The Sphinx

CHAPTER 4

The gusts of wind coming off the peaks picked up sand and carried the fine particles with them, limiting visibility to less than two hundred feet in any direction. Area 51 was completely covered by the storm.

Captain Mike Turcotte kept one hand on the goggles strapped around his head, the other on the MP-5 submachine gun slung over his left shoulder. To his right, another figure braved the scouring wind, striding forward, away from the side of the mountain where the massive hangar doors that had opened slightly to allow them out, now slid closed. The doors were painted the same color as the mountain, a dull, sandy tone, and they appeared to become part of the slope as they shut.

“At our Area 51 it was snow that the wind carried,” the other man yelled, his strong accent audible above the howling shrieks.

Turcotte didn’t acknowledge the Russian’s comment. Already the mountain from which they had emerged had faded into the brown, swirling fog. He concentrated on moving in a straight line, knowing how easy it would be to become disoriented and wander into the wasteland that surrounded Area 51.

Turcotte held up his right arm, fist closed, the military signal to stop. Yakov, the Russian, lumbered to a halt, waiting. Almost seven feet tall, Yakov seemed little bothered by either the wind or blowing sand. He wore a long black coat that flapped behind him. A short black beard covered his lower face. A fur hat, incongruous in the sandstorm, topped his large head.

“The runway.” Turcotte pointed ahead at the edge of concrete that was visible in the relative lulls between the stronger gusts. He turned to the right and moved in that direction, using the edge of the runway as his guide. After several minutes he came to another stop. To the right, in between surges of the wind, they could make out the gutted ruins of the hangar that had been destroyed by the blast from space.

“With our own sword,” Turcotte said, more to himself than Yakov.

“What?” The Russian leaned closer.

“We were attacked with our own weapon.”

“What was in there?” Yakov asked.

“The bodies of the two STAAR personnel we killed. The scientists were still working on the bodies, trying to figure out how much was human and how much was alien. Eight people were killed in the blast.”

“It is the price of war,” Yakov said.

“We’re not winning the war,” Turcotte said.

Yakov didn’t reply to that. He reached up and made sure his hat was still attached. “We could have waited in the hangar.”

“Too many prying eyes and inquisitive ears in there,” Turcotte said. Yakov laughed, a deep rumble that was ripped away by the wind. “You are learning. Paranoid is good. Paranoid keeps you alive.”

“Major Quinn is doing an electronics sweep of the Cube… the underground operations center for Area 51 where you met him. Once he’s sure it’s secure… and Dr. Duncan gets here… we’ll meet there and figure out what we’re doing.”

“Do you trust this Major Quinn? Was not he a member of Majestic-12?”

“I don’t trust you, never mind Major Quinn,” Turcotte said, turning from the destroyed hangar to watch the runway, or at least the small portion he could see. “Quinn wasn’t on the inner circle of MJ-12, just their military liaison in the Cube… more of a technical guy than an actual operator. And you were a member of Section Four, right? Which was the Soviet’s equivalent of Majestic, so I don’t think you have much right to be questioning Quinn’s loyalty.”

“I may be all that is left of Section Four,” Yakov said. “And we did not try to fly the mothership. Your Majestic was infiltrated by the Tiahuanaco guardian computer. I do not know if Section Four was infiltrated, but I do know it was destroyed by these aliens or their minions. I no longer know what is what and whom to trust.”

Turcotte nodded. “That’s something we need to talk about when Duncan gets here.”

“Do you trust anyone?” Yakov asked.

“Do you?”

“No one completely. You did not answer my question. Is there anyone you trust?” Turcotte’s answer was brief. “Dr. Duncan.”

“Why?”

Turcotte didn’t reply.

“You must think with your head, not your heart,” Yakov finally said. “I am,” Turcotte said shortly.

“I have seen the way you two look at each other. Such feelings can interfere with… ”

Turcotte turned, looking up at the Russian. “I’m thinking with my head, but I trust with heart. Maybe that’s something you could learn.” He reached out and tapped the large man’s chest. “I almost trust you after what happened at Devil’s Island.” Turcotte returned his attention to the runway.

Yakov smiled. “Almost. That is good. That is as far as we should take things. In our profession it is never good to deal in absolutes.” The smile disappeared. “Let me ask you something, my almost trusted friend. Dr. Duncan got you involved with Area 51 and Majestic-12 in the first place, correct?”

