Catacombs (13 page)

"What language is this? Arabic?"

"No. It's a complete system of writing predating, and entirely unrelated to, the earliest ideograms and numerals of Sumeria." Gibson tapped the notebook. "A full translation of the pictographs–and there are thousands of them–is in this book."

"Where did the diamond come from?"

"Morgan brought it to us," Boomer said.

The defense secretary smiled. "It was a party favor, actually."

"See if you can get me invited next time."

"Tell him about it, Morgan."

Morgan explained the events leading up to the remarkable Chanvai conference.

"I brought back a tape of the. . . proceedings, which Jumbe provided. Why don't you listen to it, and then I'll try to answer your questions."

Gibby took a cassette from an inside pocket of the notebook cover and slipped it into Boomer's stereo receiver.

"Good evening. . . . To my friends Morgan Atterbury and Victor Kirillovich Nikolaiev, welcome."

At the mention of the Soviet minister of defense, Jade shot a look at Boomer, who looked grimly back at him but said nothing. Jade concentrated on the voice of Jumbe Kinyati. The tape was of excellent quality; even minor background noises like the sharp cries of animals outside the room came through clearly.

"The Chapman/Weller discovery is of awesome proportions. . . . Catacombs . . a civilization that left a complete record of its one-thousand-year history for modern man to study. . . Their greatest feat. . . was FIREKILL."

Finally the tape ended. The Hondo had begun to rock gently at anchor. Jade felt a sharp distress, not entirely due to the motion of the boat.

He said to Morgan, "Kinyati's been a moderate for years. What changed him?"

"Many things. He's old, and frustrated by the slow progress of economic and education reforms in his own country. Tanzania is still among the poorest nations on earth. CCM policies of collectivization–
ujamaa
–haven't been successful in the rural areas. I suspect he's very ill. The death of his sons in Rhodesia several years ago continues to weigh heavily. Apparently he's developed a fanatic's will to stay alive long enough to drive the Afrikaners from South Africa. I think he views the potential holocaust as a memorial to his dead sons."

Gibson got up to illuminate a map of Africa on a viewing screen.

"As you can see, the southern border of Tanzania is about twelve hundred miles from Pretoria. Almost all of South Africa is within reach of intermediate-range tactical nuclear weapons. Ours, or the Soviets'."

Jade scrutinized the bloodstone again. "Are the Russians taking this seriously?" he asked the CIA man.

"Yes, from what little we've been able to learn. Naturally it's very difficult to know what they're thinking. But they've always been nutty on the subject of flying saucers. Some key members of their scientific establishment devoutly believe that we've received periodic visits from extraterrestrials, so it shouldn't be too much of a reach for them to accept an ancient buried civilization, or whatever."

"When was the meeting in Tanzania?"

"A week ago," Morgan replied. "I came back immediately, via Torrejon."

"Do you still think this is a hoax?"

"If it is, Jumbe's taken in quite a few people, including some respected, hard-headed scientists."

Morgan glanced at Gibby, who continued, "We have voiceprint comparisons of nearly everyone who spoke on the tape you just heard. They are who they were represented to be–including Marshal V. K. Nikolaiev. Voice-stress analysis tends to confirm that all of them, including Jumbe, devoutly believed in what they were talking about."

"But voice-stress analysis isn't very reliable."

Gage said, "It only means that otherwise sensible men may have convinced themselves of the unbelievable and the impossible."

"Jumbe's forcibly detained his eminent guests for a full week. There should have been an uproar from family, friends, colleagues."

"Tanzania's on a war footing," Morgan explained. "There's not much shooting, but Jumbe has closed the borders pending the outcome of what he calls 'a national emergency.' No one can enter or leave the country. Travel is restricted. The press has been muzzled. There's no way to learn exactly what's going on."

