The land was dry, with a few hardened native shrubs, the only plants to be seen.
James looked around and happily said, “This is it. Here’s the spot.”
“That’s great. Where’s the Ark of Light?” Aliana asked.
“Below us… well, actually, it’s somewhere down a river that’s below us.”
Sam jumped up and down a couple times and said, “The soil appears pretty sturdy to me. Did you have a plan of getting to the river below?”
“Yeah. Tom, do you mind running back to the helicopter and grabbing that box I brought, while I dig a hole?”
Tom nodded his head and then ran back to the helicopter, returning a few minutes later with the box.
“What did you bring, dad?”
“Dynamite. I’m not sure how old it is. I found it on the old homestead I was staying at, and thought it might come in handy.”
“Shit, you could have killed us. Do you have any idea how unstable that stuff is, particular after a number of years, rotting away?”
James laughed, “I’m only kidding. It’s just ANFO, ammonium nitrate/fuel oil, the more contemporary, and cheaper, explosive commonly used in mainstay mining and just a little more stable.”
Sam, by this stage, had dug nearly three feet deep in the soft soil, but each time he tried to dig further, more surrounding sand seemed to fill the hole.
“You want to keep digging until you reach that river, or shall I use the ANFO and speed the process up a little?”
“Be my guest,” Sam said, stepping away from the hole.
Sam watched as his father laid the ANFO and set the charge cable with surprising dexterity, making him wonder just how many times his father had done this before.
“All right, everyone back… and I mean a long way back.”
Five minutes later, James pulled the detonating switch, and the ground in the distance disappeared. Slowly, the small party of four, walked up to where the hole had been. What remained was a limestone cavern large enough to drive a truck through. And at the bottom, a small creek flowed gently, into the unknown.
Rodriguez drove his six-wheeler at a pace that would have made the German engineers at Mercedes proud. He knew where they were headed, but still hadn’t taken into account that they’d use a damn helicopter, making them a lot faster.
Behind him, Frank and Byron struggled to keep up in their own six-wheelers, each armed with an AK 47, loaded and ready to go.
Up ahead, and to the left of them, a giant plume of black smoke reached for the sky, followed by a loud boom, four or five seconds afterwards.
“Shit, they’ve already reached it!” Rodriguez said out loud, as he swung the wheel and headed towards the smoke. His foot to the floor, he challenged every inch of the million dollar Mercedes’s engineering price tag.
Sam reached for the fourth dive tank from the back of the helicopter, ready to follow the stream down as a team of four.
Aliana put her hand on it, effectively stopping him from removing the tank. “No way. I’m not following you or any of your other crazy people down through another one of those stupid subterranean rivers. I’ve been there, done that — not again.”
“Really? I thought you’d had fun.” Sam grinned. “That’s all right, but I think you’re underestimating the significance of the Ark of Light!”
“I doubt it. I’ve heard little of anything else from your father since you left. Says it has the ability to provide him with unlimited power… I thought that’s what he already has?”
The two started walking towards the opening where the subterranean river flowed. Sam laughed. “Yes, that sounds like my father, but this could be the greatest historical artefact ever found. It could bring peace to the world, and in the wrong hands, destroy it.”
“I hate to be the pessimist, but in the hands of mankind, I fear it’s more likely to do the latter. So what, exactly, is it supposed to do?”
As they approached the cave, Sam saw that his father, already inside it, had started to run out a long cable, and smiled at Aliana, as though she, like a naive child, would never understand the importance of gold and power.
“This scepter,” Sam continued, “when placed on top of the Pyramid of Giza at the midday of winter solstice in the year 2020, will point to the final vault of the ultimate artefact — the God’s Relic, an ancient requiem of all human knowledge, from the first cycle.”
“What do you mean by first cycle?” Aliana asked.
James smiled as he overheard the conversation. Sam recognized it as his ‘I’m about to tell you something that will blow your mind type smile’ and then replied, “The generation of humans before present day civilization occurred.”
Aliana turned her head slightly as she thought about what he’d said. “We weren’t the first?”
“Not even the second, I’m afraid. The human race only ever seems to evolve to a certain state, before we inevitably wipe ourselves out. Some civilizations get further than the next, but somehow we always seem to mess it up. It’s in our nature,” James said.
“And where do we fit into this? Are we the furthest along the stream of evolution?”
James thought about the question for a moment and then replied, “No. And we’re unlikely to beat some of the more successful civilizations.”
Aliana stared at him. Her expression told them she was considering if there could really be any truth to any of it.
“Legend has it that this scepter holds the key to a vault, which contains all human knowledge, spanning all the cycles of civilizations gone by,” Sam said.
“How does the information get there?”
“No one knows. Some people have hypothesized that earth has a caretaker… like God, who keeps an eye on things, and stores all the information that man accumulates until a cycle finally becomes so intelligent as to break the code.”
“What code?” she asked.
“The ability to not destroy yourself. Something that so far, all civilizations before us have failed to do.”
“That’s ridiculous. It’s in the same realm as a child being told that Santa Claus delivers presents to children all over the world in a single night!”
Grinning mischievously, Sam said, “Then again, it might just have been a longstanding fable, like the Mahogany Ship, that means nothing…”
Aliana clearly didn’t believe a word his father had said. She replied, “Well this sounds very exciting, but if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll just wait here until you retrieve it.”
“Very good,” James said, then throwing his dive gear over his shoulders, impatiently said, “We’ll see you soon.”
Sam kissed her and said, “I won’t be long.”
Tom then looked at him, and said, “Actually, I’m going to leave this one to you and your father. I’m going back for the truck you stole earlier. Based on the weight predictions that James has given me, there’s no way I’ll get the Super Huey off the ground with that thing on board.”
“You don’t want to dive now, and go back for it afterwards?”
“No, it’s going to take a couple hours to get back with it, and I don’t want to be flying once it’s dark. Let’s not forget that Rodriguez and his men are still searching for it, too.”
“Good point.” Sam said, unconcerned. “While you’re there, you might want to load the wooden crate from the Chinook, too.”
“Okay, will do.”
Sam picked up his netted duffle bag, and then slid into the water. Surface swimming to the end of the tunnel, he then disappeared below the surface.
Ahead of him, Sam found his father dragging the cable over his shoulder.
He caught up quickly and switched on his high powered, rock penetrating sonar so he could see the images of any heavy metals below.