The Nemesis Origin

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.

Yin passed Ethan one of the mugs as she made her way forward, and he sat back down in his seat and gestured with a nod of his head towards the cockpit.

‘Arnie reckons that we’ll land within an hour on the lake to the south of Angor Wat. After that we’ve got to make our own way north.’

‘That’s fine,’ Lucy replied. ‘Believe me, out there nobody is going to find us unless we want them to.’

‘And just where is it that we are going?’

Lucy pulled out a map from her bag and unfolded it until it showed a particular area of mountainous and jungle terrain in the north of Cambodia.

‘Mahendraparvata is an ancient city of the Khmer Empire in Cambodia,’ she explained as she moved to sit next to him. ‘The location of the city has been known for years, but most of it remained concealed by forest until it was uncovered by a recent archaeological expedition. Apparently they had the use of advanced airborne laser scanning technology.’

‘What’s there that is so important to us?’

Lucy pulled out a photograph and showed it to Ethan. He instantly recognised the sun icon from the underwater temple at Yonaguni, a semi-circle of radiating lines of various lengths extending downward from the sun. But this one was located on a carved stone that looked as though it were atop a structure of some kind, the tops of the forest canopy visible surrounding the monument.

‘And this was taken at Mahendraparvata,’ he surmised.

‘Just two years ago,’ Lucy confirmed. ‘The name Mahendraparvata means ‘Mountain of the Great Indra’. It is derived from Sanskrit words and is a reference to the sacred hill top site commonly known as ‘Phnom Kulen‘ today where Jayavarman II was consecrated as the first king of the Khmer Empire in the year 802. The name is attested in inscriptions on the Angkor-area Ak Yum temple.’

‘802 AD?’ Ethan echoed. ‘That’s a lot more recent than the Yonaguni site engraving.’

‘Much, but the inscription on the Yonaguni monument is the closest physically to this one, and I cannot believe that such a close location is not somehow connected, especially as the Yonaguni altar faces toward Mahendraparvata. My guess is that whoever carved the inscriptions at Yonaguni passed on the tradition to those who lived at Mahendraparvata, or they at least in some way inherited the religion or beliefs behind the inscription.’

‘So, what are we going there for if we already have an image of the icon?’

‘That’s the interesting bit.’

‘I had a feeling that you were going to say that.’

Lucy pulled out the image of the icon from the Yonaguni monument and held it alongside the one from Mahendraparvata. ‘Notice anything?’

Ethan stared at the two images but he could see nothing particularly different about them.

‘They look the same to me.’

‘The lines, radiating outward from the sun,’ Lucy encouraged.

As though sunlight had suddenly burst from the image, Ethan spotted it.

‘They’re slightly different lengths,’ he realized. The radiating lines varied from one icon to the next. ‘But that could be an error on the part if the person who carved them.’

Lucy shook her head.

‘These people built temples as big as modern buildings with no mortar, constructed from nothing but perfectly carved rocks. They built the temples at Angor Wat, complexes as big as modern towns, with ornate carvings from thousands of tonnes of rock. They knew how to carve an icon without screwing it up.’

‘So what does it mean?’

Lucy smiled as she looked at the two images. ‘It means that there could be a message inside the differences between the two images. It means that if we can decipher that message, we can follow the directions it gives us. These icons are trying to tell us something.’

Arnie walked down from the cockpit and jabbed a thumb over his shoulder.

‘Yin’s taking us in toward Angkor Wat. Your destination is about twenty eight miles north of Siem Reap, below Phnom Kulen mountain in Siem Reap Province. You’ll have a hell of a time getting there as there’s nothing to follow but goat tracks, the area is filled with bogs and reed beds, and to cap it all the entire zone is a landmine hazard from back in the heady days of the war here.’

If Arnie had thought that he might dissuade Lucy from going any further, he was about to be very disappointed.

‘I know,’ Lucy replied. ‘An archaeological expedition to find Mahendraparvata was co-led by Damian Evans of University of Sydney and Jean-Baptiste Chevance of London’s Archaeology and Development Foundation. The team uncovered dozens of temples out there and even figured out a reason why the civilization collapsed. I’ve studied their work extensively.’

Arnie nodded, turned and marched back toward the cockpit. ‘Good to hear. ‘We’ll be landing in fifteen minutes.’

‘He’s not much interested in digging,’ Ethan said to Lucy. ‘What happened to the city? Why did it vanish?’

‘Deforestation,’ Lucy explained. ‘Quite the warning shot across modern civilization’s bows once again. Virtually every single ancient society collapsed because its population exceeded the ability of the land around it to support them. The city of Mahendraparvata declined as water management issues and a growing population starved the area of resources.’

