Covenant (49 page)

T
he late-afternoon sun flared off the hot asphalt as Lieutenant Jerah Ash guided the jeep to a manned barrier on the edge of the airport. In the rear of the jeep sat Aaron, Safiya, and Rachel, while Lucy Morgan sat next to Ethan, guzzling water from bottles and gorging on Israeli Army ration packs.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Ethan said to Lucy. “You need a hospital.”

“Like hell,” Lucy shot back between mouthfuls. “Do we know if they’ve taken off yet?”

Ethan shrugged as Lieutenant Ash signaled to the guards manning the barrier and drove through. As they reached the gates where rows of private aircraft were parked, Ethan could see several large jets with towering T-tails, shiny white fuselages, and chrome fittings.

Lieutenant Ash stopped and climbed out of the jeep to scan the airfield for one aircraft among dozens.

“There, that one,” Ethan said, spying a distant sleek jet with a blue MACE logo emblazoned across the fuselage. “It’s taxiing out right now.”

Lieutenant Ash nodded, keying his microphone and speaking quickly. Ethan didn’t wait to hear what he said, leaping instead into the driver’s seat and gunning the engine as the MACE jet taxied to the edge of the runway.

“Hey!” Lieutenant Ash shouted.

Ethan barely heard him as he accelerated directly toward the runway, yanking the wheel to avoid clipping the tails from a line of parked training aircraft.

“Jesus, Ethan!” Aaron Luckov shouted. “Take it easy!”

Ethan ignored his friend as he forced the jeep into a hard turn around one plane, the tires screeching on the tarmac and the chassis shuddering. Ahead, the whine of the MACE jet’s engines suddenly climbed to a deafening roar, the jumbled city horizon behind it blurring in clouds of heat.

“They’re taking off without clearance!” Lucy shouted, hanging on desperately in the rear of the jeep.

The jet suddenly sprang forward as it released its brakes, accelerating down the runway.

Ethan turned the jeep, mounting the taxiway with a thump before surging onto the open grass alongside.

“That’s a twenty-five-ton aircraft!” Rachel shouted as she realized what Ethan was about to do. “Are you suicidal?”

Ethan turned a pair of cold, gray eyes to her. “Almost.”

Rachel sat back in silence. The jeep bounced violently as it left the grass verge and skidded onto the dark tarmac of the runway. Ethan struggled for control of the jeep as it swerved into the path of the oncoming jet, wrestling the wheel back into his grip and steering the jeep to the edge of the runway and leaping out.

The Gulfstream jet roared toward him, a cloud of translucent brown haze billowing behind it as it accelerated. Ethan dashed to the center of the runway, the Sig pistol in his hand as he took aim at the undercarriage of the jet rushing toward him and filling the sky. Ethan aimed carefully and fired three times, the sound of the pistol drowned out by the roar of the jet’s turbofan engines.

The second bullet punctured the left nosewheel tire, the third piercing the right as the jet swerved violently. As the Gulfstream thundered past in a crescendo of jet blast, Ethan hurled himself to one side, rolling and looking back to see the plane’s air brakes pop open and the thrust-reverser buckets close over the engine exhausts.

“She’s disabled!” Ethan shouted, as Lieutenant Ash jogged breathlessly to the edge of the runway, joining soldiers in two other vehicles as they accelerated in pursuit of the rapidly slowing jet.

Ethan leaped back into the jeep as the Gulfstream taxied off the main runway and came to an ungainly halt nearby. The three vehicles converged on the aircraft even as the boarding steps unfolded and three men scrambled out in a desperate attempt to flee.

“Freeze!” Lieutenant Ash bellowed, drawing his pistol and aiming it at the men. “Hands in the air!”

Ethan watched as the crew members came to a standstill and were surrounded by a dozen armed troops. Lieutenant Ash waved two of his men forward, and they cuffed the crew before leading them away. Ethan looked up the steps of the aircraft, and then at the lieutenant. Without hesitation, the Israeli officer led the way into the interior.

