Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth Read online

  Indiana Jones

  and the

  Hollow Earth

  Max McCoy

  Don't miss any of Indy's

  exciting adventures in

  INDIANA JONES AND THE

  PERIL AT DELPHI

  INDIANA JONES AND THE

  DANCE OF THE GIANTS

  INDIANA JONES AND THE

  SEVEN VEILS

  INDIANA JONES AND THE

  GENESIS DELUGE

  INDIANA JONES AND THE

  UNICORN'S LEGACY

  INDIANA JONES AND THE

  INTERIOR WORLD

  INDIANA JONES AND THE

  SKY PIRATES

  INDIANA JONES AND THE

  WHITE WITCH

  INDIANA JONES AND THE

  PHILOSOPHER'S STONE

  INDIANA JONES AND THE

  DINOSAUR EGGS

  Available wherever

  Bantam Books are sold

  EVEN BENEATH THE FROZEN ARCTIC WASTELAND,

  THE FLAME OF NAZI EVIL BURNS....

  INDIANA JONES—He was given possession of a box by a dying explorer, with the warning to protect its contents at all costs. Now Indy is racing to discover its ancient secret before his old enemies can put him in an early grave.

  ULLA TORNAES—A brilliant and beautiful Danish scientist, she joins Indy on his Arctic adventure, only to discover the price of courage and the ruthlessness of Hitler's minions.

  EVELYN BRIGGS BALDWIN—He nearly lost his life on a North Pole expedition. Now he must be prepared to put his life on the line again to protect the world's greatest secret.

  REINGOLD—He has sworn allegiance to Hitler, and nothing will stand in the way of his mission's success—not even Indy and his friends.

  SPARKS—An eccentric radio technician, he sets out on a quest for stolen treasure only to find himself in the middle of a desperate battle whose stakes are nothing less than good and evil... and personal survival.

  The Indiana Jones series

  Ask your bookseller for the books you have missed

  INDIANA JONES AND THE PERIL AT DELPHI

  INDIANA JONES AND THE DANCE OF THE GIANTS

  INDIANA JONES AND THE SEVEN VEILS

  INDIANA JONES AND THE GENESIS DELUGE

  INDIANA JONES AND THE UNICORN'S LEGACY

  INDIANA JONES AND THE INTERIOR WORLD

  INDIANA JONES AND THE SKY PIRATES

  INDIANA JONES AND THE WHITE WITCH

  INDIANA JONES AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE

  INDIANA JONES AND THE DINOSAUR EGGS

  INDIANA JONES AND THE HOLLOW EARTH

  INDIANA JONES AND THE HOLLOW EARTH

  A Bantam Book / March 1997

  TM & © 1997 by Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved.

  Used under authorization.

  Cover art by Drew Struzan. Copyright © 1997 by Lucasfilm Ltd.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books

  * * *

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

  * * *

  ISBN 0-553-56195-2

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  * * *

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  * * *

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  RAD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  An S522 eBook conversion

  For Don Coldsmith and the Tallgrass Writing Workshop

  The ice opens suddenly to the right, and to the left, and we are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls are lost in the darkness and the distance. The circles rapidly grow small—we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool—and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and tempest, the ship is quivering—oh God!—and going down!

  —Edgar Allan Poe, "Ms. Found in a Bottle"

  Indiana Jones

  and the

  Hollow Earth

  Prologue

  The Chimera of Memory

  This is what Indiana Jones remembers:

  Cradling the dying Ulla with one arm while pointing the Webley down the tunnel with the other. He can hear the sound of the approaching Nazis, the tromp-tromp of their boots and the urgently whispered "Schnell! Schnell!" of the squad leader, but for one long moment they are still hidden by the last bend in the rock-lined passage.

  Indy is exhausted, his aim is weak, and his hand is shaking so badly that what he's doing with the heavy revolver can hardly be called aiming. There are only two rounds left in the Webley's cylinder, two shots with which to make a last stand against a half dozen heavily armed SS troops.

  Long odds, but Indy and his companions have no choice.

  They have reached the end of the Edda Shaft and their backs are literally against the wall: a broad, flat wall of featureless gray rock. There are no more passages to take, no signs to decipher, nothing that would indicate a way around this deadest of ends.

  Gunnar has taken off his shirt and is making himself ready to fight with his bare hands by slapping his own face, hard enough to bring the blood to the corners of his mouth. Sweat gleams from his broad chest, and his flowing red beard and fierce blue eyes conjure images of his berserker ancestors.

  Sparks is the youngest and smallest of the group, but has remained the calmest. The seventeen-year-old army radioman is sitting cross-legged, arranging and rearranging a pile of stones on the floor.

  "What color is between red and green in the spectrum?" Sparks asks.

  "Yellow!" Indy shouts. "Hurry up! They're almost here."

  "I've almost got it," Sparks says.

  But Indy can't quite remember why the stones are important or what it is that Sparks almost has.