‘Bleak,’ Ethan agreed. ‘I still don’t understand why we actually have to travel to this place.’

‘Because the photograph I have here doesn’t show any context,’ Lucy explained. ‘If we’re going to decipher what this message is then we need to know how they relate to each other. Sun worship was a common religion among ancient societies for obvious reasons. I’m hoping that if we can obtain some kind of orientation information from the site at Mahendraparvata, then it might tell us something about what the messages mean.’

‘I don’t know if we’ll be able to get Arnie to stick around,’ Ethan admitted as he glanced towards the cockpit.

‘We’ll have the advantage by then,’ Lucy pointed out. ‘Nobody knows that we’re here, right?’

Ethan heard the engine note change and the Catalina began descending toward the ethereal layer of clouds below. He got up and made his way forward to the cockpit to see both Arnie and Yin engrossed in their navigation duties. The Catalina descended into the cloud, both pilots silently monitoring their instruments as the aircraft flew in zero visibility through the glowing orange and gold mist. Ethan and Lucy both got into seats just behind the cockpit door and strapped in as the aircraft bounced and gyrated in the turbulence billowing up from the land below to form the clouds.

It was almost ten minutes before the aircraft emerged from the cloud base and Ethan got his first glimpse of the Cambodian wilderness. A patchwork of rice fields, the ankle-deep water reflecting the warm broken sunlight in silvery patches, stretched before them between thickets of dense jungle draped in veils of mist. Ahead, vast mountain ranges vanished up into the clouds, and before them was a wide strip of water burnished by the sunrise as though some careless giant had laid an enormous copper sword across the plains.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Lucy murmured, momentarily stunned by the scenery before them.

Arnie pointed to the water and gave Yin a thumbs up, his wife nodding as she guided the Catalina toward the water. Ever descending, the Catalina passed over the rice fields and Ethan could see women toiling far below, men guiding oxen through the fields, white specks against the green that stopped moving and probably were looking up at the aircraft as it passed overhead.

‘There is no radar coverage out this far,’ Arnie announced to Ethan. ‘And none at all out over the ocean. Nobody could have tracked us here. We’ll land at a remote spot on the lake and let you both out.’

Ethan nodded and reached across to pat his friend on the shoulder. ‘I appreciate you doing this for us, Arnie.’

Arnie responded with a vague scowl but said nothing as he returned his attention to the instruments. Ethan and Lucy watched in silence as the Catalina flew out over the lake, just five hundred feet above the surface of the water as Yin expertly orientated the aircraft to face into the wind while at the same time picking a landing spot far to the lake’s western shore.

Ethan watched as Arnie wound the flaps down and drew the throttles back, the Catalina descending ever closer to the water and slowing until Yin finally flared the nose and the Catalina shuddered as its hull touched down on the water. The entire aircraft vibrated as it thundered along the surface of the lake and then gradually began to slow.

Yin guided the Catalina close to the shore as Arnie leaned one arm back across his seat and looked over his shoulder at them.

‘No boat aboard, I’m afraid,’ he reported with a smile that suggested anything but disappointment. ‘And no jetties long enough for us to moor. You’ll be taking a dip.’

Ethan pretended not to notice Lucy’s angry glare as he made his way to the Catalina’s side hatch and opened the latches before sliding the door back. Green water stared up at him and he ensured that the waterproof bag inside his rucksack was sealed before he threw it onto his shoulders and without further hesitation jumped into the deep green water.

Ethan kicked out for the shoreline as he heard Lucy jump from the aircraft and splash into the water behind him. It took less than a minute for him to find his feet on the floor of the lake and wade his way out to the shoreline, Lucy just a few yards behind and still wearing a scowl on her face.

She crawled from the water and stood up, drenched and with her hair hanging limp from its ponytail as she dragged clumps of reeds from her clothes. Behind her, Ethan heard the Catalina’s engines clattering once again and the aircraft turned to face out across the lake and a faint spray of seawater hit Ethan in the face. Moments later, the engines rattled and spat before the propellers stopped turning and a deep silence descended upon the lake.

Arnie poked his head through the cockpit’s top-hatch and called to them. ‘Twenty four hours. You don’t show, we don’t stay, go it?’

Before Ethan could reply, Arnie ducked back inside the cockpit and slammed the hatch shut.

‘Well, that’s that then,’ Ethan said. ‘Where to now?’

Lucy, her face now permanently set in an angry grimace, stormed past Ethan as she climbed towards a road that encircled the lake.

‘North,’ she snapped without elaborating. ‘We get to the town at Siem Reap by the river, and we’ll figure out the rest from there.’

Ethan suppressed a smile as he climbed after her toward the road.