The transporter was 131 feet long by 114 wide. It moved on four double-tracked crawlers, each 10 feet high and 41 feet long. Just one of the track shoes weighed 2,000 pounds. With a maximum speed of one mile per hour, Atlantis cleared the VAB doors and the treads slowly crunched their way toward Launch Complex 39-A, which was 3.4 miles away. Etor turned and walked toward one of the old launch sites, half a mile away from the road, easily outpacing the shuttle on its path.
He climbed down a rusting iron staircase into an old observation bunker, his feet splashing through water that had accumulated on the concrete floor. He leaned on a ledge, peering through a narrow slit at the black silhouette of the moving shuttle. He pulled out a small black box and pressed the on button.
“It is moving,” he reported.
“Do you know the mission profile?” the voice on the other end asked.
“The cover story is deployment of two surveillance satellites. The reality is that the payload consists of the latest generation of Warfighter satellite. They want to put it in orbit and take out the Warfighter you control.”
“That is unacceptable.” There was a short pause. “I have a lock on target. Out here.”
“Out,” Etor acknowledged, putting the communicator back in his pocket.
The transporter was less than a quarter mile from the VAB when a flash of light streaked down from above and hit the top of the external fuel tank. The laser beam ignited the five hundred thousand gallons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen.
The resulting explosion not only obliterated Atlantis, it took out the vehicle assembly building. Windows as far away as ten miles were blown, and the shock wave from the explosion was heard in Orlando, forty miles away.
Etor had ducked down, deep inside the shelter, but even there the passing blast wave sucked the air out of his lungs. He waited a few seconds, then stood and looked out. There was nothing where the shuttle had been.
Professor Mualama took another deep drink from the canteen looped over his shoulder and looked up at the wall of heavy clouds that blocked the sky to the west as he spoke. He was a continent away from South America, but once more deep inside an uninhabited wilderness.
“The Greek historian Herodotus, visiting Egypt in 547 B.C., was told that the source of the Nile was a bottomless lake set among tall, whitecapped mountains astride the equator. He thought the story was outrageous, but… and this is a valuable lesson for you, Nephew… he wrote it down anyway.”
The young man whom Mualama had just addressed was a bit worse for wear. Peter Lago’s khaki shirt was streaked with salt stains. His arms were covered with scratches and his muscles ached from the eight-hour march since leaving the last sign of civilization in Kasese, Uganda. They’d been climbing up a one-track trail since getting off the plane on the unfinished dirt strip in the town, and as far as Lago could tell, they were heading into the clouds. His uncle had set an unrelenting pace, in a rush since having Lago pick him up at the airport in Dar es Salaam the previous evening, hiring a bush pilot to fly them illegally into Uganda, and setting off on the trail.
Lago… a former archaeology student at Dar es Salaam… had worked with his uncle on digs before. East Africa was where many of the oldest fossils attributable to genus Homo had been found. The two had spent several summers working at the established digs in the Olduvai Gorge of Tanzania, where a fossil of Homo habilis had been found that had been dated back two million years. Homo habilis was the true beginning of the lineage of current man, and so few fossils had been found that any discovery was significant.
Lago considered his uncle a very strange man with eclectic interests. Both ancient man and modern history mesmerized his uncle… he was a scientist who believed in knowing one’s facts, yet he also collected every piece of legend and mythology he could find.
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 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.
“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.”