He poured himself a hot cup of coffee with plenty of sugar and set his mind to the task at hand.
He was almost comforted at knowing what he’d find inside: a handful of old photographs and handwritten documents, some of them nearly a hundred years old. He’d requested the folder again after his man in Spain, Richard Hale, told him Martin Faber had requested this very file just before he resigned from the agency.
What were you looking for, Mr. Faber?
Studying the file brought back mostly good memories. His old friend George Carver, a CIA security expert who had died of a heart attack in 1994, had dedicated the last few months of his life to studying the discovery of Noah’s Ark. He had tried to convince Owen that it should be kept under constant surveillance. He insisted they had to learn everything they could about “that great and terrible day” if humanity was to survive it the way it did eons earlier.
Carver had been interested in the topic since he was a West Point cadet. He heard a professor from the University of Richmond discussing photos the CIA had taken of Noah’s Ark by chance as a spy satellite flew over Mount Ararat. Carver made some inquiries at Langley and discovered, to his surprise, that the story was no fairy tale. In September of 1973, a series-KH-11 satellite indeed shot an image of something bizarre: At the edge of a melting glacier on the northeast face of Ararat’s highest peak was the outline of three curved wooden beams that seemed to form the shape of an ancient ship. What other ship would anyone find atop a mountain if not Noah’s Ark?
Carver discussed his findings with anyone who would listen. He asked questions, requested classified documents and even asked several senators about getting to the bottom of it. Unfortunately, his illness cut short his work. After Carver’s death, his professor friend doubled his efforts to bring to light the secret dossier on the ark and the pictures of the “anomaly of Ararat.” And it finally happened in 1995. Needless to say, it was on the cover of the New York Times the next day and set the intelligence community buzzing.
Among the declassified images were not just the KH-11 images but others from U-2 spy planes and Corona satellites. All the pictures were dated between 1959 and 1960 and they all seemed to indicate that an enormous wooden ark indeed existed. Still, it was only visible when snowy conditions allowed.
But this wasn’t all Martin Faber had requested from Langley’s archives.
He had asked to see a smaller, more exclusive dossier, one that had not been declassified, one that only a handful of Elijah’s members had ever seen—the folder that was now on Michael Owen’s desk.
Just holding it filled him with an indescribable nostalgia.
He now had an idea what Faber was looking for, why he had rushed off to Ararat before his kidnapping, and he also now understood what Dujok was after, as well—it was all one and the same. He just hoped whatever the government satellites were picking up didn’t have anything to do with them.
78
“Is that it?”
Ellen Watson’s phone conversation was so brief, so clinical, that I thought she hadn’t managed to get through. I guess I thought it odd that such a young woman could simply dial up the most powerful man on the planet.
“Well, what did he have to say?” Dujok said impatiently.
“The president will personally ensure that the USS Texas won’t be an issue,” she said, her aquamarine eyes darkening.
“Is that all he said?”
“He asked where we were headed and whether we were going by helicopter.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“That our objective was in Turkey, at the site where we detected the last adamant, and that I had no idea how we’d reach such a remote location. Do you?”
Dujok swelled with pride. “This vehicle can fly nonstop for eleven straight hours and reach a top speed of three hundred seventy miles an hour. We can be at our destination within seven or eight hours,” Dujok said. “Can you get your president to clear our flight plan?”
“Sure. Do you need the coordinates for the type-X emission that Washington triangulated?”
“Not necessary,” he said, tapping his laptop. “The signal that gave us our coordinates came from one of your satellites. I trust they’re accurate.”
79
Worry had reached the bridge of the most modern submarine in the US fleet. Two of the three giant monitors showed satellite images of their tactical team coming under enemy fire. Everyone aboard was on edge. The HMBB had caught the very moment when an unidentified vehicle entered the combat zone and neutralized Sergeant Odenwald—effectively rendering the mission a failure. Moreover, the captain of the boat cut off communications with the NSA director when he was ordered to stand by, sitting on his hands.
And now, something else to worry about.
“Captain, sonar ops here.”
The image of the officer who was the underwater eyes and ears of the sub flashed on a third monitor. Captain Jack Foyle turned around to face him.
“Sonar, report.”
“We’ve detected something, sir. An unidentified helicopter departed Noia several minutes ago heading north-northeast.”
“And . . .”
“Sir, we just cross-referenced its heading with the coordinates of the anomaly we received from the satellite. It’s a match. And, sir”—the young officer steadied himself—“the ‘transmitter’ is aboard. The electromagnetic signature is a match.”
“How far are they, son?”
“Less than ten miles, sir.”
The USS Texas was topside in the Atlantic. There was no way to intercept the bird given its current position.
“Should we take it down, sir?” said a young officer fresh out of the academy.
“Our orders are to recover the tablet intact, sailor. If we open fire now, we’ll lose it. Plus, have you stopped to consider the implications of racking up more casualties on Allied soil? The ones from the fishing town this morning are more than enough for me, kid.”
