The Ice Cap and the Rift

A Comboquake rakes across the submerged twenty-five hundred mile ribbon of the Atlantic Ridge, threatening disaster on three continents. At the north end of the Ridge, a fifteen-mile long rift tears into Iceland’s largest ice cap, spewing a curtain of steam five hundred feet in the air. Advanced satellite imagery reveals the dissection of a large cavern eleven hundred feet down the ragged crevasse, containing objects and structures frozen in the ice that shouldn’t be there.

The UN’s Institute for the Study of Unusual Phenomena (ISUP) and its new director, John Henry Morgan, geologist, ex-marine, are cast into the aftermath of the largest single shift ever recorded in the Earth’s crust and the strange anomalies left in its wake.

When it’s discovered the cavern was occupied 180,000 years ago and contains a perfectly preserved hi-tech habitat and a travel machine, ISUP’s benign scientific expedition to study the origin and contents of the cavern turns chaotic.

Ferreting out the existence and significance of the discoveries, nations and terrorists mount sophisticated operations to acquire technological treasures for their own purposes.

The ISUP organization finds itself at the convergence of clandestine assault from several fronts. Acts of deceit and violence cascade into escalating brutality. Lives are expendable, a scenario that has plagued the human race throughout the chronicles of time.

Frantic action streams across the globe, crossing oceans and air lanes: Prague; London; New York; Washington, D.C.; Libya; France; Spain; Iceland; China.

As factions grapple for power, survival of the ISUP scientists lies in their choices of whom to trust, how to utilize mysterious new technologies, and whether to seek assistance from an esoteric source claiming domicile in the Pleiades, a star cluster of the Taurus constellation.