Turcotte nodded, then realized the other man couldn’t see the gesture as a blast of wind reduced visibility to zero. “Yes!” he yelled.

“How did she know of what was going on here? Of Majestic-12?”

Turcotte had never really thought about that, and he hesitated answering. He decided to get to the other thing on his mind. “What about Tunguska? Why did General Hemstadt mention that just before he died? That we didn’t know what caused it?”

Yakov shook his head. “I have not been able to find out much. Maybe Hemstadt was trying to misdirect us. You have to understand… ” Yakov began, but his attention was diverted; something was moving in the storm.

“There’s the bouncer.” Turcotte waved a flashlight, glad that the conversation had been interrupted. A silver-skinned, disk-shaped object hovered ten feet over the runway, moving slowly toward them. There was no visible means of propulsion and no windows in the skin of the craft, although Turcotte knew those on the inside could see out, the alien technology allowing light to pass through via a technique that those who had worked on the craft at Area 51 had yet to unravel. The bouncer, the nickname for the craft among the Air Force pilots who trained on them, descended until it came in contact with the runway twenty feet in front of Turcotte and Yakov. The official designation for the nine atmospheric alien craft was MDAC, or magnetic drive atmospheric craft. Two had been recovered nearby during the early days of World War II, parked in a cavern along with a massive mothership. That discovery was the reason Area 51 had been located at this remote site, since they had had no way to move the mile-long mothership from its hiding place.

Eventually, from clues discovered in the mothership cavern, the other seven had been recovered from a cache deep under the Antarctic ice. Each bouncer was about thirty feet wide at the base, sloping up to a small cupola on top. There was no doubt that the numerous test and training flights of the craft had led to many UFO sightings and contributed greatly to UFO folklore.

Turcotte had never learned if the craft had gotten that nickname because the people inside could get bounced about so badly or because the craft seemed to literally bounce off an unseen wall when changing direction. The propulsion system was something else that Majestic-12 had been unable to reverse-engineer despite decades of trying. They had determined that it worked off the planet’s magnetic field, and Turcotte knew from personal experience that the bouncers lost power if they were too far from the planet’s surface, but beyond that, they could not duplicate or reverse-engineer a working model.

A hatch on the top of the bouncer swung up and a slight figure climbed out, then down the side of the craft. Turcotte ran forward and handed Duncan a set of goggles, which she pulled down over her eyes.

“The Cube isn’t secure yet?” She was between the two men, their bodies giving her some relief from the dust storm.

“Quinn said any minute now.” Turcotte held up a cell phone. “He’ll call us when it’s ready.”

Duncan nodded. “Good, I wanted to talk to just the two of you alone first anyway.” She looked past them at the ruins of the hangar. “I had a private meeting with the President just before coming here. Cutting through the political double-talk the bottom line is we’re on our own. The destruction of the two space shuttles has shaken the entire administration. Everyone’s afraid to find out how deeply we’ve been infiltrated by either the alien representatives… the Guides/Mission and The Ones Who Wait/STAAR… or the human group, the Watchers. Losing Warfighter and having it used against us was the final straw.”

“Who directed Warfighter to attack the talon?” Turcotte asked.

“The President acceded to the demands of his National Security Council to have Warfighter target the talon. Payback for the destruction of Columbia. It didn’t work the way they had planned. Now they’re afraid of two things. One is that Warfighter can hit any target on the face of the planet. I think the President has visions of a laser blast right through the roof of the Oval Office. The other is they don’t want to admit Warfighter exists. There’s already infighting at UNAOC and among the members of the Security Council. The Russians and Chinese might walk out if they know we put a weapon into space two years ago.”

“So, as usual, they hide the truth?” Turcotte asked.

“Did you expect something to change?” Duncan asked. “I also met with Peter Sterling, the head of the United Nations Alien Oversight Committee, in New York, and he said pretty much the same thing as the President. He’s trying to build a coalition, but he’s fighting the Security Council the whole way.”

The bouncer had lifted and floated past them, entering Hangar One, sliding between the large doors that just as quickly shut behind it. Turcotte felt very vulnerable- standing with Yakov and Duncan on the edge-of the runway, the dust storm limiting their world to a small circle of concrete. He could understand the President’s fear. A weapon floating above their heads in space that could strike down at any moment was unnerving.