  Then there is Ulla.

  The Danish cave explorer has been shot in the chest by a Nazi ricochet. Her khaki blouse is wet with blood and her straight blond hair, where the ends have brushed against her blouse, is stained a strawberry color. Her skin has turned a fishbelly shade of white, and her lips, unpainted and normally a healthy salmon, are tinged with blue. Her breath is ragged and is accompanied by a sickening gurgle.

  "Jones," she says.

  "Sugar, don't try to talk," Indy says as he wipes his eyes with the back of his gun hand. "Save your strength."

  "Be a man," she rasps. "And don't call me Sugar."

  The heat is unbearable and the thick air feels like molasses in Indy's aching lungs. Then the hair on the back of his neck and along his forearms begins to bristle.

  "Do you feel that?" asks Sparks.

  "Yeah," Indy says over his shoulder. "What is it?"

  "Static electricity. The air has become supercharged. I don't know why."

  The Nazis are almost upon them. The rhythm of their boots and the rattle of their equipment has become a cacophony that is about to burst from around the corner.

  Gunnar growls.

  Then Ulla opens her eyes and looks over Indy's shoulder at the empty wall beyon
d. Her eyes widen and she wets her blood-flecked lips.

  "I must be dead," she says. "The Valkyries are here."

  And that is the last that Indy can remember.

  What happened next? It is a troublesome but minor mystery, one that continues to tug at the back of Indy's mind but that really doesn't amount to much; after all, it's not as if the fate of worlds turn on his remembering. Oh, he can recall most of the failed expedition down the Edda Shaft—the eventual discovery of the underground river and so forth—but it is here, at the dead end, where his mind goes blank.

  It may have been noxious fumes emanating from the superheated rocks, combined with hunger and fatigue, that caused the loss of memory. Or, they could have stumbled into a pocket of bad air, or any one of a half dozen other explanations that would account for the missing time.

  Except...

  Sometimes, in the shadowy world between wakefulness and dreaming that Indy can almost remember, he can almost make sense of it; or during a thunderstorm, when a bolt of lightning hits a little too close and leaves his senses reeling; or even—how curious!—when he spies winged chimeras and gargoyles peeking from the eaves of medieval buildings.

  Then Indy goes back to the very beginning, scouring his memory for clues, and like a careful librarian he goes patiently through to the end.

  The tale begins in snow and it will end in snow....

  1

  The Late Visitor

  Princeton, New Jersey

  Early 1934—Winter

  The arctic wind growled like a living beast at the corners of the house, and it was this otherworldly sound—transformed by the imagination into something both frightening and pitiful—that caused Indiana Jones to look up from his reading for the first time since supper.

  Having been wrenched from tales of gold and ghosts in the mountains of New Mexico, it took him a moment to gather his senses and correctly place the source of the eerie wail. He marked his place in Coronado's Children with a scrap of paper. Then he removed his reading glasses, placed them carefully atop the pile of other books and assorted maps beside his chair, and massaged his tired eyes with his fingertips. His vest was unbuttoned and his favorite bow tie, a gift from Marcus Brody, dangled limply around his neck. Indy glanced at the clock on the fireplace mantel—above the hearth that had grown cold from neglect—and uttered a grunt of disbelief that it was nearing midnight. In a little less than six hours, he would be on a train bound for New Mexico. He should have been asleep hours ago, but he was reluctant to surrender himself to the nightmares.

  He couldn't remember exactly when they began—they may have gone as far back as that summer in Utah, when he was thirteen—but there was no doubt that they were becoming more frequent. And more frightening.

  The nightmares always followed the same pattern: Indy would come to his senses inside a small, dark box. His arms would be pressed tightly against his sides. Not until the dirt started raining on the lid would he realize that he was in a coffin, and the coffin had been lowered into a grave. He would shout and claw madly at the coffin lid, but to no avail—he was buried alive.

  Then came the knock.

  Softly, muffled by the crust of snow that clung to the front door and nearly lost in the fury of the winter storm that was turning the New Jersey countryside into something white and alien. Had Indy not been summoned back to the here and now by the shriek of the wind, he might have missed it; even so, he wasn't altogether sure that he hadn't imagined the sound.

  Indy unlocked the door and swung it open a few inches, allowing a torrent of snowflakes to swirl and flutter into the living room, and blinked against the numbing cold. A figure in a dark overcoat, with a hat pulled low over his eyes, stood at the bottom of the steps. His right hand gripped the rail, while tucked beneath his left arm was a package about the size of a cigar box.

  "Dr. Jones?" the man rasped.

  "Yes," Indy said.

  "Forgive the inconvenience—" the man began, but he wheezed to a stop in mid-sentence. He closed his eyes, as if in pain, and held up one hand to beg Indy's patience.

  Indy grasped the man's elbow.

  "We'll be more comfortable talking where it is warm," Indy said as he pulled the man gently into the house and shut the door behind him. He walked him across the room and to the heavily padded chair next to the fireplace.

