BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2)

by Fernando Gamboa

  “The ice age?” I asked. “What are you talking about? What ice age?”

  Cassandra spread her arms as if the answer were obvious. “The last ice age, of course. The one that ended some twelve thousand years ago, which is just when that theory the professor mentioned dates the Sphinx of Giza. The ice age that kept more than a third of the planet under a layer of snow and ice, anywhere between three and nine thousand feet thick, and when today’s deserts were fertile prairies and savannahs.”

  “Forgive me,” Professor Castillo said, “but I don’t see the relationship between the two.”

  “I didn’t see it either,” she admitted, “until I remembered an article by an American geologist who claims that toward the end of the last ice age, when the ice was melting faster and the sea level was about four hundred feet below the present level—”

  “Excuse me?” I interrupted her, thinking I had misheard. “Did you just say that the sea level twelve thousand years ago was about four hundred feet below what it is today?”

  “Yes, about four hundred, if I remember correctly.”

  “I had no idea,” I admitted in amazement.

  “And you’re a diver!” the professor said joking. “You didn’t know that what you see when you swim underwater used to be solid land not so long ago?”

  “To be honest, that’s something they don’t explain in diving centers.”

  “Oh, come on. Didn’t you ever ask yourself where all that melting ice went after an ice age?”

  “The truth is, the only ice I’ve ever had any interest in is the one I put in my rum.”

  Cassandra shook her head with a look of disappointment. “Well, anyway, can I go on with my explanation?”

  “By all means.” I mocked a bow. “Please continue.”

  She cleared her throat. “As I was saying, toward the end of the ice age, the center of the glacier that occupied today’s North America melted and formed a vast sea. This immense inland sea held eight times more water than the Mediterranean.”

  I could not hold back a whistle of admiration, and she paused once again.

  “Will you let me finish!” she protested angrily.

  In response I passed two fingers along my lips to zip them up.

  “That huge inland sea,” she went on, looking at me out of the corner of her eye, “is known to geologists as the Laurentian Sea. It went on expanding with the melting until it was only separated from the ocean by a thin wall of ice. That ice dam”—she put her hands together to simulate a dam—“inevitably broke one day under the enormous pressure, and millions of cubic miles of water were released in a matter of seconds.” She separated her hands abruptly as she said this. “This created a wave fifteen hundred feet tall, a tsunami like nothing the world had ever seen before, and the planet was overwhelmed by a worldwide catastrophic flood. As a result the sea level all over the world rose more than three hundred feet in a matter of hours.”

  I was speechless, trying to imagine a wave fifteen hundred feet high hitting the coasts of the whole planet.

  “Is that really true?” Angelica asked at last in a whisper.

  “It’s no more than a theory,” Valeria said. “I’ve heard of it too.” She turned to Cassie. “What I still don’t know is what conclusion you think you’re leading to with this.”

  “Isn’t it clear enough?” Cassie said looking at each one of us in turn. “Haven’t we seen the carvings that tell of a great tsunami and how a whole island disappeared under the water? That would give us a date. And based on that event we could date everything else.”

  There was a thoughtful silence. I had no idea what to say, so it was Eduardo who spoke. “It could be…” he admitted, running his fingers through his beard. “I guess it makes sense. And when do you say this mega-tsunami could have occurred?”

  “At the end of the ice age, some twelve thousand years ago. I’m almost positive this is the origin of the Great Flood myth. And the reason why it comes up with slight variations in practically every culture on the planet. For the simple reason that it happened all over the planet! The fact is that it makes a good explanation for why the Ancients crossed the Atlantic to here, and why their island ended up under water.”

  “In that case,” the professor said, “and if we take it for granted that the creators of the Sphinx in Giza also built this one, it would confirm that they were both erected at the end of the ice age at the latest. Long before the appearance of Ancient Egypt or any other known civilization.”

  “And perhaps,” Claudio added, “they also brought the basics for the cuneiform writing we’ve only seen in the Middle East up to now, plus the architecture of pyramids and ziggurats.”

  Valeria shook her head exaggeratedly, as if she had just been told that elephants are pink and fly wonderfully. “You’re wrong,” she stated flatly. It almost looked as though she was delighted to rain on our parade. “As far as I know there’s no record of cuneiform writing being used in Mesopotamia until only five thousand years ago, which brings down this hypothesis. So if it hadn’t been invented yet, they could hardly have brought it with them, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I’d already thought of that,” Cassie said, ready to defend her hypothesis, “and I can think of a simple explanation. We’ve taken for granted that these inscriptions are inspired by the cuneiform writing of Sumer, but… what if it was the other way around?”

  “You mean—”

  “That the writing we’ve found all over this place is the real cuneiform writing. That it’s really the original, not the one in Sumer. Why not accept the possibility that the cultural current flowed the opposite way to what we’ve believed till now? Or even in both directions?”

  “Are you suggesting,” Valeria asked with obvious distrust, “that everything we know of the history of humanity is wrong and that the real origin of civilization occurred… here?” She uttered the last word as if she were referring to a pile of excrement.

