With the mammoth sealed inside the container and preserved by the ice, which was in no danger of melting due to the intensely low temperatures of even a Siberian spring, Yuri had placed his parents into the care of friends as he prepared for what would become the longest journey of his life. With four trusted associates in whom he confided his astonishing find and with their shared intimate knowledge of the Siberian tundra, they had travelled out into the wilderness and spent two days photographing and documenting the remains before resealing the container and burying the mammoth once again in the ice. With the evidence of his find established, his four associates returned home while Yuri travelled south and escaped the Soviet Union via a container ship bound for Europe.
It had taken Yuri three months to establish a sale to a collector based in Montreal who had both the means and the funds to help Yuri smuggle the mammoth out of Russia. The deal was simple: Yuri would give up the remains of the mammoth for precisely half of its value on the black market, in return for the dealer ensuring that both he and his parents were spirited out of Russia and provided with the cash from the illegitimate deal with which to begin a new life in the United States.
Two months later Yuri and his parents had landed safely in Canada, while the remains of the mammoth had been successfully transported across the Bering Sea and into the collector’s hands without the Russian government’s knowledge. As far as Yuri was aware, they still did not know that a crime taken place out on the lonely Siberian wastes.
The value of the illegal sale and the assistance of the Montreal collector’s less savoury friends had provided Yuri and his family with a new home, documents and all of the legal paraphernalia required to begin their new life. In a time when it was still possible to move unnoticed and establish new lives, before computers, before the intensive surveillance of governments, Yuri had been able to provide for his parents until their deaths a few years later, their passing following a period of great happiness rather than the suffering they had endured for so many years previously.
Yuri success prompted him to continue on his path and over the next few years he had successfully smuggled numerous fossils from sites as diverse as Alberta, Montana, China and even Mongolia. Each sale that he achieved to private collectors swelled his bank accounts, and the contacts he made in the underworld laundered the money that passed through them. By the time Yuri was thirty five years old he was a millionaire with properties scattered across the United States, his fossil smuggling business carefully concealed behind the facade of a real estate company operating out of New York City.
Somewhere between his arrival in America and his retirement from the business of smuggling fossils, Yuri had become fascinated with the concept of out of place artefacts, a generic term given to objects that were found in archaeological digs that had no right to be there. The most famous example of such an artefact was the Antikithera Mechanism, an extraordinarily complex solar calendar that has been constructed by the Greeks two thousand years before. Remarkable in its complexity and accuracy, the device had once been believed to be constructed by aliens and handed to the Greeks as the catalyst for their sudden technological advancement.
Although that hypothesis had rapidly been dispelled by the hard work of archaeologists on the mechanism, the potential and possibility that extra-terrestrial intelligences had influenced the advancement of mankind had become an obsession for Yuri. He had spent years searching for evidence to support the hypothesis, and his efforts had not been without fruit. Virtually every single society and civilization in known history bore legends that had traditionally been interpreted as creation stories, or myths of dragons flying through the air or imagined gods created to explain the origin of mankind on the Earth. Yuri, like many others, have come to believe that these legends and myths had some basis in reality, their apparently supernatural flavour merely a consequence of witnesses’ inability to construct a suitable explanation for the things that they had experienced.
Yuri looked down at the folder before him as he recalled so many examples of ancient gods that could in fact have been ordinary people witnessing extraordinary technology at a time in human history when such an experience would have been indistinguishable from magic. He felt certain that Dr Lucy Morgan did not share his beliefs, for he had attempted to contact her on numerous occasions regarding her work in Israel and had received no reply. Likewise, her work in other fields revealed no evidence of interest in out of place artefacts or indeed the alien intervention hypothesis.
Yuri opened the file and sifted through the papers, and instantly his eye was caught by a secondary file that contained images of a number of archaeological sites around the globe. What struck him immediately about the sites was their location, far from the places where people, even archaeologists, would normally spend time searching for evidence of ancient historical artefacts. Perhaps, he mused, Vladimir been right after all.
Yuri reached out with one hand and pressed a communication button on his desk. Instantly a speaker came to life and his son’s voice reached him from elsewhere in the house.
‘Yes, papa?’
Yuri picked up a single sheet from the secondary folder and examined the image upon it as he spoke softly down the phone, an undersea wilderness dominated by huge stone structures and an unusual icon embedded beneath swaying sea moss.
‘Prepare the jet,’ he instructed his son. ‘We leave this afternoon.’
‘Where are we going, father?’
Yuri set the piece of paper down and looked out of the windows once more at the London skyline.
‘Japan.’
XII
The Japan Airlines Boeing 777–200 descended through a layer of broken cloud with barely a hint of turbulence as Ethan peered out of his window at the vast island emerging from the North Pacific below them. Lucy Morgan sat next to him, buried in a series of books that she had bought with her in an attempt to replace some of the major details within the files that had been stolen from Ethan’s cottage in the Scottish Highlands.
‘Remind me again,’ Ethan said as he watched the island passing by beneath the aircraft as it circled towards the airport. ‘Why are we in Japan?’
Lucy did not look up from the books as she replied.
‘Yonaguni Island is the location of one of the very oldest cities of ancient times, rumoured by some to be perhaps ten thousand years old.’
‘I’d never heard of it until you mentioned it to me in Scotland,’ Ethan admitted as he heard the Boeing’s undercarriage whine down.
‘That’s to be expected,’ Lucy replied, ‘as the entire city is under the water. Yonaguni is a formation of rock situated just off the coast of the island, and a shallow enough for us to dive,’ she explained. ‘It was discovered quite some years ago and there has been a great deal of debate in the scientific literature over whether the formation is the result of natural processes or has been hand carved by man. The debate is the result of mainstream archaeology’s insistence that there were no active complex civilizations ten thousand years ago, therefore how could there be any complex structures built at that time?’
‘So we were still running around throwing spears at antelope when this city supposedly was built?’
‘In a sense,’ Lucy agreed. ‘The dawn of civilization seven thousand years ago was preceded by a long period where mankind essentially grasped the concept of agriculture and in many cases were no longer living the life of the hunter gatherer. However, dwellings were made of things like daub, straw, mud bricks and other natural building materials: there were no major construction efforts or anything approaching what we would call cities.’