Long before his midlife plunge into the serious study of Sanskrit, Sumerian, and the earliest-known cultures of the Fertile Crescent, he knew he would someday visit the Giza plateau. The circumstances of that visit were important, however: he desired a certain kind of access that mere celebrity would not afford him.
Deaver’s space hero cache had at least helped open the door to a cordial e-mail correspondence with Egyptologist Dr. Marcus Mancini which resulted in a dream opportunity: impressed by the scholarship of the astronaut-turned-historian, Mancini invited Jake to Egypt to visit his dig-in-progress at Giza. Deaver promptly accepted.
Blessed with the good timing of winter break, he could grade papers on the long flight to Cairo and back. And after he resolved his holiday plans, neither reports of tourist kidnappings nor the State Department’s vocal concerns about his safety could have kept him away.
Shielding his eyes and scanning the desert plateau for signs of his host, Jake directed the armed, embassy-vetted driver to park their Land Rover rental near the base of the Great Pyramid. Gawking up at this Wonder of the World with exuberant pleasure, Deaver abandoned the truck’s hardworking air-conditioning for the intense Egyptian sun.
“Commander Deaver!”
Reeling slightly from the initial body slam of Sahara heat, Jake heard the voice calling his name. He surveyed the awesome site overlooking the Valley of the Kings, finally seeing Dr. Mancini descend a four-thousand-year-old sandstone causeway and stride down a sandy incline to greet him.
“Dr. Mancini, I presume.” Jake smiled easily as they shook hands.
“Please. My friends call me Marcus, Commander.” Mancini beamed at the still lean and fit former space hero who somehow made his sixty years look like forty-nine and holding. “Or should I say professore?”
“Jake is good.”
“Molto bene. I’m so happy you could make the journey. Come.”
With Deaver’s driver/bodyguard cradling a machine pistol and keeping pace a few steps behind, the seventy-one-year-old Italian archaeologist led the way back up to the Pharaonic causeway from where they could best view the dig.
“Take a look.”
Sweating through his T-shirt, Jake caught up with Mancini, only to have his breath taken away by the sight below: within the shadow of the famous Sphinx, three ornate sailing ships were being exhumed from thousands of years of dry dock by a small army of Egyptian laborers.
“Magico, eh?” Mancini gestured toward the exotic vessels, which seemed to be emerging from Time itself as much as from the dunes at Giza.
“My God, Marcus. They’re beautiful.”
Despite the withering stare of Ra, the sun god, and a cloud of tiny black flies that refused to be waved away, Deaver was entranced.
“How big are they?”
Mancini turned to him from beneath the slice of shade afforded him by the brim of a battered Panama hat.
“Oh, somewhat bigger than the Nina, the Pinta, or the Santa Maria,” he said, with a discernible note of mischief. Jake reacted to the implied ocean-crossing range being ascribed to the tall reed ships.
“You tested for saline?”
“Si, si. But say nothing, please.”
Mancini flicked a glance at Jake’s Egyptian bodyguard.
“For the Antiquities Committee,” he said, lowering his voice, “they must remain ‘ceremonial boats,’ at least for now. But I promised myself I would not complain.”
The idea that these colorful craft might have once sailed down the north-flowing freshwater Nile to ply the Mediterranean Sea was part of an ongoing conflict that divided Cairo’s classicist Egyptologists from many scholars in the West. Long-held basic assumptions about the history of Mankind in the so-called cradle of civilization had come under intense assault from European and American archaeologists for a generation. And the Cairenes were in no mood for further heretical assertions in the scientific literature.
Whether human civilization was dramatically older than modern Egyptians claimed or not, Jake found the debate about it endlessly fascinating.
“I can only imagine, Marcus. Must be quite a tightrope.”
“In Egypt, my friend, Egyptology is not just a science. It is also a religion, an ideology, a national obsession, and a blood sport.”
