Return to the Earth's Core

BURROUGHS DIDN’T INVENT PELLUCIDAR. HE WAS CLASSIFYING IT. When a violent Saharan sandstorm uncovers a colossal, century-old iron cylinder buried beneath thirty feet of dunes, a joint U.S. Special Operations team makes an impossible discovery: the skeletal remains of an Imperial German officer, claw-gouged steel plate, and a journal proving that the legendary hollow earth is real. Determined to unlock its secrets before hostile foreign powers catch wind of the discovery, the Pentagon greenlights Project Prospector II—a two-hundred-foot, nuclear-powered subterranean cruiser armored in titanium-carbide and equipped with a four-thousand-degree plasma drill. Under the command of veteran Delta Force leader Colonel Arthur Pendelton and combat-tested Apache pilot Dr. Traci McKenzie, an elite expeditionary force plunges eighty miles straight into the planet's mantle. What awaits them on the other side defies human history. Beneath the unblinking glare of a stationary central sun lies a breathtaking, inverted world of perpetual daylight, savage prehistoric carnivores, and towering primeval jungles. But humanity is not alone. Chained in subterranean pits are millions of primeval humans, dominated by the telepathic, reptilian Mahars and their brutal, gorilla-like Sagoth shock troops. When Captain McKenzie is abducted into a nightmarish slave march bound for the Mahar feeding pits, a desperate search-and-rescue mission sparks an all-out war for continental liberation. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Bolt action-and-bayonet legions of Emperor Neil Zander Innes—grandson of the legendary David Innes—the surface operators must face ancient armies, aerial terrors, and a sinister biological secret that could change the fate of two worlds forever. Modern firepower meets primeval savagery in this pulse-pounding return to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ legendary inner world.