The subordinate didn’t answer.
“Sonar, is the helicopter maintaining its heading?” Foyle asked.
“Right now, they’re still headed along the coast toward La Coruña, Spain, sir.”
“La Coruña?”
“It’s a medium-sized city just north of our position, sir.”
“Does it have an airport?”
The officer turned to his computer and punched in some information.
“Affirmative, sir.”
“Com!” Captain Foyle said, turning on his heels to face a young brunette, an officer in charge of all ship’s communications, who was, at the moment, carrying a wireless phone. “Call the NSA and tell them to freeze all activity at that airport and to contact local authorities to limit access by all trains and buses. We’ll send a strike team immediately.”
Instead of snapping into action, the young sailor stepped forward and handed the captain the phone.
“You have a call, sir.”
“It’ll have to wait!” he grumbled.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the officer said stiffly. “This can’t wait.”
80
Haci was clearly a talented pilot.
To get out of Noia, he skillfully maneuvered around power lines and stayed low to avoid radar. He knew he was flying an unregistered craft in unauthorized airspace and was bound to draw attention, so he tried everything he could to go unnoticed. Before we knew it, he had stopped following the coast and had started northeast, over the homes and villages of Galicia, giving us our first taste of freedom. From the outside, my situation might not have seemed so promising: I hadn’t slept all night, had been shot at twice, was bruised from head to toe and had been inches from death. And all because of the person who was now heading up this mission.
Still, knowing I was finally on my way to see Martin, I was grateful to Artemi Dujok and his men.
Typical Stockholm syndrome, I thought. But what the hell . . .
We were relaxed at last, enjoying the scenery. And then, a warning light
on the instrument panel went on.
“Sheikh, we’ve been detected by radar,” Haci said.
“Can you shake it?”
“I’ll try . . .”
The Sikorsky X4 dove down low again, nearly grazing the tops of the eucalyptus trees passing by in a blur, but the warning light continued to flash.
“How far away are we from the coast?” Dujok asked.
“Maybe three kilometers, sir.”
“Well, Miss Watson, we’ll soon know whether it was worth it to bring you along,” Dujok said. “If your boss gave the order in time, we’re saved. Otherwise, we’ll be dead in the next few minutes.”
“I trust my president, Mr. Dujok,” she said. “I know he won’t let us down.”
“I hope you’re right.”
81
“Is this Captain Jack Foyle?”
Foyle had transferred the call to his adjacent ready room. The voice on the other end of the line seemed familiar and authoritative.
“This is Captain Foyle. Who do I have the pleasure of—”
“This is President Castle.”
Foyle held the phone, dumbstruck.
“I know you’re off the coast of Spain, Captain,” he said flatly. “And I know the NSA gave you one set of instructions. But I’m giving you a direct order to stand down.”
“Sir, I—”
“You’re a soldier, Captain Foyle, and you were just following orders; I understand completely. And you won’t be chastised for it.”
“It’s not that, sir,” Foyle said. “We launched a sortie earlier today. And we lost five men.”
“You launched a raid on Spanish soil?”
“Yes, sir.”
The phone went silent for several seconds. Castle needed to think.
“Did you recover the bodies?”
“No, sir. They’re in the hands of local authorities. I assume our embassy is trying to repatriate them as we speak,” Foyle said. “We encountered enemy fire during an urban gun battle.”
“Enemy fire? Where?” The president’s tone went from incredulous to worried.
“A small coastal village called Noia, sir.”
Castle needed another minute. That was close to where Ellen Watson had been when she made her phone call from that helicopter.
“Were there any civilian casualties, Captain?”
“Not that I know of, sir. But we caused substantial damage to a historic building.”
“All right, Captain,” Castle said, sighing. “Your mission has officially changed. I need you to do three things for your country.”
“Yes, sir?”
“First, I need you stand down and call off all combat and search-and-rescue operations. You are not authorized to fire one more round. Understood? I know an unidentified aircraft has just taken off from the city of Noia—you may already be tracking it. There’s an official from my office aboard on a special mission. You are instructed to let them on their way.”
“Sir, if I may . . . it’s the subjects aboard that helicopter who killed our men.”
“Captain, right now, I need you to simply follow orders,” Castle said. “The next thing I need you to do is contact the admiral of the Sixth Fleet, fill him in on what’s happened and ask for new orders. Notify the families of the soldiers killed in action, and leave the area.”
“And your third order, sir?”
“I want you to listen to my next question and be completely honest with me, Captain.”
“Of course, sir.”
“What exactly were you ordered to do in Noia?”
Jack Foyle hesitated. The NSA’s director had been explicit that he could not reveal the contents of the countersigned message he received to anyone under any circumstances. But he wasn’t about to lie to his commander-in-chief.
“Sir,” Foyle said, “our orders were to locate a powerful mobile electromagnetic weapon and secure it for study by US scientists.”
“Is that all?”
“No, sir. We also were to capture a civilian, one Julia Álvarez, without bodily harm, and to neutralize her captors.”