It went beyond that, though, for him. He’d expected bad news from Duncan’s Washington and New York meetings, but a small part of him had hoped that someone in the administration or at the United Nations would step forward and take the lead. Duncan’s next words effectively quashed that hope.

“The isolationists control both the House and the Senate, which limits the President’s options, and China has veto power in the Security Council, which hamstrings UNAOC from taking action. Since most actions up to now have occurred away from U.S. soil… meaning primarily the Black Death in South America, Qian-Ling in China, the Airlia at Cydonia on Mars, and the shield surrounding Easter Island… the feeling in the States seems to be that if we stick our heads in the sand, nothing bad will happen if we don’t see it.”

“You Americans,” Yakov growled. “You entered the Great Patriotic War only after millions of my countrymen were dead at the hands of the Nazis, France was overrun, and England was teetering on the edge of collapse. And then it took a direct attack against your base in Pearl Harbor to get you off the fence and into the fight. What will it take this time? This is a world problem. One that the oceans on either side of your country will not keep at arm’s reach.”

A strong gust of wind hit them, staggering Duncan into Turcotte, who steadied her with an arm around her shoulder.

“I’m telling you the reality of the situation,” Duncan shouted. “We can stand here and argue how screwed up it is until we’re blue in the face, but it’s not going to change anything. The isolationists have a very persuasive argument, using the facts we’ve given them regarding the Airlia being on the planet so long. The point they make is that if the Airlia and their human agents have existed peacefully with us for so long, why not go back to the status quo?”

“That’s bull,” Turcotte said. “Majestic trying to fly the mothership upset the balance, and it’s never going to be restored. This is a fight to the end.”

“I know that, and that’s why I’m here,” Duncan said. The bottom line is that we’re on our own. I have the same presidential authorization to gain us aid from whatever government organization we need, but that’s it. We also have some support from Sterling at UNAOC, but that will be limited, as even UNAOC is being pressured to toe the isolationist line. And we have to be covert about any actions we take, not only because of the isolationists but also to steer clear of The Mission, the Watchers, and The Ones Who Wait. Just be glad the President didn’t shut us down.”

“Would that have been so bad?” Turcotte muttered, the words unheard by the other two.

“Official policy right now,” Duncan yelled, “is to gather information but take no direct action.”

“That’s crap,” Turcotte said. “We’re sticking our necks out and getting no support.” He pointed at the ruins of the hangar. “We lost eight people in there.”

“I know… and that’s being kept under wraps also. I did get us some backup,” Duncan said.

“Who?” Turcotte asked.

“A Special Forces team straight from Bragg. Your friend Colonel Mickell handpicked the team, so they should be good. They’re en route now. We’re to use them as we see fit.”

“No limitations?” Turcotte asked. “Like national boundaries?”

“Unofficially, no limitations,” Duncan said. “Officially, if we screw up, it’s our ass on the line.”

“Great,” Turcotte said. His phone buzzed, and he flipped it open, one hand over his free ear so he could hear, then shut it. “Quinn says the Cube is secure and clear of any surveillance devices. Let’s get inside, get you cleaned up, then figure out what we’re going to do.”

“There’s something else,” Duncan said.

“What?”

She reached into her coat and pulled out a piece of paper that the wind tried to rip from her grasp. “We’ve heard from Easter Island.”

“The guardian?” Turcotte asked.

“The message is apparently from Kelly Reynolds… or whatever Kelly has become now.”

The security guard flashed his light at the ID card, then checked the face of the holder to make sure the two matched. The security rating on the card was the highest possible in the dark world of covert operations. The organization listed was the Central Intelligence Agency.

The owner of the card did ostensibly work for the CIA, but in reality he was a member of STAAR, which stood for Strategic Tactical Advanced Alien Response. Founded by President Eisenhower, the organization had been set up to be a coordinating group for response to a potential alien assault… given the fact that aliens had indeed visited Earth in the past, as evidenced by what Majestic-12 was working with at Area 51. In reality, though, STAAR was a front organization in America for The Ones Who Wait, allowing it to infiltrate the government bureaucracy at every level. It was the way of bureaucracy and the compartmentalization of the covert world that the correct piece of paper or security clearance could override every suspicion for decades.

