Anger was the only thing keeping Juan going now, anger at Linda and Mark for disobeying Eddie’s order to disembark the Golden Sky before she left Istanbul. The pair of stowaways was continuing to search for evidence of the Responsivists’ plan to hit the ship with their toxin.
Cabrillo was going to throw them in the brig when he saw them again and then give them raises for their dedication. He was fiercely proud of the team he’d assembled, and never more so than now.
His thoughts returned to Max Hanley and Cabrillo’s mood became more foul. There still hadn’t been any reply from Thom Severance, and every minute that ticked by made Juan think there never would be, because Max was already dead. Juan wouldn’t let himself say that aloud and felt guilty even thinking it, but he couldn’t shake the pessimism.
With Ivan Kerikov’s megayacht Matryoshka returned to the inner harbor, the Oregon lay at anchor a mile off shore once again. When he studied his ship, Juan could sometimes glimpse what a beauty she must have been in her prime. She was well-proportioned, with just a hint of rake at bow and stern, and her forest of derricks gave her a look of commerce and prosperity. He could imagine her with fresh paint and her decks cleared of debris, facing a backing sea off the Pacific Northwest, where she’d had a career as a lumber hauler.
But as they now approached, all he saw was the rust-streaked hull, the patchwork paint, and the sagging cables draped across her cranes like disintegrating spiderwebs. She looked forlorn and haunted, and nothing shone on her, not even the propeller of the lifeboat hanging off its amidships davit.
The sleek taxi nosed under the boarding stairs, the waters so calm and the driver so deft at the controls that she didn’t bother setting out rubber fenders.
Juan tapped Linc’s ankle with his foot and the big man grunted awake. “You’d better hope I return to the same spot in the dream I was just having,” he said, and yawned broadly. “Things were just getting interesting with Angelina Jolie and me.”
Juan offered a hand to lift him to his feet. “I’m so damned tired I don’t think I’ll ever have a carnal thought again.”
They each hefted their bags, thanked the young woman who’d piloted them out, and stepped onto the boarding ladder. By the time they reached the top, Juan felt like he’d just scaled Everest.
Dr. Huxley was there to greet them, along with Eddie Seng and Eric Stone. She was beaming at Juan with a high-wattage smile and nearly hopping from foot to foot. Eddie and Stoney were smiling, too. For an instant, he thought they had news about Max, but they would have told them when he’d called from the airport following the flight from Manila.
As soon as he was firmly on deck, she threw her arms around his shoulders. “Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, you are a bloody genius.”
“Far be it from me to disagree, just remind me what feat of brilliance I performed this time.”
“Eric found an online database of cuneiform from a university in England. He was able to translate the tablets from the pictures you e-mailed with your phone.” Cabrillo had sent those as soon as they reached the Manila airport.
“The computer was able to translate,” Eric corrected modestly. “I don’t speak a word of ancient Sanskrit.”
“It’s a virus after all,” Julia gushed. “From what I’m able to deduce, it’s a form of influenza, but unlike anything science has ever seen. It has a hemorrhagic component almost like Ebola or Marburg. And the best part is that I think Jannike Dahl has natural immunity because the ship where it first broke out landed near where she grew up, and I believe she’s a descendant of the original crew.” Juan could barely keep up with the rapid flow of words. “What are you talking about? Ship? What ship?”
“Noah’s ark, of course.”
Cabrillo blinked at her for a moment before reacting. He held up his hands like a boxer begging for the fight to be over. “You’re going to have to start this from the top, but I need a shower, a drink, and some food, in whatever order they come. Give me twenty minutes, and meet me in the conference room. Tell Maurice I want orange juice, half a grapefruit, eggs Benedict, toast, and those potatoes he does with the tarragon.” It was nearly dinnertime, but his body was telling him it wanted breakfast. He turned to go but glanced back at Julia. “Noah’s ark?”
She nodded like a little girl dying to tell a secret.
“This I’ve gotta hear.”
Thirty minutes later, his meal gone, the sourness in Juan’s stomach had been replaced with a contented glow, and he felt he had just enough energy to listen to Julia’s report.
He looked to Eric first, since he had done the translation. “Okay, from the top.”
“I won’t bore you with the details of enhancing the pictures or finding an online archive of cuneiform, but I did. The writing you found is particularly old, according to what I was able to learn.” Cabrillo recalled thinking the same thing. He motioned for Stone to continue.
“I turned the problem over to the computer. It took about five hours of tweaking the programs to start producing anything coherent. The algorithms were pretty intense, and I was bending the rules of fuzzy logic to the breaking point. Once the computer started to learn the nuances, it got a little easier, and after passing it through a few times, adjusting here and there, it spat out the entire story.”
“The story of Noah’s ark?”
“You may not know this, but the epic story of Gilgamesh, which was translated from cuneiform by an English amateur in the nineteenth century, chronicles a flood scenario a thousand years before it appeared in Hebrew texts. Many cultures around the globe also have flood myths as part of their ancient traditions.
Anthropologists believe that because human civilization sprang up in coastal areas or along rivers, the very real threat of catastrophic flooding was used by kings and priests in cautionary tales to keep people in line.” Eric adjusted his steel-framed glasses. “As for myself, I can see tsunami events being the genesis for many of these stories. Without written language, stories were passed down orally, usually with added embellishments, so, after one or two generations of retelling, it wasn’t just a giant wave that wiped out your village, it was the whole world that had become inundated. In fact—” Cabrillo cut him off. “Save the lecture for later and stick to what you’ve discovered.”
“Oh, sure. Sorry. The story starts out with a flood, but not a sudden swell of water or a heavy rain. The people who wrote the tablets describe how the water of the sea they lived by rose. I believe it rose about a foot a day. While nearby villages simply moved to higher ground, our folks believed the rising would never stop and decided the only way to survive was to build a large boat. It was in no way as large as the boat described in the Bible. They didn’t have that kind of technology.”
“So we aren’t really talking about Noah and his ark?”
“No, although the parallels are striking, and it is possible that the people who remained behind and described what happened laid the foundation for Gilgamesh and the biblical story.”
“Is there a time frame for this?”
“Fifty-five hundred B.C.”
“That seems pretty precise.”
“That’s because there is physical evidence of a flood just as it’s described on the tablets. It occurred when the earthen dike at what is now the Bosporus collapsed and flooded what had been, up until that time, an inland sea that was some five hundred feet lower than the Mediterranean. We now call this area the Black Sea. Using underwater ROVs, marine archaeologists have confirmed that there were humans living along the ancient shoreline. It took more than a year for the basin to fill, and they estimate the falls at the Bosporus would make Niagara look like a babbling brook.” Cabrillo was amazed. “I had no idea.”