The Lost Angel

by Sierra, Javier

  I’d been absentmindedly watching the helicopter blow eddies of snow down below when Daniel’s history lesson made me look up at ominous clouds surrounding the mountain’s peak.

  “Is . . . is it still active?”

  “Oh, no, no, no . . . ,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “It’s been quiet for centuries. It was probably dormant by the time Noah arrived.”

  “It better be . . .” Ellen joked.

  “As delicate as it is, any kind of volcanic activity would have destroyed the Ark. What a travesty that would have been . . .”

  “Although there was an earthquake up here in 1840 that almost did the job,” Dujok yelled from the cockpit.

  “Earthquake? Wait, so it is a seismic area?”

  “Well, it was. That quake was as powerful as the eruption of Mount St. Helens. It destroyed several mountain villages. Killed more than two thousand people. Leveled St. Jacob’s Cathedral, which housed the Ark’s most valuable relics. Believe it or not, there used to be pilgrimages to visit the Ark before the quake. We still have some of the worshippers’ journals.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure, everyone around here has heard about the Ark and the holy stones it carried,” Daniel added. “You can hear story after story of all the groups who sent expeditions to recover the stones in the years following the earthquake. Napoleon III. Nicholas II. Viscount James Bryce. The CIA. The list goes on and on. Actually, any of the stones you hear about out in the world, including Solomon’s Urim and Thummim, only left here with our people’s blessings.”

  “The stones all came from the Ark?”

  “The one and only, Ms. Álvarez.”

  It amazed me that there was no doubt in their minds that buried under the permafrost was a ship thousands of years old. An enormous vessel built to the Bible’s specifications: three hundred cubits long by fifty cubits wide; forty-two thousand cubic feet of space. It was like a giant box floating on the high seas. As hard as I tried, I just couldn’t imagine a ship the size of the Titanic marooned on a mountaintop fifteen thousand feet above sea level.

  I’d always had a hard time believing the story, whether the protagonist was Noah, Utnapishtim or Atrahasis. Like so many other Western kids, I’d grown up with the story of the Ark. I’d colored pictures of it in kindergarten class. And I daydreamed about it when a story about it appeared in the press in the 1980s. That’s when an explorer named Jim Irwin had set off to Ararat to find the Ark. The nuns at my Catholic school kept us up-to-date with his travels and even encouraged us to pray for that astronaut-turned-archaeologist and his expedition. Irwin gave everyone hope; he was, after all, one of only twelve men ever to set foot on the moon during the Apollo missions. And if he believed in the Ark, he would not be deterred. My rational mind was developing only then, and I remember hearing over the radio that his mission was more mythology than science. And that it was important for Irwin to prove God had once walked on this earth as surely as he, Irwin, had walked on the moon.

  But, alas, Irwin failed in his mission. He never found the Ark. And his failure planted the seeds of my skepticism.

  As a matter of fact, every so-called Ark discovery that made news ended up being debunked shortly thereafter. If there was, in fact, an Ark buried atop Mount Ararat, no one had been able to find it.

  Or had they?

  Something told me I was about to find out.

  It was nine thirty in the morning when Daniel Knight and Artemi Dujok decided it was time to begin our climb.

  From the outset, though, I had a feeling that the mountain itself wasn’t going to be our biggest hurdle. It was the fog and icy snow underfoot, not to mention our inexperience at this altitude. Any experienced mountain climber will tell you it takes time to acclimate to the thin air and the atmospheric pressure at high altitudes—time we didn’t have. It was never more apparent than when I hooked myself up to the tethering cable that connected all of us.

  Dujok shot ahead at a pace I knew I wouldn’t be able to match.

  He hiked confidently, poking his walking stick into the powder to check the depth with the assuredness of someone who knew this path well. Watching him trek ahead so confidently reminded me how stupid I’d been when he made me believe we had discovered my husband’s location together. How goddamn naïve I’d been! What’s worse, I felt betrayed knowing Martin had put my life in danger just to satisfy his insane obsession.