Boomer had been silent for an unusually long time, his face closed in glum contemplation. Now he said, "But the South African Department of National Security knew right away that you and Nikolaiev had paid a visit to Jumbe. And left in the middle of the night. With all those warmongering broadsides from Jumbe, they're getting a little paranoid."

"How much have you found out about the Chapman/Weller expedition?" Jade asked Gibson.

"Members of the expedition assembled in Dar es Salaam over a ten-day period beginning the eighteenth of September of last year. They left Dar for Lake Tanganyika on the twenty-ninth and established a base camp in the Makari Mountains. Almost immediately after that, as you heard on the tape, there was no further contact with them."

"They were looking for a prehistoric burial ground. How did they know it might be there? Have other explorers covered the same territory?"

"As far as we know, only one. Dr. Macdonald Hardie."

"Who's he?"

"I should have said the late Dr. Hardie; he died in a flash flood in Africa sixteen years ago. He was a paleoanthropologist who had a bit of money laid by, enough to give him independence from the university and foundation cliques. He was determinedly antiestablishment, always challenging the accepted theories of evolution. In a thirty-five-year career he made some significant discoveries, particularly in East Africa and the Afar region of Ethiopia. His most famous find was the bone clusters of approximately fifty Ethiopians, who lived a communal existence some three million years ago; these individuals were strikingly human in form. He was accused of misinterpreting the fossil form as a direct link with modern man, and it was rumored he had perpetrated some post-Piltdown trickery, although other anthropologists stopped short of calling him a fraud."

"Was this the burial ground Chapman/Weller hoped to find?"

"No. Apparently he was very secretive about his Tanganyika discovery, which he made before he died. If Hardie did stumble across the Catacombs, he had to realize it was one of the most significant scientific discoveries of all time, demanding rigid silence and many years of painstaking exploration with a few archaeologists he trusted completely. Chips Chapman, for one."

"If Hardie confided in Chapman, why would he wait thirteen years to investigate?"

"It's just a guess that Chapman knew what he would find. Assuming that Hardie made notes of his discovery, they're missing from the archives at Edinburgh University, and no one we've talked to in the academic community knows anything about them."

"But his daughter may know about the Catacombs," Boomer said. "She may even have seen them."

"Sounds like a good break. What's the matter, can't you locate her?" The Hondo was creaking and rocking as a collision of twilight air masses in the little cove created a thermal. Jade went pale. "Jesus," he muttered. "What's the matter with this tub? Throw out another anchor."

Boomer laughed and got up to rummage for Dramamine, which he gave to Jade.

"Right now Hardie's girl is almost a neighbor of yours–she's about a hundred miles away from the war shield, at Talon Mountain Federal Correctional Facility."

Jade swallowed his Dramamine and looked up in disbelief.

"Raun Hardie?"

Boomer nodded. "That's ironic, isn't it? The FBI wasted three years and fifty thousand man hours trying to track her down. Justice spent six months on her case, and the trial lasted three months. Raun Hardie didn't whimper, she didn't cry, she never backed down. She was a common criminal, legitimately accused of a Federal crime, maybe an inch away from being a murderer, but somehow we came out of it looking like the bad guys. Now we need her, badly, and I wonder how far we'll get."

"Have you talked to Hardie yet?"

"Basically it's a matter of finding the right approach," Boomer said optimistically.

"Good luck," Jade said through clenched teeth. He was holding his stomach.

"Are you going to heave?"

"Don't know yet, Boomer."

"You're making a hell of an impression. Here I was telling everybody how tough you are. Your body is a marvel of science, capable of incredible feats."

Jade sighed and looked at Morgan, who smiled sympathetically; Boomer was a notorious needler.

"Marvel of science?"

"Yeah, I look it, don't I? I make the most of what I have, physically and mentally. Most people get ten percent out of themselves and think they're overachievers. On the tape I heard you tell Jumbe you thought his entire presentation was a hoax. What do you think now?"

