Thermal infrared imagers pointed at the talon along with low-light-level cameras, recording what they saw and passing it to stations on Earth. Over sixty feet long and fifteen wide, the Warfighter was larger than the Hubble space telescope. It weighed twenty-three tons, a third of that weight fuel for the maneuvering thrusters designed to place it over any spot on the globe within two hours of notification from the ground.
It boasted the full complement of imaging hardware that the latest U.S. spy satellite, the KH-14, contained, but the primary mission of the Warfighter wasn’t to spy but to destroy. The imagers were for pinpointing targets; due to both its size and proximity, the talon was easily acquired as Warfighter closed to within sixty miles. The last one-third of Warfighter’s weight was a small nuclear reactor hooked to a powerful high-frequency overtone laser.
Launched covertly from Vandenberg Air Force Base two years previously, Warfighter IV was the culmination of decades of classified work funded under the Star Wars program. Designed to destroy enemy satellites in space and missiles in flight in the atmosphere with the laser, its presence in orbit’ broke every treaty the United States had ever signed regarding the militarization of space. The nuclear reactor also violated every space launch doctrine ever established. The imagers had a solid target lock on the talon, and the reactor began powering up the laser as Warfighter closed to within forty miles. As the power level passed through fifty percent, a golden glow suffused the tip of the talon. A thin line of power leapt at the speed of light from the talon to Warfighter, enveloping it in a stasis field. All contact the satellite had with its human controllers on the planet below was severed in the blink of an eye. The power buildup held at fifty percent. Slowly the talon used the field to draw Warfighter to it until the two were in orbit less than fifty meters apart.
They moved in tandem that way for fifteen minutes. As the Earth rotated below and the two drifted, their relative position to the planet changed. Soon they were over the western United States. The golden beam slowly rotated Warfighter until it was once more oriented toward the planet below. The imagers locked on a target on the Earth’s surface.
The nuclear power buildup was released, and power surged to the laser. With a bright flash, a bolt of high energy arced toward Earth.
Area 51, Nevada
Area 51, located approximately ninety miles northwest of Las Vegas, on the edge of a dry lake bed nestled between mountains, consisted of three major parts. The most visible was the seven-mile-long concrete runway that extended across the dry Groom Lake flats. It was the longest runway in the world, used to launch and land the most sophisticated aircraft American designers could make.
The next most noticeable feature from above was the physical plant on the surface, consisting of hangars, support buildings, and tower for the runway. The third—and invisible from above—part was the two hangars built into the side of Groom Mountain and the underground facilities that had housed the agency that had controlled Area 51 and the alien craft headquartered there—Majestic-12—for over five decades.
The normal operations at Area 51 came to an abrupt halt as a flash of light seared down from above, hitting one of the hangars. It was through the roof in a flash.
The initial blast was followed by a string of secondary explosions, and in less than ten seconds there was no longer a hangar and it would take days to recover the pieces of bodies from those who had been inside.
CHAPTER 3
Mato Grosso, Brazil
It was after three days of difficult journeying that the falls finally came into view. They had been audible for hours during the approach. There was no mistaking the sound of over two million gallons of water tumbling over the edge of the Parana Plateau of South America, cascading down 270 feet onto the rocks below—a natural thunder that abated only once every forty years during a dry season in the middle of a drought upriver.
The vision matched the awesome sound. It was as if an ocean met an abyss, as the Iquaca River in southern Brazil tumbled over a wall of 275 individual falls, stretching two and a half miles wide, most separated only by a few craggy rocks with some trees struggling to grow in the watery mist.
Downstream, on the west bank of the river, the small party stood in silent awe for minutes, simply watching the power of nature. Finally, one of the figures, the tallest of the group, shifted his gaze from the falls to the narrow gorge beneath them, where the water was carried away.
“Garganta del Diablo!” the native guide, Bauru, yelled in the tall man’s ear, struggling to be heard as he pointed at the gorge. “That is what you seek, Professor.”
“The Devil’s Throat,” the tall black man translated. Professor Niama Mualama was over six feet six inches in height. He was slender but not skinny, with broad shoulders and muscles packed on his frame like whipcord. His face was broad and friendly when he smiled, which was just about all the time. The only indication of his age were the thin tines around his eyes and a touch of lightness in his closely cropped black hair. He was old enough to have a one-year-old granddaughter back home in Nairobi, from his only daughter. His wife had died three years before from cancer, and since the funeral and the mourning period afterward, he had spent all his time pursuing his life’s obsession.
Mualama was an anthropologist affiliated with the University of Dar es Salaam on the east coast of Tanzania. The fact that the university had barely a thousand students and Mualama had been one of only two professors in the anthropology department had done nothing to dint his enthusiasm. He had gone to graduate school in the United States and England and had returned home to help run the department. Recent changes in the government had caused severe cutbacks to what the ruling powers considered unessential programs at the university, and Mualama’s department had been one of the first to fall under the ax two years ago.