  Martin.

  How will I react when I see him? How will he try to explain all this madness?

  Ellen Watson panted as she followed behind Dujok. She’d been complaining for a while now about a headache, but no one had paid much attention to her. Waasfi followed behind her. And, just behind me, Daniel and Haci brought up the rear, pulling along an aluminum sled stocked with supplies and provisions. We walked at a moderate clip, literally following in Dujok’s footsteps. I was surprised to find that, despite the tension last night and my growing doubts, our troupe was not in bad spirits. Behind me, for example, Daniel huffed along but was as chatty as ever.

  “. . . and the etymology of the place names in this region confirms this mountain was where Noah disembarked,” he was saying, panting because of the altitude. “On the north face, just before the ravine, there’s a little village called Masher, which means ‘Judgment Day.’” A blast of cold air made him clear his throat. “On the Armenian side of the mountain, the capital city is Yerevan, which is said to be the first word Noah said when he saw solid ground—‘Erevats! There it is!’ And over yonder is the village of Sharnakh, which means ‘Noah’s settlement.’ Oh, and over there’s the town of Tabriz—‘the boat.’ It’s all like that for a hundred miles around . . .”

  I was more worried about watching my step than listening to his litany of worthless information.

  With each passing mile, we moved more sluggishly as we tracked around slopes and snowdrifts. Daniel Knight and Ellen Watson proved to have a harder time than any of us had expected, and they slowed us down as well. Which is why, after three straight hours of climbing, I breathed a heavy sigh of relief when we finally stopped to rest at the foot of a giant stone wall. It was an impressive structure covered in deep, vertical gouges that sometimes intersected like crosses, and the wind howled as it rushed over the scars. The wall rose up, up until it disappeared behind the low-lying clouds, making us feel like ants next to a skyscraper. Dujok explained that we were standing at one end of an enormous glacier.

  “We’re here,” Dujok said.

  “Really . . . finally?” Ellen panted.

  Dujok staked his walking stick into the snow and turned to his GPS. “Yes,” he said, offering nothing more. Their voices echoed in the mountain silence.

  “So, where is he? Where’s Martin?” I said, impatient, looking at what clearly seemed like a dead end.

  Dujok didn’t say anything. He just brushed the frost out of his mustache, unlatched himself from the tethering line and headed toward a stone outcropping with a flashlight.

  “Where’s he going?” Ellen muttered behind me.

  “To get you the answers you’re looking for,” he shouted, and disappeared into the foggy base of the stone.

  Little did I know we were not alone. Somewhere in the distance, an unseen set of eyes watched our group through a pair of infrared military binoculars.

  92

  “It’s the entrance to some kind of ice cave,” Nicholas Allen said as he watched the group through his binoculars.

  The thought of an ice cave only made Tom Jenkins feel worse. Despite being wrapped in layers of thermal clothing, his face and body felt frozen through and through. Although they’d rented all the best gear in Dogubayazit—North Face clothing, ultraviolet goggles, Marmot gloves—the climb had left Jenkins exhausted. What was worse, their cell phones weren’t working. They couldn’t seem to get a signal—actually, all their electrical equipment seemed to be malfunctioning—anywhere on Mount Ararat. But what worried Allen was that the local authorities had confiscated their weapons and assig
ned a pair of trackers to follow them. “Understand our point of view, Colonel,” the Turkish police had told him. “Ararat is still a very sensitive area for us. If something happens during your climb, our men will be there to take care of it before you know it.”

  “What’s that? A cave? Wonderful,” Jenkins grumbled.

  “And it looks like they’re going inside.”

  “How many men?”

  “I can make out five. Maybe six. Some of them are armed. I count one . . . two submachine guns. I hope they’re not stupid enough to use them. They’ll cause a damn avalanche.”

  “Recognize anybody?”

  Allen steadied the infrared binoculars. But looking at simply their heat signatures wasn’t enough to identify them.

  “No. But I’ll bet the one who just went into the cave is Julia Álvarez. It’s them, no doubt. No one else would be crazy enough to climb all the way up here in November.”

