Area 51

CHAPTER 14

“Who did you call?” Turcotte asked, as he toweled his hair.

While Von Seeckt had been on the phone, Turcotte had taken a shower and cleaned himself up. Kelly had run out and gone to a Wal-Mart to buy him a loose-fitting pair of pants and a shirt to replace his torn and sooty jumpsuit. He felt more human now. The stitches that Cruise had put in his arm were holding up well.

“I left a message for a Professor Nabinger.” Von Seeckt held up the crumpled piece of paper he had in his hand. “I believe he may hold the key to understanding the mothership.”

“Who is Nabinger?” Kelly asked.

“An archaeologist with the Brooklyn Museum.”

“Okay, time out,” Turcotte said. “I thought I was halfway up to speed with all this, but now you’ve lost me.”

“When they discovered the mothership,” Von Seeckt said, “they also found tablets with what are called high runes on them. We have never been able to decipher the tablets, but it appears that Professor Nabinger might be able to.” Von Seeckt’s fingers ran over the head of his cane. “The only problem is that we have to get access to the tablets to show them to the professor.”

“We are not going back into Area 51,” Turcotte said flatly. “Gullick will have our heads if we go back in there. And they’ll find us here soon enough too.”

“The tablets aren’t there,” Von Seeckt said. “They’re being held at the Majic-12 facility in Dulce, New Mexico. That is why I said we must go there.”

Turcotte sat down in an easy chair and rubbed his forehead. “So you’re agreeing with Kelly and say that we should go to Dulce. I assume whatever facility is there is highly classified also. So we’re just going to break in, rescue this reporter Johnny Simmons, get these tablets, decipher them, and then what?” “We make public the threat,” Von Seeckt said. He looked at Kelly. “That’s your job.”

“Oh, I’ve been hired?” Kelly asked.

“No, sounds to me like you volunteered like I did,” Turcotte said with a sarcastic laugh. “Sort of like people used to volunteer to charge across no-man’s-land in World War I. Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to pick up hitchhikers?”

Von Seeckt’s voice was grim. “None of us in this room has any choice. We either expose what they are planning to do at Area 51 in four days and stop it or we — and many others — die.”

“I’m not sure I buy into the danger this mothership holds,” Turcotte said.

Von Seeckt shook the piece of paper with the message from Nabinger on it. “This confirms my suspicions!”

Turcotte glanced at Kelly and she returned the look. For all they knew Von Seeckt could be a total crackpot. The only reason Turcotte even began to believe the old man was the fact that Cruise had tried to kill him. That meant someone took him seriously enough to want to get rid of him. Of course, they might want to kill him because he was a crackpot, but Turcotte thought it best to keep that thought to himself. He didn’t feel on very firm ground; after all, his phone call had been to a number that was disconnected, so his story didn’t hold up much better than those of the other two people in the room.

Von Seeckt had told him about Duncan being in the Cube. She might be legitimate, she might not. Turcotte’s training told him that when he didn’t have enough information he had to make the best possible choice. Going to Dulce seemed like a good way to at least accumulate more information from both Von Seeckt and Kelly on the way there.

“All right,” Turcotte said. “Let’s stop yacking and get going.”

Less than a hundred miles east of Miami, the islands that made up Bimini were scattered across the ocean like small green dots. It was in the sparkling blue water around those dots that massive stone blocks had been found that had fueled speculation that Atlantis had once been there.

Peter Nabinger didn’t have the time to dive to see the blocks. Besides, he’d already seen pictures of them. He was here to see the woman who had taken the pictures and then stayed to study them further.

As he walked the short distance from the tiny dirt-strip airport to the village where Slater lived, Nabinger reflected on the only other time he’d seen the woman. It had been at an archaeological convention in Charleston, South Carolina. Slater had presented a paper on the stones in the shallow waters off her island home. It had not been received well. Not because her groundwork and research had been faulty, but because some of the conclusions she had proposed had gone against the prevailing winds of the world of academic archaeology. What had fascinated Nabinger was that a few of Slater’s slides showed forms of high runes etched into the underwater stonework. He’d gotten copies of the slides and they’d helped him decipher a few more high rune symbols.

However, the chilly, in fact hostile, reception her presentation had received had convinced Nabinger to keep his own studies quiet.

Nabinger wiped the sweat from his brow and adjusted his backpack. At the conference Slater had not seemed particularly perturbed at the attacks on her theories. She had smiled, packed her bags, and gone back to her island.

