“Wait. What’s a stele?”
“A carved stone obelisk used by the Egyptians usually to mark a military victory or some important event.”
“So this goes back to the Egyptians?”
Mercer held up a hand. “That’s getting ahead of the story, but Cali and I both remember seeing it in the village square. It was about seven feet tall and very weathered. Anyway Bowie hired some locals to help him dig out samples of the ore. And as you know, ever since then the natives have been suffering from long-term radiation exposure. He crated up about a thousand pounds’ worth of dirt and made his way to the port city of Brazzaville. That’s where he realized that he wasn’t the only person looking for the ore. In fact it seemed there were a couple of groups interested in what he was doing in the interior. He was pretty sure his guide had betrayed him to some German agents.
“I’m sure you’re aware that the Nazis had a thing for the occult and had sent out teams of agents to find certain ancient relics. Hitler needed them to legitimize his claim about pure Aryan stock and all that crap. That’s how they came into possession of the Spear of Longinus, the weapon purportedly used to pierce Christ’s side.”
“I’ve seen the movie,” Ira said. “Lost ark and all that. Besides that fits with what you told me about others showing up at that village a few years after Bowie to mine the rest of the ore.”
“And gunning down most of the villagers,” Mercer added. “Anyway Bowie managed to get the crates of ore samples onto a tramp steamer called the Wetherby, with orders that it go to Chicago, where Einstein believed Fermi should study it to see if they really were transuranic elements.”
“Why didn’t Bowie stay with the ship?”
“Paranoia, plus he had just spent several weeks around plutonium without any kind of protection. He realized he was suffering from radiation poisoning and was also wracked with malaria and a few other fun tropical bugs. There’s a line in his diary that goes something like ‘For three days my bowels ran like the River Styx.’”
“Lovely.”
“The day after the ship sailed he was almost killed by a pair of men he believed were Germans. They tried to muscle him into a car but two other men dressed in dark suits came out of nowhere, shot the Germans, and vanished.”
“Who were they? Did he know?”
“He didn’t but we do.” Mercer’s statement invited an explanation.
Cali said, “Last night two men in dark suits showed up at my condo and forced me to go with them. They took me to Mercer’s, where they warned us to stop searching for something called the Alembic of Skenderbeg.”
“They were the same guys who wiped out Caribe Dayce and his army in Africa and took on Poli Feines at the Deco Palace,” Mercer added. “They called themselves Janissaries and said we were caught up in an ancient conflict we couldn’t possibly understand.”
Ira held up a hand. “Hold on. Are you saying that the men who saved Bowie in Brazzaville are the same two who took out Dayce?”
“No, but I think they belong to the same organization, a secret group that’s been around for at least seventy years and may have roots going back to the 1400s. Skenderbeg, whose real name was Gjergi Kastrioti, was an Albanian-born general in the Ottoman Army, a Janissary who eventually revolted against Sultan Murad II. He captured a key town in Albania and, with a force never exceeding twenty thousand, managed to keep the Ottomans’ quarter million men at bay for twenty-five years. He had close diplomatic ties and financial support from the Vatican because he was defending Christendom from Islamic invaders.
“What’s interesting, and why I mention all this, is that the name Skenderbeg is a local translation of the Ottoman, Iskender Bey or Iskender the Great. We know him as Alexander the Great. This morning I got in touch with an Ottoman history teacher at George Washington University to get some more background on Skenderbeg. It’s accepted conjecture that Skenderbeg was given this title because his military skill matched that of Alexander’s, but there’s another story, one that can’t be verified. It was rumored that he possessed a talisman of some sort that Alexander carried into battle against his greatest foe, Darius, at the Battle of Arbela in 331 B. C., and it was this talisman that allowed both men to defeat armies ten times the size of their own.”
“What sort of talisman?”
“The professor didn’t know, but I assume it’s this alembic the Janissaries mentioned. The professor said the real expert on Skenderbeg is a Turkish historian named Ibriham Ahmad. I tried calling him in Istanbul but just left a message.”
“We have a theory,” Cali said. “Before his final battle against Darius, Alexander invaded Egypt and overthrew the Persian governor. According to history the people welcomed him openly and paved the way for the construction of the city of Alexandria, home to the famous library. During his stay in Egypt he went to the temple of Zeus-Ammon someplace in the Libyan desert. It was there that the oracle revealed to him that he was the son of Ammon, Egypt’s chief deity, and was thus a god himself. A year later he defeated Darius.”
“With you so far,” Ira said.
“What if Alexander received something else when he visited the oracle, like how to procure a great weapon fit for a god? Trade along the North African coast was well established by this time. It’s possible the priests had learned about magic rocks that could incapacitate an army and told Alexander where to find them.”
“What we think,” Mercer said, “is he sent a column to Central Africa, to the site near the Scilla River. There they mined some of the plutonium ore and erected a stele to commemorate their visit.”
“We think Alexander went into battle against Darius using an improvised radiological bomb,” Cali concluded. “We checked and the Battle of Arbela was carefully staged. Both Alexander and Darius knew when and where they were going to meet. It’s possible that in the days leading up to the battle Alexander had radiological dust spread around Darius’s encampment. His people would need little more protection than rags tied around their mouths so they didn’t inhale the plutonium, which is the only way plutonium is fatal by the way, while Darius’s men would suffer radiation poisoning. Nothing lethal but enough to incapacitate them and allow Alexander’s smaller army to wipe them out.”
“Now jump forward seventeen hundred years to Albania,” Mercer added, “and you have a general who holds off a huge army for decades using a talisman that once belonged to Alexander the Great. We think Skenderbeg used his alembic to dose the Ottoman Army with enough radiation to make them too sick to fight.”
“What happened to Skenderbeg?”
“He died in 1468 of natural causes,” Mercer said. “His men held out for another decade but eventually they were overrun.”
“And his alembic?” Ira had a dubious look on his pug face.
Mercer shrugged. “I’m hoping Professor Ahmad in Istanbul can answer that.”
“Admiral Lasko,” Cali said, “I know this all sounds like a bit of a stretch but there’s a line in Chester Bowie’s journal that ties it together somewhat. He left Brazzaville right after the abduction attempt and made his way across Africa to Alexandria. In his journal he wrote that given a couple of days he could have found Alexander’s hidden tomb. He knew there was a connection between Alexander the Great and his work.”
“From there,” Mercer went on, “he caught a steamer to Europe, where he did the one thing the Nazis would never suspect. He knew he was dying and wanted to reach America as fast as possible to tell Einstein what he’d discovered. He sent Einstein a telegram from Athens and Einstein wrote him back telling him to contact Otto Hahn, a nuclear physicist who would eventually win the Nobel Prize for being the first person to split a uranium atom.”