As a new student of the ancient world, the Apollo alumnus was aware of the factions and the infighting. Jake had read and closely followed the work of West, Bauval, and other non-Egyptian scientists who’d been given permission to study the Sphinx in the early nineties.
What their university-sponsored testing revealed was that erosion patterns on the oldest portion of the leonine body of the Sphinx had not been caused by eons of scouring desert wind and sand. The evidence in the stone was of water damage: heavy, protracted rainfall and deep pooling water acting on this monumental Egyptian national treasure over hundreds of years.
Problem was, the most recent geological era wet enough to have caused water erosion like that had occurred at the end of the last Ice Age, around 10,500 B.C.E.
This would make the fabled man-faced lion sculpture not simply older than the pharaohs credited with building it; the Sphinx would have to be at least five thousand years older than any known human civilization capable of building it. The dilemma this presented amounted to a crisis for the classicists.
“I guess the Egyptians prefer that their Egyptian national monuments stay Egyptian.”
“Preciso. But what you may be most interested in is up here.”
As they hiked together up toward the Pyramid steps, two Jeeps full of heavily armed, black-uniformed paramilitary police zoomed past, kicking up a dust cloud of fine sand. Jake’s driver/bodyguard waved them a casual salute.
“Trouble?” Deaver indicated the patrol.
“Radical fundamentalism.” Mancini gestured with both hands, as if to keep at bay an invisible army of the night. “They don’t know preservation from plundering. Or a Belgian tour bus from invading ‘infidel’ hordes. But forgive an old man’s disappointment over things that cannot be changed in our lifetimes. We go up here.”
Without a pause, Mancini proceeded to climb the steep face of the Pyramid like a mountain goat. Already hot and sweaty, Jake and his twentysomething driver exchanged looks, marveling at the older Italian scholar’s energy.
Here we go, Deaver thought. Then mindful of the stress on his knees, he made his way up the great sandstone Wonder.
Waiting beneath a frescoed archway, Dr. Mancini seemed unfazed by the climb. He offered Jake a hand up the last step.
“Thanks.”
Deaver moved into the shade under the arch, gasping for breath. Looking out from this high vantage point across the plateau, he could see the two principal sister Pyramids, the oldest ones at Giza arrayed in a slightly offset line in relation to where he now stood.
Pulling a large water bottle out of his backpack, Jake offered it around. Mancini accepted, but the young Egyptian waved it off, leaning his shoulder against a shaded wall of two-ton stone blocks and lighting an acrid cigarette.
Jake unashamedly drank down a half liter before tucking the bottle away.
“So, what do you think?” Mancini gestured to the artwork above them.
“Oh, boy.”
Wiping sweat from his hands and face with his shirttail, Jake now focused on the fresco and immediately saw what he had come here most wanting to see.
It was a hieroglyph very much like one he had drawn by hand and sent to Mancini for translation: the most Egyptian-looking of the six hieroglyphs he’d brought home from the lunar rubble of Sinus Medii, the provenance of which he’d not shared with the Italian archaeologist.
“It’s gorgeous, Marcus.”
“A match, or a near match, don’t you think?” Mancini said, enjoying Deaver’s enthralled reaction.
“Can I take a rubbing?”
“Of course.”
Deaver extracted a pad of tracing paper from his backpack, tore out a sheet, and placed it carefully over the glyph. A
delicate graphite image emerged as he worked with the edge of a soft pencil.
“God. It’s beautiful.”
Jake had characterized his original freehand drawing as “an untranslated glyph” he had run across. And the luck of Mancini actually finding a similar one at Giza had made the journey to Egypt feel something like fate.
Securing the rubbing between pristine leaves of vellum and two pieces of cardboard, he slipped it away inside his pack, then took out a small digital camera and began documenting the glyph in situ.
“Does it relate to the Moon?” Jake asked casually, covering the fresco from various angles and distances.
“Well, the context would suggest cosmology. Maybe early Sumer from the clay tablets, but I haven’t run a search. I can give you the software we use to sort out glyphs and pictos, Commander, if you like.”
