‘About time.’
Ethan jogged down to the waters’ edge and strolled into the cooling water as he saw a familiar face leaning on a bamboo railing on one of the elevated homes. Nicola Lopez’s smile was bright, her legs long and tanned and her thick black hair flowing over her bare shoulders like glistening oil.
‘I don’t see you out running every morning,’ Ethan pointed out as he waded across to Lopez’s home, situated alongside his own.
‘I’ve got youth on my side.’
Ethan hauled himself up a ladder and onto the balcony where Lopez handed him a glass of chilled water. ‘Anything?’ she asked, as she did every morning.
‘Nothing,’ Ethan replied. ‘No new boats, no encampments, nothing.’
‘Excellent. In that case I shall brace myself for another day filled with nothing but sunbathing and idle strolls along the beach.’
‘You take it easy now.’
‘I’ll cope.’
Ethan followed her off the balcony and back down into the water as they made their way to the nearby beach where a small number of industrious islanders were already unloading the morning’s first catch onto sheets made from palm fronds. They greeted the two Americans with cheery waves and smiles, having long since grown accustomed to their presence on this speck of an island. Ethan had offered his services to the islanders when they had first arrived, helping to repair machinery and tools, while Lopez had taught the younger children to read and write in English and Spanish in return for food and somewhere to live. Their efforts to integrate as seamlessly as possible into this remote little village had gone down well with the elders and they were now accepted as a part of the community.
‘Which section of beach will be enduring your backside this fine morning?’ Lopez asked as she selected a pristine area and tested it for crabs hiding beneath the sand, before lying down and stretching out like a cat basking in the heat of the sun.
‘You don’t ever worry about when they’ll come back?’ he asked as he sat down alongside her.
‘Nope.’
‘It’s gonna happen one day.’
‘Ethan, don’t spoil my ambience.’
‘Just sayin’.’
‘And I’m just ignorin’. I’m not going anywhere even if Doug Jarvis comes walking up out of the water right there in the damned bay.’
Ethan lay back on the sand and put his hands behind his head. ‘I just don’t think you should keep ignoring what’s happening in the world. We still have a job to do and it’s not finished yet.’
Lopez, her eyes closed, did not look in his direction as she replied.
‘Be quiet, I’ve got a whole lot of gratuitously unnecessary sleeping to do. I think I’m safe in saying that there’s absolutely no danger of Jarvis or anybody else showing up today.’
Ethan shrugged and then heard a riotous flapping of wings as a flock of birds suddenly took flight from the forest to their right. Ethan looked up at them as a deep throbbing noise reverberated through his chest and then from behind the treeline a huge aircraft burst into view. Its long, straight wings were painted a brilliant white that flashed in the sunlight as it thundered over the bay, twin piston radial–engines mounted above the wings and clattering noisily. Ethan recognized the aircraft type straight away, a vintage PBY Catalina seaplane whose pilot was well known to both Ethan and Lopez.
‘You were saying?’ Ethan said as the big seaplane turned away from the beach and began circling out in preparation for a landing.
‘Tell me I didn’t hear all that,’ Lopez uttered without opening her eyes.
Ethan stood up and watched as the big Catalina turned through a full circle, deploying her flaps and outriggers before descending and touching down on the surface of the ocean a hundred fifty yards off the beach.
The aircraft slowed and turned for one of the larger empty jetties around the bay as Ethan reluctantly walked toward it. The Catalina’s big engines sounded deafeningly loud to Ethan after months of hearing nothing harsher than the occasional screech of jungle birds. Even the last serious storm they’d experienced had passed by a hundred miles to the east, the thunder and lightning mere distant rumbles across the endless ocean.
Ethan caught a pair of mooring lines tossed from the cockpit and tied them loosely to the jetty as the pilot mercifully cut the fuel to the engines and the infernal din clattered into silence. The odors of metal and grease and aviation fuel seemed harsh to Ethan, grim reminders of the life that he had left behind, and he could hear the metallic engines tinkling as they cooled and contracted.
‘Warner! Damn me if there’s nowhere you can’t hide!’