Her attitude had seemed to suggest that they could take it or leave it. Until someone came up with some better ideas and supported them, she was sticking to hers. Nabinger had been impressed with that self-confident attitude. Of course, she didn’t have a museum board of directors or an academic review board for tenure looking over her shoulder, either, so she could afford to be aloof.

He looked down at the card she had given him at the conference — a small map photocopied on the back pointed the way to her house. She’d given it to him when he’d asked for copies of the slides. “We don’t have street names on my island,” she had told him. “If you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t get there. But don’t worry, you can walk everywhere from the airfield or the dock.”

Nabinger spotted a shock of white hair above a garden of green surrounding a small cottage. As the woman turned around, he recognized Slater. She put a hand over her eyes and watched him approach. Slater was in her late sixties and had come to archaeology late in life, after retiring from a career as a mineral- and geologic-rights lawyer representing various environmental groups — the reason she could afford to go her own way and another reason she irritated the archaeological old guard.

“Good day, young man,” she called out as he turned into her drive. “Ms. Slater, I’m—”

“Peter Nabinger, Brooklyn Museum,” she said. “I may be old and getting a little long in the tooth, but I still have my mind. Did you take a wrong turn on the Nile? If I remember rightly, that was your area of expertise.”

“I just flew in here from Cairo, via the puddle jumper from Miami,” Nabinger said.

“Iced tea?” Slater asked, extending her hand toward the door and leading him in.

“Thank you.”

They walked into the cool shadows of the house. It was a small bungalow, nicely furnished, with books and papers piled everywhere. She cleared a stack of papers from a folding chair. “Sit down, please.”

Nabinger settled down and accepted the glass she gave him. Slater sat down on the floor, leaning her back against a couch covered with photographs. “So what brings you here, Mr. Egypt? Do you want more photos of the markings on the stones?”

“I was thinking about the paper you presented in Charleston last year,” Nabinger began, not quite sure how to get to what he wanted to know.

“That was eleven months and six days ago,” Slater said. “I would like to think your brain works a little quicker than that, or we might have a long day here. Please, Mr. Nabinger, you are here for a reason. I am not your professor at school. You can ask questions even if they seem silly. I’ve asked many silly questions in my life and I never regretted a one, but I have some regrets about the times I kept my mouth shut when I should have spoken up.”

Nabinger nodded. “Are you familiar with the Nazi cult of Thule?”

Slater slowly put down her glass. “Yes.” She was thoughtful for a moment. “Do you know that about ten years ago there was a great controversy in the medical community about using certain historical data to study hypothermia?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “The best data ever documented on hypothermia was developed by Nazi doctors immersing concentration camp inmates in freezing vats of water and recording their decreasing bodily functions until they died. They also took some out of the water before they died and tried to resuscitate them by warming them up in various ways — which invariably failed to work. Not exactly something your typical medical researcher can do, but entirely realistic if you’re looking for accuracy.

“The decision the American medical community made was that data gathered in such a brutal and inhuman manner should not be used, even if it advanced current medical science and eventually saved lives. I do not know how you would feel about that issue. I don’t even know how I feel about it.”

Slater paused, then smiled. “Now I am the one circling the subject. But you must understand the situation. Of course, I have read the papers and documents available on the cult of Thule and on the Nazis’ fascination with Atlantis. It is part of my area of study. But there are those who would violently oppose any use of that information, so, as eccentric as some of my theories do seem, I have had to keep that particular piece of information out of my own papers and presentations.”

Nabinger leaned forward. “What have you found?”

“Why do you want to know?” Slater asked.

Nabinger reached into his backpack and pulled out his sketchbook. He handed her the drawing and rough translation. “That’s from the wall in the lower chamber of the Great Pyramid.” He checked his watch. He had to catch his return flight to Miami in an hour and a half. He proceeded to quickly relate Kaji’s story of Germans opening up the chamber in 1942, ending it by showing her Von Seeckt’s dagger. He then described his efforts at deciphering the high runes and the message he had taken off the wall of the chamber.

Slater heard him out. “This reference to a home place. Do you think that is reference to a place on the far side of the Atlantic?”

“Yes. And that’s why I’m here. Because the Germans — if they did go into that chamber in 1942, which I’m not absolutely convinced of yet despite the dagger— had to have gotten their information about the chamber from somewhere. Perhaps the Germans found writing somewhere that got them to that chamber, if you follow my logic.”

“I follow your logic.” Slater handed the drawing back. “In the early days of World War II, German U-boats operated extensively along the East Coast of the United States and here in the islands. They sank quite a bit of shipping. But they also conducted some other missions.