“Thanks. That’d be great.”
Mancini asked the Egyptian bodyguard a question in his own language. The serious-faced young man unslung his automatic weapon, put out his cigarette, and indicated he would stay where he was.
“All right,” Mancini said, leading the way to the Pyramid entrance. “Shall we move on?”
Jake stashed the camera, hitched up his pack, and followed the archaeologist down the dimly lit tunnel that led to the fabled King’s Chamber. Mancini stopped a moment as their eyes adjusted to the dark.
“By the way, the word Cairo is not Egyptian. It’s ancient Sumer.”
Jake struggled to place that fact in the context of what he knew or thought he knew about the time line of human civilization.
“So, the name for the Egyptian capitol predates the pharaohs?”
“It’s in the clay tablets.” Mancini nodded and then continued on in the demi-dark toward the King’s Chamber.
“So, what’s it mean, Marcus?”
“That’s what I’m trying to puzzle out, my friend.” Mancini laughed.
“No, I mean what does Cairo mean in Sumerian?”
“Oh! Forgive me, Commander.” The archeologist laughed again, lighting the way now with a small halogen lamp. “It refers to the planet Mars. Cairo means ‘Mars.’ “
55
February 9/Dr. Paula Winnick’s Residence/Georgetown
Dr. Paula Winnick’s prewar town house in a posh section of Georgetown was quite some distance from Cairo geographically, culturally, and psychologically. But a jackal-head sculpture in Winnick’s art collection was enough to thoroughly transport Deaver back to the Great Pyramid.
“Jake?”
Startled, he turned away from the Egyptian display, hearing tea things rattling and tinkling somewhere off in the kitchen. Angela called out a question.
“Cream or lemon?”
“Neither, thanks.”
Inside and out, Dr. Winnick’s home had impressed them both as postcard charming, from the ivy-covered fieldstone exterior to the rambling, high-ceilinged rooms crowned with ornate moldings like sculpted cream.
Set off by the deep shine of waxed parquet floors, the exquisite old Persian carpets underfoot seemed too precious to walk on. And adorning every wall were superb pieces reflecting a lifetime of collecting, and not just from Egypt: there were art and artifacts, tools and weaponry from Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and more. It was fabulous and a little intimidating.
Joining Angela and Dr. Winnick around a hand-carved Thai coffee table, Jake sat on the silk-embroidered teak couch and sipped Lapsang souchong tea as Angela gave their hostess the background on her investigative efforts before presenting Winnick with the TOLAS photo of the pyramids at Cydonia.
The Nobelist produced her reading glasses and studied it closely.
“We’d just like to have your reaction, what you think about the possible commandeering of Mars Observer, and why NASA might be sitting on this. And if you have any thoughts about who it might have come from . . .”
The intimation was subtle enough to ignore, but Dr. Winnick was not one for ignoring things. She rubbed her eyes and perched her glasses on the top of her head with a decisive stab.
“Well, compelling as this image might be, Ms. Browning, I’m afraid I’m not your whistle-blower. Nor, frankly, would I be.”
Her voice sounded flinty and patrician. Sipping at her smoky tea, Dr. Winnick gave Deaver a long penetrating look that might have been a reproach or the acknowledgment of an unspoken issue between them that she was not prepared to broach. At least not in front of Angela.
“Was there something else you wanted to talk about?”
Sitting beside the distinguished scientist, Angela could only take her at her word that she was not their Deep Cosmo. She felt a little disappointed, partly at not having been quite as smart as she thought she’d been.
But there was still the hope of making a powerful ally.
“I’d like to ask you about your work at the Brookings Institute, in 1959.”
“Ah, Brookings.” Winnick glanced at Jake again, seeing where this discussion was going; then she concentrated on Angela.
“I was invited to take part in a congressional study: the Implications and Hazards of Space Exploration. Eisenhower ordered it when NASA was just a high-flying idea that he was crazy about.”
“So, you and Dr. Margaret Mead made a recommendation . . .”