“Were you told why?”
“Yes, sir. Apparently, one of them is planning a global-scale attack. One that would cause immeasurable damage—using an electromagnetic weapon.”
82
Three minutes later, the warning light on the Sikorsky’s instrument panel went out.
“We lost them, sir,” Haci said.
“Are you sure?” Artemi Dujok turned toward the cockpit with a raised eyebrow.
“Yes, sir. The radar has stopped tracking us.”
Dujok turned around and looked, satisfied, at Ellen Watson.
“Thank you, Miss Watson. You’ve been a big help.”
“So now that I’ve proven my worth, will you tell me everything you know about Operation Elijah?”
I watched Dujok carefully. She clearly had held up her end of the bargain. Would he confide in her with me looking on?
“Wouldn’t you rather get some rest before we reach our destination?”
“There’ll be time for that. Right now, I want to know everything about this mysterious operation.”
“Suit yourself,” Dujok said. “You’ve certainly earned it. And we have a couple hours ahead of us. I can’t see why I shouldn’t tell you everything I know.”
Ellen sat up in her chair, in rapt attention as Dujok filled her in on a centuries-old mission.
83
The first picture was an old one. Almost ancient.
Michael Owen slipped it out of the envelope and held it carefully. It had been taken by Czar Nicholas II’s troops in the summer of 1917 near the Turkish-Russian border. It showed a group of tired, filthy men, frozen to the bone in their threadbare uniforms, and clearly none had shaved in days. Three of them posed stiffly in front of the ruins of a house that had been destroyed by an avalanche or an earthquake. The image spoke to Owen across the valley of time.
He understood what it had taken to get that picture into his archives. American operatives had paid for it in blood. They had snatched it four decades after it had fallen into the Bolsheviks’ hands. The Russians needed this picture as much as their revolution. And it wasn’t hard to understand why.
If you looked closer, beyond the grainy image, you could see something strange about the house. It was three stories high and looked as if the façade had only recently been destroyed. The levels that were exposed to the elements did not reveal the typical items in a household. There was no furniture, no clothes, no broken bricks or splintered beams. Only a series of small, dark, empty rooms, stacked one next to the other.
When you pieced it together with the other photos in the dossier, it all made sense. Another photo taken some three hundred yards from the curious house appeared to hold the key. The odd “house” was really only the visible part of a long, rectangular structure that disappeared into a glacier, which, apparently, had split in half during some kind of earthquake or landslide, exposing the building’s innards to the elements. Written on the back of the photo in Russian was the following:
Romanov expedition. July 1917
Noah’s Ark
For years, experts had speculated as to the existence of these photos. All the books about Noah’s Ark referred to these photos but none had ever published them. They only spoke about an exploration that Nicholas II commissioned to the Turkish border before he and his family were murdered, but there was never any physical proof. Yet here was the evidence, in black and white. The hundreds of soldiers, engineers, photographers and historians were captured on their way down the mountain by Nicholas II’s enemies and accused of high treason. Most were summarily executed and the ones who managed to escape never spoke again of what they had found on that mountaintop. For a regime founded on atheism, the discovery of a biblical relic was pure dynamite. The very father of the revolution hid the photos among his private papers, resisting destroying them for the equal parts of fascination and disgust they stirred in him. But that didn’t
keep him from sending a team of combat engineers—who were more naïve and less resistant than imperial soldiers—to blow up the ark. But they were never able to find it again.
Or maybe it was just God’s will.
But then, of course, came the theft.
In 1956, a double agent stumbled across the pictures when he gained access to Leon Trotsky’s archives. He managed to slip them out of the country and sell them in Berlin to a representative of the US embassy. But on the day of the exchange, he and the buyer were discovered in the eastern part of the city and gunned down by the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. Two days later, though, a border captain—enticed by a million dollars—eventually got the photos to their ultimate buyer; the Elijah project had finally managed to get them, although it cost them one of their top spies.
Michael Owen was only a boy when all of that had gone down. Maybe that’s why it didn’t hurt to hold these pictures now.
The picture he was most interested in was the last of the series. It was a shot of one of the top floors of the “house,” which looked to have been hermetically sealed. It was a picture of a Russian soldier whose eyebrows and mustache were covered in frost, leaning up against a wall stained with dark streaks. His icy stare, emboldened by vodka, seemed to say, “I dare you to come any closer, asshole.” It was Owen’s favorite picture from the moment he first saw it. The soldier pointed a gloved finger at several etchings on the wall. They looked like initials carved into stone. You could only make out four of them, but from the picture, it was clear there was room for more letters. Just below them were a series of scribbles that Michael Owen had come to know very well. In the sixteenth century, someone had called them Monas hieroglyphica. But interestingly, none of those characters were Hebrew. If this was Noah’s Ark, then the biblical patriarch had not marked his ship with the alphabet of his people, but rather these inscrutable symbols:
The Lost Angel Page 27