Key To The Abyss (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798243629942)

A pulse-pounding thriller of ancient physics and modern survival.

High in the frozen hell of the Karakoram mountains, a secret older than the Cold War is waking up.

Elias Thorne is a man of "practiced economy" and "mechanical hunger," a survival specialist who understands the physics of a kill better than the company of people. When he is sent to extract Anya Varma from a besieged mountain monastery, he finds more than just a woman in hiding. Beneath her skin lies the Jade Compass-a biological map to the World-Clock, a subterranean machine with the power to rewrite the laws of physics or reset the planet's magnetic heartbeat.

From the vertical glass sheets of the Himalayas to the "oily expanse" of the Caspian Sea and the high-tech fortresses of the Aegean, Thorne and Anya are hunted by The Consortium-a global shadow-force that views the world as a broken machine in need of a violent restart.

As the tectonic plates begin to "groan like living things," Thorne must use every improvised engineering trick and high-velocity round in his arsenal to protect the "Living-Archive". In a world of "steel and sacrifice," they are the only sentinels standing between civilization and total liquefaction.

"A masterpiece of tactical economy and atmospheric dread."