"It's still a lot to swallow," Morgan admitted. "But there are facts that can't be disputed. The red diamond I brought back is the real thing. And it would be a tremendous labor to make up a new language consisting of thousands of pictographs, which fill over five hundred pages of translation, just to perpetrate a hoax. Not saying it couldn't be done, but the etymologists we've consulted have been impressed–in some instances dazzled. Then there's the matter of a 'lost civilization,' or race of people. Now, that's wonderful stuff for adventure stories, but there's little evidence except for some unexplained ruins. In place of real evidence that a highly technological society could have existed on the edge of the last ice age, all we have is a great number of 'out-of-place artifacts,' curiosities turned up in the course of routine field work by investigators during the last hundred years. A couple of examples should do.

"In the Museum of Natural History in London there is the skull of a Neanderthal-type man which was found in the vicinity of Broken Hill, Rhodesia, in 1921. Neanderthal man goes back to the Upper Pleistocene age. The skull came equipped with a perfectly round hole on the left side. If an arrow or spear had penetrated the bone, there would be radial cracks. The hole had to be made by a projectile traveling at a velocity of nearly three thousand feet per second."

"In other words," Jade said, "a bullet. With a hell of a hot load behind it."

"Exactly. The skull opposite the hole was broken, blown out from the inside. A typical wound resulting from a gunshot. The skull was found in the ground at a depth of about sixty feet, so it's almost a certainty that the owner was shot many thousands of years ago. No other explanation comes close. Another example: Many models of workable airplanes have been discovered in such places as a tomb in Egypt. A fragment of a Chaldean book called the
Sifr'ala
is almost a hundred pages long in its English translation; basically it's a construction manual for an aircraft, with reference to vibrating spheres, graphite rods, and copper coils. The
Sifr'ala
also contains a nearly complete lesson in aerodynamics: wind resistance, gliding, and stability. Back then they may have known as much about flying as we do now. I could go on for a couple of hours about ancient aerial surveys, spark plugs found in rocks half a million years old, accounts of atomic warfare in Hindu records, electroplated gold jewelry from the tombs of the pharaohs, platinum and aluminum smelters that require extremely high temperatures–but you get the idea."

"I think you're sold," Jade observed. "But even if the Catacombs exist, the real hoax could be FIREKILL. Only Dr. Landreth knows for sure. He convinced Jumbe that he alone has the key to this formula. But as a source he's highly questionable."

"There is a theoretical basis for the concept of a force field," Morgan said. "Going back to ancient sources, we know that the Egyptians did some significant research in electromagnetics. They used variations of a Van de Graff generator and Crookes tubes to negatively charge electron beams, which then negatively charged small objects. If they were able to experiment on a large scale, they may well have constructed the pyramids, by floating those huge blocks of stone into place. If FIREKILL is authentic, it could consist of simple machines that produce, using solar energy, enormously powerful electromagnetic waves, either to repel missiles in trajectory or pull them apart, turning them into harmless fragments in space." The Hondo settled down into a gentle rocking-chair rhythm. Jade held his head for a few moments, breathing deeply.

Boomer said, after a long silence, "We wouldn't want to be the last superpower on the block to acquire FIREKILL. Because of the waiver provision in the Arms Export Control Act, I have the authority to send weapons and advisors anywhere I damn please without informing Congress, as long as I think there's a qualifying emergency. But even if I have incontrovertible proof that FIREKILL exists, giving nukes to Jumbe is out of the question."

"What Jumbe doesn't realize," Gage said, "or chooses to overlook, is the fact that the economy of South Africa continues to support the entire continent. There are fifty-one black states in Africa, and most of them are in terrible shape economically. The O.A.U. is bitterly antiapartheid; its leaders clamor for economic sanctions in the UN–but without the billion dollars in illegal trade that goes on each year with the Afrikaners, most of black Africa would face starvation and political chaos."

"Quite a dilemma you have there," Jade said helpfully. "I wonder what this conversation sounded like at the Kremlin."