  Cassandra rubbed her face with both hands, infinitely tired. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it was a round trip. First they came from there, then they went back. Who knows!” She shrugged. “Perhaps the Ancients didn’t disappear, but simply left. Or else some of them might have gone west and founded the great pre-Columbian cultures, while some others made the journey back to Africa and built the Sphinx and the pyramids!” She took a moment to recover her breath and her calm. “What’s clear is that there was some kind of relationship between both parts of the world, and that cultural exchange, which nobody has known anything about until now, would explain almost everything we’ve found in this place. In fact,” she declared, convinced, “that would give a new focus to the history of humankind and shed light on a lot of its mysteries.”

  This time not even Valeria dared to contradict Cassandra openly. As far as my humble understanding was concerned, this hypothesis sounded very solid.

  In one brush stroke it solved the question of why the legend of the Great Flood was so universal, together with the mystery of the Sphinx of Giza, the inexplicable similarity between the Mesopotamian pyramids and the ones the Maya had built. And of course, it explained the origin of the Ancients and the very existence of the city we were trapped in.

  I congratulated her with a wide smile. “I think you’ve nailed it, Cassie. If this place is as important as you say it is, I’m not surprised the Germans sent an expedition here.”

  Three heads turned to me at once.

  “Germans? What Germans?” Angelica asked.

  I was under the impression that we had already told them about our discovery. Obviously we had not.

  “Well… more or less at the other end of the city, we found a temple with the remains of a Nazi camp from the forties.”

  “Nazi?” Valeria asked. She looked at her father for confirmation. “How do you know they were Nazis?”

  “You see, the damned, great red and white flag with a swastika in the middle gave us the clue.”

  “How do you get there?” Claudio as
ked. “Would you know how to go back?”

  Cassie, the professor, and I exchanged looks and nodded.

  “Probably,” the professor replied. “But why the interest?”

  “What do you mean, why the interest?” Valeria said gesticulating wildly. “You tell me there’s been a prior expedition to this place some sixty years ago and you ask me why the interest? Can’t you see, for heaven’s sake? They might have found everything we haven’t, they might have deciphered the cuneiform symbols, they might have—”

  “Hold it, hold it,” I said raising my hands. “We’ve already been there, and I don’t think there’s anything of the sort. There was some outdated canned food, empty wooden crates, and a nice little mummified Nazi officer. The only thing that might have been of any use to you were the notebooks and journals of this officer. By the way, now I can understand why he decided to lock himself in and put a bullet in his head. But I’m afraid those are in a small red backpack which the mercenaries took away from me.”

  “Then we have to get it back!”

  I could not help but smile at her naïve determination. “Okay, sure. Do you want to go yourself, or should we ask them to bring it to us?”

  “I mean it. Those notebooks might hold the key to all this mystery. Not getting them back would be just plain irresponsible.”

  “And trying to get them back would be suicide!” I was getting annoyed by her insistence. “Whatever there might be in those notebooks, nobody else is going to die for them.”

  Once again, although I had no way of knowing it yet, I was wrong.

  68

  With the arrival of dawn we decided it would not be a good idea to stay in the sanctuary, since the mercenaries would easily find the tracks we had left the night before. The old Nazi camp, on the other hand, looked like as good a place as any to hide during the day. There was the unexpected advantage that the water was now up to our ankles, and although this made it more difficult for us to move in the forest, it would also complicate things for the mercenaries trying to follow our trail.

  What we would do once night fell again was something we did not even want to think about.

  We were tired, with circles under our eyes after the long sleepless night, but at least we were cheered by the elusive morning sunshine which filtered through the canopy of vegetation onto our faces. We headed stealthily to where we expected to meet the main stone way. Once there, we followed it toward east, praying we would not come across Souza’s men.

  An hour had gone by before we began to identify places we had already been through. After a couple of wrong turns we came out at last in the empty area that surrounded the building where the Nazis had established their small base camp, which had ended up being their last trench and finally their graveyard.

  With our new understanding of what had happened, it was clear that the graveyard crosses—with no tombs—were dedicated to the men who had “disappeared” at the hands of the Morcegos. Only the hundreds of shell cases strewn on the ground were mute witnesses to the last battle for those still surviving soldiers. It was difficult to imagine the horror they must have gone through. As for the dead officer beside his table… it was easy to guess that he had preferred to shoot himself rather than share the terrible fate of his men.

  “Amazing…” Valeria muttered when she came face to face with the ruins.

  “Why would they want to clear all the vegetation around it?” Claudio asked as he noticed the wide fringe of wasteland.

  “That’s anyone’s guess,” Cassie said. She and the Argentinian had really hit it off. “Perhaps they needed the space.”

  “I’d say they did it to defend themselves.” I was trying to imagine myself in the soldiers’ skin. “A defensive perimeter, so they could see whoever was coming.”

  “They might even have set up reflectors, or even torches, to try to repel the Morcegos,” the professor said gazing around the rim of the clearing.