“The entire panel spent a year studying and debating the risks of the proposed space program, and in the end we unanimously advised Ike and Congress that ‘any discovery of alien artifacts’ be kept from the public. Margaret and I wrote the opinion. I suppose that’s what you have a problem with.”
Angela’s face confirmed her assumption.
“I just don’t understand it,” she said. “You’re a scientist. It seems so entirely against everything that you and Dr. Mead would stand for. I just don’t understand why.”
“Because of the Law of Unintended Consequences, my dear.”
Winnick included Jake in her grim, worldly smile and then warmed up their cups from an English fine china teapot.
“The potential for worldwide social, political, and religious destabilization in the face of such a discovery represents the greatest single hazard to mankind inherent in the whole NASA endeavor.”
Deaver broke his silence, but with affection and respect.
“Even so, Paula, you must admit the world has moved on in the last forty-odd years. Look at Star Wars or Star Trek. Polls show at least eighty percent of Americans now believe in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial beings. The idea of contact is not such high strangeness to people anymore.”
“In the first-world countries, perhaps you’re right,” Winnick allowed. “But what about the billions of people who aren’t American or European or Japanese? Who never heard of George Lucas or Captain Picard, who don’t know that Americans once walked on the Moon. Half the planet have never even made a phone call! America is not the world, Commander, much as we’d like it to be. Bring us that mask over there, would you?”
Winnick indicated a Polynesian artifact on the wall, lit by a tiny spotlight. Jake took the colorful coconut-husk carving down and passed it to the elderly scientist.
“Impressive,” Angela said, hefting the mask.
“It’s Turaawe. It always reminds me of Dr. Mead and how she used to carry a Victrola when she went into the bush. She had to stop playing it for the natives, though, because, invariably, when she cranked up the music they’d go pelting off into the forest in fright. It’d take days to lure them back.”
“Funny,” Jake said, already guessing the impending moral.
“Also kind of heartbreaking,” Angela added. Winnick nodded in agreement.
“What’s most heartbreaking is that there are no Turaawe masks being made anymore, because the Turaawe, as a people, no longer exist.”
She waved an aging hand at the entire Pacific Islands collection.
“Before she died, Margaret gave me all these things because she couldn’t bear to look at them anymore. It was her own contact with remote island groups
she was studying that ended their isolation and unintentionally caused their demise.”
“And she blamed herself.”
“ ‘I killed them with curiosity, Polly.’ That’s what she said. When she went back in the ‘50’s she was just devastated. After being exposed to our metal knives, cooking utensils, and machine-woven cloth, the Turaawe culture was substantially lost in a single generation. Wood carving, boatbuilding, weaving, dancing, singing, most of their language and oral history was almost entirely gone. We can see the same thing replicated again and again from Africa to the Amazon to the hill tribes in Southeast Asia.”
Angela saw the connection.
“So, in Brookings, you and Dr. Mead were raising an alarm.”
“Loud as bells, my dear. Loud as bells. We had to get people thinking. Even well-intended contact by a technologically superior race can wipe out entire human cultures just as surely as black plague, genocide, or natural catastrophe. And we know that because we’ve done it ourselves. Who knew what we might find, venturing out into the solar system?” Winnick held up the Mars photo for emphasis and then tossed it back down on the table.
“Even just the confirmed discovery of alien artifacts would irretrievably alter the course of human civilization. Overnight and forever. It is a lesson of history that we ignore at our peril.”
Jake felt this last point being directed most sharply at him. He gave Angela a warning glance and then spoke to Winnick with the intimacy of an old friend.
“I told Angela everything, Paula.”
“Oh, God.”
Winnick slumped back into the couch, the shared secret of Apollo 18 seeming to occupy the room with them now like an undesired guest.
Angela tried to remedy that, leaping into the breach.
“Believe me, Doctor, I have assured Jake and I want to assure you: this goes no further without the Commander’s expressed consent.”
The Orion Protocol Page 19