The Alignment Ingress (2 page)
Read The Alignment Ingress Online
Authors: Thomas Greanias
Hank narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“If I’m figuring out this illustration correctly, the flowers you’re interested in represent locations in the Congo.”
“Maybe.” Hank glanced around to make sure they weren’t being overheard. “It’s certainly rich in gold.”
“Yes, but I think my lost Pillars of Creation are buried inside her lost tomb, which is buried under her lost palace, which I think is buried here.” Conrad pointed to the hoopoe bird in the ferns that the Queen of Sheba was staring at. “The hoopoe was Solomon’s messenger bird, and here it is...in ancient Nubia.”
“The Sudan,” Hank said. “How do you get that?”
“The alignment of your terrestrial map to my celestial chart,” Conrad explained, and showed Hank on the tablet pointing to star 109 Vir. “See how this lines up with this?” Conrad opened Google Earth, telescoping down to the ancient city of Meroe along the east bank of the Nile. “This is where legend says your girl built her palace. And where there was once a lost palace, there is probably a lost tomb beneath it. And inside that tomb are the lost secrets of Solomon.”
“I’ll be damned,” Hank said, at least acknowledging Conrad’s ingress.
“Yeah, well, if we open the wrong door, Hank, we might well be.”
Hank waved his hand dismissively. “The only difference is mine hides a whole lot of something, and yours hides a whole lot of nothing.”
That wasn’t true, Conad thought, and Hank knew it. However much he wanted to drape his discovery in “exotic matter,” the plain fact was that Hank was after the Queen of Sheba’s gold. Conrad, meanwhile, was after the centuries-old secrets she had gleaned from King Solomon—secrets about the very creation of the world that she took to the grave with her.
Knowledge, as King Solomon believed, was a hell of a lot more valuable than gold.
“Look, Hank, if you want to go to your ingress while I go to mine, that’s fine,” Conrad told him. “I just need to know that if I find some relic we can use your friend Azmadi to fence it.”
“What about Abdil?”
“I pay him out of what I find,” Conrad told him confidently.
Hank nodded. “And if you turn up nothing?”
Conrad sighed. “I’ll come to your site and help you out. Assuming you find something. You get my apologies, and I get some of your gold.”
“Agreed.” Hank took a last swig, set his empty pint on the table and then glanced at his watch. “Sorry. Got a date with a lady.”
“Our Persian princess?”
“She’s next. This one is threatening to sail away tomorrow.”
“Sounds like a matchmaker job from Montgomery,” Conrad said, figuring that nobody was going to hear him over the guitarist at the bar hacking away at a spirited version of “Break On Through.”
“Yep, Conrad. You got your people. I’ve got mine. We all sing for our supper.”
Conrad watched Hank walk away and could only wonder what kind of date it was this time. Then he began to ponder life with Abdil off his back and the possession of the knowledge of the ages.
Realizing he had consumed more ale than he thought, Conrad made his way to the bathroom. It was in the back of the tavern, down a long tunnel carved out of the cliffs. The urinals were modified urns, and the walls and ceilings were covered with ancient treasure maps for the tourists.
As Conrad studied a copy of the 1513 Piri Reis map of an ice-free Antarctica, a plank beneath his feet creaked. He looked over his shoulder but saw nobody.
All of a sudden the floor gave way beneath him. His head banged on a trapdoor, and he plunged into darkness.
A quarter of a mile down the beach, Hank looked out at the
Sea Academy
gleaming regally in the bay at twilight. The ship billed itself as a floating university for international students, and Hank had been eyeing it for a reason. Conrad guessed it right: he had a job to do for Montgomery.
The
Sea Academy
’s silhouette looked like the warship it had once been before being reconditioned into a floating university/summer tourist boat and smuggling ship. Stories varied about what the
Sea Academy
did in its military career, but pretty much all agreed that she had had a checkered history of undercover ops, humanitarian missions and false-flag postings.
No wonder Hank felt a kinship to her. Too bad she’d be an underwater tourist attraction by morning.
Hank stripped down, waded into the waves and swam toward her hull.
