by Iain King
Myles tried to let the monuments change his mind, but they couldn’t. Everything about the greatest empire the world had ever known was shaded by one single truth: that it was brought down.
Rome declined and fell: everybody knew that. But that most famous fact hid an enigma. Perhaps the city’s greatest puzzle – the riddle of Rome.
How was the world’s greatest superpower - the most sophisticated civilisation of its age, an empire for more than a thousand years – defeated by a bunch of homeless barbarians?
Rome’s wonders would always be overshadowed by the mystery of how they were lost.
Helen grabbed his arm. ‘Shall we see the Pantheon?’ she suggested. She was still trying to lift his mood, and he could tell. ‘You ought to teach this stuff to your students, Myles…’
Myles shrugged. She was right: Rome was an empire built on war and conquest. Perfect material for a military historian. He should teach it.
But he knew he couldn’t. And the reason why was something he could never explain to Helen.
They passed a fast-food outlet, an ice-cream seller and a man hawking plastic sunglasses for five euros a pair. School groups trampled over the ancient squares. Great artefacts were being smothered by chewing gum. Will our civilisation end this way?
They crossed a piazza towards the Pantheon. Myles looked up at the sandstone columns guarding the entrance, then hauled open the over-sized wooden doors to go inside. Helen followed close behind.
Their eyes adjusted to the gloom. The only light came from the single window in the centre of the ceiling. They moved towards the middle of the patterned marble floor, directly below the window. Then their gaze slowly fell down to the alcoves and statues around the side of the circular building. Constructed in 126AD, Rome’s heyday, this was a church built for the worship of all the gods - long before Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and tried to bring the whole Roman Empire with him.
Bang
Myles crouched down, hunching his head into his shoulders. He scanned around.
He couldn’t tell, but no-one else had reacted. A few people even looked at him as if he was odd – which he knew he was.
Helen saw it first. She motioned with her eyes: the huge doors to the Pantheon had been slammed shut, and the domed ceiling amplified the sound.
Myles calmed himself.
Helen put her hand on his face, and asked ‘Are you OK?’
He was. It was just instinctive. His body had adapted to behave that way in Helmand. It would take time to unlearn.
The army thought it had cracked Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In a change since Vietnam and the Second World War, troops were now flown from the frontline in groups. They were given time in an isolated place where they could drink away their memories – together, with people who had experienced similar things. By the time they returned home they had already half-forgotten their wars.
Not Myles. He had been a lone civilian advisor. His experiences had been unique, and nobody but Helen had any idea what he had been through. When he saw a street, his first thought was still to wonder where someone would place a machine-gun to control movement. When he saw a patch of grass, he feared an improvised explosive device – a deadly IED - could be buried underneath.
The symptoms would be obvious in anybody else, and therefore treatable. But for Myles, an unorthodox specialist in war and a misfit by any standard, it was hard to say what behaviour was normal.
Afghanistan hadn’t made him violent. Myles would never be that. Nor had his experiences made him hateful, which was a common expression of combat trauma. But Afghanistan had turned his imagination against him. He used to dream up solutions. Now he dreamed up enemies.
‘Myles, you need to get back to the hotel,’ said Helen.
Helen was right.
They turned around. Away from the spectacles of the long-gone empire, into the commercialised narrow streets and the crowds.
They passed a homeless man in one of the alleyways. He looked tired and hungry. Myles could tell the young man didn’t have much - unshaven and with ruffled hair, he’d probably been sleeping rough for weeks. So Myles found some change and threw it towards him. The man thanked him with a nod.
Outside a Hard Rock Café they saw men and women in business suits. They were standing about and chatting nervously, like they didn’t belong there. Obviously foreign. Myles picked up their accents: American.
Some of them recognised Helen, but none of them reacted. Myles guessed they were used to dealing with famous people.
Then he realised: these people worked in the American Embassy, which was opposite. He could faintly hear a fire alarm, which explained why they were all outside.
Just routine - it was only a drill.
Myles smiled at them. Some of them smiled back, others just ignored him. None of them were worried.
Then he looked up to see a very large cardboard box suspended from a rope. A man in dark glasses was manoeuvring it near a second-floor window.
The man lifted his glasses.
Myles caught his eye and saw a sinister look. He grabbed Helen’s arm and pointed. ‘A bomb,’ he whispered. ‘It’s got to be a bomb…’
Helen tried to work out how Myles could know the dangling box contained explosives. But Myles was already amongst the crowd. ‘Move away – quickly,’ he warned. ‘It’s a bomb.’
The Embassy workers took time to react.
‘Quick. It’s a bomb,’ Myles insisted. He was flapping them away with his long arms. A few started to move slowly, until two or three started to run. Then everybody began to run with them. ‘Helen – run away!’ Myles could see this was the perfect terrorist trap: set off the Embassy fire alarm then blow up all the staff as they muster outside.
