After Pat had photo-recorded the inscriptions and the strange global maps inside the burial chamber, she and Giordino were airlifted to Cape Town, where they met with Rudi Gunn in the hospital soon after his operation. Causing a scene bordering on an uproar, Gunn ignored the orders of the hospital staff and enlisted Giordino to smuggle him on an airplane out of South Africa. Giordino gladly complied, and with Pat's able assistance sneaked the tough little NUMA director past the doctors and nurses through the utility basement of the hospital and into a limousine, before speeding to the city airport, where a NUMA executive jet was waiting to fly them all back to Washington.
Pitt remained behind with Dr. Hatfield and the Navy SEAL team. Together, they carefully packed the artifacts and directed their airlift by helicopter to a NUMA deep-ocean research ship that had been detoured to St. Paul Island. Hatfield hovered over the mummies, delicately wrapping them in blankets from the ship and carefully arranging them in wooden crates for the journey to his lab at Stanford University for in-depth study.
After the last mummy had been loaded onto the NUMA helicopter, Hatfield accompanied them and the artifacts on the short flight to the ship. Pitt turned and shook hands with Lieutenant Jacobs. "Thank you for your help, Lieutenant, and please thank your men for me. We'd have never done it without you."
"We don't often get an assignment chaperoning old mummies," Jacobs said, smiling. "I'm almost sorry the terrorists didn't try and snatch them from us."
"I don't think they were terrorists, in the strict sense of the word."
"A murderer is a murderer by any other name."
"Are you headed back to the States?"
Jacobs nodded. "We've been ordered to escort the bodies of the attackers, so ably dispatched by your friends, to Walter Reed Hospital in D.C. for examination and possible identification."
"Good luck to you," said Pitt.
Jacobs threw a brief salute. "Maybe we'll meet again somewhere."
"If there is a next time, I hope it's on a beach in Tahiti."
Pitt stood in the never-ending drizzle and watched as a Marine Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft hung in the air above the ground, and the Marines climbed on board. He was still standing there when the plane disappeared into a low cloud. He was now the only man on the island.
He walked back into the now-empty burial chamber and took one final look at the global charts etched into the far wall. The floods had been removed, and he beamed a flashlight on the ancient nautical charts.
Who were the ancient cartographers who'd drawn such incredibly accurate maps of the earth so many millennia ago? How could they have charted Antarctica when it was not buried under a massive blanket of ice? Could the southern polar continent have possessed a warmer climate several thousand years ago?
Could it have been habitable for humans?
The picture of an ice-free Antarctica wasn't the only incongruity. Pitt had not mentioned it to the others, but he was disturbed by the position of the other continents and Australia. They were not where they were supposed to be. It appeared to him that the Americas, Europe, and Asia were shown almost two thousand miles farther north than they should be. Why had the ancients, who otherwise calculated the shorelines with such exactness, have placed the continents so far off their established locations in relation to the circumference of the earth? The observation puzzled him.
The seafarers clearly had a scientific ability that went far beyond the cultural races and civilizations that followed them. Their era also appeared more advanced in the art of writing and communication than others that came thousands of years later. What message were they trying to pass on across the constantly moving sea of time that was imperishably engraved in stone? A message of hope, or a warning of natural disasters to come?
The thoughts running through Pitt's mind were interrupted as the sounds of rotor blades and engine exhaust echoed through the tunnel, announcing the return of the helicopter that was to carry him to the research ship. With a sense of reluctance, he turned off his mind at the same instant he switched off the flashlight and walked from the dark chamber.
Without wasting time waiting for government transportation, Pitt flew from Cape Town to Johannesburg, where he caught a South African Airlines flight to Washington. He slept most of the way, taking a short walk to stretch his legs when the plane landed in the Canary Islands to refuel. When he stepped out of the Dulles Airport terminal, it was nearly midnight. He was pleasantly surprised to find a dazzling 1936 Ford cabriolet hot rod with the top down, waiting at the curb. The car looked like something out of California in the 1950s. The body and fenders were painted in metallic plum maroon that sparkled under the lights of the terminal. The bumpers were the ribbed type from a 1936 De Soto.
Ripple moon disks covered the wheel in front, while those in the rear were hidden by teardrop skirts. The seats in front and in the rumble seat were a biscuit-tan leather. The elegant little car was powered by a V-8 flathead engine that had been rebuilt from top to bottom to produce 225 horsepower. The rear end was fitted with a fifty-year-old Columbia overdrive gear system.
If the car wasn't enough to turn heads, the woman sitting behind the wheel was equally beautiful. The long cinnamon hair was protected from the light breeze outside the airport by a colorful scarf. She had the prominent cheekbones of a fashion model, enhanced by full lips and a short, straight nose and charismatic violet eyes. She was wearing an alpaca chunky autumn leaf brown turtleneck with taupe wool tweed pants under a taupe shearling coat that came down to her knees.
Congresswoman Loren Smith of Colorado flashed an engaging smile. "How many times have I met you like this and said, `Welcome home, sailor'?"
"At least eight that I can think of," said Pitt, happy that his romantic love of many years had taken the time out of her busy schedule to pick him up at the airport in one of the cars from his collection.
He threw his duffel bag into the rumble seat, then slid into the passenger's seat and leaned over and kissed her, holding her in his arms for a long while. When he finally pulled back and released her, she gasped, catching her breath, "Careful, I don't want to end up like Clinton."
"The public applauds affairs by female politicians."
"That's what you think," Loren said, pressing the ignition lever on the steering column and pushing the starter button. It fired on the first rotat
ion and emitted a mellow, throaty roar through the Smitty mufflers and dual exhaust pipes. "Where to, your hangar?"
"No, I'd like to drop by NUMA headquarters for a moment and check my computer for the latest word from Hiram Yaeger on a program we're working on."
"You must be the only single man in the country who doesn't have a computer in his apartment."
"I don't want one around the house," he said seriously. "I have too many other projects going without wasting time surfing the Internet and answering E-mail."