“Help me move this,” he ordered Lago.
Together they put their shoulders to the boulder and edged it away from the cavern wall. Underneath, an oilskin-wrapped package was revealed. Mualama sat down and got his breathing under control before picking up the package. It was much heavier than what he had found underneath the stone in the Devil’s Throat in South America. Carefully he unwrapped the covering. Inside he uncovered a sheaf of several hundred pages, bound by a red ribbon, preserved by the freezing air.
In bold letters that Mualama recognized as Burton’s handwriting, several words in Arabic were written on the cover page. Mualama translated them as he read:
THE PATH OF A TRUTH SEEKER
BY SIR RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON
Mualama peeled off his glove and carefully turned the page. “Ahh!” he exclaimed as he saw the handwritten script on the next page that began the body of the text.
“What is wrong, Uncle?” Lago asked.
“It has never been easy to follow Burton, and even now he makes it hard,” Mualama said as he quickly began thumbing through the manuscript.
“I have never seen writing like that,” Lago commented.
“I have seen this at a dig in Iraq. It is an extinct tongue. It is called Akkadian and was written and spoken in ancient Assyria and Babylon.”
“Why the title in Arabic and the body of the text in another?” Lago asked. “The title is an arrow pointing in the text. It is Burton’s way.”
“Is there anyone who can read it now?” Lago asked.
“Perhaps,” Mualama said as he stopped on a page where there was a drawing. He held up the piece of paper. “Ah! This is even better for right now. This is the piece I needed.”
“What is it?”
“Burton must have copied this from another source.” Mualama carefully put the page back in the manuscript. “It fits in with two other drawings I found following his trail and tells me where we go next.”
Lago sat on the floor of the cavern, exhaustion etched on his face. “And that is?”
“Home to Tanzania. To Ngorongoro Crater.”
“And what is there?”
“We will know when we find it.” Mualama stood and slapped his nephew on the shoulder. “Come on, young man. You can’t be more tired than I am, and this is exciting! We are on the trail of a great mystery!”
“Forty-nine hours.” Kincaid spun his laptop around so they could all see the screen, although no one other than he could make out what the numbers and lines displayed meant. “Lexina didn’t pull that number out of the air. This is the drifting orbit of the talon and Warfighter… ” Kincaid touched the left side of the screen. His finger moved to the right side. “This is the orbit of Stratzyda. The two will come within two kilometers of each other in forty hours here, over the Atlantic. I assume she’ll use the talon to then take control of Stratzyda and change its orbit to coincide with the talon’s. Then it will take the talon and its new satellite another nine hours to drift east on the talon’s orbit, as the earth turns beneath it, to be in position over the center of the United States to deploy the nukes.”
“Can’t your government bring Stratzyda down before the talon gets control of it? Or change its orbit?” Turcotte asked Yakov.
“It is now out of maneuvering fuel. It has been just drifting up there for the past five years. We have no control over it anymore,” Yakov said. “It was never designed to be able to reenter the atmosphere… the bombs, even unexploded, are simply too radioactive.
“You have to understand that things have changed in my country in the past ten years. There is no money, no working system. Only a quarter of our ground-based missile system is functional… the rest is falling into disrepair. For over two-thirds of every twenty-four-hour cycle, we have no satellite coverage of the United States and are essentially blind, as our surveillance satellites have degraded.”
“Can we destroy Stratzyda before it gets close to the talon?” Turcotte asked Kincaid.
“We’re a little slim on orbital vehicles right now,” Kincaid said. “Lexina made sure of that. I’ll check into it, but I wouldn’t count on it. Also, we’d have to go through other agencies, most likely the Air Force, to get help and…”
Duncan supplied the answer. “And there’s a good chance any plan might be compromised, as the Atlantis launch obviously was.” She shook her head. “Forty-nine hours until we die.”
“Actually,” Quinn said, “forty-eight hours and twenty minutes now.”
“Is there a way to find Lexina? To stop her control of the talon?”
“It is possible there is a device that might control the talon,” Yakov said. “Where?” Turcotte asked.
“Section Four recovered an alien artifact that they believed might be some sort of remote piloting device.”
“Wouldn’t any archives have been destroyed when the base was destroyed?” Duncan asked.
“The archive area was far underground. It might have survived intact.”
Duncan nodded. “All right. You go to Russia and see if you can get control of the talon from Lexina. Any other ideas on what the key is or where it might be if Yakov doesn’t succeed?”
“Obviously, the key would be an Airlia artifact,” Major Quinn said. “I’ll inquire throughout the intelligence community to see if anyone has found anything new regarding the Airlia or if someone has been holding artifacts in secret.”
“I’ll double-check the hard drives we recovered from Scorpion Base,” Kincaid said.
“Anyone else?”
“Maybe the guardian on Easter Island might have some information,” Quinn added.
Duncan nodded. “I’ve already thought of that. If the guardian is using Kelly Reynolds to send out information, maybe we can make a connection the other way. I’m going to Easter Island to see if I can contact Kelly. The Navy has a new plan to penetrate the shield around the island and find out what is going on. If they can get through, maybe I can make contact with her.”
The look on Turcotte’s face indicated what he thought of that plan of action. “The Navy already tried that once, and the Springfield is still sitting at the bottom of the ocean, trapped by foo fighters.”
“I think Easter Island is important,” Duncan said. “It’s the center for Aspasia’s faction here on the planet, just as Qian-Ling seems to the center for Artad’s faction. We can’t get close to Qian-Ling again due to the Chinese nuking it, but we can get close to Easter Island. As Yakov noted, maybe the enemy of our enemy can give us some information.
“Status of the Airlia base on Mars?” Duncan had already moved on to Kincaid.
“We’re watching it,” Kincaid said. “No visible activity. Communications between the Cydonia guardian and the one under Easter Island have continued on a pretty regular basis. The NSA still hasn’t been able to decipher the code.”
“Mike?” Duncan had made it around the table.
Turcotte shrugged. “I’m just the hired gun. Sitting around waiting for the next crisis. There’s nothing new with me.”
“Your Special Forces team just arrived.” Major Quinn was looking at the screen of his laptop, which was connected to the Cube operations center. “I’ll check them out,” Turcotte said.
Yakov stirred. “Until the next crisis arises, I would like Captain Turcotte to accompany me to Russia. I could use some… how do you say… backup? I do not think I will get much support from my government, given all that has happened.”