The operative’s code name was Etor, and he quickly strode past the guard and toward the VAB… vehicle assembly building… a towering edifice five hundred and twenty-five feet tall and covering eight acres of land, one of the largest buildings in the world. The VAB was designed to withstand winds of up to 125 miles per hour. Its foundation rested on 4,200 steel pilings 16 inches in diameter driven down 160 feet to bedrock.

Etor had first visited the facility when it was named Cape Canaveral. The VAB was originally designed for the assembly of the massive Saturn launch vehicles. It had since been modified to support the assembly of the space shuttle.

Etor watched as the high bay door, 456 feet high, rumbled to a halt, opening the spacious interior to the warm night air carried by the ocean breeze. The space shuttle Atlantis, mated with its external fuel tank and two solid rockets, stood vertical on top of the crawler-transporter. With a very slight jar, the huge treads on the crawler began moving, edging the entire shuttle system on its mobile launcher platform out of the VAB.

Although the final destination was in sight, it would take the crawler six hours to make the short distance to the point from which the shuttle would be launched. Normally when a shuttle was moved at night, spotlights highlighted the procedure, providing a spectacle to the American public whose tax dollars funded the entire operation. This night, though, the movement was being made in blackout conditions. All roads around the space center had been blocked off since nightfall, reducing spectators to the security personnel and technicians involved… and those with the proper security clearance.

With the destruction of the shuttles Endeavour and Columbia, Atlantis, quickly brought out of a retrofit, was the only spaceworthy manned craft left in the inventory; The shuttle Discovery had been stripped down to the bone for an extensive rebuilding, and it was estimated that even at breakneck speed… a term astronauts didn’t want to hear when someone was talking about working on a vehicle they would be riding in… it would take over a month to get it ready for flight.

The transporter was 131 feet long by 114 wide. It moved on four double-tracked crawlers, each 10 feet high and 41 feet long. Just one of the track shoes weighed 2,000 pounds. With a maximum speed of one mile per hour, Atlantis cleared the VAB doors and the treads slowly crunched their way toward Launch Complex 39-A, which was 3.4 miles away. Etor turned and walked toward one of the old launch sites, half a mile away from the road, easily outpacing the shuttle on its path.

He climbed down a rusting iron staircase into an old observation bunker, his feet splashing through water that had accumulated on the concrete floor. He leaned on a ledge, peering through a narrow slit at the black silhouette of the moving shuttle. He pulled out a small black box and pressed the on button.

“It is moving,” he reported.

“Do you know the mission profile?” the voice on the other end asked.

“The cover story is deployment of two surveillance satellites. The reality is that the payload consists of the latest generation of Warfighter satellite. They want to put it in orbit and take out the Warfighter you control.”

“That is unacceptable.” There was a short pause. “I have a lock on target. Out here.”

“Out,” Etor acknowledged, putting the communicator back in his pocket.

The transporter was less than a quarter mile from the VAB when a flash of light streaked down from above and hit the top of the external fuel tank. The laser beam ignited the five hundred thousand gallons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen.

The resulting explosion not only obliterated Atlantis, it took out the vehicle assembly building. Windows as far away as ten miles were blown, and the shock wave from the explosion was heard in Orlando, forty miles away.

Etor had ducked down, deep inside the shelter, but even there the passing blast wave sucked the air out of his lungs. He waited a few seconds, then stood and looked out. There was nothing where the shuttle had been.

Professor Mualama took another deep drink from the canteen looped over his shoulder and looked up at the wall of heavy clouds that blocked the sky to the west as he spoke. He was a continent away from South America, but once more deep inside an uninhabited wilderness.

“The Greek historian Herodotus, visiting Egypt in 547 B.C., was told that the source of the Nile was a bottomless lake set among tall, whitecapped mountains astride the equator. He thought the story was outrageous, but… and this is a valuable lesson for you, Nephew… he wrote it down anyway.”

The young man whom Mualama had just addressed was a bit worse for wear. Peter Lago’s khaki shirt was streaked with salt stains. His arms were covered with scratches and his muscles ached from the eight-hour march since leaving the last sign of civilization in Kasese, Uganda. They’d been climbing up a one-track trail since getting off the plane on the unfinished dirt strip in the town, and as far as Lago could tell, they were heading into the clouds. His uncle had set an unrelenting pace, in a rush since having Lago pick him up at the airport in Dar es Salaam the previous evening, hiring a bush pilot to fly them illegally into Uganda, and setting off on the trail.