Arnie Hackett hauled himself from a top hatch above the Catalina’s heavily glazed cockpit to slide down the fuselage and onto the jetty. Ethan shook his hand as a bleary–eyed Lopez joined them and looked the pilot up and down.
‘Arnie, lookin’ good.’
‘Not nearly as good as you, Nicola,’ Arnie replied as he hugged her.
‘I’ll give you a million bucks to get out of here and tell nobody that you found us,’ she said as she released him.
Arnie offered her an apologetic look as he gestured back toward the Catalina and they saw an old man climb out of the main hatch and step onto the jetty. Spritely for his age, Ethan felt that he saw a weariness in Doug Jarvis’s expression as he walked up to them with his hands in his pockets and a smile on his face, his white hair bright in the morning sunlight.
‘Ethan, Nicola, you’re looking well.’
‘I take it that something interesting must have occurred for you to have travelled all the way out here.’ Lopez uttered, not attempting to hide her disdain for the unwelcome interruption.
‘You could say that,’ Jarvis replied and then looked about him at the nearby fishermen and women working on their nets. ‘Is there someplace we can go?’
‘Someplace secure?’ Lopez snorted. ‘We’re a billion miles from anywhere, what do you think’s going to happen? Have the CIA learned to teach birds of paradise to eavesdrop?’
‘You’d be surprised,’ Jarvis replied. ‘They once trained ravens to deliver listening devices hidden in broken pieces of roof tile to ledges outside embassies, and surgically inserted similar mechanical bugs into a cat that lived in the Kremlin.’
Lopez didn’t respond as Ethan gestured to the beach stretching around the bay, far from the prying eyes of ravens and rogue cats. They walked in silence until they were well beyond earshot of the villagers before Jarvis spoke once more, the gentle whisper of the rollers an effective foil to any listening device that might conceivably have been placed in the area.
‘There’s been a breakthrough in the search and we want you both to go check it out.’
Ethan felt his shoulders sag at the prospect of returning to civilization once again and confronting the dark forces that he knew were still searching for their lost billions.
‘Can’t Garrett hire somebody else for this?’ Lopez asked. ‘I mean, I know he’s down to his last few trillion dollars and all but there must be other people willing to chase this down for you.’
‘Not people whom we can trust,’ Jarvis countered. ‘We’ve put Lucy Morgan on this and she was in India the last time we spoke but she’s been off the radar ever since.’
Ethan’s eyes narrowed. ‘She’s missing?’
Jarvis shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, but you know how she likes to go off on her own.’
Ethan nodded. Doctor Lucy Morgan’s disappearance eight years before in the wilds of Israel’s Negev Desert had been the first time that Ethan had been contracted by Jarvis to work for the DIA and the first time he had met Lopez. In those few years they had conducted no less than eleven investigations for the secretive ARIES unit before it had been closed down by Homeland Security just months previously.
‘Did she find anything?’ Lopez asked, her natural curiosity peaked.
Jarvis perched himself on a rock as he replied.
‘As part of her investigations conducted af
ter you and your team were pulled out of Egypt, Lucy was pursuing something that she had noticed about the artefact we recovered from the Black Knight satellite.’
Ethan recalled the extraordinary device that they had recovered from Antarctica a couple of years previously, located inside the remains of a satellite that had been orbiting the earth for some thirteen thousand years. Dubbed the Black Knight, the satellite had been a staple of conspiracy theories since it had first been detected by Nikola Tesla over a century before and later classified by air forces around the globe.
‘Lucy had noticed that the projection we witnessed from the artefact contained an icon that she recognized from other archaeological studies conducted around the world, and she began a search starting with the oldest examples of that icon that she could find.’
Ethan frowned. ‘What does this icon look like?’
Jarvis pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Ethan. Printed upon the page was a series of three concentric circles, with the whole being bisected by a vertical and horizontal line in the manner of an inverted Crucifix, the vertical element poking from the top of the rings.
Lopez glanced at Jarvis. ‘Lucy was looking for ancient carvings of a rifle scope’s sights?’
