by Hep Aldridge
“Got it,” I said.
“She spent the next four years behind a desk with promises of being able to return to the field going unfulfilled. She got fed up with the bureaucratic bullshit, and that’s when I snagged her. She’s back to full field operations and is still a great analyst."
“So, we could use her as needed?"
“Yep, that is if she agrees… and she will act as a conduit to Wilson on the money side of things."
Dimitri was beside himself and said, “Great idea!"
Fitz looked at him with a slight grin and said, “I thought you might like that.”
I said to Fitz, “Okay, then let’s do it."
Fitz now touched the table-top, and a voice responded,
“Yes, Colonel?”
“Have O’Reilly report to my location ASAP.”
"Yes, Sir, Colonel," the voice replied.
Fitz said, “When she gets here, I’ll bring her up to speed and brief her on our plans; from then on, she will be a part of your team and under your command Colt, chopper too!"
O’Reilly arrived a few minutes later, took a seat at the table, and Fitz did his briefing thing.
When he finished, she turned to us, smiled and said, "Sounds like fun." O’Reilly said she would contact Wilson and get things moving on the financials. Joe said he would contact Gus on the Falcon and bring him up to speed on the plan to search for the galleon. Joe also reminded me that Lawrence would arrive at OIA in about an hour and a half. He had made his excuses to his lady friend and gotten a ride on a corporate charter jet that had left LAX about three and a half hours ago.
It had cost him a full three-day spa treatment for his companion and a first-class ticket home, but he had pulled it off. O’Reilly volunteered to fly over and pick him up once he got in. Dimitri volunteered to tag along, just so he could bring Lawrence up to speed before they got back here.
O’Reilly said, “Fine, if it’s okay with you, Boss?” The way the two of them were grinning, rather than get into a protracted discussion, I agreed.
Fitz said, "Now that we know how we will proceed, I think we need to get back into the lab and turn our attention to the contents of the crate." We left the conference room, going our separate ways. Joe said he would join us as soon he contacted Gus and pulled out his cell phone.
Back in the lab, there was not much new. Tests continued to be conducted with everything the two techs could throw at the cube, and I think they were about to go looking for a kitchen sink. No new information.
Joe had rejoined the group and walked over to the table with the stones and blocks on it.
After a couple of minutes, he said, “Colt, come here and look at this." He was standing at the table with the ingots spread out, and next to them, the contents of the two leather pouches were in separate piles.
As I walked over to him, he was staring at one ingot and running his hand through the faceted stones and spreading them out.
"What’s up?” I asked as I got to the table.
He never looked up but said, “I’m not sure yet, maybe nothing.” He had one finger of his right hand poised over the engraving at the center of an ingot and with his left he was rummaging through the cut and polished stones. In a few seconds, he stopped and said, “Here,” as he picked up a ruby somewhat in the shape of an ellipse. I looked to where his finger on his right hand was pointing and saw a similar design cut into the silvery surface.
“No way,” I said as he brought the stone closer to the ingot. By now everybody had gathered around and was looking at the table top.
Joe looked up at me and said, “What do you think?"
"I don’t know,” I said and looked at the faces peering down, including the techs’, “try it and see.” Joe slipped the ruby into the niche and it slid perfectly into place.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Fitz said.
“Nice decoration,” Joe interjected, and we were all admiring how it looked when from each side of the engraved ellipse, a lace pattern of silvery spider webs covered the ends, locking the gem in place. It was then we heard the low humming that came from the bejeweled ingot!
"Holy shit," one of the techs shouted, “You turned it on!”
Joe said, stepping gingerly back from the table, “Turned what on?"
"The silver block thing."
The other tech shouted, "Turn it off; turn it off!" The hum was increasing, still low, sounding like a small turbine spinning up. The ruby was glowing ever so faintly, and most everyone was backing away from the table except Joe and me.
"Shit, turn the damn thing off; we don't have a clue what it’s doing,” Fitz shouted.
Joe said, his voice rising, "Turn it off? I don’t even know how I turned it on!" I leaned over the block and pressed my finger against the uncovered center of the ruby and the hum immediately diminished. I heard everyone exhale in one whoosh the breath they had been holding.
“How did you do that?” one tech asked.
“I touched it,” I said. At that moment, Joe reached out and touched the stone again and immediately, the low hum began… Joe touched it again, and it stopped.
Fitz said, “Joe will you stop that shit? You may blow us all to hell and back. We have no idea what that thing is."
Joe said, "I think maybe I do." As he touched it, the hum started again. He let it continue a minute, listening intently, as it rose to a low level and got no louder. We also noticed the ruby’s glow was back. He touched it again, and the hum stopped; he then slid his finger-tip across the entire stone, including the spider web-lace work at both ends and the lace disappeared, and we heard a very low popping sound as the stone raised up slightly from its resting place in the engraved niche. Joe reached down, picked it up, and looked at us, grinning from ear to ear, “Found the on and off switch, boys!"
We stood and stared in disbelief. Johnson, the tech said, “You could have killed us all.”
Joe, still grinning, said, “Well, we said we needed answers; now we have some!"