The jet had been heavily modified, with plush leather couches and a minibar, but none of that interested Ethan as much as the large crate lashed down in the center of the fuselage. Lieutenant Ash checked the consignment numbers on the side.

“Listed as medical supplies and equipment,” he said. “The package is for a private residence in Washington DC.”

He tore open a consignment note stuck to the side of the crate, and raised his eyebrows in surprise as he read the address.

“It’s for a Kelvin Patterson.”

“The man behind everything,” Lucy Morgan hissed as she looked at the crate. “I’ll bet a year’s salary that the remains I found are in there.”

Lieutenant Ash looked at one of his men. “Open it.”

The soldier produced a digging tool from his webbing, lodged the hook under the lid of the crate, and pulled hard. The wooden lid splintered as the nails popped out, and Jerah Ash reached over and pushed the lid clear.

Ethan stared down into the crate to see a rectangular block of sandstone. Inside, illuminated by the interior lights of the aircraft, lay the skeletal remains entombed in rocks that had held its body for millennia.

“That’s the one,” Lucy Morgan said as she joined him beside the crate.

Lieutenant Ash stared at the remains, apparently caught between relief and alarm. “And this … thing. It’s—”

“Some kind of ape,” Ethan said, shutting the lid. “First things first, this isn’t over yet. There’s still Kelvin Patterson. He must be involved and he must have people waiting for this to arrive in DC. Let’s fly this plane over there and see who turns up.”

“Not a chance,” Lieutenant Ash snapped. “You can’t fly this plane anyway.”

Aaron and Safiya Luckov, standing behind the officer, spoke together as though prompted.

“We can.”

Lieutenant Ash looked over his shoulder at them in mild surprise, but shook his head vigorously as he turned back to Ethan.

“These remains belong here in Israel, and I’ve already risked enough bringing you here. This ends now.”

“It won’t if you don’t let this aircraft travel back to the United States,” Ethan said calmly. “If we repair the aircraft’s tires and leave now, then you’re in the clear. You found and protected Lucy Morgan and you ensured that I left the country, as ordered to by Shiloh Rok. You’re the hero of the hour, Jerah. If you don’t, there’s going to be one hell of a diplomatic spat over these remains. We only have Sheviz’s testimonial evidence against Patterson, but people have died in America as a result of these experiments and neither I nor the United States of America want to let that go unpunished. Do you?”

Lieutenant Ash stared at Ethan for a long moment, and then a bitter chuckle erupted from his throat. He shook his head and rubbed his temples wearily.

“If I do this, will you promise that I’ll never, ever see you again?”

Ethan grinned.

“That, I can promise you.”

Jerah Ash sighed, and turned to the troopers standing behind him.

“We wouldn’t have time to offload that … thing anyway. Seal the crate and repair the damage to the aircraft’s tires.”

As the soldiers hurried to do their work, Lieutenant Ash turned back to Ethan.

“And what exactly are you going to do in Washington?”

Ethan wiped the exhaustion from his eyes with one trembling hand, and looked longingly at one of the Gulfstream’s plush leather couches. Suddenly, for the first time in years, he desperately wanted to go to sleep.

“I’ll figure that out when I wake up.”

Rachel looked at Ethan, but said nothing.

“Not like you to be at a loss for words,” Ethan said.

Rachel smiled, shrugged. “I don’t know what to say. You were right.”

“I’m making the most of it—doesn’t happen that often.”

“I don’t believe that for a moment,” Lucy Morgan said from one side. “I owe you one.”

“You owe me two,” Ethan said, and gestured to the crate. “Why did these things leave one of their own behind, do you think?”

“Everything dies,” Lucy said sadly.

“Unless what?” Ethan encouraged her. “There’s a reason. Sheviz said it himself: he couldn’t find as many remains as he felt sure were out there. Why would that be?”

“Sheviz said that he found similar remains in India and Iraq,” Lucy replied, looking at him curiously. “Both are part of what was once Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization and the origin of many claimed instances of extraterrestrial influence on mankind in ancient history.”