Jarvis didn’t reply, instead looking at Ethan.
‘What you’re looking at there is one of the world’s oldest surviving icons from the ruins of an ancient city in India, which is where Lucy was last headed when I spoke with her. She wasn’t aware of the precise location of the city but had obtained a guide to lead her there.’
‘And this icon, what does it represent?’ Lopez asked.
‘It is believed to be associated with a city that we now refer to as Atlantis.’
‘Atlantis,’ Lopez echoed, ‘as in Plato’s lost city, and not the one at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas.’
‘The same,’ Jarvis confirmed. ‘This could be the break we’ve been looking for, the final piece in the puzzle. This is what connects almost every other investigation you did under my command at ARIES with what Majestic Twelve spent so long searching for: the actual connection between mankind and the strange visitors recorded in the myths and legends of virtually every ancient civilization that ever lived. This is our end game, the discovery of this city and perhaps the answers mankind has been seeking for our entire existence.’
***
VI
The interior of the beach house was cooler than the heat of the sun outside already beating down from a flawless blue sky. Ethan revelled in the shadows of the stilted hut, the water below cooling the interior and the sea breeze maintaining a constant and cooling flow of air.
Jarvis had set up a small satellite dish connected to a display screen now standing on a table in Ethan’s hut as a connection was established with Joseph Hellerman, a former DIA scientist and technology expert who had lost his job after ARIES had been shut down and was now employed by Rhys Garrett, their billionaire benefactor. The bearded youth’s visage flickered into view on the screen as Jarvis stood back and Hellerman waved.
‘Hi guys, hope you’ve been enjoying your vacation.’
Lopez smiled brightly back at him. ‘Wish you were here Jo, what have you got for us?’
Hellerman’s face was alive with excitement. ‘Have you seen the icon yet?’
‘Yeah, Doug showed us. What’s the big deal?’
‘This,’ Hellerman replied, ‘is the big deal.’
The screen changed to show an image of what looked like a large stone pillar that had clearly been shaped by human hands, standing in the middle of what looked like a jungle somewhere. Somebody had placed a metal rule alongside the structure to reveal its height as being around three feet. At the top of the rock Ethan could see a carving that matched the printed image Jarvis had handed to him on the beach, while below the carving was a series of what looked like ancient texts inscribed into the rock.
‘It’s a rock,’ Lopez said flatly. ‘With a picture on it.’
Hellerman’s enthusiasm was not dulled by her dismissal of the evidence.
‘It’s not just the imagery that matches what we’re after,’ he said. ‘It’s the text.’
‘Does it say “turn right for Atlantis”?’
‘It’s Hindu,’ Hellerman explained, ‘and it speaks of the legends of Lanka, a city described in the Hindu texts of the Ramayana. The saga is the story upon which Homer’s Iliad is based, and concerns the story of many wars over a great capital city that eventually sank into the ocean. The story that we would all recognize now is that of Troy.’
‘You’re saying that Homer’s work was plagiarised from earlier Hindu works?’ Ethan asked in surprise.
‘Not plagiarised,’ Jarvis corrected him, ‘but referenced as a myth, and that this same story is the basis and reference for virtually every cultural and religious story ever written since.’
‘But that stone might not be old enough to qualify as a precursor to every other source of legend,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘And I thought that it was Atlantis that was destroyed by the ocean and that Troy was conquered by the Greeks?’
Now, Hellerman’s true excitement began to shine through.
‘Doctor Morgan tested the soils in which she found the stone, the sedimentary layers in which it was buried. The tests came back three days ago and confirmed that this artefact was located within sedimentary layers dated at some twelve thousand years old.’
Now Ethan started to take notice. Throughout their investigations, he and Lopez had repeatedly found compelling evidence that the officially recognized dawn of civilization as being some four to five thousand years ago was likely an error and that complex civilizations far older than those in the Fertile Crescent may have flourished millennia before.
Hellerman gestured to a photograph of the stele beside him as he talked.