She looked to be 55 meters long with a shallow draft. She could go a long way up a good-sized river—the modern equivalent of a paddlewheel. With a few artillery pieces and decent recon, she could stand up against anything she was expected to encounter. She could hold enough men, ammo and gear to drop off a “toehold camp” pretty much anywhere, serving as the base until the actual camp was finished.
She could do basically the same near any island.
Like this one.
As the hull rose up like a giant whale on top of him, Hank had another one of his flashbacks—or flash-somethings—that had dogged him since Afghanistan. This one must have been triggered by a story he’d heard. In his head he saw a WWII battleship going down, and suddenly he was trapped with the crew deep below in watertight rooms with no chance of escape. The captain was telling them what they already knew: their fate was sealed. All Hank could hear was his own voice saying, “Leave the lights on, we’re playing poker.”
Was this some guilt trip for ridding the world of this floating front for nasty bad guys? Because the Sea Academy was no honorable battleship, these guys were fighting no“good war,” and nothing was stopping them from jumping ship when it went down.
Hank shook the image out of his head and carefully attached a C4 charge beneath the
Sea Academy
’s waterline, armed the fuse and quietly swam back to shore.
Minutes later he was rising from the surf. He toweled himself off and put on a dry shirt from a bag on the beach. Checking the illuminated dial of his black Victorinox Dive Master watch, for a nanosecond he felt like James Bond in the beginning of
Goldfinger.
If only there were a beautiful girl in a bathtub waiting for him.
Conrad awoke in darkness, aware of the smell of the sea and the unmistakable bobbing of a ship on the water. His hands were tied behind his back to some kind of rail. Then something like a hood was ripped off.
Standing on the polished deck of the yacht before him was the foul face of Abdil Zawas, two of his goons behind him. One was methodically coiling a long whip.
“
Think you can use my money to find some priceless idol and keep it for yourself, Yeats?”
Conrad saw he was on the deck of Zawas’s yacht. “I was just going to give you a call and tell you I found it.”
“Is that so? Tell me where this idol is.”
“I could do that. But you still need me to dig it up. There’s a curse.”
Zawas laughed. “That curse is me, Yeats,” he said, leaning close. “I would have picked up your friend Mr. Johnson, but then he has a habit of attracting trouble.”
The word was barely out of Zawas’ mouth when suddenly a thunderous explosion lit up the harbor and rocked the yacht.
There were whoops and cheers from the tavern high in the cliffs. Zawas and his men ran to the other side of the deck to watch the
Sea Academy
light up the night.
Thank you, Hank Johnson.
Crew members from the harborside bars scrambled to get to the sinking ship. But rather than offer aid, their aim from what Conrad could see was to strip the ship of any and all valuables.
“Johnson!” Abdil cried out.
Then came a second, deafening explosion, sending Abdil ducking into a cabin as glowing debris rained down.
“Toldya there’s a curse,” Conrad called out.
Zawas came out from hiding, dazed and furious, waving the whip as he marched straight at him. “Show me the idol, Yeats!” he yelled like some movie villain. “Or I show you the whip!”
But a third explosion hit, rocking the deck and sending Zawas down on all fours. By now Conrad had freed himself. He climbed over the rail and jumped ship into the waters, leaving behind a tangle of empty ropes and a raging Zawas cursing after him into the night.
NIANTIC LINKS
Hank Johnson DOD Debrief - Part 1
Hank
Johnson DOD Debrief - Part 2
H
ank Johnson’s quest for the Queen of Sheba’s mines had begun in Geneva even before he met with Conrad Yeats in Cape Verde. On the morning of November 23, 2012, Hank slipped away from the Niantic project facility based at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics known as CERN to board a train to Zurich. He left with only his familiar backpack stuffed with maps and satellite overheads of a remote site in Africa.
The site, he hoped, of the legendary Queen of Sheba’s lost mines.
Hank’s official explanation for his sudden departure was that he had found something on an intel map and was off shooting the pilot for his new “Nomad” TV series.
The real story, however, was that he had traced “exotic matter” or XM patterns with a Reverse Big Bang Algorithm to the site—evidence of a significant portal. Portals were transdimensional anomalies through which ordered data was transmitted via XM. Nobody knew what was contained in this data, only that it was sequenced and thus engineered by some intelligence.
