Yuri leaned down beneath is seat and lifted out what looked to Vladimir like a stone libation bowl, dirtied with age. Yuri set the bowl between them on the table.
‘This, my son, is the Fuenta Magna. It was found in 1958 near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. As you can see it features beautifully engraved anthropomorphic characters and zoological motifs characteristic of the local culture.’
‘It’s lovely,’ Vladimir uttered without interest. ‘Make your point, papa.’
‘It is often referred to as the Rosetta Stone of the Americas, and is one of the most controversial artefacts in South America as it raises questions about whether there may have been a connection between the Sumerians and the ancient inhabitants of the Andes, located thousands of miles away. The reason for that are the inscriptions, here on the edge.’
Vladimir peered at the writing running around the rim of the bowl’s interior. ‘It looks a bit like hieroglyphics.’
‘They’re better than that,’ Yuri replied, ‘they’re in two different scripts. One is the ancient language of Pukhara, a forerunner of the Tiahuanaco civilization native to Bolivia and Peru. The other is proto-Sumerian, a culture that rose in the fertile crescent of Persia, thousands of miles away.’
Vladimir looked up at his father. ‘Could the Sumerians have sailed across the oceans and met the Pukhara?’
‘Their civilizations had only just managed to begin the rudimentary basics of agriculture, Vlad’,’ Yuri explained. ‘Sailing around the globe wasn’t just unlikely, but truly impossible.’
Vladimir shook his head. ‘I still don’t understand, papa. What if we do find these remains and we do understand the message that is within them? Why is it so important?’
Yuri sighed heavily as he realized the extent of his son’s incapacity to understand the importance of what he was pursuing.
‘Because it underlines more than just human evolution — it reveals the fact that our development as a species has been guided. We had help,’ he explained. ‘Because it brings to an end more than just religious conflict, the centuries and millennia of which have cost millions of lives for absolutely nothing. Because it could reveal not just that humanity’s development has been guided at some point in our past by intelligences not of this Earth, but that life at large in the universe is in fact guided, that we are not merely the product of natural processes but that the spread of life in the universe may in fact have been deliberately engineered, perhaps even by species that have long since passed into extinction. We are not pursuing just remains in a dusty desert, my son, we are pursuing the final chapter in our understanding of how we came to be here. We are seeking the actual origin of life in our universe, the true nature of God.’
Vladimir stared at his father as the depth of their quest began to finally sink in. The younger man glanced up at the skies as though searching the heavens, and as he did so Yuri too looked skyward at the light cumulus clouds drifting through the endless blue.
It was then that he saw the tiny speck of an aircraft climbing away from the nearby islands, and heard the sound of the engines as they passed overhead. He shielded his eyes with one hand and easily identified the shape of the aircraft, its distinctive fuselage and wide straight wings bright white as they reflected the sunlight flaring off the clouds beneath them.
The Catalina was heading south west, right out over the ocean. Although there were isolated islands in that direction the aircraft was still climbing, already through five thousand feet already. That put its likely destination is at least a hundred nautical miles away and probably more as it sought the colder high altitude air to cruise more efficiently.
Yuri lowered his hand as he watched the aircraft disappear above the cumulus clouds and spoke without looking at his son.
‘Contact our IT experts and have them access local flight plans filed from the islands. Find out if there are any Catalina recorded as being due to depart the island today.’
Vladimir craned his head back toward the faint noise of the passing aircraft.
‘You think they’re aboard?’
‘If I were looking to leave the area in a hurry and did not want to be traced, I would charter a private aircraft and make sure the pilot had not filed a flight plan. If we don’t find one…’
Vladimir nodded as he got out of his seat and hurried away.
XVIII
Ethan awoke to a nudge on his shoulder. He opened his eyes as the sound of the rumbling engines and rattling interior of the Catalina invaded the blissful oblivion of sleep, the cabin half in shadow but intersected by brilliant halos of gold and orange light blazing through the port windows. Yin, Arnie’s co-pilot, satisfied herself that he was awake before she moved away across the interior of the Catalina’s fuselage and shook Lucy Morgan’s shoulder.
Ethan set up on the cramped seat where he had managed to grab a few hours’ sleep, his joints aching and his legs numb from the vibrations coming from the Catalina’s twin engines. He stood up and moved to one of the bulbous viewing panels near the rear of the fuselage and crouched down to look out. Blankets of tattered stratus cloud glowed orange as they passed by several thousand feet below them, and through the gaps he could see a coastline even further below, the waves flecked with white rollers.
‘Where are we?’ Lucy asked as she sat up in a seat with a blanket wrapped over her shoulders.
‘Crossing the Cambodian coast,’ Ethan replied, ‘assuming Arnie knows where the hell he’s going.’
The flight had been a long one, and despite the Catalina’s impressive range Arnie had been required to land at an airstrip he knew deep in the mountain wilderness of Java. Despite his reservations Ethan had been forced to allow Arnie to choose his own course, mainly because they were required to avoid any major airports to prevent their passage being recorded. Arnie’s contacts, of whom Ethan guessed the less he knew the better, included a couple of airstrip operators who also had access to the Avgas which fuelled the Catalina’s aged piston engines. Landing on a makeshift airstrip atop a mountain ridge almost entirely enshrouded in cloud had been an experience that neither Ethan nor Lucy would forget a long time, but to Arnie and Yin it had all seemed like business as usual. Not for the first time, Ethan wondered what Arnie got up to with his aircraft when tourism season was off.
Ethan made his way to the cockpit and clambered into the co-pilot seat alongside Arnie, who was scrutinising a map and checking off their position via his instruments. A modern screen in the centre of the cockpit held a GPS display and Ethan could immediately orientate himself to their position.
‘How much farther until we land?’ he asked.
Without looking up, Arnie pointed at the GPS display which showed a large inland lake far from Cambodia’s coast.
‘That is Tonle Sap Lake, south of Angor Wat. It’s the closest location I can take you to without attracting too much attention. The lake is massive so we’ll land well south of the temples where all the tourists are. From there, you’re on your own.’
‘How much further north of the lake is this place that Lucy is looking for?’
‘According to this map, it’s a recently excavated temple site about twenty five miles north of Angkor Wat. There’s not much in the way of public transport out there and you’re pretty much on the edge of the mountains and jungles. Rather you than me.’
Ethan spotted Arnie’s smug grin but he chose not to respond. He took one last look at the astonishing vista outside the cockpit windows, the broken cloud far below reaching the base of distant mountains that soared into the powder blue sky, their rugged peaks bathed in the dawn sunlight, and then he made his way back into the interior of the Catalina to see Lucy sipping from a mug of hot coffee.