It is death to approach them, the old man had said. Now the king understood what he had meant by that.
The other men stared in disbelief at their fallen comrade. Then, almost in unison, they raised their weapons and charged the creature.
“No!”
The king’s warning fell on deaf ears. The men closed to within a few paces of the creature and attacked. As the first blow was struck, the world vanished in a flash of light, and he saw no more.
TREMOR
ONE
“This is not what I expected.”
George Pierce glanced over his shoulder at the young woman seated in the rear of the rented SUV. Fiona Sigler stared out the window at the landscape passing them by, a featureless grassy steppe stretching out to the horizon. “What were you expecting?”
Fiona turned to meet his gaze and shrugged. “Well, you know… Russia. I thought it would be more…” Another shrug. “Russian.”
“You do realize,” Pierce said, “that Russia is the largest country on Earth, geographically speaking, with many diverse ecoregions? It’s not all Doctor Zhivago and frozen tundra. I hope they taught you that at that expensive private academy your father sent you to.”
“Yes, Uncle George,” Fiona said, with more than a little exasperation. “I just didn’t expect it to look so much like Kansas.”
Pierce smiled. Fiona was not wrong. He knew on an intellectual level that Russia — all six-and-a-half-million square miles of it, fully one-eighth of the Earth’s habitable land — was comprised of a variety of climates and topographical zones. But the world outside the windows of their rented SUV bore little resemblance to his preconceived notion of what they would encounter during their excursion to Chelyabinsk Oblast. In truth, he had not known what to expect, but not anything so dull.
“Too many hills,” Erik Lazarus murmured from behind the steering wheel. “Kansas is a lot flatter than this.”
Fiona’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Is that even possible?”
“Aside from the fact that the road signs are all in Cyrillic,” Lazarus said, “it looks a lot like where I grew up.”
Pierce hid a smile. He sometimes forgot that the brooding Lazarus, a physically imposing man of few words, had grown up in the US Midwest. Iranian by birth, Lazarus had been adopted as an infant by an American couple — Derek and Ruth Somers — and spent his early years in rural Illinois, though it was his subsequent life experience as a Special Forces operator that seemed to define him.
Lazarus was right about the terrain, though calling the gentle undulations ‘hills’ was a bit of a stretch. Still, as a trained archaeologist, Pierce knew that even minor variations in the landscape could hide discoveries of monumental importance — especially here.
The archaeological significance of this particular parcel of Russian real estate had only been recently established. In 1987, Soviet surveyors preparing to flood the area to create a reservoir, to support the local iron mining industry, had discovered ruins thought to be associated with the Sintashta culture. The Bronze Age proto-Indian people had occupied the steppe to the east of the Ural Mountains, possibly as early as 2000 BCE. The site, named Arkaim — the word translated imprecisely to ‘arch’—had been called Russia’s Stonehenge, owing to its circular layout and possible significance as an ancient astronomical observatory. Like Stonehenge, Arkaim had become both a tourist destination, albeit a regional one, and a Mecca for believers in UFOs and other paranormal phenomena.
As an archaeologist specializing in the Classical Era, Pierce had only a passing familiarity with the Sintashta culture. In his new role as the Director of the Cerberus Group — the public face of the very secret Herculean Society, an ancient organization dedicated to preserving and protecting the legacy of the man whose life had inspired the legend of immortal Hercules — Pierce had been compelled to take a closer look at Arkaim.
During the course of a highly classified mission just a few months earlier, an American military special operations unit had discovered the remains of a megalithic city — predating even four thousand-year-old Arkaim — in the Ural Mountains, just a few hundred miles to the north. Contained within that nearly pristine site, was evidence of a prehistoric race of giants known as ‘the Originators.’ Their advanced — and possibly alien — technology had influenced the rise of human civilization, and in the wrong hands, it could just as easily end it.
The architectural similarity and close proximity of Arkaim suggested that it might also hide Originator artifacts, and that possibility obligated Pierce to take pre-emptive action. If there were Originator artifacts at Arkaim, or even clues hinting at the existence of that ancient and possibly otherworldly race, it was imperative that they not fall into the wrong hands. When technology with the potential to enslave or exterminate the human race was concerned, pretty much any hands were the wrong hands. It was the mission of the Cerberus Group to keep those things secret.
In his youth, Pierce had dreamed of being Indiana Jones, a dream that had directly fueled his interest in archaeology. But in his role as Director of the Cerberus Group, he was more like the workman from the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, hiding the prize away in a secret warehouse at Area 51, never to be seen again. He hated it, but he also knew that there was a very good reason for it. The upside was that sometimes, like today, he got to be Indiana Jones before he turned into Area 51 guy.
“The turn-off is coming up,” a disembodied female voice said. “Five hundred yards.”
“I see it,” Lazarus said, easing off the gas pedal. “Thanks, Cintia.”
Pierce glanced down at his satellite-enabled smartphone, which rested in a bracket mounted to the dashboard of the vehicle. The screen displayed a real-time GPS map, with their route and destination outlined in blue. But the voice that had issued from the speaker did not belong to an automated system, at least, not in the literal sense. Cintia Dourado was the Director of Technology for the Cerberus Group. She was probably more comfortable interacting with computer networks than she was with actual living humans. However, under her outlandish appearance of dyed hair, tattoos, and facial piercings, along with fashion choices that could only be described as eclectic, the Brazilian-born computer expert was still very human.
Partly because her job required her to stay close to the computer, but also because she was moderately agoraphobic, Cintia preferred to work from Cerberus Headquarters, beneath Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. That was by no means a limitation, though. If the worldwide computer and satellite network was like an orchestra, then Cintia was the conductor, and together they made beautiful music.
“No problem,” Cintia replied. “I’m going to get the babelfish online, but if you get lost, you know where to find me.”
Lazarus turned the vehicle onto a rutted but serviceable dirt road and continued forward at a slower pace.
“And this is where we leave Kansas behind and head over the rainbow to Oz,” remarked the woman sitting beside Fiona in the back seat. Augustina Gallo was not only a professor of Classical History at the University of Athens — on an indefinite sabbatical to work with the Cerberus Group — but she was also Pierce’s girlfriend. Despite her name and her obvious Mediterranean ethnic heritage, Gallo was as American as a Georgia peach.
“Flying monkeys, I can deal with” Pierce said. “Russian bureaucrats, on the other hand, may prove a little more daunting.”