All of which begged the question of who or what was on the other side of these portals? Again, nobody knew. For the time being, whatever they were had been coined with the term “Shapers,” because it appeared that this ordered data in exotic matter had for centuries been shaping human thought and influencing human civilization. The existence of the world’s ancient shrines, monuments and cities around XM portals made the link indisputable.
A portal this big and this old in the jungles of Africa promised ancient ruins. For whatever reason, deposits of exotic matter seemed to be linked to religious shrines and cultural landmarks around the world, as well as rare earth minerals.
Those ruins, in turn, were probably hiding the famous gold mines.
If his hunch proved correct in Africa, Hank would call in Conrad to help him explore what was buried below. Conrad was about the only specialist from the outside he trusted for this sort of operation, even if Conrad dismissed exotic matter as a marker of ancient ruins in favor of his astronomical alignments.
Probably the same difference at the end of the day, and cosmically linked in some way.
Everything is.
On the train to Zurich, Hank texted his colleagues Calvin and Devra back at Niantic that he was sorry he hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye before setting off for his TV pilot. Especially since he had planted the idea in their heads that he wouldn’t be leaving until a few days later on the 26th. This way he’d have a jump on any tail they put on him.
Hank had many masters—Niantic, IQTech and others— but in many ways that made him the master. His cross-agency work gave him a unique drone’s-eye view of global intelligence and geopolitics.
It was a far cry from the narrow silos most operatives existed in, never sharing “their” intel with other agencies. How many inter-agency task force meetings had he attended where he was fully aware of the vital intel each agency knew but that none felt the others “needed” to know?
From his perch at least he could connect the dots that others missed. Ironically, this was the very reason he was so valuable to his different employers. Despite their distinct and at times competing agendas, each master knew what they were getting in Hank Johnson. His primary challenge then was keeping his stories straight with his respective master and not crossing his lines of communications.
He settled back in his seat and looked out the window at the gleaming caps of the Swiss Alps as the train slid through the wintry wonderland. The Congo promised an entirely different backdrop for his pilot, he thought as he pulled out his tablet from his pack and studied the coded image of the Queen of Sheba reclining in her garden.
The Queen of Sheba was just Hank’s kind of girl: straightforward on the surface, but more mysterious the deeper you go.
In very similar accounts, the books of First Kings and Second Chronicles in the Bible simply state that the Queen of Sheba, who has no name and comes from an otherwise unknown land, heard of the great wisdom of King Solomon of Israel and “his relations to the name of the LORD.”
So she appeared before Solomon in his spectacular Temple, bearing gifts of spices, gold and precious stones. She also tested him with questions. The accounts don’t record her questions, only that Solomon answered every one of them. In return for his wisdom, she paid Solomon with gold—more than four tons of it.
Straightforward story, except it didn’t make much sense. Why bring gold to somebody as rich as Solomon? What wisdom could be worth that much? Why hide the Queen of Sheba’s true home? The Bible, so specific with so many locations, is silent on this one. Did Solomon not know? Did he conceal it for a reason?
Ever since biblical times, guesses have been made as to the location of the Queen of Sheba’s mines, ranging from Atlantis to Australia and even the Solomon Islands. But Hank always felt the pre-Islamic tradition was the most plausible, based on his research into ancient Arab trade routes in Africa. That tradition spoke of what was now Zimbabwe. But Hank doubted the Arab traders would have given up the location of the Queen of Sheba’s mines any more easily than the Incas would have given up El Dorado.
It was Hank’s obsession with these early Arab trading routes —and the notion that key mines and points of distribution would be kept secret—that ultimately led him to the coded Queen of Sheba painting.
Now, together with Conrad’s star charts, this painting was pointing him to the Congo as the location of the Queen of Sheba’s mines.
Hank leaned back, closed his eyes and thought about her predicament for a moment. If she came from sub-Saharan Africa, she had to pass through mighty Egypt without having her treasure confiscated or taxed and without encouraging a greedy Pharaoh to torture her for the source of the gold and take the mines for himself. So she had to conceal the location of the mines, hence a circuitous route.
