Sandstorm: A Sigma Force Novel - Hardcover

Rollins, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060580666 ISBN 13: 9780060580667

Publisher: William Morrow, 2004

Synopsis

The explosive first adventure in James Rollins' bestselling Sigma Force series!

A freak explosion in the British museum in London ignites a perilous race for an earth-shaking power source buried deep beneath the sands of history. Painter Crowe is an agent for Sigma Force, a covert arm of the Defense Department tasked with keeping dangerous scientific discoveries out of enemy hands. When an ancient artifact points the way toward the legendary "Atlantis of the Sands," Painter must travel across the world in search of the lost city-and a destructive power beyond imagining.

But Painter has competition. A band of ruthless mercenaries, led by a former friend and ally, are also intent on claiming the prize, and they will destroy anyone who gets in their way.

Ancient history collides with cutting-edge science-with the safety of the world at stake!

About this title

About the Author

James Rollins is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of international thrillers. His writing has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold more than 20 million books. The New York Times says, " Rollins is what you might wind up with if you tossed Michael Crichton and Dan Brown into a particle accelerator together." NPR calls his work, " Adventurous and enormously engrossing." Rollins unveils unseen worlds, scientific breakthroughs and historical secrets matched with stunning suspense. As a veterinarian, he had a practice in Sacramento for over a decade and still volunteers at local shelters. Nowadays, Rollins shares his home up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains with his two golden retrievers, Echo and Duncan. He also enjoys scuba diving, spelunking, kayaking, and hiking. Of course, he loves to travel and experience new places around the world, which often inspire his next globe-trotting adventure.

From the Back Cover

PRAISE FOR JAMES ROLLINS

"Rollins is one of the most inventive storytellers writing today." -- Lincoln Child, coauthor of The Ice Limit

"While Clive Cussler maintains the gold standard in action lit, Rollins has a firm grasp on the silver." -- Publishers Weekly

"Amazonia is a nonstop thrill-a-minute ride. This is just the book for Indiana Jones fans." -- Tess Gerritsen

"Excavation is a real page-turner...A compulsive read." -- Douglas Preston, coauthor of The Ice Limit

"[Subterranean is] a gripping deep-Earth adventure." -- Charles Pellegrino, New York Times bestselling author

"Rollins writes with intelligence, clarity, and a refreshing sense of humor." -- Kirkus Revkiews

"[His] fans have come to expect a fun and fast-paced story that is full of suspense...Rollins delivers Fantastic tales of action and adventure -- Booklist

From the Inside Flap

Nationally bestselling author James Rollins has transported readers to the dark heart of the Amazon, the bowels of the earth, far below the ocean, and the top of the world. Now he embarks upon his most gripping and terrifying adventure yet: to a nightmare buried beneath a treacherous desert wasteland.

SANDSTORM

An inexplicable explosion rocks the antiquities collection of a London museum-a devastating blast that sets off alarms in clandestine organizations around the world, as the race begins to determine how it happened, why it happened, and what it means.

Lady Kara Kensington's family paid a high price in money and blood to found the gallery that now lies in ruins. And her search for answers is about to lead Kara and her friend Safia al-Maaz, the gallery's brilliant and beautiful curator, into a world they never dreamed actually existed. For new evidence exposed by the tragedy suggests that Ubar, a lost city buried beneath the Arabian desert, is more than mere legend...and that something astonishing is waiting there.

Two extraordinary women and their guide, the international adventurer Omaha Dunn, are not the only ones being drawn to the desert. Former U.S. Navy SEAL Painter Crowe, a covert government operative and head of an elite counterespionage team, is hunting down a dangerous turncoat, Crowe's onetime partner, to retrieve the vital information she has stolen. And the trial is pointing him toward Ubar.

But the many perils inherent in a death-defying trek deep into the savage heart of the Arabian Peninsula pale before the nightmarish secrets to be unearthed at journey's end. What is hidden below the sand is more than a valuable relic of ancient history. It is an ageless power that lives and breathes-an awesome force that could create a utopia or tear down everything humankind has build during millennia of civilisation. Many lives have already been destroyed by ruthless agencies dedicated to guarding its mysteries and harnessing its might. aAnd now the endy may be at hand for Safia, for kara, for Crowe, and for all the interlopers who wish to expose its mysteries, as it prepares to unleash the most terrible storm of all.

Reviews

If he weren't such a good action writer, Rollins might make a dynamite climatologist. Each of his thrillers has featured as a central character an extreme environment, most recently the Arctic ice (Ice Hunt, 2003) and now the hot sands of Saudi Arabia. But while Rollins writes settings and scenes that sizzle, what's caught in the heat are usually familiar characters grappling with far-fetched threats, and so it is here. That one male lead is a danger-courting archeologist named Omaha Dunn seems less parodic than tired, and the novel's premise of a hoard of antimatter hidden in the legendary city of Ubar is almost as ridiculous as the idea that this cache has been guarded for millennia by an order of women who propagate without men, via parthenogenesis. Rollins writes less like Michael Crichton than Stan Lee. Most of his readers won't care, though, because there's just enough scientific gloss on the nonsense to make it palatable, and anyway, what they want, and what he delivers, is action, as Omaha and an American military agent, Painter, join forces with two Mideastern women, one a scientist, the other a billionaire, to locate the steadily destabilizing antimatter before it's snatched by a villainous cabal, or worse, blows up the planet. And that's why they'll buy this book in numbers big enough to have it flirt with national bestseller lists.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sandstorm

By Rollins, James

William Morrow & Company

ISBN: 0060580666

Chapter One

Fire and Rain

November 14, 01:33 A.M.
The British Museum
London, England

Harry Masterson would be dead in thirteen minutes.

