‘Nothing!’ came the voice from the frozen depths beyond. ‘I can’t see anything down there!’
‘OK, we’ll keep going,’ Lynn replied. ‘Keep—’
‘Wait!’ The cry was heard by the whole team, the tone unmistakable. Burns had found something. ‘I think I see something over to the west! I… Yeah, someone moving, right down below at the bottom!’
There was a pause, and the woman and two men holding the rope felt it move slightly, and knew Burns must be adjusting himself, swinging to face the person he had found. ‘Hey!’ they heard Burns shout. ‘Over here!’
Lynn waited for news, anxious. The next words from Burns surprised her more than she expected. ‘It’s him! He’s all right!’ There was a pause. ‘But he wants us to come down there after him!’
Lynn frowned. What the hell?
Two hours later, half the team was down with Tommy Devane, who had been secured in a new thermal suit and been given emergency rations, although he had almost refused them in his excitement. And when Lynn saw what he had discovered at the bottom of the ridge, she was not surprised in the least.
The body was only partly covered by ice, the glacial melt having exposed one half, perfectly mummified by the frozen conditions. It was the body of a man, modern in appearance. He was blond, short-haired and clean-shaven. He could almost have been one of them. Who was he? What had he been doing there? How had he died? How long ago? The questions tumbled through Lynn’s mind in quick succession.
She knew the body could be very old indeed — in 1991, a frozen mummified man had been discovered in the Italian Alps, and carbon dating had shown him to be well over five thousand years old. But this body was different. For a start, it was clothed in a material of a sort she had never seen before.
‘What’s he wearing?’ she asked Devane, who had spent his time examining the body while waiting for the team to arrive.
‘I’m not sure. Some sort of armoured textile, but I’ve never seen anything like it. It seems incredibly complex.’
‘Some sort of military special ops?’ Lynn asked Jeff Horssen, a data analyst who used to work for the US National Security Agency, a hotbed for secret military technology that the average citizen never saw.
Horssen examined the material, exceptionally well preserved by the ice. ‘Could be. They’re working on some really advanced cold-weather gear, I know that much. But this isn’t like anything I’ve seen.’
Lynn looked back to Devane; his expression said that there was more to come. ‘So what else?’ she asked him.
‘I don’t know about advanced,’ he said with a curious mix of surprise and delight, ‘but how about ancient?’
The bewildered looks on the faces of his teammates delighted him even more. As the hot driller, Devane was used to taking ice core samples — thirty-centimetre wide sections of ice drilled down and recovered from up to a kilometre deep, showing ageing layers like the rings of a tree. Air pockets, perfectly preserved in the ice, could give climate information on the region stretching back tens, even hundreds of thousands of years. An expert on the subject, he merely pointed at the steep iced walls of the ridge.
Lynn followed his finger, and looked at the wall for several moments before realization dawned. ‘Oh my—’
‘Yes,’ Devane confirmed. The ice that had sloughed off from the main glacier body had left striations on the cliff face that were akin to an open ice core sample, the lines able to be read for miles across. ‘From my estimate of these readings, that man we’ve just found was buried here under the ice no later than forty thousand years ago.’
3
‘We’ve found something down here,’ Lynn announced over the UHF radio to the teammates back at the Matrix base.
‘What?’ came the static-laden reply.
‘It’s a frozen body. Mummified. Potentially very ancient. And with some anomalous artefacts.’
‘Huh?’ Lynn could hear the confusion. ‘Like what?’
‘Things better not to discuss on an open line,’ Lynn decided. ‘We’re coming back to base.’
The UHF transmission was picked up by the National Security Agency’s Keyhole satellite, and transmitted directly to the supercomputers at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, fifteen miles south-west of Baltimore. Within fifteen minutes, it had passed through various levels of analysis; but on the orders of one man the message went no further, and was ‘lost’ for ever.
Stephen Jacobs clenched his fists in anger. They were so near completion! So near! He couldn’t let anything stand in the way of the organization’s dream. A mummified body buried in the Antarctic ice with ‘anomalous artefacts’? It could, of course, be nothing. But Jacobs also knew what else it might be, and such a discovery would cause too many questions to be asked, at just the wrong time.
He sighed. He would have to speak to his superiors. He could let nothing jeopardize the dream.
‘So just what the hell is it?’ asked Sam Maunders, a seismologist, when all team members were reunited back at the Matrix base — home, such as it was.
‘As far as we can tell,’ Lynn began as Devane started distributing cans of beer from the fridge, ‘it’s the body of a man — apparently the same as a modern human — which seems to have been buried in the ice approximately forty thousand years ago.’ She looked up as Devane slid a beer across the dining table to her, smiled in thanks and popped the lid. What the hell, she thought as she took a long pull from the can. You don’t make a discovery like this every day.
‘We found the body with what appears to be modern clothing,’ Lynn continued.
‘Like what? What do you mean?’ Maunders asked, fascinated. This was much more exciting than shifts in the ice, that was for sure.
‘Advanced arctic clothing, some sort of light yet highly insulating material.’
‘But what does it mean?’ asked Joy Glass, the lead computer analyst.
Lynn just shook her head. ‘At this stage, we don’t know.’
There followed wild speculation over what they had found, and the atmosphere was jubilant, excited, and just plain crazy. Despite their mission, a forty thousand year old mummy was simply far more exciting than gathering seismic data and carrying out oceanic modelling. It was potentially earth-shattering in its significance.
If it was true, Lynn reminded herself as a scientist. They would need a lot more examination time, and a lot more resources to get to the bottom of the matter. She was all too aware of the damage done to ‘Ötzi the Ice Man’, the mummy found in the Alps, when it had first been discovered. The authorities had assumed that the body, discovered by a couple hiking in the mountains, had died in a climbing accident. They therefore weren’t trying to preserve and protect the body, they were simply trying to free it from the ice. As a result, they shredded his clothing, used his bow as a tool to prise him out, and even jack-hammered a hole through his hip.
Such mistakes were not going to be made with their own find; Lynn was determined to follow strict scientific procedure in the extraction and examination of the body. This attention to detail — even when the excitement of discovery threatened to overwhelm her — was what had put her at the top of her field.
Evelyn Edwards — known as Lynn to her friends — was exceptionally gifted, having graduated top of her class at Harvard and then clawing her way to the top of a still very much male-dominated field.