Extinction Plague: Matt Kearns 4 Read online

  Matt felt his gorge rise. He quickly changed channels.

  Matt was a professor of paleo-linguistics at Harvard University but didn’t look it. At thirty-six, he was a long-haired surfer, and still with boyish good looks. But he also had an amazing brain for facts, pattern recognition, and logical intuition. He was one of the few language specialists in the world who could read and understand some of the most obscure and ancient languages on the planet.

  He was currently on his spring break – and that meant no classes, no rules, and no administrators trying to get him to apply for more grant money. For now, all he wanted to do was eat tacos, drink beer, sleep, and maybe travel to the coast to find some waves … starting this very weekend.

  His phone rang and he grabbed it up, about to send whoever it was to message bank until he saw the name – Mom. He answered it.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Happy birthday, my handsome son.”

  Matt grinned. “That was last Sunday, you know that.”

  It was a running joke between them that Matt seemed to make his birthday celebrations run for at least a week.

  “Did you open my card?”

  “Yes, thank you, and thank you for the money.” He turned to look at the card sitting on his side table. It was of a dog wearing a paper party cap and blowing a horn. There was a fifty-dollar bill resting beside it. “You don’t need to do that anymore. I have plenty of money of my own now.”

  “Buy yourself some socks or something. But not beer,” she said with mock stern in her voice.

  “Oops.” He chuckled. “Okay, but only if you promise not to let Belle sleep on your bed. She takes up all the room.”

  “It’s only on special occasions, or when she’s scared of something,” Karen replied.

  “Mom, that dog of yours is as big as a timber wolf. The only thing she’s scared of is missing her dinner.” He grinned.

  “Oh Matt.” Karen laughed. “Don’t forget that Megan is arriving tomorrow sometime. Do you know when exactly?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon, I think.” He inwardly groaned. His cousin was okay, but had a personality as big as Texas, and had steamrolled him ever since they were kids.

  “Good, and no fighting, okay? You’re her favorite cousin.”

  Yeah, right, he thought. Megan was going to be in town for some sort of pointy-head mathematics convention and, as it coincided with Matt’s birthday, she had browbeaten him into letting her crash at his place. “I’m looking forward to it,” he lied.

  “And …?”

  “And what?” Here it comes, he thought.

  “Have you met any nice girls lately?” Karen asked.

  His phone pinged with a message.

  “One second, Mom.” He pulled the phone from his ear to read – it was from his dating app, and he smiled as he read the handle: LanaPHD.

  Matt had grown tired of hunting the bars or waiting to meet interesting women at parties, so had taken advice from one of his colleagues and set himself up as Matthew267, a profile on WASSUP, the newest site for meeting people.

  His reticence had dissolved after a few weeks, and once he got the hang of swiping one way or the other, and weeding out the grifters, sock puppets, and catfishers, he had found some pretty cool people.

  Some he would love to have a drink with and some he would like to do more with. But then LanaPHD had caught his attention a few weeks back: a young woman in her early thirties with an interest in ocean life, plus doctorates in biology, biochemistry, and entomology. She made him laugh, and she made him think.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I have,” he said. “She’s a scientist.”

  “Great, bring her home to Walnut Grove, I’m doing a turkey for Thanksgiving. Everyone will be here.” Karen sounded excited. “Even Megan is dropping in straight after she visits you to lend a hand.”

  “I’ll put it on the list.” The ranch out in Walnut Grove had always been a great place for family events at Christmas, New Year, Thanksgiving, Easter, or just about any time. And since his dad passed away a few years back, his mom was determined to keep the tradition going.

  There was only one problem bringing the mysterious Lana – he looked again at her avatar: it was of a sandy beach and blue on blue water somewhere in the tropics – he had never actually met her face to face.

  Sure, his pic was of a perfect wave breaking on Australia’s Bells Beach, so he guessed they seemed perfect for each other, at least on paper.

  “You let me know, Matthew, and I’ll set an extra place. Love you, honey, and can’t wait to see you soon. Oh, and remember –”

  “No fighting,” Matt said in unison with her. “Sure, Mom, love you too.” Matt rung off and then read Lana’s brief message: What are you up to? Talk to me, I’m bored.

  He grinned and slowly one-finger messaged her back. He started with: Was just talking to my mom while I hang out with television and beer.

  He looked at it. Too boring, he decided, backspaced and restarted: Planning my next getaway to find the perfect wave.

  Better, he thought, and sent it.

  Matt sipped his beer again and returned to channel surfing. He finally settled on an image of seawater so clear it looked like blue glass. In the background there were cliffs, forests, and curling around the rocky point were perfect waves.

  Magnificent, he thought.

  He sipped beer as he let the images transport him there. Every time he saw that type of water with the sun beaming down, it made him want to dive in. And seeing a wave without a soul on it made him want to track the spot down.

  The long-haired Scottish presenter pointed along a mountainous coastline that looked ancient to the point of being almost prehistoric. The man was at Milford Sound, on New Zealand’s southern island’s west coast, and he walked along the cliff top and then stopped to stare down at a shelf of rock. He held out both hands flat and made a rising motion.