No longer able to teach, he had devoted all his time to his studies and research, traveling extensively around the world, searching for answers to a mystery he had stumbled over as a young man. Mualama had spent two decades following clues scattered about the world. The last clue had led him to this location, and recent events regarding the alien presence on Earth had given a particular urgency to his mission.
He turned back to the thundering water. “The first European to see the falls—a Spaniard, Alvar Nunex de Vaca in 1541—called them Salto de Santa Maria, the Falls of Saint Mary.”
Bauru shrugged. He had never heard that. They had always been the Iquaca Falls, from the local tongue, in which Iquaca meant “great water.” Bauru was of Indian-Spanish descent. He was a short, stocky man with dark skin. His most distinguishing feature was his bald head.
His hair had begun falling out several years before, and he’d decided to complete the process on his own. He shaved it every day, even when he was in the wilderness.
“Let’s go.” Mualama shouldered his pack and headed toward the gorge, where the surging water passed between rock cliffs on its journey to the Orinoco River, the third-largest river in South America, and a long journey to the distant Atlantic Ocean.
Bauru led and the two porters he had hired followed, scrambling across rocks, then into the thick jungle as they swung around the most immediate cliffs.
It was an arduous three-hour journey that covered less than a mile before they came back out on the edge of the gorge, the water fifty feet below them. The sound of the falls was only slightly diminished.
“That is what I wanted to see,” Mualama said.
The rock he was pointing at was twenty feet long by fifteen wide, with a perfectly flat top. It sat about eight feet out from the edge of the gorge in the river. Mualama eyed the water. It was fast moving and full of stirred-up silt, making the water reddish brown in color.
Mualama slipped his pack off and pulled out a leather-bound notebook.
“What do you have?” Bauru asked. He thought the African most strange. They had linked up three days before at Santos, on the Atlantic Coast, just south of Sao Paulo. Even though Mualama had told Bau
ru he’d never been in South America before, the dark man had more than carried his load on the journey and seemed undaunted by the thick jungle.
Mualama pulled a piece of paper out of the notebook. “A copy of a telegraph sent almost a century ago.” He gave it to Bauru to read.
I have but one object: to uncover the mysteries that the jungle vastness of South America have concealed for so many centuries, We are encouraged in our hopes of finding the ruins of an ancient, white civilization and the degenerate offspring of a once cultivated race.
“Who sent this?” Bauru handed it back.
“Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fawcett, a British officer and explorer.” Mualama was looking about.
“Did he find what he was looking for?”
“Fawcett, his son Jack, and a cameraman named Raleigh Rimell sent that telegraph on the twentieth of April, 1925, just before setting out on an expedition. They made one radio contact on the twenty-ninth of May, reporting their position, not far from here, then were never heard from or seen again.”
Bauru wasn’t surprised. Many had disappeared into the jungle, particularly in this area of Brazil, the Mato Grosso, a vast, virtually impenetrable land of jungle, escarpments, and tortuous rivers.
“What is this city they were looking for?” Bauru asked. There were many tales about the Mato Grosso. ranging from lost cities to terrible monsters to strange tribes of white-skinned people.
“Fawcett said he believed that people from Atlantis had come here just before the island was destroyed. That they built a mighty city in the jungle that deteriorated over the years. He claims that he found an old Portuguese map in Rio de Janeiro that showed a stone city enclosed by a wall deep in the Mato Grosso.”
“You are searching for this city?”
“No.”
“You are searching for the remains of Fawcett’s party?” Bauru knew that would be an impossible task—the jungle would have consumed the three men and left no trace, especially after seventy-five years.
“No.”
Bauru was a patient man. “Then what are we looking for?”
“What Fawcett was really looking for.” Mualama was scanning the rocky crags below them.
Bauru was intrigued. “Not a lost city?”
“Oh, I think Fawcett believed there was a lost Atlantean city out there somewhere in the jungle, and certainly the events of the past month with the alien Airlia confirm there was an Atlantis,” Mualama said. “But on that particular expedition, he was searching for something else.” Mualama pointed below. “We must go down there.”
Bauru eyed the route down with trepidation. He pulled his pack off and extracted a 120-foot nylon climbing rope. He tied one end around the thick trunk of a tree, then tossed the free end over the edge. Mualama already had a harness around his waist and a snaplink attached to the front. The African popped the rope through the gate, wrapped a loop around the metal, then prepared to back over the edge of the gorge, his left hand on the fixed end coiling from his waist to the tree.
“How will we get back up?” Bauru asked.
“I will fasten the other end to the rock below,” Mualama said. “Then we can climb back up using chumars.”
“Chumars?”
