She stared at the old man who’d taken such interest in her. He was clearly crazy, but there was no doubt in her mind he truly believed every word he said. “I’m afraid I couldn’t help you even if I wanted to.”
“Why not?”
“What you’re asking is impossible in the time that you’ve given me. Do you understand how much equipment I would need from my office in CERN?”
“I have no idea, but fortunately for me my son has gone to great lengths to retrieve everything from your office so that you can commence work immediately.” Robert Cassidy smiled. “He’s on his way up — I think you two may have previously met. Did I mention he used to work at CERN, too?”
She looked up as the door opened wider and a man walked in. He had blond hair, and an almost sheepish grin. He remained silent as he carried her laptop into the room.
“Daniel!” she screamed at the man who she was meant to marry two weeks ago.
Chapter Seventy-One
The elevator came to a stop at the bottom of the dark void. Sam had a powerful flashlight mounted with the scope on the barrel of his Uzi, which he shined around. Everything from the flooring through to the three mile high vertical ice cliffs rising to the roof of the chasm was ice. The elevator was the last remaining evidence of anything manmade.
“Now where?” Tom asked.
“No idea. Cover me, and I’ll see if LIDAR can show us the way.”
Sam slung his Uzi over his shoulder and then pulled out his handheld LIDAR gun. He switched it on and a moment later he was staring at a clear image of the entire vault. The place looked completely sealed — but no one builds a three mile elevator into a dead end for no reason.
Sam looked at Tom. “Can you see anything?”
Tom stared at it and then said, “What about this spot here?”
“The round hole?” Sam tried to enhance the image. “That’s only a few feet wide.”
“That’s a few feet wider than anywhere else I can see.”
“Okay, let’s try it.”
Sam held the LIDAR gun in front of him, searching for anything else. He was confident they were alone in the cavern — otherwise it would have detected the image of a person. A moment later, the elevator began returning to the surface.
“Shit!” Tom swore.
Sam moved to look at it. The controls were on the elevator. The bottom area where they’d gotten off had nothing except for a large pulley for the elevator’s cables. There was no way to call back the elevator.
“Don’t worry about it yet,” Sam said, his voice calm and focused. Let’s have a look at the tunnel you found. Maybe there’s another way out.”
They slowly walked deeper into the chasm until they reached the round opening carved into the ice. It was too perfectly formed to be anything but manmade. Sam put his LIDAR gun away and checked his Uzi. He then slowly crawled into the tunnel.
It went for maybe twenty or thirty feet and Sam found he was sweating by the end of it despite being surrounded by ice. A light shined on the opposite end of the tunnel. A beacon of hope they were on the right track. He climbed out the end of the tunnel head first into a well-lit room shaped like a rectangle and made entirely from hollowed-out ice.
The tunnel Sam had climbed through opened approximately midway down the longer length of the rectangle. A second tunnel ran through the middle of the two shorter ends. These tunnels were carved into the ice and shaped similarly to the one he’d just crawled through — only instead of being empty, these tunnels housed four blue rails, which were bolted into the ice and ran straight through the rectangular room and back out the other side.
In the middle of the room a single vehicle was fixed to the blue quad-rails by a series of wheels that gripped the rails at every angle. It was made of glass and ceramic materials and shaped like a cross between an elongated egg and a bullet. At a glance it was designed to seat up to three people. Sam thought it looked like a futuristic mining cart or great rollercoaster ride. Either way, there was no doubt about its purpose.
“Tom, you’ve got to see this!” he said.
Tom’s head appeared out the end of the tunnel and his solid frame and large body followed behind. He looked up at the cart. “Where have you taken me, Disneyland’s new ride for Frozen?”
Chapter Seventy-Two
Sam and Tom strapped themselves into the five-point harnesses inside the strange vehicle. The door closed with a soft-pressurized latch and the internal climate control began to hum. Sam found a single white lever in the middle of his front seat. Sam studied it. A series of green markers were arranged next to a forward arrow and vice versa a series of red markers were arranged in the opposite direction.
Sam turned to face Tom behind. “It looks like I’m driving.”
“Then let’s go, driver.”
Sam eased the lever forwards and the cart leapt forwards, pushing his back hard into the seat as the electric motor hummed. He immediately returned it to the neutral position, but the cart was already through the first tunnel and was descending steeply. It built up speed until Sam felt like he was freefalling into the dark below.
He pulled the lever backwards until the cart slowed to a stop. He found himself being supported entirely by the five-point harness, which meant they were now in a completely vertical shaft. He felt the blood rush to his head.
Tom tapped him on his shoulder. “You’d better get this thing moving before the brakes give out and we fall to our bloody deaths.”
“Okay,” Sam said, easing the lever back to the neutral position until they started moving again.
After a few minutes the tunnel evened out into a dark and level position. Sam slowed the machine to a stop again. “I can’t see a thing.”
Tom reached forwards. His long arm stretching past Sam and flicked a single switch on the roof, labelled, external lighting.
All areas surrounding their cart suddenly lit up with a powerful yellow light. They were in another cavern hollowed out of ancient ice, hardened and compressed over thousands of years. To the left of them was a vertical ice wall that reached both higher and lower than their lights could penetrate. The cart was made of glass above and below, allowing Sam to see that sections of the rails were suspended above a void so deep their lights couldn’t penetrate. To the right was a stainless steel circular tunnel, like the ones Alexis had shown him of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Only this one reached nearly fifty feet in height compared to the one he’d seen in photos which were roughly five to six feet.
“My God, they did it!” Sam said, in awe.
Tom looked up at the giant structure. “Yeah, which means the Cassidy Project is close to completion.”
“All right,” Sam said, increasing speed again. “Let’s see if this thing can tell us where The Island’s going to launch the rocket from.”
Sam pushed the lever forward and the electric motor instantly moved the elongated egg shaped tunnel cart faster. There were no speed instruments or any other way to determine how fast they were going. The craft felt stable as its multitude of wheels spun around the four tubular rails which formed the tracks. It followed the same tunnel as the Massive Hadron Collider, occasionally dipping or raising twenty to thirty feet to extend below or above protruding steel equipment and ice, giving Sam the feeling he was on probably the most expensive rollercoaster ride of all time.