  Matt turned up the sound as the man pointed down toward the water. The camera panned around and Matt saw that, amazingly, right at the rock shelf’s outer edge there was the long brown rusting hulk of a submarine.

  Ping – I want to come, Lana messaged back.

  He smiled as he replied. Ever been to New Zealand?

  He turned back to the screen. Matt vaguely remembered seeing something on the news about this a year or so back – following a recent earthquake the seabed had been thrust up, revealing the rusted hulk of a derelict German U-boat. The Germans had removed the human remains for services back in their home country but left behind the wreck and New Zealand hadn’t pushed for a clean-up.

  The commentator continued in his broad accent, informing his viewers that it was the local chief, Manawa Kawheina, who had found the submarine and had agreed to allow the commentator and his team to enter his tribe’s sacred marae to talk about it.

  The Maori marae was a private, fenced-in complex of carved buildings and grounds that belonged to a particular tribe or important family, and it was a rare honor to be invited into one. Only the presenter and one cameraman were allowed to visit.

  The tribal leader was a large man, gray-haired now, but still with broad shoulders and fearsome tribal tattoos covering his face. He reclined in a huge carved chair flanked to his left by a surly looking young man that had to be his son given the resemblance.

  For all his fearsome looks the chief was jovial and friendly, and greeted his guests warmly with the traditional touching of noses. Matt was losing interest now that the program had moved away from the ocean, and frankly he didn’t care that much about a submarine wreck.

  He lifted the remote about to surf away again as the cameraman panned around the ornately carved room. The camera settled on a large flat green-hued stone propped at the rear of the marae, looking a little like a grave’s headstone.

  The camera panned in, and Matt sprayed his beer.

  The slab of stone appeared to be made of some sort of green granite. The camera panned closer, and Matt’s eyes widened as he tried to take it in whi
le around him time seemed to stand still.

  His phone messaged again, but he ignored it – it wasn’t just the stone that riveted his attention, but the carvings, the language, and the images. He’d seen something like that before, and it sent a shiver from the base of his spine all the way up to tingle his scalp.

  It was the most ancient writing in existence, and perhaps even the mother of all tongues – Aztlantean – and it only turned up in a few places on Earth where that long lost seafaring race visited, and also at their home, a place he had seen with his own eyes. It was buried a mile below the dark ice of Antarctica, and he was sworn to secrecy about it by the US military.

  He’d seen the language and the images carved into the monolithic edifices of a crumbling once-mighty empire.

  Matt hadn’t even realized he had been sitting forward until his ass nearly fell off the edge of the chair.

  The camera began to move on, and he quickly held up the remote, pointing it, and pressing uselessly.

  “Stop.”

  He launched himself to his feet and stared, trance-like, as his linguistic brain immediately switched to translation mode, and began deciphering the swirls, strokes and pictoglyphs into a coherent narrative. Then the camera finally panned away from the image.

  “Shit.”

  He stamped his bottle down and grabbed a pen and magazine next to his chair and started scribbling what he remembered – it wasn’t much – and after a moment he sat looking at what he had written.

  They have come and they will come again. Each ending greater than the last.

  “What ending?” He asked the empty room. The rest of the message had been lost at the edge of the stone or he’d simply missed it when the camera changed angles.

  Matt stood and paced. To 99.99% of people in the world this would have been indecipherable or meant nothing. Hell, to 99.99% of linguists in the world it would have meant nothing. But the language and the implication were clearly a warning, and he had learned never to ignore warnings from this ancient race.

  Plus there was something else that jolted him, and now nagged at him – he was sure he’d seen the stone before, or maybe one just like it.

  His phone pinged again, and this time he picked it up and read: Where’d you go?

  Shit, he thought. He quickly fumbled a message back: Something’s come up, chat soon, promise.

  He turned back to the TV screen, staring wide-eyed. As the presenter droned on, his Scottish accent faded into background white noise as Matt concentrated on rummaging through the attic of his memory, searching for the stone. An image formed: a photograph, not in color, grainy, and …

  Matt turned and then leaped over his chair to quickly cross to a wooden chest in the corner. He flipped it open, pulling out file boxes, string-bound notebooks and then finally a battered leather folder, exploding with notes, clippings and drawings.

  He took it back to his chair, sat and opened it, quickly riffling through the copious contents. It was one of his later folders that contained all manner of things associated with the mysterious Antarctic city. He soon found what he was looking for.

  He gently pulled the loose page free and held it up – it was a single image, grainy and unfocused. It was from just over a decade back; a World War II artifact had turned up, a diary that was believed to be in Adolf Hitler’s handwriting. The interesting thing was it dealt with a lot of the occult and spiritual things the madman was exploring toward the end of the war. The one that had caught Matt’s attention was Hitler’s focus on the missing continent of Atlantis.

  Matt stared at the picture, refamiliarizing himself with the image. It seemed Hitler’s exploration was a failure, or so the world was led to believe. But he did secure a fragment of stone that originally came from an 18th century whaler that he thought might be from the lost continent. It had caught Matt’s attention then, but it transfixed him now, as it was the same as the one he had seen on the screen.

  No, almost the same, he corrected himself.

