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The Rock is Robert Doherty’s 1996 standalone military-SF thriller, written under the pseudonym Bob Mayer used for his more speculative work. A U. S. Special Forces team is inserted into the Antarctic ice cap to investigate an artifact a satellite has imaged twelve kilometers below the surface. The artifact is identifiable as not naturally occurring, and it is broadcasting. The team’s mission is to find it, identify it, and not bring it home if it has already started doing what the satellites suggest it has started doing.
Doherty / Mayer is a former Green Beret, and the small-unit Antarctic procedural in the front half is the most carefully sourced part of the book: cold-weather field medicine, the actual logistics of moving a team across the polar plateau, the realistic limits of mid-1990s satellite uplink kit. The alien-artifact reveal in the back half drifts into more standard-issue government-conspiracy territory and asks the reader to forgive a couple of large geopolitical coincidences. The team-character work is sketched rather than developed.
Recommended for fans of military-SF thrillers (James Rollins’s Sigma Force entries, Steve Alten’s The Loch) and for readers looking for books like The Rock in the Antarctic-artifact subgenre. Three stars, with the cold-weather operations earning the rating.
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