  Valeria stepped up, impatiently, taking no notice of our conversation. She rubbed her hands with glee. “That’s enough talk. What are we waiting for?”

  This time I was carrying a flashlight, so that making my way through the rubble to the narrow passage was easier than before. Once there, I crawled ahead of them and came out in the great hall of the temple with its many columns.

  “Now that we know what happened to the men who were here,” the professor commented as he swept his flashlight over the columns and low ceiling, “it feels as though I can smell death.”

  “I think it’s just us, Doc. We all need a good shower,” I said trying to lighten the mood.

  We followed the route we had come by forty-eight hours before and through the building until we arrived at the barricades strewn with shell cases. I showed them the door to the room and invited them in, like a hotel concierge.

  Angelica shone her flashlight on the flag hanging on the wall. “Well, they were Nazis all right.”

  “The big question,” the professor said, “is how they found this place and what they managed to find out that we haven’t.”

  “I’d go one further,” his daughter said from the other side of the room. “What did they find and what did they take?”

  I switched off my flashlight to save batteries as I turned to her. “What makes you think they found something and took it away?”

  “Come and look at this.”

  I followed the sound of her voice, then the beam of her flashlight. It was shining on the inside of a wooden crate whose top she had lifted. She put her arm in up to her elbow and brought out a handful of wood shavings.

  “They used this to keep samples in,” she said. There was no trace of doubt in her voice.

  The first time we had been there I had not looked around so thoroughly, and what she said made sense. But there was another possibility.

  “How do you know?” I asked. “They could have used the crates to protect their own stuff when they brought it here.”

  “They could have, but they didn’t,” she said calmly. “These are sample crates. No doubt.”

  “But—” I began stubbornly.

  Before I could say anything else, she raised her index finger to call for silence. She touched the side of the crate with the same finger to point at a brief inscription, written in the tight Germanic handwriting of the beginning of the century, of which I could only decipher the number 57.

  “My grandparents were Austrian,” she said with a grin. “If I’m not mistaken, it says here: Box no. 57 Archäologischen proben. In plain English: Archeological samples. Box number 57.”

  The light of the flashlights allowed us to explore the place more thoroughly than before. We found a multitude of astronomical and topographical records, together with other objects whose purpose we could not guess. I even found an old camera on its worm-eaten tripod. More surprisingly, just a few yards from that room we found another one where they had stored the biggest and heaviest objects.

  There we found a rusty old gasoline generator, together with several empty oil barrels. Lined up along the wall there was a great quantity of rusty sealed cylinders. According to Valeria’s translation, these contained pressurized hydrogen.

  “They’d certainly come well equipped,” Claudio said. He kicked one of the barrels of gasoline. It sounded hollow.

  “Not well enough,” I said, thinking of the lost battle which had been fought on the other side of that door.

  “It must have been a purely scientific expedition,” Cassie said. “I don’t suppose they were prepared for what they came up against.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said thinking of the mummified SS officer lying on the other side of the table. “The guy in the other room doesn’t look much like a scientist, though.”

  “Make no mistake, Ulysses,” the professor said. “The Nazis weren’t just soldiers, you know. Hitler’s party was a political organization. There were military men right through to grocers in it, not to mention scientists and archeologists. So, it’s quite possible that this offi
cer who committed suicide might have been one of the few soldiers of the expedition.”

  “You may be right, professor” Angelica said while searching another shelf. “But look at this.” She showed them a handful of long rifle bullets, then dropped them back into a box full of them. “It seems a whole lot of bullets for an archeological expedition, don’t you think?”

  We all gathered around, intrigued, and Claudio was the first to comment. There was disappointment in his voice. “Pity we don’t have the right weapons to go with them.”

  “Maybe we don’t need them,” I said quickly.

  Cassie sneered. “Oh, yeah? And how do you plan to shoot them? By doing a run-up?”

  I smiled back at her. “I’m only saying we should take them with us. They might be useful.”

  “If you wish, Ulysses.” The professor shrugged and pointed behind him with his thumb. “But they weren’t much use to the people out there, were they?”

  69

  Once we were outside again, we decided to sit beside the entrance and enjoy the bright sunshine in that unusually treeless area. Paradoxically, even though we were deep in a hot tropical forest, the feel of the direct sunshine on us was a rare luxury.

  After a thorough search of the building behind us, we had discovered that there were no more rooms apart from the ones the Germans had used. As we had expected, all the rusty rifles and machine guns we had found on the floor were useless. In the end we could only recover a couple of rusty military knives with swastikas on their hilts, a small but heavy box of bullets, a glass bottle with a couple of pints of gasoline squeezed from the dregs of the barrels… and a new series of unanswered questions that kept piling up, one after another.

  I climbed on top of a fallen column beside the portico and lay down, trying to relax. I was there for quite a while, hearing the others talk a few yards away.

  “But then,” Valeria said, “if the one we’ve seen is sample box number fifty-seven… where are the other fifty-six?”