Artemis Fowl_ The Opal Deception - Eoin Colfer [74]
“Did I hear you talking about a Mud Man named Zito?”
Holly turned toward the dwarf, then kept right on turning. “Yes. So what? And for heaven’s sake close the door.”
Mulch pulled the door so only a crack remained. “I was just watching a bit of human television in here, as you do. Well there’s a Zito person on CNN. Do you think it’s the same person?”
Holly grabbed a remote control from the desktop. “I really hope not,” she said. “But I’d bet my life it is.”
A group of scientists appeared on the screen. They were gathered in what looked like a prefabricated laboratory, and each wore a white coat. One stood out from the rest. He was in his mid-forties, with tanned skin, strong handsome features, and long, dark hair curling over his collar. He wore rimless glasses and a lab coat. A striped Versace shirt protruded from beneath his white lapels.
“Giovanni Zito,” said Artemis.
“It is incredible, really,” Zito was telling a reporter in slightly accented English. “We have sent crafts to other planets, and yet we have no idea what lies beneath our feet. Scientists can tell us the chemical makeup of Saturn’s rings, but we don’t honestly know what lies at the center of our own planet.”
“But probes have been sent down before,” said the reporter, trying to pretend he hadn’t just picked up this knowledge from his earpiece.
“Yes,” agreed Zito. “But only to a depth of about nine miles. We need to get through to the outer core itself, almost two thousand miles down. Imagine if the currents of liquid metal in the outer core could be harnessed. There’s enough free energy in that metal to power mankind’s machines forever.”
The reporter was skeptical. At least, the real scientist speaking in his earpiece told him to be skeptical. “But this is all speculation, Dr. Zito. Surely a voyage to the center of the earth is nothing but a fantasy? Possible only in the pages of science fiction.”
A brief flash of annoyance clouded Giovanni Zito’s features. “This is no fantasy, sir, I assure you. This is no fantastical voyage. We are sending an unmanned probe, bristling with sensors. Whatever is down there. We will find it.”
The reporter’s eyes widened in panic as a particularly technical question came over his earpiece. He listened for several seconds, mouthing the words as he heard them.
“Dr. Zito, eh . . . This probe you are sending down, I believe it will be encased in one hundred million tons of molten iron at about five and a half thousand degrees Celsius. Is that correct?”
“Absolutely,” confirmed Zito.
The reporter looked relieved. “Yes. I knew that. Anyway, my point is, it would take several years to gather so much iron. So why did you ask us here today?”
Zito clapped his hands excitedly. “This is the wonderful part. As you know the core probe was a long-term project. I had planned to accumulate the iron over the next ten years. But now, laser drilling has revealed a deep orebody of hematite, iron ore, on the bottom edge of the crust right here in Sicily. It’s incredibly rich, perhaps eighty-five percent iron. All we need to do is detonate several charges inside that deposit and we have our molten iron. I have already secured the mining permits from the government.”
The reporter asked the next question all on his own. “So, Dr. Zito, when do you detonate?”
Giovanni Zito removed two thick cigars from his lab coat pocket. “We detonate today,” he said, passing a cigar to the reporter. “Ten years early. This is a historic moment.” Zito opened the office curtains, revealing a fenced-off area of scrubland below the window. A metallic section of piping protruded from the earth in the center of the three-foot-square enclosure. As they watched, a crew of workmen clambered from the piping, moving hurriedly away from the opening. Wisps of gaseous coolant spiraled from the pipe. The men climbed into a golf trolley and exited the compound. They took shelter in a concrete bunker at the perimeter.
“There are several megatons of TNT buried at strategic points inside the orebody,” explained Zito. “If this was detonated on the