“As you have talked with this Kaji fellow in Egypt, I have talked to some of the old fishermen here in the islands, who know the waters and the history. They say that in 1941 there were numerous sightings of German submarines moving here among the islands. And that the submarines did not seem interested in hunting ships — since we are off the main shipping lanes here — but rather to be looking for something in the waters around the islands.”

Slater reached behind her and gathered some photos. “I think this is what they found.”

She handed them over. They appeared to be the same photos that she had presented at the conference. Large stone blocks, closely fitted together in about fifty feet of water.

Slater talked as Nabinger looked at the photos. “They might have been part of the outer wall of a city or part of a quay. There is no way of knowing, with large portions covered with coral and other underwater life and the sea bottom close by sloping off into unexplored depths. This section with the stones might be just a tiny part of a larger ancient site, or may be the only site, built there thousands of years ago when that area was above water. Built by a people we don’t know about, for a reason we can’t yet figure out.

“The major pattern of the stones is a long J or more accurately a horseshoe with the open end to the northeast. All told it’s about a third of a mile long in about fifty feet of water. Some of the stones are estimated to weigh almost fifteen tons, so they didn’t get there by accident and whoever did put them in place had a very advanced engineering capability. You can barely get a knife point in the joints between some of those stones.”

Slater stood up and leaned over Nabinger’s shoulder and pointed. “There.” There was a large, ragged gouge in one of the blocks.

“And this is?” Nabinger asked.

Slater shuffled through the photos. “Here,” she said, handing him a close-up of the scar on the block.

Nabinger peered at it. There were other, very faint, older marks — writing around the edges of the gouge! Very similar to what was in his notebook, but the gouge had destroyed any chance of deciphering it!

“What happened to this stone?” Nabinger asked.

“As near as I can tell,” Slater said, “it was hit by a torpedo.” She touched the picture, running her fingers over the high runes. “I’ve seen others like these. Ancient markings destroyed sometime in the last century by modern weapons.” Nabinger nodded. “They’re just like the ones I deciphered from the lower chamber. Not traditional hieroglyphics, but the older, high rune language.”

Slater walked over to a desk buried under stacks of folders and books. She rummaged through, then found what she was looking for. “Here,” she said, handing Nabinger a folder. “You are not the only one interested in the high rune language.”

He opened it. It was full of photos of high runes. Written on walls, on mud slabs, carved into rock — in just about every possible way by which ancient cultures had recorded their affairs. “Where did you take these photos?” Nabinger asked, his heart pounding with the thought of the potential information he held in his hands. He recognized several of the shots — the Central American site that had helped him begin his breaking of the rune code.

“There’s an index in the folder detailing where each photo was shot — they’re numbered. But, basically, several locations. Here, under the waves. In Mexico, near Veracruz. In Peru, at Tucume. On Easter Island. On some of the islands in Polynesia. Some from your neck of the woods in the Middle East — Egypt and Mesopotamia.”

“The same symbols?” Nabinger asked, thumbing through the photos. He had seen many of the same ones before, but there were a few new ones in there to add to his high rune database.

“Some differences. In fact, many differences,” Slater answered. “But, yes, I believe they all stem from the same root language and are connected. A written language that predates the oldest recorded language that is generally accepted by historians.”

Nabinger closed the binder. “I have been studying these runes for many years. I’ve seen a lot of what you have in here before — in fact I was able to decipher what I did of the wall of the chamber in the Great Pyramid using symbols from a South American site. But the question that bothers me — and why I have never made public my findings — is how can the same ancient writing have been found in such vastly separated places?”

Slater sat back down. “Are you familiar with the diffusionist theory of civilization?”

“Yes, I am,” Nabinger said. He knew what Slater was referring to despite the fact that the prevailing winds of thought this decade blew in favor of the isolationist theory of civilization. Isolationists believed that the ancient civilizations all developed independent of one another. Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China, Egypt — all crossed a threshold into civilization about the same time: around the third or fourth century before the birth of Christ.

Nabinger had heard the argument many times. Isolationists cite natural evolution to explain this curious bit of synchronicity. They also explain many common points in the archaeological finds of these civilizations as due to man’s genetic commonality. Thus the fact that there are pyramids in Peru, in Egypt, in Indochina, in North America — some made of stone, some of earth, some of mud, but remarkably similar to one another given the distances between those sites — all that is just because each society as it developed had a natural tendency to do the same thing.

Nabinger himself found this a bit of a leap. It would have been quite a genetic coup if all these civilizations should also have developed this same ancient high rune writing and then abandoned it, well before the first hieroglyphics were being etched on papyrus.

