a sad looking tree with only a few hollow branches above us. I proposed to her that night—I didn’t even have a ring and told her that I would find the best one once we got back to civilization—which was code for off the base and out of that job. She said she would think about it, making a joke that she really meant she would think about it once she saw the size of the diamond I was to give her. But I still wasn’t sure how to take it. Things moved along just fine until the incident in Afghanistan happened.

  I tried my best to get out of the web—get us both out. We had never been involved—not directly. Politics required a scapegoat. I became an easy target. Krafty of course knew the truth. He was now making me pay the price. But he let her off the hook and she found a job a week later that required her to basically give twenty-four hours’ notice and we stood there at the station, saying nothing. I looked into those beautiful dark passionate eyes and found I couldn’t let go. When she left, it was as if a steel cable had violently tugged something away from my chest. I yearned to go after her but I had nowhere to go.

  After everything was ready, I relaxed as much as I could and waited for sunrise, excited at the prospect of seeing her again. I didn’t even consider the possibility that she could be dead already.

  Chapter 2

  I was awoken around 4 AM. Someone came into my apartment and rudely turned on the light in my bedroom. I looked over to see Tip still sleeping beside me. She had asked to stay until the very moment I walked out the door, and I gladly relented.

  “What the—”

  The figure pushed my mouth hard, preventing me from talking or moving. I got a good look at him. He was in his forties, bald and big. Clearly a government agent of some sort, he seemed a little too snug in his button-down shirt which had no tie but was soaked from the moisture and the cruel Bangkok heat.

  “We’ve got a situation and I need you ready to go in two minutes,” he said. “The government will reimburse you for any expenses for things you lose. You are to be informed that your papers are now in order and everything is clear for you to return to the United States.” He let me go then.

  I got up in confusion, trying to find some clothes to put on, and seriously thinking about canceling my deal before realizing that, no, I probably couldn’t cancel it even if I wanted to. This was a one-way street now. Then I thought about her, and I put some resolve into putting on my socks. I had to go no matter what.

  Luckily, my bags were packed and ready to go. I just had one thing that really mattered to me. It was a necklace attached to a rather rare specimen of Chert rock obtained by my Ph.D. advisor and friend from western Australia, Paul Rutherford. It was light colored, about the size of an eyeball, smooth enough not to be dangerous and to those who knew its history, priceless. It had probably been formed by the same phytoplankton that brought about the Great Oxidation Event that allowed more complex oxygen-breathing animal forms of life. Eventually humans would breathe this air and still do. It is quite possible that the earliest forms of life, something close to the Last Universal Common Ancestor touched this rock. LUCA was the ancestor of all life on Earth, from the smallest prokaryote to the most complex form the brain. Finding its identity was the focus of my entire scientific career. With great affection, I called the rock ‘Chertie’ and talked to it sometimes when I was bored, lonely or had no one else to confide in. It also helped that Chertie had experienced events far more significant than any in my life could compare to.

  “Looks like we’re in a real mess now, Chertie,” I said to the rock in a soft voice so as not to arouse suspicions from the men with me.

  “What did you say?” said one of the men whose name I couldn’t remember.

  “Just—I’ve left a real mess for the landlady.”

  “Don’t worry. She’ll get paid,” he replied gruffly.

  The landlady was a sweet old widower who had been paid for the month’s rent but not the next. I knew Krafty would get to work on that. Problems such as unpaid rent before the lease was up, raised questions, and questions caused problems. She deserved at least what she was owed. She had given me a bracelet made by the people from her village in Isan, the northeast region. The bracelet was made of roughly three kinds of volcanic rock: rhyolite, basalt and beautifully polished obsidian. To my embarrassment, she had found out about my work for the government and wanted to give me something of value. I was embarrassed because I wanted to stay low key and didn’t consider my work that important.

  She got along with Tip too. The landlady and Tip would talk about life back in their hometowns a lot and share gossip. I would let Tip stay in the apartment until the money ran out. Tip was still sleeping in bed when I left, and I gave her a quick wave which I know she didn’t see.

  We got into the car, and it started to rain. The floods would be starting again soon. Perhaps that was why they were in a hurry. Bangkok is one of those cities that manages to feel dirtier after a long rain. It always intrigues me how water slides through the concrete streets and slips through cracks and places no one wants to unveil.

  It was a good hour before dawn, but traffic was already picking up. Despite the thick water and the squatting refugees from the coastal areas, carts and tuk-tuks were moving alongside cabbies, trucks and other vehicles. Several times people slipped and fell amidst the large splashes of waves, only to get back up again and make their way further. I glanced at the mix of shabby and high-tech buildings of the city. Smog, thick during that time, hung over the air like a morning hangover. The heat was already unbearably hot and I wondered how many more years it would be before the city itself would have to be abandoned. I had told the government there was less than a decade at current trends. My work as a geologist had helped push that boundary a little further perhaps.

  The car was nothing special, but at least the seat could be adjusted. I turned around and noticed for the first time that there were two people in the back seat. They both looked like military from their flat expressions and serious eyes. There would be no fun discussions on this ride, I thought sourly.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Shut up. I’ll tell you when we get there.”

  “OK,” I said, raising my eyebrows.

  Forget fun discussions, there would even be no casual chats about the weather even. The usual process was to minimize the deadliness that the weather patterns had produced within the past decade with greater frequency. Oh look, today’s a nice day, those conversations usually started with. They ended up pretending reality isn’t reality for a while even though everyone knows what’s happening. It was all right, I thought. At least the banalities would be disposed of.

  We were up on the raised highway. No water blocked our path, so we were able to cruise fair
ly quickly. I looked out on the doomed city. The Chao Phraya River had swelled to enormous levels. Already the dinghies and short buildings along the river had been overtaken, looking like submerged boats. I spotted one woman in the distance who was on one the roof of one building, sitting on a plastic chair, wearing a wide hat while watching the river. Her hair fluttered in the wind with a wistful clumsiness. It must have been at least 120 degrees up on that roof, but she didn’t seem bothered by it. I wondered what she saw in the murky depths of the river below her.

  We arrived at an airport which was run like a typical military no frills place. There were Thai fighter jets stored along the side, and a few unmarked craft were waiting on the runways. The Thai government recently ordered its military and police to have a two-mile cordon to block the constant protestors. They were mostly displaced farmers and other out-of-work people who had little hope of getting what they needed. Their eyes gazed at the passing vehicles that moved into the airport with looks of wonder and hate. I wondered what would become of them. There had been a bombing of the Thai royal family just two weeks before. This had been unheard of before. Now no one was surprised by it.

  With a half-spent cigarette, Krafty was there waiting for us after we parked. There was a look of impatience on his face even though we were there early. He had a habit of looking at his watch many times when he was angry or nervous. No one knew the time better than he did.

  “You’re late,” he said to my driver without much feeling. Once you knew him like I did, you realized that everything he said was scripted more or less—designed solely for the purpose of getting some desired effect. If he asked if you wanted sugar in your coffee, it was either because he wanted you to relax, or perhaps to murder you with some odorless poison. Lucky for me, I knew he needed me for something.