If he had known this, he would've smoked his last cigarette down tothe filter. Instead he stamped out the fag after only three drags andwaved the cloud from around his face. If he was caught smoking outsidethe guards' break room, he would be shit-canned by that bastard Fleming,head of museum security. Harry was already on probation for comingin two hours late for his shift last week.

Harry swore under his breath and pocketed the stubbed cigarette.He'd finish it at his next break ... that is, if they got a break this night.

Thunder echoed through the masonry walls. The winter storm hadstruck just after midnight, opening with a riotous volley of hail, followedby a deluge that threatened to wash London into the Thames. Lightningdanced across the skies in forked displays from one horizon to another.According to the weatherman on the Beeb, it was one of the fiercestelectrical storms in over a decade. Half the city had been blacked out,overwhelmed by a spectacular lightning barrage.

And as fortune would have it for Harry, it was his half of the city thatwent dark, including the British Museum on Great Russell Street.Though they had backup generators, the entire security team had beensummoned for additional protection of the museum's property. Theywould be arriving in the next half hour. But Harry, assigned to the nightshift, was already on duty when the regular lights went out. And though the video surveillance cameras were still operational on the emergencygrid, he and the shift were ordered by Fleming to proceed with an immediatesecurity sweep of the museum's two and a half miles of halls.

That meant splitting up.

Harry picked up his electric torch and aimed it down the hall. Hehated doing rounds at night, when the museum was lost in gloom. Theonly illumination came from the streetlamps outside the windows. Butnow, with the blackout, even those lamps had been extinguished. Themuseum had darkened to macabre shadows broken by pools of crimsonfrom the low-voltage security lamps.

Harry had needed a few hits of nicotine to steel his nerve, but hecould put off his duty no longer. Being the low man on the night shift'specking order, he had been assigned to run the halls of the north wing,the farthest point from their underground security nest. But that didn'tmean he couldn't take a shortcut. Turning his back on the long hallahead, he crossed to the door leading into the Queen Elizabeth II GreatCourt.

This central two-acre court was surrounded by the four wings of theBritish Museum. At its heart rose the great copper-domed Round ReadingRoom, one of the world's finest libraries. Overhead, the entire two-acrecourtyard had been enclosed by a gigantic Foster and Partners?designedgeodesic roof, creating Europe's largest covered square.

Using his passkey, Harry ducked into the cavernous space. Like themuseum proper, the court was lost to darkness. Rain pattered against theglass roof far overhead. Still, Harry's footsteps echoed across the openspace. Another lance of lightning shattered across the sky. The roof, dividedinto a thousand triangular panes, lit up for a blinding moment.Then darkness drowned back over the museum, drumming down withthe rain.

Thunder followed, felt deep in the chest. The roof rattled, too. Harryducked a bit, fearing the entire structure would come crashing down.

With his electric torch pointed forward, he crossed the court, headingfor the north wing. He rounded past the central Reading Room. Lightningflashed again, brightening the place for a handful of heartbeats. Giantstatues, lost to the darkness, appeared as if from nowhere. The Lionof Cnidos reared beside the massive head of an Easter Island statue.Then darkness swallowed the guardians away as the lightning died out.

Harry felt a chill and pebbling of gooseflesh.

His pace hurried. He swore under his breath with each step, "Bleedingbuggered pieces of crap ... " His litany helped calm him.

He reached the doors to the north wing and ducked inside, greeted bythe familiar mix of mustiness and ammonia. He was grateful to havesolid walls around him again. He played his torch down the long hall.Nothing seemed amiss, but he was required to check each of the wing'sgalleries. He did a fast calculation. If he hurried, he could complete hiscircuit with enough time for another fast smoke. With the promise of anicotine fix luring him, he set off down the hall, the beam of his torchpreceding him.

The north wing had become host to the museum's anniversary showcase,an ethnographical collection portraying a complete picture of humanachievement down the ages, spanning all cultures. Like theEgyptian gallery with its mummies and sarcophagi. He continued hurriedly,ticking off the various cultural galleries: Celtic, Byzantine, Russian,Chinese. Each suite of rooms was locked down by a security gate.With the loss of power, the gates had dropped automatically.

At last, the hall's end came into sight.

Most of the galleries' collections were only temporarily housed here,transferred from the Museum of Mankind for the anniversary celebration.But the end gallery had always been here, for as far back as Harrycould recall. It housed the museum's Arabian display, a priceless collectionof antiquity from across the Arabian Peninsula. The gallery hadbeen commissioned and paid for by one family, a family grown rich by itsoil ventures in that region. The donations to keep such a gallery in permanentresidence at the British Museum was said to top five millionpounds per annum.

One had to respect that sort of dedication.

Or not ...

Continues...

Excerpted from Sandstormby Rollins, James Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060580666
• ISBN 13: 9780060580667
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 464