The diffusionists argued the other side of the civilization coin, and Nabinger felt more affinity for their stance. They believed that those civilizations rose at approximately the same time on the cosmic scale — and exhibited all those similarities, including the high runes — because those civilizations had all been started by people from a single earlier civilization.

There were problems with the diffusionist theory, though — serious problems — and that is why Nabinger kept his views on the subject to himself. The strongest argument against the diffusionist theory was that there was no way for people from these different locations to have communicated with one another or have had any social or cultural intercourse. Those early people would have had to cross the Atlantic and the Pacific, according to diffusionist theory. They had a hard enough time even sailing around on the Mediterranean at that epoch, never mind crossing the oceans.

Slater’s face wrinkled as she smiled. “And you know who the number-one spokesperson for the diffusionists is, don’t you?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Leif Jorgenson. The man who sailed the Atlantic in a Viking ship to prove that Europeans were in North America long before Christopher Columbus. And who floated from Indonesia to the Hawaiian islands on a wood raft to support his theory that the islands were colonized from the west.

“But he’s taken all that — and more — a step further in the last ten years. He’s currently working the recently discovered ruins in Mesoamerica, looking at pyramids and the Mayan calendar and — guess what? — new high runes discovered there.

“Four years ago Jorgenson uncovered a massive site in Mexico near Jamiltepec. Over twenty large earthen and stone pyramids covering almost seven hundred acres on the west coast of Mexico, less than two miles from the Pacific Ocean. It had been covered by the jungle and because of the mountains around it was accessible only by sea.

“At the site he found further evidence of cross-cultural communication at a time earlier than traditional historians say is possible. There was jewelry made with gems that could only have been mined over two thousand miles away in South America. Stonework very similar to that at other sites, some on the other side of the Pacific in Oceania. He has in his possession hard evidence of a certain degree of interaction among widely spread peoples many centuries ago, but he is basically being ignored by the mainstream scientific community because they simply do not believe it is possible.”

Nabinger was aware of the find, but he didn’t want to offend Slater. After all, he’d come to her. “How does Jorgenson think civilization originated?”

“He believes that there was an original culture of white-skinned, long-eared, pyramid-building, rune-writing people living and flourishing at what he calls the ‘zero point,’” Slater replied. “And that civilization spread out from that zero point at what he calls a ‘zero time’—just prior to civilization developing simultaneously at all those other places that we are now studying. Civilization came from the zero point.”

“And where is the zero point?” Nabinger asked, even though he had a very good idea of what the answer would be.

“It is the place so many legends call Atlantis.”

“And that is why you are so familiar with his theories,” Nabinger said.

“Yes. Because there are connections that have not been adequately explained.” She paused. “Let me put it this way. Most people dismiss Jorgenson’s zero-point theory based on physical impracticality. They say that there is no way man at that time — somewhere around four thousand B.C. — could have made it from the zero point to the other locations around the globe, regardless of where you place the zero point. They would have had to cross the oceans.

“Jorgenson’s reply is that while there is not enough scientific evidence to convincingly support his theory, there is also not enough to refute it. If you assume there was a way ancient man could have crossed the oceans and spread, then the evidence falls into place. Thus all the sea journeys Jorgenson has undertaken in replicas of old sailing vessels.”

She tapped the translation Nabinger had given her. “I must give you credit, young man, for pursuing your study of the commonalities among the high runes, in defiance of the common theories. Obviously it has brought you success that many other scientists and investigators have failed to find because they accepted the standard theories and could not see the greater possibilities in thinking differently. I have tried my own hand at translating the high runes, but it is not my area of expertise.”

“Let’s get back to the Atlantis idea,” Nabinger said, checking his watch again.

“Jorgenson believes — and as you know there is scientific data to support this — that there was a major geological event in the Atlantic Ocean somewhere around 3400 B.C. Pretty much every culture around the globe refers to a great flood at about that time. Even the Tibetan Book of the Dead talks of a large land mass sinking into the sea at that time, and they are on the other side of the world from the Atlantic.

“And there are so many legends referring to the same thing: a great civilization in the middle of an ocean, destroyed by fire or flood! The Mayans called Atlantis Mu. The northern Europeans called it Thule. There was also the land called Lemuria — which a Madame Blavatsky picked up for her own cult of Thule — which is the question you started this meeting with.

“Lemuria was a land that scientists in the nineteenth century postulated must have existed because of the presence on Madagascar of a certain type of monkey, the lemur, that was also found in India. They believed Lemuria had been in the Indian Ocean. Blavatsky’s followers, with the stroke of their pens, moved Lemuria to the Pacific, tying the legend in with the statues on Easter Island, which loops us back to Jorgenson’s large-eared race. The statues on Easter Island are of, as you also know, a large-eared people.”