Lago… a former archaeology student at Dar es Salaam… had worked with his uncle on digs before. East Africa was where many of the oldest fossils attributable to genus Homo had been found. The two had spent several summers working at the established digs in the Olduvai Gorge of Tanzania, where a fossil of Homo habilis had been found that had been dated back two million years. Homo habilis was the true beginning of the lineage of current man, and so few fossils had been found that any discovery was significant.

Lago considered his uncle a very strange man with eclectic interests. Both ancient man and modern history mesmerized his uncle… he was a scientist who believed in knowing one’s facts, yet he also collected every piece of legend and mythology he could find.

Lago was still waiting for an explanation why they were here, but he was used to his uncle’s long silences, because he knew he would eventually get more information than he ever wanted once the older man began speaking. It appeared that time had come as Mualama began talking again, filling up the minutes of the short break that he had allowed every two hours during the march.

“In A.D. 50, Marinus of Tyre, a geographer, recorded a story he heard from a Greek merchant who claimed to have traveled inland from the east coast of Africa for twenty-five days and reached a land of mountains and snow where the source of the Nile came out of two lakes.

“The Greek mathematician and geographer Ptolemy was the first geographer to use longitude and latitude lines to identify locations on the face of the planet. He also thought the idea of snowcapped mountains lying on the hot equator most fascinating. He called these mountains Luna Montes, the Mountains of the Moon, a name many still use for where we are.”

Mualama stretched his back, the bones cracking as they settled in place. In his backpack lay the package he had recovered under the stone in the Devil’s Throat. It had pointed him to the next clue, back home to Africa, and he had wasted no time getting here.

“Unlike Kilimanjaro and Ngorongoro,” he continued, “these mountains… also called the Ruwenzori, a corruption of the local word for rainy mountains… were not formed by volcanic action. We are basically on the edge of an enormous massif, about one hundred and twenty kilometers long and fifty kilometers wide.

“We are in Uganda, and the border with Zaire runs along the center of this massif, where the peaks are.” He pointed ahead at the clouds. “There are four major summits… Mounts Speke, Stanley, Baker, and Luigi di Savoia. All named after white men, of course. The locals have their own name for them, which the Europeans ignored. Stanley was the first white man to see the peaks in the modern age. He was in this area in 1875 and told of the mountains by his native guides, but, like us today, he could see nothing but the clouds and mist they are covered in for over three hundred days out of the year. He came back thirteen years later, in 1888, and happened to have a clear day and saw the white peaks.”

“Uncle…” Lago knew if he didn’t interrupt, his uncle would fall completely into his lecture mode, and it might be hours before he got around to the information the young man most needed to know.

Mualama frowned. “Yes?”

“Where are we going?”

“Mount Speke.”

That answered one of Lago’s unasked questions… why he was here. He had experience mountain climbing, summiting numerous mountains in Ethiopia and South Africa. He had never been to the Mountains of the Moon, but he knew climbing Speke would be difficult, especially if the weather turned bad. So, as usual his uncle needed his help. He decided to ask the third question.

“Why are we climbing Mount Speke?”

“Do you know who Speke was?” Mualama asked instead of answering.

Lago shook his head.

“Stanley was Anglo-American. Luigi di Savoia was an Italian duke who mapped the mountain range in the first decade of the twentieth century. Speke was an English explorer. He is best known for discovering Lake Tanganyika with Sir Richard Francis Burton in 1858. At the time, they thought it was the source of the Nile. The two had a long-running feud when Speke returned to England before Burton and announced the discovery, taking most of the credit. They were scheduled to debate the issue when, the day before, Speke was killed in a most unfortunate hunting accident. It is quite an irony that Burton would have hidden the next clue on the mountain named for his hated rival.”

“The next clue?”

“You will see,” Mualama said.

Lago checked the cuts on his arm from the jungle that had encroached over much of the trail, half listening to his uncle, waiting for him to answer the question as to the purpose of this expedition. His uncle was known not only in the family but at the university, for his trips all over the world, searching for something he never quite told anyone.

The journey had been more than worth it so far, though, simply to see the bizarre terrain they had passed through. Swamps and marshes had surrounded the trailhead, but as they went up, the vegetation changed to a strange world of giant plants among misshapen rocks. Lobelias grew twenty times their normal height, and many other plants that rarely topped a foot or two elsewhere towered over their heads. The almost constant moisture from the clinging clouds combined with the mineral-rich soil and high dosage of ultraviolet light, due to the altitude and latitude, to produce mutations unknown elsewhere on the planet.