  He silently continued to scan the mountainside.

  “Notice the shape at the top of the mountain? Looks like some kind of structure, doesn’t it?”

  “What are you getting at, Colonel?”

  “That maybe we’re looking at the actual Ark. It looks a lot like the classified photos I’ve seen in the Elijah archives. A geometric shape jutting out of a frozen block of ice . . . one that’s visible only when the ice melts during really hot summers. Makes sense they’d have to go into the glacier to reach it.”

  “Wait, wait . . . you mean Noah’s Ark? They think they’ve found Noah’s Ark?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Allen said, shrugging his shoulders and handing the binoculars to Jenkins. “What else would they be looking for up here?”

  Jenkins looked through the lenses and zoomed in. “Well, the damn boat must be a hell of an attraction, Colonel, because they’ve all gone inside.”

  “Perfect. Time to move in. You coming, Jenkins?”

  93

  My heart was pounding as I approached the crevice in the stone, my breath freezing in nervous puffs. It must’ve been close to midday because my stomach was starting to grumble from hunger.

  It wasn’t until I reached the rock face, past the looming fog, that I got a better look at it. The fissure was just wide and high enough for a person to slip through, ducking under the hanging icicles, as Dujok had done. I dug my hiking cleats into the icy ground and carefully made my way through.

  I was surprised to find any kind of light inside such a narrow space. But soon I saw why. That crack into the very heart of the glacier was slowly melting and the ice acted like a prism, refracting and reflecting light all around me. It was beautiful, yet I couldn’t stop thinking about how dangerous this was. The walls were brittle, not the kind of solid ice you’d expect to see inside a glacier thousands of years old. But I pressed on, moving forward toward a faint murmur coming from inside the mountain until I reached an opening.

  Three dark outlines were waiting for me at the end of the tunnel. The first was Artemi Dujok, who’d taken off his rucksack and was reaching out to help me down a steep step at the end of the pass. The other two faces I didn’t make out right away.

  “Hello, love!” I heard a familiar woman’s voice say. She was holding a lantern, and it took a second for my eyes to adjust to the dark.

  But I could’ve picked out her British accent from a mile away. I should have known that wherever Daniel Knight was, Sheila Graham would be close behind.

  “Sheila!”

  “Well, of course it’s me, love. Who else would you expect?” she said, lowering the lantern.

  Sheila looked as splendid as usual. Forget that her perfectly coiffed hair was under a thick wool hat. Her lips were perfectly made up in a carmine red and her eyelashes were curled. It’s as if the cold only managed to make her more beautiful.

  “I suppose,” she said, after stamping a pair of kisses on my cheeks, “that you haven’t met William, have you?”

  The third shadow stepped into the light. He walked with a cane and a slight limp, although he tried to stand up straight, gentlemanly. He had a snowy white face with a carefully manicured beard and rosy red cheeks. No, I’d never seen this man before in my life. And yet, when our eyes met, he smiled as if my face brought back fond memories.

  “You look lovely, Julia,” he whispered.

  I couldn’t get over seeing a man almost in his eighties deep inside a mountaintop glacier. Although Mount Ararat was no Everest, it still wasn’t hospitable for a man of his advanced age. Yet he didn’t seem out of place. On the contrary. He was dressed in warm thermals like the rest of us with a flashy Granny Smith–green scarf that hung around his neck neatly, giving him a lofty air. He spoke and moved gracefully, as if the thin mountain air had no effect on him.

  “I can see everything I’ve heard about you is true,” he added, his eyes smiling. “True in every way.”

  “This is William Faber, love,” Sheila said.

  It took a second for all the information to register.

  Bill Faber?

  The man who refused to attend my wedding?

  A flood of images and memories flashed in my mind, the blood pounding in my temples.

  The father who never called his son? The man who ran off to the United States and left Sheila and Daniel to do his work with John Dee’s crystals?