Slater laughed. “I can tell you even better myths and stories. In 1922 another German published a book about Atlantis and claimed it had originally been occupied by a genetically perfect people. But the perfection was marred when an outside woman arrived and taught them how to ferment alcohol. So much for the perfect society. Because of this imperfection Atlantis was then destroyed by the tail of a comet! The continent burned and only a handful of people escaped.”

“Where do these people get their ideas from?” Nabinger asked.

“Ah, ever the scientist,” Slater said. “You want source material?” She went to her crowded desk and searched for a minute, before pulling out a dog-eared hardcover book.

“This is the original mention of Atlantis from the Timaeus, a treatise on Pythagorean philosophy written by Plato. I have it here in the original Greek. Allow a little bit of leeway for my translation, as I don’t often converse in the language.”

She turned several pages and ran her finger down the writing. “As is traditional with the Greeks, this manuscript takes the form of a dialogue among several persons, Socrates being one of them. In this passage Solon is telling the story of some of the Greek legends — for example the flood of Deukalion and Pyrrha. He is rebuked by an older priest: Solon, you Greeks are children. There have been and will be many destructors of mankind, of which the greatest are by fire and water.”

She turned a few pages.

Slater looked up from the book. “There are many who believe Plato is referring to North and South America, but then those people run into the same problem that Jorgenson has. The technology of the day rules out an ocean voyage across the Atlantic, so whatever Plato is referring to, if it is real, had to be closer to Europe. Of course, Plato is also saying something that goes against conventional thought: that the ocean outside the Pillars of Hercules, the Strait of Gibraltar, was navigable to people at that time.”

She turned another page.

“And now for an especially interesting detail,” Slater said.

Slater smiled. “You know, of course, about the Sargasso Sea to the east of here. And the water around the islands here is relatively shallow in many places. If the ocean level were a bit lower, it would be almost impassable to most ships.”

“So you believe you are sitting on the site of Atlantis?” Nabinger asked.

“I don’t know,” Slater said candidly. She pulled a volume off her bookshelf. “Take this with you, along with photographs of the runes. It has more about the legend of Atlantis that you might want to look at. I hope I have given you the information you wanted.”

“That and more,” Nabinger assured her, although there was little she had told him that he didn’t know and he already had most of the high rune images on file. He had just enough time to get to the airport and catch the hop back to Miami and continue with his trip. He hoped Von Seeckt had more.

“One thing,” Slater said as they walked to the door. “What do you think was in the black box that was taken out of the pyramid?”

Nabinger paused. “I don’t have a clue.”

Slater nodded. “My reference earlier to the use of data from the concentration camps: I did not make that idly. This man you are after, this German, Von Seeckt. If he is part of what I think he is part of, then you might be getting into something that you need to be very careful of.”

“And that is?” Nabinger felt the minutes to his flight tick down.

“Ask him when you see him,” Slater said. “If he evades answering, ask him specifically about Operation Paperclip.”

“What was that?”

“Something I heard whispers about when I worked in Washington.” Slater stepped back toward her house.

“Is there anything else I should know?” Nabinger asked, poised at her gate.

“I know you were humoring me,” Slater said. “You knew nearly everything I told you, but you stopped by anyway. Why?”

“It was on the way,” Nabinger answered honestly. “But also, I hoped you might have some new information, since you keep up with this area of research. Your information on Von Seeckt might prove helpful.”

Slater was standing in the shadow cast by the peaked roof of the house. “They found something unusual at the Jamiltepec site in Mexico about eight months ago.”

That was news to Nabinger. “What did Jorgenson find?”

“Jorgenson didn’t find it,” Slater said. “I have only heard rumors. Jorgenson was away lecturing. His people were deep under the main pyramid when they found a passageway leading down. They were getting ready to open it when they were shut down. The Mexican army came in claiming that it was an historical site, but anyone with enough cash could have had them do that.”

“What happened?” Nabinger asked.

“From the whispers I’ve heard, it appears that Jorgenson’s team had been infiltrated. Some say by the Mexican government, since it was their army that shut the dig down; others say it was the CIA. That’s because there are rumors that Americans were seen working the site after Jorgenson’s people had to clear out. He made a stink, but once the Mexican government pulled his authorization there was little he could do.”

“Any idea what was down there?”

“Not a clue, my son. Not a clue. But you might want to ask Von Seeckt.”