  "Thank you," the man gasped.

  The visitor removed his hat, tugged off his gloves, then placed the articles on the arm of the chair. The dark wooden box, however, he kept safely on his lap.

  The visitor was at least seventy. His hair and beard were the color of dirty snow, and the skin on the backs of his hands shone like blue-veined alabaster in the light from the electric lamps. There was a nasty scrape on the back of his right hand, and although the cold appeared to have stopped the bleeding, it looked painful. To Indy, the bruise seemed to be in the zigzag pattern of a tire tread.

  "Sorry to barge in on you like this," the old man said. "It shows a dreadful lack of manners. But you were the only person I could think of at this hour."

  "Don't worry about that," Indy said as he leaned down and looked into the man's unusually alert, steel-gray eyes. "Are you hurt? Or are you sick? Can I ring the doctor for you?"

  "I'm quite all right," the old man said with a wave. "Did you lock the door behind me?"

  "No, but—"

  "Please, humor an old man," the visitor pleaded. "Lock the door."

  "Are you sure you're all right?"

  "For now. Lock the door."

  "If you say so," Indy said as he went to the door and slid home the bolt. Beside the door was his suitcase, packed and ready to go. On top of the suitcase was his fedora.

  "A trip?" the old man asked.

  "Yes," Indy said. "I'm leaving in the morning for New Mexico, where I hope to do some limited but potentially rewarding archaeological work in the Guadalupe Mountains."

  "Treasure hunting," the old man said. "I am rather cold and would be grateful for something warm to drink. Whiskey, perhaps."

  "I'm all out. But I could warm some coffee."

  "That will do. Black, with lots of sugar."

  Indy went to the kitchen, lit a burner, and placed the pot of three-hour-old coffee over it. While the coffee was heating he knelt at the fireplace and prodded the ashes of the old fire with a poker. Soon he had located a pocket of embers and, by carefully feeding them with paper and kindling, made a cheerful blaze to take the chill from the room.

  "Careful," he warned a few minutes later as he handed the visitor a steaming mug. "Don't burn yourself."

  "Thank you," the old man said, holding the mug with both hands. Then he eyed Indy curiously. "You don't remember me, do you?"

  "No," Indy said.

  "I'm not surprised." The old man gentiy probed the back of his skull with his fingers, then grimaced in pain. "It was years ago. You were a graduate student at the University of Chicago and I was on tour, and our paths crossed one night when you accompanied Abner Ravenwood to one of my lectures at the old civic auditorium. My name is Evelyn Briggs Baldwin."

  "Of course!" Indy said. "You lectured on your adventures with Peary in the Arctic and your own dash for the pole in 1902. You built Fort McKinley, discovered Graham Bell Land, and believed that the aurora borealis could be harnessed as a perpetual source of power for humanity.... I found the concept quite fascinating, actually."

  "It is comforting to know that someone remembers me after all these years," Baldwin said. "I certainly remember you. You were so full of questions after the lecture, so brimming with enthusiasm. You impressed me that night, and afterward I made a point of following your career in the papers. You have been no saint, Dr. Jones. You seem to have had more than your share of what in simpler times used to be called scrapes."

  "Well..."

  "No matter," Baldwin said. "It shows that you have spirit, that you aren't afraid to challenge convention for the sake of the greater good. It is the reason that I am here tonight. I obtained you
r home address, with the intent of mailing you this chest."

  Baldwin tapped the box with his forefinger. It was made of some kind of dark exotic wood, had brass hinges and a sturdy thumb latch, and resembled a tiny treasure chest. It had obviously held some type of medical or scientific instrument, but that must have been long ago; there were many gouges and scratches on its exterior, the corners had been beaten down, and the gold-scripted name of the manufacturer, Burroughs Wellcome & Co., was badly cracked and faded. A heavy piece of twine had been tied around the chest to discourage anyone from trying to open it.

  "Why me?" Indy asked.

  "Because there is no one else I can trust," Baldwin wheezed. "I have been forgotten by the world, condemned to old age and a series of meaningless clerking jobs with various government departments. I never married. All of my friends are dead. I have a niece who lives in Kansas, but we are hardly close. And the secret which I am about to entrust to you requires someone with your degree of resourcefulness."

  The old man paused. So much talk had clearly exhausted him, and he needed a last bit of strength. He leaned back, rested his head against the back of the chair, and draped his hands over the box in his lap. A drop of blood glistened from the interior of his right ear.

  "I'm calling the doctor," Indy said.

  "No," Baldwin said.

  "I am no longer asking."

  "But I have more that you must know."

  "Then you can tell me while the doctor is on his way," Indy said. He hurried to the telephone, jiggled the switch hook, but his ear was met with silence.

  "It's dead," he said as he replaced the receiver. "The storm must have knocked down the lines. I'm surprised that we still have electricity."