“Like what?” Fitz stormed.
“Like, I believe this block is some kind of power supply, and it's activated or turned on and off by placing this stone in the engraved niche on it.”
“Yeah, but what does it do?” Fitz bellowed.
“Hell I don’t know, This shit didn’t come with instructions,” Joe replied.
I stepped in then and said, "Okay, guys, take it easy." Everyone’s adrenaline was running wild. I mean how often do you get a chance to start up an alien device, not knowing what it does and having no idea how to shut it down… Okay, that was pretty scary for a minute or two… or maybe three. All right, it scared the shit out of all of us for a time, but nothing happened, and we came away with some answers without destroying the world as we know it. I’d say that was a good thing!
Joe was now looking at the other blocks of silver metal. He picked up a cut sapphire and placed it into a corresponding niche on one of them, and the same thing happened. A spider web of silver threads encased two-thirds of the stone, and a low hum started again. Joe touched the stone, and the hum quit, slid his finger across the stone, and the silvery threads disappeared and there was the slight pop as the stone left its resting place.
Joe, looking very pleased with himself, said, “I think we have just found our first hard evidence concerning these stones and ingots. The stones activate the blocks. How? I have no idea, and the blocks generate something. I’m guessing some kind of power or energy based on the humming sound we heard. That’s providing we can apply our world knowledge of power and physics to this stuff, which I’m not sure is entirely possible.” With that, he turned, rubbed his hands together, and with a Cheshire cat grin on his face said, “Now, for the cube.”
Chapter Nineteen
Unfortunately, the cube proved to be more problematic than Joe had expected, and after four days, we were no closer to having any answers about it than when we started. Fitz had brought in two new members to our team from his Skunk Works division, a theoretical ph
ysicist and an electronics engineer. They had been given the invisible cloth to work with as well as assisting Johnson and Stevens as needed. Stevens was working on the silver ingots and gems while Johnson worked on the cube dilemma. Fitz had expanded our work space to an adjacent lab, and it had become a beehive of activity.
Lawrence had gotten in, and Joe was right, he was pissed that we didn’t contact him right away with our discoveries. Too bad, we all agreed, maybe next time he will stick around a little more and arrange his personal schedule to accommodate the important stuff. True to his word, though, he had followed through on all our legal paperwork and we were incorporated and would soon receive our permits/leases in the area we wanted to search for the galleon from the feds. We had brought Gus up to speed, and he was adding another crew member to the Falcon, another one of his shipmates from Nam. In the meantime, I had put Junkyard (Nils) and Lawrence in charge of the galleon recovery efforts. The rest of us focused on the contents of the crate and the story in the journal. It became obvious that a trip to South America was in our future if we were ever going to get to the bottom of this.
We had spent a week at Fitz’s compound eating and sleeping in the dormitories; the rest of our waking hours were in the labs. Lawrence and Nils had headed back to the coast to gear up the search operations for the galleon. They were closing down the ecology company cover we had been using, thanks to Fitz, and replacing it with our Risky Business Ltd. information. Thus, making us a new legit salvage operation based out of Port Canaveral.
Wilson had set up our finances, and our company was solvent with a nice bank account, holding donated funds from numerous sources, many anonymous but all legal, more or less. It was from a part of the gold we had already found and an untraceable conduit to replenish funds when necessary was set up.
Things were coming together on most fronts, but the cube still had us stymied, and the frustration was building. The techs all agreed that the smaller cubes were generating some kind of energy or power when activated by the gems, but they couldn’t figure out what kind or how the stones activated them. I kept hearing, “But the laws of physics don’t allow for that.”
I came into the lab a week later to find a heated discussion going on amongst the techs over the laws of physics topic with Joe sitting on a stool at a distance, taking it all in.
As I entered, he looked at me with an exasperated expression, shook his head, and stood up from the stool and said in a loud voice to the techs, "Gentlemen, I know you have over a half a dozen PhD’s between you from many prestigious institutions. I have been listening to the same laws of physics bullshit discussion for the last four days, and I’m fed up with it. It should be obvious to guys as smart as you that our laws of physics may not apply here or at least physics as we know it. So, maybe it’s time to break out the old copies of Star Trek and Star Wars and build a new paradigm of physics, taking into consideration something other than Our laws and start thinking outside the Goddamn box for a change!"
He turned and stomped toward the door and, as he passed me, he said, “Shit, I only have a master’s degree, and I figured that shit out two days ago,” and left the room.
The techs all looked at one another and, after a minute or so, one said, “Was he serious?” to his colleagues.
I spoke up and said, “Dead serious, let me see if I can help you understand where he’s coming from. One, we pretty much know this stuff is alien in origin, and I mean alien as from out there,” I said as I pointed to the ceiling. "Two, it was brought to this planet, not just dropped out of the sky by the aforementioned aliens. Three, since they came to our planet and brought this highly advanced stuff, that means they must have developed some type of interstellar ship and drive system or created some other technological way to get them here. Four, if their technology accommodated that, then their tech must be far beyond what we now know and understand here on Earth. So, five, the laws that govern their physical universe are either very different from ours or quantum leaps ahead of where we are now. Therefore, we need to explore science fiction more as science fact and start coming up with new theories on all this stuff without the constraints of our laws of Physics. Does that help you guys?” I asked.