‘Homer’s Troy was conquered by the Greeks but later fell into disrepair and was claimed by the ocean. Plato’s Atlantis was supposedly consumed by waves commanded by an angry Zeus, whose wrath had been driven by the societal collapse of morals in mankind’s civilization and the fraternizing of lesser gods with mortal women.’
‘Sounds familiar,’ Ethan said.
‘Even the gods can’t resist a good woman,’ Lopez pointed out.
‘It sounds familiar because it is,’ Hellerman said. ‘The vast majority of ancient origin stories contain a narrative involving the growth of a great civilization which then becomes too powerful for its own good and a threat to the gods, who summarily destroy that civilization with a natural disaster of one kind or another. The big issue for modern society in the west is that we tend to assume that the biblical narrative is the oldest and first instance of such legends, but in fact the opposite is true. When the Hebrews wrote their Torah, the Old Testament, they simply copied the legends of far older civlizations and adapted them for their own purposes.’
Jarvis picked up the threads of Hellerman’s story.
‘The Pentateuct, or “Five Scrolls”, are the first five books of the Bible as supposedly recorded by Moses and relate the story of Genesis and the familiar legends. However even there Moses points out that he is recounting legends from a time of much greater antiquity that would have been preserved in songs and oral tales, as there was no writing at the time until the rise of Sumerian civilizations many thousands of years later.’
‘Although there is no historical evidence that a man named Moses ever lived,’ Hellerman added, ‘it is clear that somebody wrote the words down and were referring to older legends which we can easily identify as coming from the far east.’
‘That’ll go down well in the Bible Belt,’ Lopez murmured. ‘What did Lucy dig up about these older versions of the legend?’
‘The stories are well known to researchers,’ Hellerman explained, ‘but rarely revealed in education because of the influence of churches across the world, who actively campaign to keep these kinds of revelations for fear of their power being further eroded by the spread of secularism. Most
religious educators in the west teach children to believe only in the bible and that all other histories, regardless of evidence, should be considered heresy and false testimony. The truth of course is that the bible is merely a copy of so many older texts, and the flood myth of Genesis is one of the most striking examples of that. The Greeks copied their legends of Atlas and Atlantis from the Hindu stories of Atalas, the sunken paradise of the Hindus. As in the Greek traditions, Atalas – whose name is Sanskrit and means “Pillar” – was deemed to be the “Pillar of the World”, just as was Atlas in Greece.’
‘The Mahabharata, the other great Hindu classical saga that completes the Ramayana,’ Jarvis said, ‘tells of the mighty empire of Krishna and its destruction in the great war between the Lunars and the Solars. Hastinapura, the capital of the Pandu empire, was the “City of the Pillars”. The Mahabharata also tells of Dvaraka, the capital of Krishna, located in an island in the middle of the seas. Krishna’s capital, Dvaraka, sunk underseas when the divine hero died in the great war, more or less in the way Atlantis went under, according to Plato.’
‘And Krishna,’ Hellerman added with a knowing smile, ‘was born of a virgin on December 25th when a great king slew all new born sons in the region. Krishna grew to become a great leader and prophet, was captured and killed before rising from the dead three days later. That legend was recorded thousands of years before Christianity was conceived.’
‘I’ll cancel my church subscription,’ Ethan said. ‘Any more?’
‘Dravidian traditions speak of a vast sunken continent towards the south–east of India called Rutas. The Dravidas claim to have moved to India from that continent when it sank underseas in a great cataclysm. The Phoenicians claimed, like the Dravidas, to have come from an “Island of Fire” located beyond the Indian Ocean. Even the Egyptians spoke of the mysterious Hanebut, a people who lived beyond the Indian Ocean in the region of Amenti. The name of the Hanebut means “People of the Haze” or “People of the Pillar”. This enigmatic people was said to live under a dark haze which the light of the sun never penetrated. The Egyptians affirmed that the region of the Hanebut was real and could indeed be visited, as they often did. Most ancient nations spoke of a similar region in the overseas covered by a dark haze or mist that can only be described today as volcanic smoke.’
The Atlantis Codex (Warner & Lopez Book 7) Page 4
