‘Dispatch four men to the airport to await the Catalina’s arrival. I want the aircraft searched this time. If they’re not aboard then we shall be forced to intercept them at Macchu Picchu. Prepare your team for deployment and contact US Southern Command— we’ll need a suitable aircraft for transport.’
‘Understood. And the site in the Andes?’
Aaron thought for a moment. ‘Tourists will have no access to the site at night, and the mountain roads are far too dangerous to traverse in darkness. Warner and his people will want free movement, so they will attempt to access the area before dawn and be gone before the first tourists arrive after sunrise.’
‘That will require a tactical insertion of our team,’ Lieutenant Veer informed him. ‘There’s no way we ‘ll be able to reach the site and ascend the mountain ahead of Morgan.’
‘Arrange it,’ Aaron agreed. ‘You and your men will deploy en route and set up a perimeter around the citadel. It’s imperative that Lucy Morgan is allowed to find the remains that she seeks, after which we will liberate them from her and depart the area as if we were never there.’
The agent nodded, turned and hurried from the jet as Aaron retook his seat and tossed the flight plan down onto a table next to him. It was time to bring this entire episode to a close.
XXXI
Ethan squinted up into the star-filled sky above as he stopped for breath on the endlessly winding trial high above a plunging gorge that descended towards the Urabamba River far below. The mountains loomed large above him in the darkness, their peaks enshrouded in dense forests and ribbons of cloud that glowed a faint blue beneath the light of a crescent moon.
The temperature was falling as they climbed, the track narrow and treacherous as it circled this way and that around the mountainside. Approaching the mountain’s tip from the south rather than from the east, where the main service road wound its way up to the citadel, the old Inca Trail was less well trodden and thus less likely to be blocked by the Russians should they have arrived first. From his vantage point, Ethan could see the main road zig-zagging back and forth up the mountain’s eastern flank.
Lucy laboured past him, her head down and arms swinging as she marched relentlessly up the track. Lopez kept pace with her easily, perhaps somewhat more at home here in South America. Ethan knew that she had grown up in the Vedeer Mountains of Guanajuato in Mexico, long before her family had attempted to find a better life in the United States. Lopez had been the only member to remain after her family returned to Mexico, and had ultimately ended up working for DC’s Metropolitan Police Department. Behind Lopez, Jarvis and his two escorts trudged wearily in pursuit.
‘This is why modern society doesn’t build cities on top of damned mountains,’ Jarvis gasped as he passed by.
Ethan squatted down quietly and watched the track behind them for a few moments in an attempt to determine whether they were being followed. As the sound of the team’s footsteps faded away he revelled in the deep silence of the mountains, reminded briefly of his foggy highland refuge in Scotland, half a world away. Nobody appeared behind them, and he turned his head to look out across the plunging gorge to the main road. He could see no evidence of headlights or detect any movement of pedestrians ascending the mountain. The citadel was closed to tourists during the night, and most began the journey down the mountainside long before sunset. Ethan knew that the earliest risers gained access to the highest peaks at dawn, and armed guards protected the site during daylight. If they didn’t want to be caught up in a fire-fight with Peruvian officials, their work had to be complete before sunrise.
The car journey to the mountain on Peru’s dusty and often untreated roads had taken two hours, and then there had been a long trek out and round to the south of the mountain to avoid the tourist trails.
‘Checking our tail?’
Ethan saw Lucy squat down alongside him in the darkness.
‘It’s good practice, even alone up here,’ he replied, and then looked again at the mountains. ‘This place does seem remote enough for your alien interventionists to appear, in the sense that virtually every sighting of UFOs seems to occur in lonely places rather than city centres.’
‘If they interacted with us thousands of years ago, maybe it was because we weren’t so well connected as we are now,’ Lucy speculated.
‘How will you know if you’ve found the remains you’re looking for?’ Ethan asked. ‘Won’t they all look the same?’
‘Do you remember what Dr El-Wari said about the Pharaoh Akhenaten? That is skull was deformed, a rare feature known today as Scaphocephaly?’
‘Yes,’ Ethan replied. ‘You think that the same deformation will be present here?’
‘There is a place about four hours’ drive from here on the Paracas Peninsula,’ Lucy replied. ‘Stone tools have been found in the area, and cursory analysis has established dates as old as eight thousand years. But the big discovery there was of dozens of skulls, all of them massively deformed. The thing is, the phenomenon of skull deformation is not unique to the Paracas area. The Egyptians performed it, as did people on the island of Vanuatu in Melanesia, Malta in the Mediterranean, and the Olmec of Mexico amongst others. Most of these skulls are elongated as the result of artificial binding, whereas a number of the Paracas skulls show specific characteristics that would seem to indicate that they were in fact born that way.’
‘How could you tell?’
‘They had non-human features,’ Lucy replied, and Ethan thought that he saw her shiver in the darkness. ‘One is the presence of two small holes in the back of the skull, perpendicular to the cranial suture present in the parietal plate of the skull. Every normal human skull is composed of three major bone plates; the frontal plate and the two parietal plates which lie behind this, intersecting the frontal plate and making a “T” shape. The Paracus skulls have only two plates, an unknown feature of modern man, and some investigators believe that the two holes are fixing points for tendons and ligaments necessary to hold up the person’s elongated head, just as similar holes appear in human jaws as fixing points for muscles and tendons.’
‘Could it be a genetic disorder?’ Ethan asked. ‘Something inherited?’
‘Perhaps,’ Lucy conceded, ‘but the big issue with the Paracus skulls is that ritualistic deformation could only alter the shape of the skull, not the skull volume. But several skulls excavated from a site called Cerro Colorado, adjacent to the main graveyard in Paracas, had a cranial volume more than double that of a normal human.’ Lucy shivered again. ‘In one case, a deformed foetus was found inside the mummy of its dead mother, its skull heavily elongated. They didn’t just pass on this trait, Ethan, they were born with it. Something happened to these people thousands of years ago, something terrible.’
Ethan got to his feet. ‘Let’s not dwell on it too long. We’ve got a job to do here for Beth. We can swap horror stories later.’
Ethan jogged with Lucy around the corner of the trail, turning right to see the mountain open up before him and high upon its peak the vast citadel of Machu Picchu. The immense mountain soared out of the gorge to rise high into the sky before him, the angular and geometrically-aligned city upon its peak a dark and brooding presence, a shadow against the great darkness of the heavens.
Lopez and the others had stopped just ahead of them and were likewise admiring the spectacular view.