Decipher (4 page)

Read Decipher Online

Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
7.8Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Matheson heard Charlie's breath catch in his throat. Glancing at him quickly he saw his friend was glued to the monitor too. He had the look of a man who'd just lost his lover. When had those two gotten together? The ship lurched and swung back. Screw Charlie's love-life. Matheson dived across the room. Everyone was panicking. He flipped up the Plexiglas sheath on the central console and hammered the bright red abort switch.
More sirens added to the din. The computer confirmed that the node had capped off and had jettisoned the ship's umbilical. But the internal pressure readings didn't change. Something had been pumped and was rocketing up the inside of the pipe-line. If they didn't dump the umbilical now it might catch on the sea-bed and they'd never get out of there.
Matheson whirled around looking for the dump controls. He found Captain Jaffna already on the intercom, yelling at the bridge for full ahead. His fingers flew across the keys. The umbilical would be gone in seconds.
Matheson checked the monitor again, checked Jaffna. Watched the pipe begin to fall through the deck-hole into the water below.
The remaining roughnecks scrambled for cover. Some made it, but some didn't.
Dumping the umbilical was becoming impossible. As it slid into the ocean it caught on more sheering braces. Hanging limply from the towering derrick it was 3,000 feet of
dead weight pipe under no control, at the mercy of the undercurrents.
The creaking got louder. The derrick buckled, came crashing down and crushed another roughneck. Matheson could see the guy's thick bushy mustache. His name was Pete. He was still alive, but he was trapped, Matheson realized, under a pipe-line that was now pointing directly at the bridge and living quarters. Directly at them. Like a cannon.
 