“And Hans Karowitz told us about the change in climate at the end of the Younger Dryas, which affected sea levels,” Ethan said. “That would alter certain conditions.”

Lucy paced up and down in deep thought.

“He said something about experiments in Washington DC too, something to do with blood groups?”

Ethan nodded.

“They think that O-negative blood stems from these beings, as it has no apparent origin in human evolution and can’t be cloned.”

Lucy looked at the crate for a moment longer.

“Blood groups, DNA, climate,” she murmured softly to herself. “Why would they try to—”

“Think about it,” Ethan said with a brief smile. “There may be one in every ancient city.”

Rachel gasped, her eyes flying wide.

“My God,” she said. “They left it here on purpose. It’s a Rosetta stone.”

W
hat the hell’s a Rosetta stone?” Lieutenant Ash asked, dumbfounded.

Lucy gestured to the remains.

“It’s a stone tablet that recorded a decree issued in Memphis by King Ptolemy over two thousand years ago. The decree was in three texts: Egyptian demotic script, ancient Greek, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, and allowed archaeologists to decipher hieroglyphics for the first time. Don’t you see? They must have left behind one of these skeletons at the site of every early civilization they encountered; that’s why Sheviz found fragmentary remains in different countries.”

Jerah Ash shrugged.

“Why bother?”

“Because it was the best way for them to leave us a message,” Lucy gasped, turning a full circle on her feet and holding her hands to her head. “My God, I can’t believe I didn’t realize it before.”

“You think that’s what really happened?” Ethan asked.

“Of course,” Lucy replied. “For years we’ve wondered, if they visited us in the past, why they hadn’t left markers or evidence of their presence. We know the ancients expended enormous effort, materials, and even lives on building temples and pyramids when the time would have been better spent building fortifications instead, so whatever the reason it must have been important. So why would such visitors just leave our ancestors to build ambiguous megastructures, maintain oral traditions, or carve figurines that could be interpreted in any number of ways? But we’ve been looking at the problem the wrong way round, thinking in terms of our own technology, not theirs.”

Rachel frowned.

“You think that the answer is in the burials?”

“Not the burials,” Lucy said, “but the bones, the mitochondrial DNA. That’s why the blood could be so important. O-negative blood could have had its origins in these beings. If so, the fact that it remains today means that it could be traced via people with O-negative blood using mitochondrial DNA that’s been passed down the feminine line from seven thousand years ago.”

Ethan thought for a moment.

“Could they actually do that? Leave a message in the remains?”

Lucy nodded enthusiastically.

“It would be like a message in a bottle,” she said. “The bottles are living cells and the message is encoded in mitochondrial DNA. Viruses are designed to infect organisms on Earth and upload their DNA into the genomes of those organisms, so there is a well-understood pathway for getting information into DNA. Our own genomes have got huge amounts of this junk that has climbed onboard from viruses over evolutionary history. Now there could be a message encoded in it, maybe in a string of nucleotide bases.”

Ethan caught on to her train of thought.

“We wouldn’t be able to decipher the message until we’d reached a certain technological standard.”

“Exactly,” Lucy agreed. “And the climate change since these beings were on our planet has hidden the evidence from view.”

“How?” Rachel asked.

“Virtually all of the megastructures that appeared during the Bronze and Copper Ages can be considered as cargo cults,” Lucy said, “but we can’t see all of them anymore because so many of them are underwater.”

“Underwater?” Rachel repeated.

Lucy nodded.

“All of the world’s religions have their global flood myth, like Noah in the Bible. About a decade ago divers off the coast of Japan found an enormous city complete with its own pyramid. It’s called the Yonaguni Formation, and is around eight to ten thousand years old. Sea levels were much lower after the Younger Dryas when these cities were first flourishing, and like today people built on rivers, floodplains, and coastal estuaries. When the planet warmed, the glaciers melted, and sea levels rose and swallowed entire cities in a matter of years, burying them forever. Many of mankind’s earliest megastructures are to be found not on land but underwater.”