Tall, writhing stems crowned with heads of spiky leaves swayed overhead, while the ground was covered with layers of pink blossoms. Tree heathers draped with beards of lichens formed with the rest to create a landscape that might have existed millions of years ago when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. It was a land out of time with the rest of the world, and one of the most remote and inaccessible places on the planet.

Lago was startled out of his thoughts as his uncle grasped his arm. Lago was surprised by the intensity in his usually easygoing uncle’s face. “Men died so I could get the information that leads me here.”

That got Lago’s attention. “What men?”

“My guide and porters in Brazil.” Mualama quickly summarized his escape from beneath the stone altar in the Devil’s Throat; the walk to the nearest town; hitching a ride back to Santos; and then the flight to Dar es Salaam.

“This Bauru was a brave man,” Lago noted when his uncle finished. “Who killed your porters and trapped you there?”

“I believe it was a group that has tried to stop me several times over the years,” Mualama said. “They are known as The Mission.”

“Why are they trying to stop you?”

“They are afraid of what I might find.”

“Which is?”

“I’ll know when I find it.”

Lago controlled his frustration. “What are we looking for on Mount Speke? What kind of clue?”

Mualama pulled out the oilskin-wrapped package. “This is what I found in Brazil. Burton put it there over a hundred years ago.” He unwrapped the covering. A thin sheaf of papers was inside a leather case. “When Burton died in 1890, his wife, Isabel, burned a manuscript. No one knows exactly what was written in that manuscript.”

He tapped the papers. “I believe this is a copy of the introduction to that manuscript. The manuscript itself is the untold story of Burton’s life, of his secret expeditions. I have been following clues he left, going from one to the next, for over two decades now. Even this is just another stone in the path leading me here, to these mountains.” Mualama looked up from the papers toward the mist covering the mountains. “On the side of Mount Speke, something is hidden. Something important. I believe… I hope… it is the rest of the manuscript. That is where we go.”

“Why did Burton go to such extremes to hide this material?” Lago asked.

“I wondered that myself,” Mualama said. “These papers say that he made a promise never to tell anyone about something he had seen. Something incredible. However, he did not promise to not help others try to find what it was he saw. Of course, he knew he had to prevent those with bad motives from also following his clues, so he made it very difficult. Very difficult.” The old professor stood, putting the journal back into his pack. “It is time to continue.”

“Are we ready?”

The voice was that of one used to speaking from the pulpit, strong and deep, easily reaching those assembled on the deck. Their solid mass, standing shoulder to shoulder in the space between the ship’s bridge and the forward hatch, showed their determination. There were sixty-two people on the deck. All were dressed alike, in dull-brown pants and parkas. Sewn onto the left chest of each parka was a patch that was becoming more and more familiar around the world: It was circular with a small Earth in the center; coming out of the Earth were lines to stars that surrounded the planet.

“We are ready!” they answered with one voice.

The mountains of northern Tasmania towered over the freighter on the landward side. Their rugged beauty contrasted with the rust-stained hull of the ship. Originally called the Island Breeze, the ship had been renamed Southern Star for the purpose of this journey.

Captain Halls watched the passengers from his bridge, and he couldn’t give a rat’s ass what they wanted to call his ship. He had his money.

The man who had asked the question turned and walked in from the small wing off the bridge. “Let us depart,” he said to Halls.

“We’ll be under way in a minute, Mr. Parker,” Halls said.

“Guide Parker,” the other man corrected him.

Halls gave the order, which was relayed to the engine room. The ship slowly parted ways with the quay and headed for the center channel of Smithon Harbor.

Besides the way they were dressed, the people on deck did not act like ordinary passengers. They didn’t line the railing and watch the land fade. Instead they looked out to sea.

“It’ll be a hard journey,” Halls said. “And I understand the American Navy has Easter Island under strict quarantine. I’m not breaking any blockade for you people.”

Parker turned. Halls stepped back from the sheen in the man’s eyes. He’d seen that look before, from missionaries he’d run into in the South Pacific, where his ship had spent many a year plowing the normal island trading routes.

“We have our faith in a power greater than the American Navy,” Parker said. “We will get ashore, one way or the other. Our destiny lies on Easter Island.”