Mualama held up two small pieces of machinery. “They clip on the rope, then allow it through in only one direction. You rest your weight on one, slide the other up, then rest your weight on the other. It is slow, but you will get back up.”
Mualama put the chumars back in his pack and edged over the side of the gorge. He rappelled down, his feet finding precarious purchase on the jagged rock wall, Twenty feet above the surface of the river, he paused. Mualama bent his knees, bringing his body in close to the wall, then sprung outward as he released tension on the rope. The nylon slid through the snaplink as he descended, and he landed directly on top of the rock. He knelt and hammered a piton into the top of the rock before he unhooked from the rope. He tied off the free end of the rope to the piton and looked up at Bauru and gave a thumbs-up.
Only then did he turn his attention to the stone below him. At the height of the rainy season the top would be submerged, and thousands of seasons had scoured the surface smooth. Centered on the downstream side, just before the edge, was a small mark. Seeing it, Mualama allowed himself to feel the excitement of making a true discovery, of another step in his long and strange path about to be completed. He had feared this entire trip would turn up nothing, as previous trips to other places in the past had, but the mark was where it was supposed to be, and that meant—Mualama stopped himself from thinking too far ahead.
Bauru slid down the rope and arrived, leather gloves keeping his hands from burning on the nylon. The two porters followed, as Mualama examined the carving. “What is it?” Bauru asked. He had never seen such strange markings.
“It is Arabic script for the number one thousand and one,” Mualama translated. The water had worn smooth the edges of the carving.
“Arabic?” Bauru touched the rock. “This has been here for a long time. What Arab would have been here that many years ago? You said Fawcett was an Englishman.”
“The mark was carved there in 1867, long before Fawcett set out on his journey. But it was an Englishman who carved the numbers. An Englishman who spoke and wrote fluent Arabic. Sir Richard Francis Button.”
“I have not heard of this man.” Bauru said.
“He was a famous explorer and linguist. Burton was assigned as British consul to Brazil in 1864. He was based on the coast in Santos. In 1867 he left Santos and traveled alone for almost the entire year. It is known he navigated the San Francisco River north of here for over fifteen hundred miles in a canoe. He barely survived, arriving at the coast suffering from both pneumonia and hepatitis.”
“Why did he do this?” Bauru thought most foreigners quite strange. He would never travel that far in the Mato Grosso alone. It was akin to committing suicide. He was amazed that the man had made it to the coast, especially given the limited equipment he must have had over a hundred years earlier.
“To hide something.” Mualama pointed down. “It must be underneath. I think Burton traveled here during the dry season of the drought of 1867, when the water was much lower. In one of his papers I found in England he described a chamber under a flat rock like an altar, in the throat of the Devil.” Mualama looked around. “We are in the Devil’s Throat. This is a flat rock in the right place. And this mark is his.”
“How do you know that?” Bauru asked.
“Burton translated the story of the Thousand and One Nights from the Arabic. To mark his way, he used riddles that only someone who knew about him would recognize. I have no doubt we are in the right place. I must go underneath and find the chamber.”
“Is this what Fawcett was looking for?”
“I believe so.”
“But Fawcett never returned,” Bauru noted.
“He might never have made it here,” Mualama said. “The journey is easier now.” Bauru looked at the water askance. “There is much danger in the rivers here. You cannot see more than six inches in that muck. There are—”
“I have to,” Mualama cut him off. “Like Fawcett, I have been on Burton’s trail for twenty years, and this is the next step.” Mualama pulled off his shoes and socks.
“Why did Fawcett lie about what he was looking for?” Bauru asked, trying to forestall the professor’s going into the water.
“Because it is a very dangerous path he was trying to follow, and because there are those who guard it most jealously.” Mualama pulled his shirt over his head, revealing his lean torso, a black metal medallion hanging around his neck that featured an eye superimposed on the apex of a pyramid, and a back covered in scar tissue.
Bauru and the porters were shocked by what they saw. “What happened to your back?”
“I was caught in a fire.” Mualama said. He had only his shorts on. “I am going over the side.”
“Here.” Bauru pulled a shorter section of rope out of his pack
and handed one end to Mualama. “Tie this around your waist.”
Mualama quickly looped the rope around himself and tied it off. After a sharp exchange in their native dialect, Bauru and the two porters held the other end. Mualama slid over the side of the rock into the fast-flowing, warm water. He took a deep breath, then dove down, running hands along the rock, searching.
He went down about five feet, searching carefully, but there was nothing. He burst to the surface, gasping for air. He dove once more, hands searching along the rock face. He pulled himself lower, eight feet down, and felt an indentation in the rock. Reaching his hand into the opening, he grabbed hold of the inside and pulled himself down. The air in his lungs pressed him up against the top of whatever he was in.
The way ahead was still clear, but Mualama had no more oxygen. He pushed back out and surfaced, sputtering for air.
“Have you found anything?” Bauru asked.
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