The Nemesis Origin

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.

‘Keep moving,’ Ethan insisted. ‘If Vladimir and his goons get up there before we do they’ll hold the high ground and we’ll never get into the city.’

As if on cue, a light down on the hillside caught his eye and he turned to see several vehicles climbing the mountain side, their headlight beams sweeping left and right as they negotiated the hazardous switchbacks.

‘That’s got to be him,’ Lopez said.

‘He’ll have brought friends,’ Ethan agreed. ‘Our only bet is to get up there first and get this done before he arrives.’

Lucy did not hesitate and immediately began marching with even greater determination towards the ruined city. Jarvis followed wearily as Ethan hurried alongside the old man.

‘Maybe you should sit this one out,’ he suggested.

‘I didn’t come all this way to just sit on the side of the mountain and watch you get shot at,’ Jarvis pointed out as he laboured forward.

‘No,’ Lopez agreed, ‘you normally do that from Washington.’

‘Will you cut it out?’ Ethan said to her.

Lopez shrugged and kept moving as Ethan turned to Jarvis. ‘There’s nothing to be gained by coming up here. Either we’re going to pull this off or we’re not, and I don’t think that you being there is to make much difference.’

‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’

‘You know I don’t mean it like that,’ Ethan said. ‘We were unable to bring our guns with us from Berlin so we’re unarmed. We have little chance of success against Vladimir’s men, and I have no idea how long it’s going to take Lucy to figure out where these remains are buried.’

‘You need all the hands you can get then,’ Jarvis said with a finality that brooked no argument. ‘I’m not sitting on my arse and letting you take all the flak.’

Ethan relented and walked faster as he left Jarvis behind and came up alongside Lopez. ‘Any bright ideas?’

‘Quit, and get out alive.’

‘There’s a little girl in Chicago relying on us to pull this off.’

‘I know that now,’ Lopez shot back, having learned of Bethany’s plight on the flight from Berlin. ‘But what use are we going to be to her if we’re dead? There’s no way we can defeat Vladimir in an open fight, we’re not even armed.’

‘We’ve gotten out of situations as tight as this before,’ Ethan replied. ‘We’re going to have to improvise.’

‘Excellent,’ Lopez said. ‘Improvise away then, captain.’

Ethan winced at Lopez’s sarcasm and was about to reply when a faint droning noise rolled across the mountains. Ethan instinctively turned one ear to the noise and slowed as he looked over his shoulder and up into the blackened sky above them. Ribbons of cloud obscured the heavens and a sprinkling of stars that twinkled as he spotted the source of the engine noise. He could just make out a set of navigation lights as they appeared red and green from behind a bank of cloud. It took Ethan a few moments of observation to identify that the aircraft was climbing and turning as it did so, probably something that had lifted off out of Cusco’s international airport.

‘It’s just an aeroplane,’ Lopez said, ‘nothing to do with us.’

Ethan squinted at the aircraft. The airport was probably forty miles away from the mountain, and any aircraft taking off on the airport’s zero-eight runway would have turned long before it and reached Macchu Picchu. Ethan recalled that most airports had a standard departure procedure which was followed rigidly by all aircraft, especially in mountainous countries such as Peru, to avoid unwanted collisions with the terrain.

‘Then what’s it doing all the way out here at night?’ he asked.

The aircraft was almost directly overhead now and passing above banks of rippled cloud. Its high altitude meant that it was glinting as it reflected the light from a sun that had yet to breach the distant horizon, the dawn a pale streak of light between the mountains. Ethan kept his gaze fixed upon it and moments later he identified tiny specks spilling from the aircraft as though its baggage were being deliberately ejected in flight, bathed in the sun’s distant glow.

Ethan needed only a moment more to be sure that it wasn’t baggage that was spilling from the aircraft.

‘It’s a HALO deployment,’ Ethan said as he identified freefalling parachutists rocketing towards the clouds above. ‘High Altitude Low Opening deployment, we used it in the Marines in Iraq.’

‘You think they’re American?’ Jarvis asked as he looked up at the aircraft departing to the north.

‘I don’t know, but even if they are they may not be on our side. We need to move fast!’

Ethan picked up the pace and joined Lucy and Lopez as they climbed the last few hundred yards toward the city. ‘This could be the distraction we were hoping for,’ he said to Lopez.

‘You think? Now we have two armed groups opposing us instead of one. How is that going to help?’

Ethan looked at Lucy. ‘Whatever happens, you just keep your head down and do what you do. As soon as you find what you’re looking for, you get the hell out of here no matter what happens and you get back to Cusco, understood?’

Lucy nodded, and Ethan looked over his shoulder again and craned his neck back to see the specks plummeting through the clouds and emerging beneath them, faintly illuminated by the glow of the moon. The parachutists were leaving their chutes closed until the last possible instant, and extremely dangerous but highly effective tactic if performed correctly. He realized that it was doubtful that the parachutists were anything other than expert soldiers, almost certainly American and almost certainly members of the Specialist Tactics Squadron they had narrowly avoided death at the hands of in Cambodia.

‘When the shooting starts it’s going to be chaos,’ Ethan said. ‘Let’s make sure it’s not us being shot at.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Just follow my lead,’ Ethan said to Lopez as they reached the walls of the city.

He looked up above him one more time, and this time he saw parachutes billow open like black petals against the darkening sky, could hear the cracks as they filled abruptly with air and slowed the jumpers to prepare them for landing. Even in the low light he could spot the rifles in their grasp, Bergens dangling beneath them on cords.

Twelve men, highly trained and heavily armed.

‘Let’s go, move!’

One by one, Ethan and the team scaled the city’s outer wall and dashed inside.