Area 51: The Sphinx-4 (9 page)

Lago was still waiting for an explanation why they were here, but he was used to his uncle's long silences, because he knew he would eventually get more information than he ever wanted once the older man began speaking. It appeared that time had come as Mualama began talking again, filling up the minutes of the short break that he had allowed every two hours during the march.

"In A.D. 50, Marinus of Tyre, a geographer, recorded a story he heard from a Greek merchant who claimed to have traveled inland from the east coast of Africa for twenty-five days and reached a land of mountains and snow where the source of the Nile came out of two lakes.

"The Greek mathematician and geographer Ptolemy was the first geographer to use longitude and latitude lines to identify locations on the face of the planet. He also thought the idea of snowcapped mountains lying on the hot equator most fascinating. He called these mountains Luna Montes, the Mountains of the Moon, a name many still use for where we are."

Mualama stretched his back, the bones cracking as they settled in place. In his backpack lay the package he had recovered under the stone in the Devil's Throat. It

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had pointed him to the next clue, back home to Africa, and he had wasted no time getting here.

"Unlike Kilimanjaro and Ngorongoro," he continued, "these mountains—also called the Ruwenzori, a corruption of the local word for rainy mountains—were not formed by volcanic action. We are basically on the edge of an enormous massif, about one hundred and twenty kilometers long and fifty kilometers wide.

"We are in Uganda, and the border with Zaire runs along the center of this massif, where the peaks are." He pointed ahead at the clouds. "There are four major summits—Mounts Speke, Stanley, Baker, and Luigi di Savoia. All named after white men, of course. The locals have their own name for them, which the Europeans ignored. Stanley was the first white man to see the peaks in the modern age. He was in this area in 1875 and told of the mountains by his native guides, but, like us today, he could see nothing but the clouds and mist they are covered in for over three hundred days out of the year. He came back thirteen years later, in 1888, and happened to have a clear day and saw the white peaks."

"Uncle . . ." Lago knew if he didn't interrupt, his uncle would fall completely into his lecture mode, and it might be hours before he got around to the information the young man most needed to know.

Mualama frowned. "Yes?"

"Where are we going?"

"Mount Speke."

That answered one of Lago's unasked questions-why he was here. He had experience mountain climbing, summiting numerous mountains in Ethiopia and South Africa. He had never been to the Mountains of the Moon, but he knew climbing Speke would be difficult, especially if the weather turned bad. So, as usual his uncle needed his help. He decided to ask the third question.

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"Why are we climbing Mount Speke?"

"Do you know who Speke was?" Mualama asked instead of answering.

Lago shook his head.

"Stanley was Anglo-American. Luigi di Savoia was an Italian duke who mapped the mountain range in the first decade of the twentieth century. Speke was an English explorer. He is best known for discovering Lake Tanganyika with Sir Richard Francis Burton in 1858. At the time, they thought it was the source of the Nile. The two had a long-running feud when Speke returned to England before Burton and announced the discovery, taking most of the credit. They were scheduled to debate the issue when, the day before, Speke was killed in a most unfortunate hunting accident. It is quite an irony that Burton would have hidden the next clue on the mountain named for his hated rival."

"The next clue?"

"You will see," Mualama said.

Lago checked the cuts on his arm from the jungle that had encroached over much of the trail, half listening to his uncle, waiting for him to answer the question as to the purpose of this expedition. His uncle was known not only in the family but at the university, for his trips all over the world, searching for something he never quite told anyone.

The journey had been more than worth it so far, though, simply to see the bizarre terrain they had passed through. Swamps and marshes had surrounded the trailhead, but as they went up, the vegetation changed to a strange world of giant plants among misshapen rocks. Lobelias grew twenty times. their normal height, and many other plants that rarely topped a foot or two elsewhere towered over their heads. The almost constant moisture from the clinging clouds combined with the

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mineral-rich soil and high dosage of ultraviolet light, due to the altitude and latitude, to produce mutations unknown elsewhere on the planet.

