“Nate!” Nadia snapped. “I will say this one last time! ESP is not possible. Remote Viewing is not possible. Killing a sheep with the power of your thoughts is not possible. And peering through time to see the future or the past is not possible!”
“Yes it is,” a weak voice suddenly startled them all. Everyone spun to see King’s eyes flutter open. Sid gasped and looked down at him. Heinrich rushed to his side, staring at the EEG scans, his eyes wide with amazement.
“His neural activity is returning to normal. His synapses are redistributing back into a regular pattern.”
King ignored the doctor and stared past him at the assembled group.
“I know where the final piece is.”
49:
Yonaguni
A storm was brewing far in the east of the Pacific Ocean but, for the moment, the tranquil, sapphire blue waters of the East China Sea were calm and peaceful, broken only by the prow of a noisy diesel powered fishing boat.
Double checking the GPS coordinates she had been given, Kristina Lake throttled back the controls and the pneumatic-pounding of the chugging engines thankfully ceased. The pilot house was raised up above the deck, sitting atop the compartment that contained the boat’s mess-deck. Below decks were four small quarters which were usually home to the boat’s twelve-man crew, one of the most unpleasant heads she had ever made use of, and a cramped galley. One of those rooms had been converted into a giant safe, its metal door pad-locked and its single porthole blocked with a sheet of iron welded into place by engineers at a US base on Okinawa Island. For this voyage, it was home to two small rucksack-sized metal cases, one of which contained a harmless interpretation of what was contained in the other: the Moon Mask.
On the main deck below her, the other members of the UN team were gathered along with the newest recruits to the mission: three American-Japanese US Marines on loan from Marine Corps Air Station Futenma.
Insisting he was fine, Doctor King had discharged himself from the care of Doctor Henry Heinrich at the NATO base in Germany and insisted that the team fly half the way around the world based purely on some dream he’d had while unconscious. Gibbs had briefly explained his reasoning, something to do with ESP, but Lake, along with the rest of the team, still had her reservations. They were used to working with hard intel, not mystic premonition, but with no other leads, and King’s determination, Gibbs had authorised the mission. In truth, Lake didn’t much care, enjoying the activity following the dull guard duty they had kept over the Moon Mask back at the NATO base while the scientists worked out their next destination.
Following a thirteen hour flight from Germany direct to the marine base on Okinawa Island, the team had arrived to find the boat and men Gibbs had requested ready and waiting to launch.
Commandeered from a local fishing company, the Mitsuko, which meant ‘child of light’ would hopefully provide the team some element of cover in these waters. Being so close to Taiwan, always a political hotbed waiting to erupt, the waters surrounding Japan’s Ryukyu Islands had, in recent days, begun to seethe with menace. While only those highest up on the political and military food chain knew of the real reasons, the whole world had nevertheless turned its attention towards the posturing of the Chinese and US fleets in the Pacific. Chinese warships had stepped up patrols of its coastal waters and breeched the sovereignty of Japanese and Taiwanese territories. Both governments had received reports of Chinese ships detaining civilian vessels and questioning their crews and while there had not yet been an outbreak of violence, it was only a matter of time. What the Chinese were searching for, no doubt, were American spies. The location of a massive US military presence on the Japanese Island of Okinawa had always been a bone of contention for China and the team hoped that all eyes would indeed be focussed on those forces, whose numerous bases were on high alert, allowing them to slip south, skirting through the island chain to the most western point of Japan: Yonaguni Island.
“In 1987,” King had explained in a briefing to the entire team in the passenger compartment of a NATO C-130 Hercules as it thundered through the skies towards Japan. Once he had been medically cleared and his brain activity had returned to normal, he had spent several hours with Doctors Siddiqa and Yashina, two laptops and a number of books before presenting his findings to them. “A tourist diver named Kichachiro Aratake, while searching for a viewing spot to watch hammer-heads feeding around the Japanese island of Yonaguni, stumbled, quite by chance, on the find of a life time.”
He clicked the mouse pad on the laptop and turned the screen so that the whole team could see. On it Lake saw an image of what appeared to be a ruined building, in some ways not dissimilar to the Step Pyramid in Egypt where she knew Kha’um had found a piece of the Moon Mask. Only this structure was submerged under several meters of water which gave it a surreal, inky blue hue.
“The structure he found was hewn out of solid bedrock about eighty-eight feet below the surface of the ocean. It’s over six hundred and fifty feet long and rises in a series of steps, each one perfect, or near-perfect right angles, to just sixteen feet beneath the surface.” He flicked through several other images of what he called the Yonaguni Monument. There were several different angles of the ‘steps’ taken from vantage points at the base, mid-way up and from above looking down. There was a shot of two megalithic blocks, sixty-five feet long and weighing around two hundred tonnes each, thrusting upwards through the gloom, reminiscent of Stonehenge. There were channels and deep-cut ravines, flat platforms and raised plinths, even what appeared to be a wall encircling the entire structure.
King had continued his briefing as the photos flicked through one by one. “Scientific opinion on the Yonaguni Monument is divided,” he had explained. “On the one hand, many scientists argue that the entire formation is entirely natural, that the forces of nature thrust these straight, angular structures through the bedrock where they settled thousands of years ago on the sea floor. Professor Kimura, a geologist from Okinawa University, on the other hand, disagrees and says that the structure is entirely man-made. Other than the obvious aesthetic impression of artificiality,” he had glanced at the computer screen then, and Lake had to admit it had the look and feel of a building more so than a natural rock formation. “He cites evidence such as a ‘rubbish tip’ of disused blocks swept to one side in an unnatural manner, the regular measurements of the ‘steps’ of the structure, the presence of what looks like a ceremonial pathway, and the presence of this limestone wall encircling the site. Limestone,” he added, “is not indigenous to Yonaguni.
“Professor Robert Scotch from Boston University seems to have taken an intermediate view and suggests that the site is a natural construct which was manipulated by humans, carved into these unnatural shapes.”
“This is all very cool, Doc,” O’Rourke had spoken up, “but how does it help us?”
King had hesitated for a second then, as though concerned about the reaction he was going to get from his audience. “This is where the penultimate piece of the Moon Mask is,” he had said. The debate about how he knew this, the merits of ESP and the possibility of remote viewing had raged between the academics throughout their journey but King had remained adamant that this was where the Moon Mask had shown him the missing piece was. He had described flashes of a ceremony deep within a hollow chamber, then a flash of the submerged ruins. When he awoke, he knew their next destination.
Now, down on the deck, Lake watched as O’Rourke and Garcia dropped the boat’s anchor and she felt the boat pull too, steady in the strong current. She looked up at the towering cliffs of the south face of Yonaguni Island. The azure sky was startling in its intense blue and cast an equally sapphire glow upon the water below.