They stood there with their collective mouths open. "Yes, Sir, I guess so,” one of them finally said.
“Good,” I said, "then I’ll let you geniuses get back to doing your genius stuff," and as I turned to leave the lab, I looked back over my shoulder and said, "Oh, and by the way, May the Force be with you."
Doc was still busy with the translation and analysis of the friar’s journal; working on the translation of the text on top of the cube and monitoring his people in Spain who were trying to track down the owner of the signet ring. Luckily, he had some superb contacts in Seville to help with the archive search and so he was concentrating on the first two items.
Tony had his face glued to his computer screens, working on the binary code mystery he had found on the cube, and Fitz’s nerds were laboring over their physics quandary. This meant Dimitri, Joe, and I didn’t have a lot to occupy our time, so we headed back to the coast to work on a plan for our inevitable expedition to Ecuador.
Since O’Reilly was now part of our team, she flew the chopper to the Lair and met us there. I think we all were ready for a good night’s sleep in our own beds, and once we got O’Reilly settled in an office at the Lair that we had converted into a bunk room, we all headed our separate ways. We planned on staying in touch with everyone at Fitz’s base through our video and Com-link, and they all assured us they would let us know if they came up with anything.
Sleep tried very hard to elude me, but a hot shower and a pair of Scotch’s later, I dozed off. After a decent night’s rest, I met up with the rest of the team at the Lair the next morning. The smell of freshly brewed coffee, fresh pastries, and hot breakfast sandwiches bought by O’Reilly during her morning ten-mile run really kicked us into gear, and we began laying the groundwork for our trip.
Of course, O’Reilly told us not to get used to the breakfast service; we were just lucky she was hungry when she got up and hit the pavement.
“Next time, Boss, it’s someone else’s turn,” she said in a rather loud and fake gruff voice, as she handed me the bill for the food with a wink and a slight smile. No one would take this lady for granted, that’s for sure, I thought.
With the information Doc had provided us from the journal, we identified the location for the start of our South American investigations. It was in the Tayos region on the eastern side of the Andes in Ecuador. It was a very mountainous, jungle region of the country. O’Reilly jumped right in, and her skills in research and data analysis proved invaluable. There were a number of stories about the Metal Library or Golden Library in popular media. We read about a number of past expeditions that had gone in search of it. We sifted through everything we could find on-line and compiled as much information as we could.
However, trying to pull out the kernels of truth from the copious amounts of fiction out there proved to be challenging. With what we had already discovered, we found that a lot that would be considered Sci-Fi fantasy before our discoveries was, in fact closer to the truth, and much that was presented as fact was closer to fiction. This was a strange twist for internet information. Slowly, we built a picture of the mysterious caves at Tayos and the past and current investigations into the library’s whereabouts.
The Hall expedition back in ‘76 had been the most extensive investigation of the Tayos caves to date. Stanley Hall, a Scotsman adventurer, put together a large expedition to the Tayos region. Cavers, the military, and others joined forces, and they did a good job of exploring and mapping the supposed cave location. He received quite a bit of international press coverage and funding, primarily because one of the team members was astronaut Neil Armstrong.
After an extensive search of the cave, they found nothing remotely resembling a library. So, the question became, where do we go from here? We knew our true mission informatio
n had to be kept a secret, and we had to use the information we had to find the real location of the library. This would take detective work and a fair amount of acting on our part.
We decided our trip to Ecuador would have to appear just like any other group of treasure hunters or adventurers hoping to find the library. That shouldn’t be hard because that’s just what we were. The only difference was that we knew the library was real. After gathering as much information as we could, maps, expedition stories, supposed first-hand narratives, we made a list of supplies and equipment we would need. We had to be careful not to go over the top with this and draw any more attention to ourselves than previous groups of adventurer/vacationers had in their searches.
After ten days of work, we had a plan, supplies, and equipment in hand or on order, and were planning to enter the country quietly and legally. To maintain our cover, we decided not to use any of Fitz’s offered travel resources but use commercial travel and purchase anything else we might need once we arrived in country. This would include setting up a base of operations and purchasing a used four-wheel-drive SUV for transport. We had all agreed, much to Dimitri’s dismay, not to try and bring firearms into the country, and also to minimize our carrying of all the high-tech toys that Fitz offered. Keep it low key and try to fly under the radar was my mantra. Fitz was concerned for our safety, based on some recent Intel he had received about the area we were heading into, hostile actions against tourists and travelers by the local bad guys or Banditos. He also had it on good authority that the Columbian drug cartels had routes through the mountains in that area to move their product. They reportedly had been responsible for several deaths of those that had been traveling in the wrong area at the wrong time, both locals and international tourists.
He finally relented when we agreed to take two encrypted SAT phones at least. He said there is a number hidden in their electronic memory that would immediately put us in touch with him, directly, and also that we would be contacted by Uncle Harold once we were established at our base of operations.