  The elder Faber grabbed my hands with such strength and caring warmth that it caught me by surprise. He radiated a presence. I had to admit, despite all my prejudices, that he simply exuded something special. A sort of majesty. He was almost a foot taller than I was. Though age had wrinkled his skin and made him hunch a bit, his face glowed. This was a handsome man. And absolutely magnetic.

  “So you must be another one of those angels,” I muttered.

  William Faber gave a hearty laugh. “I want you to see something, Julia. I’ve been waiting for this moment for years . . .”

  William Faber limped toward the deepest part of the glacier, opposite the mouth of the icy passageway. The walls of the cavern were thirty feet high with an opening to the sky above us. Only one of the walls wasn’t frozen. Actually, it was more like a perfectly geometric slab of dark stone jutting out into the room, and it was surrounded by several metal folding tables covered with electrical equipment.

  A lab at fifteen thousand feet?

  It was warmer in this part of the cavern. I could see several devices—which explained the humming sound—including a digital barometer, a thermograph, a seismic sensor and another to measure gravity. There was a data-storage tower, some kind of satellite communication device connected to a tubular antenna and a mixing board connected to a network of speakers that were, for some reason, aimed at the rock face. PVC and metal pipes pumped warm air over the equipment while a generator the size of a refrigerator powered them.

  I looked at Bill Faber, stunned.

  “This is what Martin’s been working on since he arrived in Turkey,” he said.

  “Wha . . . what exactly is this?”

  “That wall,” he said, tapping his cane against the rock, “is part of the bridge of Noah’s famous ship. It’s been waiting for us here for the last four thousand years, buried under layers of ice forty degrees below zero.”

  Bill Faber let his words hang in the air so that the information could wash over me. And then he continued.

  “It’s amazing, really, that it’s in such good condition. The constant snow and ice have been petrifying it over the millennia, transforming the cellulose in the wood into what we have here today: wood as hard as stone. Or, rather, a stone that vaguely resembles wood.”

  “The . . . Ark . . . ,” I said, still in denial. He kept speaking, but I couldn’t get my mind around it.

  “The inside is sealed off, unfortunately,” he said. “There’s no way to get to it without using explosives. But that would be suicide. The blast would bury us under tons of ice and snow.”

  I tried to imagine the dimensions of the ship. But it was hard to, given that I could only
see a segment eighteen to twenty feet long.

  “We’ve spent decades trying to find it,” Bill Faber said. “The last ones ever to see this were the Russians. They found it in the summer of 1917, when the abnormally high temperatures melted part of the glacier in which we’re standing. And then the soldiers made an even bigger discovery, something vital to our quest: an inscription.”

  I could feel myself tensing.

  “What kind of inscription, Mr. Faber?”

  He twirled his cane in the air, walked five steps toward the ship and pointed at the most eroded part of the ship’s hull. There, over what looked like the frame of a sealed doorway, I could make out the outline of four symbols carved into the stone. They would have been easy to miss if you weren’t looking for them.

  I stepped closer for a better look and ran my fingers over each character.

  “Recognize them?” he said.

  I just stared at the cryptic squiggles.

  “It’s said that those characters spell out the true name of God,” he said, smiling. “And that pronouncing it correctly reveals its power. Martin thinks this is some kind of passkey, which, if we say it correctly, could open a doorway inside.”

  “What do you expect to find in there?”

  “A metaphor.”

  I turned from the wall and looked at Bill Faber questioningly.

  “A symbol, Julia. We’re looking for the stairway that Jacob saw in his dream, the means that will allow us to return to the place where we belong. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  “And what do you think Jacob’s ladder actually is?”

  “Well, we think it’s probably some kind of electromagnetic singularity that activates when these letters are pronounced correctly. The right harmonic frequency should work just like a light switch. But all of it depends on pronouncing the letters precisely and having the adamants to enhance the signal.”

  “And that’s why we need you.”

  The voice came from somewhere above us. It reverberated throughout the cave and almost knocked the wind out of me. I spun around and looked to the top of the wall and there I saw him, suspended near the opening atop the glacier.