Tall, writhing stems crowned with heads of spiky leaves swayed overhead, while the ground was covered with layers of pink blossoms. Tree heathers draped with beards of lichens formed with the rest to create a landscape that might have existed millions of years ago when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. It was a land out of time with the rest of the world, and one of the most remote and inaccessible places on the planet.

Lago was startled out of his thoughts as his uncle grasped his arm. Lago was surprised by the intensity in his usually easygoing uncle's face. "Men died so I could get the information that leads me here."

That got Lago's attention. "What men?"

"My guide and porters in Brazil." Mualama quickly summarized his escape from beneath the stone altar in the Devil's Throat; the walk to the nearest town; hitching a ride back to Santos; and then the flight to Dar es Salaam.

"This Bauru was a brave man," Lago noted when his uncle finished. "Who killed your porters and trapped you there?"

"I believe it was a group that has tried to stop me several times over the years," Mualama said. "They are known as the Mission."

"Why are they trying to stop you?"

"They are afraid of what I might find."

"Which is?"

"I'll know when I find it."

Lago controlled his frustration. "What are we looking for on Mount Speke? What kind of clue?"

Mualama pulled out the oilskin-wrapped package. "This is what I found in Brazil Burton out it there over a

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hundred years ago." He unwrapped the covering. A thin sheaf of papers was inside a leather case. "When Burton died in 1890, his wife, Isabel, burned a manuscript. No one knows exactly what was written in that manuscript."

He tapped the papers. "I believe this is a copy of the introduction to that manuscript. The manuscript itself is the untold story of Burton's life, of his secret expeditions. I have been following clues he left, going from one to the next, for over two decades now. Even this is just another stone in the path leading me here, to these mountains." Mualama looked up from the papers toward the mist covering the mountains. "On the side of Mount Speke, something is hidden. Something important. I believe—I hope—it is the rest of the manuscript.

That is where we go."

"Why did Burton go to such extremes to hide this material?" Lago asked.

"I wondered that myself," Mualama said. "These papers say that he made a promise never to tell anyone about something he had seen. Something incredible.

However, he did not promise to not help others try to find what it was he saw.

Of course, he knew he had to prevent those with bad motives from also following his clues, so he made it very difficult. Very difficult." The old professor stood, putting the journal back into his pack. "It is time to continue."

SMITHON HARBOR, TASMANIA

"Are we ready?"

The voice was that of one used to speaking from the pulpit, strong/and deep, easily reaching those assembled on the deck. Their solid mass, standing shoulder to shoulder in the space between the ship's bridge and the forward hatch, showed their determination. There were

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sixty-two people on the deck. All were dressed alike, in dull-brown pants and parkas. Sewn onto the left chest of each parka was a patch that was becoming more and more familiar around the world: It was circular with a small Earth in the center; coming out of the Earth were lines to stars that surrounded the planet.

"We are ready!" they answered with one voice.

The mountains of northern Tasmania towered over the freighter on the landward side. Their rugged beauty contrasted with the rust-stained hull of the ship.

Originally called the Island Breeze, the ship had been renamed Southern Star for the purpose of this journey.

Captain Halls watched the passengers from his bridge, and he couldn't give a rat's ass what they wanted to call his ship. He had his money.

The man who had asked the question turned and walked in from the small wing off the bridge. "Let us depart," he said to Halls.

"We'll be under way in a minute, Mr. Parker," Halls said.

"Guide Parker," the other man corrected him.

Halls gave the order, which was relayed to the engine room. The ship slowly parted ways with the quay and headed for the center channel of Smithon Harbor.

Besides the way they were dressed, the people on deck did not act like ordinary passengers. They didn't line the railing and watch the land fade.

Instead they looked out to sea.

"It'll be a hard journey," Halls said. "And I understand the American Navy has Easter Island under strict quarantine. I'm not breaking any blockade for you people."

Parker turned. Halls stepped back from the sheen in the man's eyes. He'd seen that look before, from missionaries he'd run into in the South Pacific, where his

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ship had spent many a year plowing the normal island trading routes.

