O’Connor hauled himself onto the limestone shelf and helped Aleta out of the water. They divested themselves of their tanks and fins and began to explore. The shelf stretched for a hundred metres before sloping down again into the crystal-clear waters of the cave.
‘I wonder how far this goes?’
O’Connor shrugged. ‘Some of these caves go a long way; there’s one across the border in Mexico that’s over 150 kilometres long.’
‘Gives a lot of scope for hiding things. Does the line on the map make any sense?’
O’Connor steadied his wrist compass and searched the walls with his torch. Suddenly he stopped.
‘Look! Up there!’ he exclaimed, flashing his torch two metres above Aleta’s head. ‘Without the map, you’d never know it, but there’s another ledge.’ He gained a foothold on the limestone wall and levered himself up to the smaller ledge, at the end of which was an entrance to a much smaller cave. O’Connor eased his way through the narrow opening to discover another colony of glow-worms, their lethal curtain glimmering at the far end of the cave. He played his torch over the rough limestone floor. On one side of the cave four metal ingots, each indented with the eagle and swastika of the Third Reich, glinted in the light beam.
Aleta squeezed into the cave beside him and gasped.
‘Some of von Hei?en’s ill-gotten gains,’ O’Connor said grimly, knowing the probable origin would have been the gold fillings of thousands of Jews.
‘Why would he have left them here? Maybe there wasn’t enough time to get them out.’
‘That’d be my guess, along with there not being enough space in his truck for the trunks in the ceiling. As for the gold, each of these ingots weighs around 400 ounces, which on today’s market is worth over US$400 000. We’re looking at about one and half million dollars worth here, so God knows how much he’s got away with.’ O’Connor shone his torch around the rest of the cave. ‘No sign of the figurine.’
‘Do you think he might have found it down here?’
‘I suspect not. Von Hei?en was a meticulous diary keeper. The last entry in the final diary was dated the day before he left, and there’s no mention of it.’ O’Connor ran his torch back and forth over the limestone, but after ten minutes’ searching there was still no clue as to where the figurine might be hidden. Finally he aimed his torch beam at the far corner, towards the ‘curtain of death’.
‘There, on the floor, just in front of the glow-worms!’ Aleta tugged at O’Connor’s wetsuit. ‘There’s a faint outline of a nautilus conch shell! Do you remember my grandfather’s notes?’
‘The Fibonacci sequence… look for?.’
‘Yes!’ she exclaimed, realising that the outline in the limestone was not only sacred to many civilisations and religions, but that the spiral of the shell grew in accordance with the Fibonacci sequence.
The High Priest’s words resonated with the icon on the cave floor. One who is amongst us now will return to unlock the secret, but if they are to be successful, they will need to find the sequence of numbers that is at the base of the universe itself. That sequence contains a common number from which a subtraction of one will give its reciprocal, and to which the addition of one will give its square. Phi and the Fibonacci sequence represented the golden mean, which was at the base of the universe. Aleta knew well that if you divided any number in the sequence by its predecessor, the result was always 1.618. If you subtracted one, you got 0.618, which was the reciprocal, or 1/1.618; and if you added one, then the resultant 2.618 was the square of 1.618.
‘We haven’t got time to go in to it now,’ she said, kneeling and using her knife to carefully scrape away the limestone that had accumulated over the sacred icon, ‘but while you were crawling around Jennings’ ceiling, Jose subjected me to some regression therapy. For the Maya, the conch shell opened a portal to their ancestors.’ Her pulse began to race as O’Connor joined her, and their scraping revealed a rectangle that formed a border around the shell.
Outside the cave, Crawford and Sanders had reached the grey stony bed of the lake. Fidel’s boat drifted aimlessly above them. Crawford spotted the rope first and signalled. He pointed to his eyes and then to the rope. Both divers followed the rope towards the cave’s underwater entrance.
53
T he wind was still howling up the Copper River Valley, buffeting the control station at Gakona, but for Dr Tyler Jackson, alarm bells were ringing over what was about to unfold, and he didn’t notice. Howard Wiley had arrived on a flying visit for a briefing. The satellite image on the screen was marked TOP SECRET, pinpointing the location of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard base at Fordo near Qom, one of Iran’s holiest cities and a major seat of Islamic academic endeavour.
‘As you’re aware,’ Gakona’s director, Dr Nathaniel B. Hershey, began, ‘for some time we’ve suspected the Iranians have been constructing a nuclear facility deep within the mountains near Qom. The infra-red satellite imagery has not been able to penetrate the solid rocks, nor is it likely that our conventional weapons will be able to inflict any significant damage.’ Hershey flashed up a diagram that showed the intended path of the extremely high-energy but low-frequency radio waves HAARP was capable of generating.
‘The second experiment in the Operation Aether series will beam three billion watts of energy directly into the suspected Iranian complex. If all goes well, anything inside the mountain will be destroyed. H-hour for the transmission burst will be in three days from now, at 0300 hours, our time. That’s 1530 hours Iranian local time, when the maximum number of workers will be on duty.’ Hershey went on to explain the details of the impact of the high-energy heat burst. He paused at the end of his briefing to allow questions. Jackson seized his chance, determined to sound one last warning.
‘There is, of course, a risk with this experiment,’ he began. A look of thunder appeared on Hershey’s square rugged face. ‘Deep-earth tomography has never been tried on this scale before, and the results are therefore unknown. It’s not inconceivable that this massive burst of energy may upset the earth’s rotational spin. The earthquake off Sumatra that caused the devastating tsunamis in 2004 measured 9 on the Richter scale, and we have incontrovertible evidence that it increased the earth’s wobble, moving the poles by several centimetres. Three billion watts of energy may have an even more devastating effect than a natural earthquake.’
‘That is pure conjecture, Dr Jackson,’ Hershey responded icily.
Wiley turned in his seat and glared at the senior CIA scientist. ‘Isn’t that why we do experiments, Dr Jackson? To see if they work?’
‘We should learn from history, sir. In 1954, as you know, we detonated the first hydrogen bomb on the Bikini Atoll. The experiment Castle Bravo was expected to yield four megatons. Castle Bravo yielded nearly four times that, devastating the population, vaporising the test island, and leaving a mile-wide crater on the lagoon floor. The radioactive fallout reached as far as Australia, India and Japan. We’re in a similar situation with Operation Aether: we don’t know what might happen here. Worse still, we’re moving towards a once-in-26 000-year planetary alignment, which culminates in December 2012, when the Maya predicted the earth would be exposed to the power of a massive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. We should at least postpone the launch of the missile and the ELF beam until after 2012, when the earth will most likely be in a more stable orbit.’