“The rocks!” Borger nodded. He zoomed the picture in and leaned back out of Clay’s way. “Now look at the picture and ignore the top of the mountain and the cliff. Look just at the rocks, and bear in mind they look like rocks on the screen, but they’re actually boulders.”
Clay studied the screen for several seconds. “Are those… shapes?”
“It sure looks like it, doesn’t it?” Borger began typing. “Now look what happens when I invert the color in the picture.”
The picture color instantly switched. The areas that were dark now appeared in shades of white. And the light areas, including the rocks, appeared black.
Clay immediately shot a look at Borger. “Those are definitely shapes!”
“I think those giant boulders on the ground were ‘arranged.’”
Clay remained quiet, studying the black shapes. They were hard to identify, but the curves and angles were unmistakable. The boulder groupings also appeared to be laid out in three separate places, together forming a perfect triangle near the base of the cliff.
“I think they might be hieroglyphs,” Borger whispered.
“I’ve never seen hieroglyphs like that,” commented a female voice.
Borger jumped in his seat, and both men spun around to see Alison standing behind them in the dark.
“Geez, Alison! You scared the crap out of me!”
He hadn’t jumped, but Clay was grinning at her. “That was impressive.”
Alison shrugged, playfully.
They turned back to Borger’s glowing screen. “Do you know a lot about hieroglyphs?” Clay asked.
“Not really. I took some courses in college,” she said quietly. “But I’ve never seen anything quite like those.” She leaned in between the two men. “Hmm.”
“What?”
“There may be some similarities to the Mayan stuff. But I can’t be sure. It’s been a long time.”
“What about Egyptian hieroglyphs?”
Alison shook her head. “No. Those look very different. Egyptian’s wrote in long lines of script. These are more like the picture blocks used in the Central Americas.”
“Do you think they can be translated?”
Alison thought about the question and shook her head again. “I have no idea. Maybe if other drawings have been documented somewhere else, but that’s a long shot. Even the Rosetta Stone, which contained detailed one-to-one translations, took years. Here, we only have three pictograms to go on. And that’s not enough.”
Borger slouched back in the chair, folding his arms in frustration.
“Or…”
Alison and Borger looked at Clay. “Or what?”
“Or we try something else.” Clay turned and grinned at them. “It just so happens, I know a beautiful woman who has a hell of a computer system, designed specifically for translating languages.”
69
The giant Pathfinder ship rocked gently over the ripples rolling across the western Caribbean. The white hulled ship was anchored less than a mile from Georgetown. Overhead, the dark sky was filled with bright stars from both the northern and southern hemispheres, complimented by a faint sliver of moon. Aside from the watch crew, there was virtually no movement or sound to be heard. It made the hand that shook Lee Kenwood awake even more startling.
Lee jumped in his bed and peered up into the darkness at the outline of Captain Emerson.
“Mr. Kenwood,” he whispered, careful not to wake Chris Ramirez in a nearby bunk.
Lee rubbed his eyes and squinted. “Captain Emerson?”
“Come with me.”
“Huh?”
“I need you to come with me, son. You have a phone call.”
“For me?”
“Yes.” His silhouette stood up straight. “Please hurry.”
Lee scrambled out of his bunk and followed him outside in nothing but a pair of swim trunks. They passed through three different metal doors before emerging into the warm Caribbean air. Emerson stopped and turned to face Lee, handing him a phone.
He fumbled for a moment but managed to get it to his ear. “Hello?”
“Lee, it’s Alison.”
“Ali? Where are you? What time is it?”
“Never mind. Listen, I need to ask you something important about IMIS.”
“What is it?”
“How hard would it be to translate one written language to another?”
Lee looked confused. “For IMIS? It would be a piece of cake.”
“What about an old language? And I mean really old, as in ancient?”
“Uh, I don’t know. I guess it would depend on what it was. You mean like Latin or something?”
“I mean hieroglyphs.”
Lee raised his head, surprised. Captain Emerson stood next to him, still watching. “Hieroglyphs? You mean as in Egyptian?”
“More like Mayan.”
Lee scratched the back of his scalp, thinking. “Yeah, I think we could. We’d have to feed in a lot of data and do some programming, but yeah, we could do it.”
“How long would that take?”
“For the data? Not long. It would take me some time to program though. Then there’s testing and debugging. Probably a few weeks.”
“How about a few hours?”
“What?!”
“We need to do it in a few hours.”
“Are you kidding?!”
On the other end of the phone, Alison glanced at Clay. They knew it was only a matter of time before one or more of the nearby countries responded to the fire. And according to Clay, Admiral Langford was trying to delay that, but his misdirection would only last so long. “No, Lee, I’m not kidding.”
Lee exhaled and ran a hand through his messy hair. “I don’t think we can make it, Ali. Even if I can do some quick and dirty programming, with no testing or debugging, we have no way to manually feed any existing data into IMIS. I wouldn’t be able to do it fast enough from this ship.”
“Okay,” she replied grimly. “Hold on.”
Alison covered the microphone and looked at Clay. “Lee thinks it’s possible, but not without someone on the ground. Which, we don’t have.”
Clay and Borger frowned in unison.
“Oh, I believe we do.” Caesare was awake and delicately eased his seat up from a reclining position. With a grin, he stood up and came into the light.
“You believe we do what?”
“I believe we have someone on the ground.”
The single bed was small, even for him. But he didn’t mind. Truth be told, he actually relished it, especially right now. He hadn’t slept all night and he was beginning to lose feeling in his left arm, but Juan Diaz didn’t care. Instead, he stared down lovingly at the sleeping face of his six-year-old sister.
Her little face, with olive skin and dark eyelashes, looked almost angelic as she breathed quietly beside him. It wasn’t his idea, but she begged him to stay with her. Diaz had arrived home less than twelve hours ago and headed directly to his parents’ house. Angelina was thrilled to see her big brother and immediately ran into his arms. If he didn’t know better, he would have suspected she somehow knew just how close he had come to death in Brazil. After that, all he wanted to do was to see his family.
Diaz suddenly raised his head when he heard his cell phone ring in the living room. In one controlled fluid movement, he quickly slid off the side of Angelina’s bed and loped lightly down the hall.
He held the phone up in the darkness and peered at the number. He didn’t recognize it. With a low voice, he accepted the call. “Hello?”
“Juan! It’s Alison!”
“Ali?”
“Juan, where are you?”
“I’m home. At my parents’ house. Where are you?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But we have an emergency and we need your help!”
“Sure, Ali. Anything.”