"We have our faith in a power greater than the American Navy," Parker said.

"We will get ashore, one way or the other. Our destiny lies on Easter Island."

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Duncan handed out sheets of paper, one each to Turcotte, Yakov, Major Quinn, and Larry Kincaid. "This was the last article Kelly posted before she went underneath Rano Rau Volcano on Easter Island and became entrapped by the guardian computer. I want you to read

it

and compare it to the one that was just transmitted."

The five were seated inside the conference room just off the Cube—the complex deep under Hangar One from which Majestic-12 had ruled Area 51 for decades.

There was the quiet hum of machinery in the room, along with the slight hiss of filtered air being pushed down by large fans in the hangar above.

Major Quinn had been the operations officer at Area 51 for many years, but he had survived the purge of MJ-12

personnel because he had not been on the

inner circle taken over by the guardian, and when Duncan had finally shut Majestic down, he had assisted her. He was the one man in the room who knew all the inner workings of the Area 51 facility and the Cube, the nickname for C3, (Command and Control Central).

Just outside the conference room was the main operations center, housing the Cube center. It measured eighty by a hundred feet and could be reached only-from the massive bouncer hangar cut into the side of Groom Mountain via a large freight elevator. The entire complex was self-enclosed and rested on massive springs designed to allow it to survive a direct nuclear strike on the mountain above. Like the old NORAD headquarter in Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, the Cube had been

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built during the Cold War, the costs hidden in the sixty-billion-dollar-a-year black budget.

At the height of Majestic-12's operations, the bouncers were being test-flown, and part of the security force—which Duncan had had Turcotte infiltrate—code-named Nightscape, had kidnapped subjects to be sent to the sister biotech facility outside of Dulce, New Mexico.

The Dulce facility was now crushed rubble, blasted by foo fighters, and Nightscape disbanded. Major Quinn had a different job now, aiding Duncan in her attempt to find out the truth about the aliens and their influence on mankind, which even Majestic-12 had been relatively clueless about.

Quinn was of medium height and build. He had thinning blond hair and wore tortoiseshell glasses with oversized lenses to accommodate the split glass he needed for both distance and close-up viewing.

The other person waiting in the room, Larry Kincaid, had worked for JPL—Jet Propulsion Laboratory—and NASA for over three decades. He was an outsider to Area 51 and had been as shocked as the rest of the world to learn what had been hidden there for decades. He was short and overweight, and his face bore the stress of his having sat through numerous space launches. He was the one who had spotted the Airlia base at Cydonia on Mars, right next to the enigma known as the Mars Face. Kincaid looked more dour than ever, with the recent word of the loss of Atlantis.

They all quickly scanned the clipping of Kelly Reynolds's article: The discovery of the alien computer known as the guardian, hidden here on Easter Island at least five thousand years ago, has been the most significant and most disappointing discovery in recorded human history. Significant because it conclusively tells us we

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are, or at least were, not alone in the universe. Disappointing because we can no longer access the wealth of information the computer contains. Like a hacker breaking into a top-of-the-line computer, we can read the file names but we don't have the code words needed to open those files and read the advanced secrets they contain. The guardian shut down less than forty-eight hours after transmitting a message up into the skies, toward whom or where we do not know.

The secret to the bouncers drive system lay just a few inches away. The details of the mothership's interstellar engine lay just as distant. The technology of the guardian computer is just as jealously guarded by the machine.

Control of the foo fighters also rests inside the guardian. The mystery of where the Airlia, as the alien race called itself, came from and exactly why they were here on our planet also lies within.

We know some basics, the barest sketch of what happened thousands of years ago when the alien commander Aspasia decided to get rid of all trace of his people's, the Airlia's, presence here on Earth to save the planet from their mortal enemies, who we now know are called the Kortad. Upon making that decision, Aspasia had to fight rebels among his own people who did not wish to go quietly into the night and in doing so destroyed the land that in Earth leg'