‘But Myles…’ queried Helen.
‘Quick!’
Senior executives, mid-level diplomats and all their support staff: everyone hurried away. Helen reluctantly moved back with them.
They started to gather at the far end of the street. From there they could see what would happen - but not a safe distance if the Englishman’s warning was right. They all watched: half-curious, half-alarmed.
Myles had become alone in the street. He looked up at the window. The man holding the cardboard box was looking nervous now.
Suddenly he left the box to swing on the rope and darted into the building.
Myles rushed over to the apartment block where the box was hanging. Damn the consequences.
This was one terrorist he was determined to catch…
Stolz’s Papers
The papers which follow were made public on the internet, on the instructions of Ludochovic.
* * *
Handwritten annotations are from Zenyalena Androvsky, and initialled ‘ZA’.
* * *
SECRET
Mechanism for Predicting the Future – History
5 July 1940
The methods we have found most effective came from ancient Babylon and Egypt, where they were pioneered along with other branches of science still in use today. They were developed by the ancient Greek philosophers, who suspected the universe was more connected than people realised. Aristotle made assumptions then tested them, keeping those which held true and discarding the rest. It took many hundreds of years for the true connections to be distilled in this way.
The Christian Church tried to co-opt this growing body of belief – the three wise men who followed a star were accepted into the Gospels, and festivals like Christmas and Easter were set according to the sun and moon. But by medieval times, as this science became more accurate, it threatened the official Church, and so was outlawed. In England, the 1542 Witchcraft Act banned all studies which linked human affairs with the position of the planets. This legislation was updated several times, and spread throughout Europe and to the USA. The ban forced the knowledge underground for more than three centuries, preventing pioneers - including Sir Isaac Newton - from publishing their discoveries. However, the legis
lation became difficult to enforce when, in 1903 and again in 1914, two different courts in New York State upheld predictions based on the planets as both scientific and very accurate, and a new strategy was needed to hide the link between the planets and human affairs.
It was done through a special sort of ‘bad’ prediction, first published in a US newspaper. When the publishers were tried under the Witchcraft Act (in the 1936 Barbanell v Naylor case), the court ruled newspapers could make public predictions as long as they were written as public entertainment, and people were divided into just twelve groups. It meant horoscopes fell outside the Witchcraft Acts because they were too vague to tell the fortune of any individual. That is how the USA and other western countries came to adopt the least accurate form of astrology, and scientific astrology was hidden.
However, it created an opportunity for the Third Reich. On orders from SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, we followed the method of the ancient Greeks: we looked for a link between the planets and human affairs. When we found one, we tested it. Links which were reliable and repeatable we kept, others we cast aside, until we had refined a large body of knowledge.
One of the first patterns we found concerned Pluto. This planet was named after the God of the Underworld and was discovered in 1930 – a time of power politics and economic turmoil. We soon found patterns about wealth, power and national borders: whenever Pluto moved into a new sign of the zodiac, it brought a new system for administering sovereign states and their money. Each time, the new system was linked to the symbolism of Pluto’s new zodiac. By knowing what had happened for the times Pluto changed zodiac sign up until 1939, we have predicted what will happen in the future:
Date Pluto changed signs
Zodiac sign
Pluto moves into
Event
October 1823 and
February 1824
Aries (traditionally associated with military threats and war)
Monroe Doctrine: US President threatens war with any power which intervenes in the Americas.
December 1852
Taurus (associated with farming)
Napoleon III becomes French Emperor and promotes free trade in agricultural goods.
April 1884
Gemini (associated with communications and measurement of time)
Berlin Conference sets borders in Africa and international conference agrees on time zones.
December 1913
Cancer (associated with homeland, protection and family values)
Federal Reserve established in USA – local banks are protected at a national level.
May-June 1939
Leo (associated with leadership)
Pact of Steel unites economies of Germany and Italy.
January 1957 – April 1958
Virgo (associated with bureaucracy and efficiency)
Bureaucracy and organisation to determine cross-border economy.
ZA: European Union set up.
October 1971
Libra (associated with diplomacy and negotiation)
International economic organisation will be replaced by negotiation.
ZA: Nixon abandons gold standard
August 1984
Scorpio (associated with evolution and renewal)
Economic protection will be abandoned.
ZA: Widespread deregulation
January 1995
Sagittarius (associated with travel, trade and exploration)
The way of trade across the world will be transformed.
ZA: World trade Organisation set up.
November 2008
Capricorn (associated with banking, conservatism and austerity)
Lending will become strict and banking will change.
ZA: Credit crunch.
January 2024 and
November 2024
Aquarius (associated with new technology, and world organisations)
Technology will replace tradition as the basis for trade; crisis for international organisations. ZA: ???
