“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 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 put it there over a 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.”
“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 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 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.”
CHAPTER 5
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 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… codenamed Nightscape, had kidnapped subjects to be sent to the sister biotech facility outside of Dulce, New Mexico.