  They matched in that they looked to be a single large flat piece of writing stone that had either been broken in half or was like a page, or a tablet that was crowded with the Aztlantean script.

  If the diary was real, then it looked like Hitler had one of the stones or one half of the whole, and now the other half had turned up in New Zealand, which was basically at the bottom of the world, and one of the closest countries to Antarctica.

  Matt’s gaze turned inward. It kinda all fit together: there was a World War II German U-boat that had been found after seventy-five years, obviously on some sort of mission down there. He bet his last buck that the Maori chief had secretly pulled the stone from the wreck.

  The television show ended. Matt got to his feet and paced to the window and looked out over the verdant green park across the road. A few joggers moved around the tracks, and a duck pond shimmered like molten silver in the evening light.

  “I need to see more,” he whispered. “I must see more.”

  He glanced at the indistinct picture again and quickly read the notes underneath – the purported Hitler diary was purchased by an anonymous buyer in Germany for three million dollars, before it was even authenticated. Matt had briefly tried to search for the stone, but it never surfaced, and wasn’t residing in any museum that he knew of. Either it had been lost during the war, destroyed, or was hiding in a private collection somewhere. Perhaps the person who bought Hitler’s diary already had it.

  That meant he had to work with what he had available. In two strides Matt was back at the side table and grabbed up his remote. He hit the info button and checked the details of the TV program.

  He needed to see that stone again, and for now, he’d settle for even seeing it on screen. He needed the TV channel to send him a USB or disc with the full program on it so he could freeze-frame it, study it at his leisure, and see if there was any extra footage. They might send it to him or they might not. Or they might send it but take their damn time, and he was way too impatient for that.

  Matt rubbed his chin and began to smile. What do you do when you need something to happen quickly and you don’t have time to screw around? You apply brute force. And when it came to brute force, he knew just the guy.

  He took out his phone and looked through his contacts, finding the one he wanted: “Uncle Jack”, a direct line to Colonel Jack “the Hammer” Hammerson.

  He dialed.

  CHAPTER 04

  The Schneider compound, Treptow, Germany

  Rudolph Schneider hunched over the screen in his private vault. Over his head was a communication headset as he talked to his representative, Herr Bruder, who was out in the field to conclude negotiations.

  The image displayed on the screen was of a single item – a ring; silver, not very ornate, and little more than a piece of beaten metal. Except it contained the letters “A F” in a stylized calligraphic script.

  It was Hitler’s ring, worn when he was a youth, and lost by the great man when he was just a boy of sixteen. And Schneider wanted it.

  Schneider half turned and looked behind him, to the rear of the vault. “We’ve found it, my master.”

  He turned back to the screen as Bruder looked up from the ring to show the opposing man’s face – Herr Arndt Fischer, a rare antiquities dealer.

  Bruder wore a small camera just over his right ear so Schneider could see and hear everything that transpired; it also allowed him to give Bruder immediate advice.

  “Up the offer to fifty thousand euros,” he said softly.

  Schneider’s face was emotionless, but he began to feel a knot of impatience bloom in his stomach.

  Herr Arndt Fischer was the current holder of the magnificent piece, but not the owner, not as far as Schneider was concerned. The true owner was Adolphus Hitler, and not this mendacious dealer in stolen goods.

  Standing just behind Fischer was his bodyguard, a large thug who was undoubtedly temporary hired muscle for this meeting, and on display to either act as intimidation or be a
shield.

  “You joke.” Fischer grinned back at Bruder and slowly shook his head. “One million.” He lifted the ring and held it up. “Because it is one in a million.”

  Bruder sat back, waiting on Schneider’s next command.

  Schneider thought for a moment. The cost was high, and though still insignificant to a billionaire such as himself, he didn’t like two things: one, that this worm would tell people Schneider was now the owner of the ring. And two, he would also tell people he had pushed the Rudolph Schneider around.

  Schneider turned to the back of the vault again, and raised his eyebrows. “Well, master?” He listened for a moment and then began to nod. “Yes, of course you’re right, the third option.” He turned back to the screen and sat forward to lower his voice. “Kill them both.”

  In one smooth motion, Bruder pulled a long throwing blade from the small of his back and threw it from waist level, spearing the bodyguard in the eye socket.

  Before the bodyguard had even fallen, Bruder was moving around the desk toward the horrified Fischer. From his wristwatch he pulled a long thread of razor wire, which he looped around the man’s neck.

  Fischer’s eyes bulged and he thrashed as Bruder sawed hard, once, twice, three times. The wire cut fast and deep, and in another few seconds of tugging, the antique dealer’s head fell to the table.

  Bruder had been holding the body forward as the blood spurted and now he pushed the corpse to the side. He reached forward to pick the bloodied ring up and hold it in front of the camera.

  “Well done.” Schneider smiled. “Bring it to me.”

  *

  Rudolph Schneider carefully polished the ring and held it up. The small item of jewelry was as unremarkable as it was scratched and dented by all the decades it had passed through.

  He tried placing the ring on his fingers but found it only slid onto his little one with any comfort. The master was not a man of large physical proportions, and his fingers were refined as those befitting someone who had played the piano and violin in his youth.