March 2043 and
January 2044
Pisces (associated with religion and confusion)
Technology of world trade will be abandoned in confusion (efforts to save it in Sept 2043) ZA: ???
May 2066 to January 2068:
Aries (associated with military threats and war)
War and power will settle cross-border economy (as with the Monroe doctrine) ZA: ???
ZA: I checked these dates on the NASA ‘Horizons’ website - http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi - it’s all true.
We then looked for patterns between the planets. The ancient Greeks associated Saturn with structures and natural limits. Neptune, discovered in 1846, is about ideals and the aspirations of the masses, but also the sea into which those ideals dissolve. The orbits of Saturn and Neptune mean they come together every thirty-six years, and these times mark major events in how the romantic ideals of Neptune are made real by Saturn. In 1773, they sparked the Boston Tea Party. In 1809 they triggered revolutions throughout South America. April 1846, and Karl Marx set up his first Communist Committee in Brussels. May 1882 was when the Communist Manifesto was translated into Russian, and Marxist political parties appeared in Europe. In 1917, Saturn and Neptune coincided with the communist revolution in Russia.
They will come together again in 1953 when we expect major ‘rebalancing’ in the Soviet world, and three times in 1989 (March, June and November) – the last of these dates, in the second week of November 1989, coincides with other planetary events, making it particularly notable.
ZA: Stalin dies in March 1953 causing big change throughout communist world.
1989 - March: first free elections in Russia.
1989 – June: Tiananmen Square massacre, China.
1989 – November: Berlin wall down.
We soon found all the planetary cycles were linked to different human affairs. The forty-two year cycle between Uranus and Saturn correlated with scientific discoveries and inventions. The longer cycle between Uranus and Neptune was linked to mass communication – and we expect humans to exchange information differently after these two planets come together in the early 1990s. ZA: internet.
Since all these cycles seemed to affect people, we found that, when they were added together, we had a measure for stability in human affairs. Instability led to war and death. We checked three centuries of warfare, and found there were many more wars deaths when outer planets were coming together in the sky rather than separating. We developed an index which predicted war deaths far more accurately than conventional means based on morale, weaponry, and battlefield terrain etc. The correlation we found was a one-in-a-million-trillion possibility (1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000). Even sceptics accepted we had a link. Then we charted the planets to forecast how many people would die in the world’s future conflicts.
SS Capt. Werner Stolz, 5 July 1940
SECRET
War Eclipses
October 20th, 1985
The Office of the President of the United States (POTUS) has asked for advice regarding the Soviet Union. This note suggests where and when POTUS should meet Premier Gorbachev for a deal most likely to end the Cold War on favourable terms.
* * *
We examined eclipses, which have long been associated with wars. Our research also confirmed the truth in astrology beyond reasonable doubt: the possibility of these events happening by chance is less than a one-in-two-trillion (one in two million million).
ZA: I checked this, and it’s true.
* * *
Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great’s victories were famously attributed to eclipses. The solar eclipse of 4th July 335BC, just before Alexander invaded Persia, occurred only 223 miles from Tyre – a city he captured in a defining moment of his campaign. The solar eclipse was centred closer to Tyre than 99.92 % of the places that it could have been.
* * *
The Crusades
In September 1093, Byzantine Emperor Ale
xios asked for help fighting the Muslims. Pope Urban II, in turn, urged all Christians to capture Jerusalem – sparking the Crusades, which lasted two centuries. The solar eclipse of 23rd September 1093 was centred just 164 miles from Jerusalem, closer than 99.96% of places on the earth’s surface that it could have fallen - a one-in-2,300 chance.
* * *
World War One
British and German troops first clashed about two days before the crucial Battle of Mons, which was on 23rd August. Meanwhile, the war’s most significant battle on the Eastern Front was at Tannenberg, which began on 26th August. The solar eclipse at 12.34pm on 21st August 1914 was centred just 281 miles from Tannenberg, closer than 99.87% of the earth’s surface.
* * *
Korean War:
Voting monitored by the United Nations took place on 10th May 1948 - but only in South Korea, leading to the Korean War two years later. The solar eclipse the day before the elections was centred only 277 miles from Seoul, closer than 99.88% of the earth’s surface.
* * *
Recommendation to End the Cold War: a Reykjavik Summit in October 1986
There is an eclipse in the evening of 3rd October 1986 centred just 569 miles from the capital of Iceland. Therefore, we recommend a summit in Reykjavik in October 1986, during which President Reagan can press Premier Gorbachev to eradicate nuclear weapons and end the Cold War.
Stolz, October 20th, 1985
* * *
ZA: NASA has maps of all these eclipses online – follow these links:
Alexander the Great’s battle: http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEsearch/SEsearchmap.php?Ecl=-03350704
* * *
The Crusade eclipse near Jerusalem: http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEsearch/SEsearchmap.php?Ecl=10930923