Matheson braced himself, watching Pete struggle under tons of battered steel until the nozzle inevitably exploded. Freezing mud blasted out, smashing everything in its path. Fists of rock tore through portholes like bullets. The smell of sulfur was overwhelming. And the cold …
Jaffna never wavered. Always thinking, always looking for an option. He keyed more controls and the ship rocked as a blast ripped through the deck-hole. Jaffna had instigated an emergency dump. The pipe-line was gone and they were free. But the devastation was immense.
Red Osprey
tossed back and forth several times before Jaffna's orders finally kicked in and the ship steamed full ahead. But she was limping badly, smoke pouring from her engine room.
Bulger thumbed the klaxons off. Everyone stood motionless, trying to take it all in. Charlie, his dark skin stained with tears, rubbed his cheeks angrily and tried to focus on the GPS systems.
“The sub?” Matheson demanded.
Charlie shook his head and shot a look at Jaffna. “We got a destroyer coming at us. North-north-west. Full speed. Sending out registry
USS Ingersoll DD-990 …
it's the Marines.”
Jaffna nodded. It was time to get out of here. He yanked the door open and let a slew of mud and rock slide into the room as he beat a retreat to the bridge. The large picture porthole beyond was smashed and the wind and ice gusted in, driving it all across the floor. A large knot of muddy rock skidded up to Matheson's boot.
Matheson turned to Charlie. They eyed each other for a moment before he tentatively stepped out onto the upper deck, ignoring the squalls that blasted his face with ice. The
drilling tower was buckled the length of the deck. Bodies lay strewn about. Huge boxes of equipment were broken and junked from stem to stern.
“Clip yourself on,” Bulger ordered quietly. He was looking distastefully at his cigar. He tossed it overboard as he clipped his own safety line to the main rail and made his way down the ladder. All Matheson could hear him keep saying was: “Christ, what a fucking mess. Oh, Jesus, this is terrible.”
Stunned, Matheson went down to the main deck to give a hand with the clearing up. He'd have preferred to go back to bed and give the day a shot from another angle. Even a sunset would have given him the sense of closure he wanted. But this was Antarctica and sunset wasn't due for another six weeks.
He had set to work making a note of the victims. There were thirteen dead in all. As he ticked them off on a clipboard, trying his best not to be sick again, a roughneck by the name of Pico interrupted. He had a large chunk of something in his hands. It looked heavy. “Hey, I think this must be yours. What kinda stuff did you guys have on deck? This looks pretty expensive.” He handed it over.
“I don't remember us having anything on deck,” Matheson commented. He frowned and examined the object, turning it over in his hands. He wasn't the only one. Bulger had a piece and Frankie made a grab for a chunk. Now he came to think of it, there were lumps of the stuff all over the deck. “This isn't from any of our equipment.”
Matheson took the rock-like object over to a puddle and started washing the dirt away. It was crystal, and picked up the light so effectively that it appeared to be glowing pale blue. Almost clear. He shared a wary look with Bulger and for that brief moment they both forgot their differences. “It's a piece of rock …”
“What kind of rock?” Frankie asked furtively. His skin was peeling. He hadn't used his balaclava either and looked terrible.
Matheson turned it over again. “Looks like diamond.”
“Doesn't look like any diamond I ever saw,” Frankie mused. “It's heavy, but it ain't nearly heavy enough. Did this come through the pipe-line?”
Charlie stepped up to them. Exchanged sympathetic glances. “Must have,” he said.
Slowly, very slowly, Bulger smiled, baring his teeth like a shark. “I knew it,” was all he said.
Matheson suddenly held his piece up to the light. “Well, I'll be damned.” He positioned himself so they could all see. “Look,” he said, disbelievingly. “It's got writing on it.”
Glinting in the light were finely etched, perfectly formed glyphs—ancient-looking symbols whose meaning was lost on them. So clear were the hieroglyphs that it looked like the diamond itself had incorporated the writing into its natural structure.
It was astounding.
“I wonder what it says?” someone was asking.
“Looks Egyptian.”
“Egyptian?” Matheson jerked a thumb at a distant iceberg. “Out here? Come on, man!”
Frankie set about picking up every piece he could find. “We gotta get more of this stuff,” he said. “Someone needs to take a look at this. We're gonna be rich!” But his hand was quickly squashed under the sole of Bulger's thick heavy boot.
“This shit right here is company property, Fat Boy. You collect it all up for the company.”
Matheson warily ran his fingers over the etchings on the stone. Thirteen people had just died because of this stuff. He gripped it tightly. They were going to be rich? Somehow, he wasn't so sure. He held the stone up to the light again. Took another good look. And that was when he noticed the black smudge on the horizon closing in rapidly. A black smudge. of storm clouds against a green sky … a
green
sky?
Klaxons erupted on deck again before he could say anything. As cliff-sized waves crashed across the bow, and the destroyer circled in from the North, Matheson watched a sleek gray military Sea-Hawk helicopter swoop in from the sky, its screaming engines barely making a dent in the noise from the storm. Hovering low over the center deck where
Red Osprey
moved least and the derrick lay crumpled, its doors slid back abruptly. Ropes were tossed out. And as a dozen Marines swung down from above, a loud-hailer fixed
next to missiles on the stub wings of the chopper suddenly sprang to life.
“This is the United States Marine Corps! Stay where you are on deck! You are being boarded!”
Machine guns were cocked. Hands held high. A braided officer took center-stage. With a scowl firmly fixed to his young face he assessed the crew with one definitive sweep before finally locking his gaze on Matheson and making a bee-line for him.
Still gripping the rock, Ralph Matheson had a manic grin smeared across his face.
The Marines were here.
They had been caught at last. Thank God, he thought.
It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when he wished to turn author—and that he did not learn it better.
 
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosopher, 1844–1900
“In the beginning was the word,” Dr. Richard Scott announced, fumbling with the switch and pressing it twice by mistake. The digital projector raced through a sequence of images so fast it was impossible to pick out the detail. Scott muffled a groan and tried in vain to cue the slide up once more, but couldn't find the number to punch in. He looked to the audience. Letting his shoulders sag. “And that word is currently not repeatable in public,” he said.
The audience gave a louder than expected note of amusement but somehow Scott couldn't trust their motives. They were academics for the most part, with a sprinkling of students. They had come to listen to the man whose little tour had caused quite a stir in some circles. Even the President, a devout and notable Baptist, had felt the urge to come out and actively question his work. One tiny professor from U-Dub. It was ridiculous. Where was the religious freedom in this country anymore? Had it all been a myth to begin with?
Scott glanced down exasperated at the equipment and caught a glimpse of his own reflection. Neatly trimmed hair. Square jaw. He fiddled with switches, but it was no use. Forlornly, he glanced over to the student research assistant they had assigned to him for just this kind of emergency. “Uh, could you—uh? Hello?”
A guy from Federal Express was getting her to sign for a package. Scott was amazed. “Uh, excuse me, sir? I'm trying to lecture here.”
“When we promise ten-thirty, sir, we mean it.”
Scott couldn't help it. He broke into a smile and burst out laughing to a squeal of feedback off the PA system. The audience laughed with him.
“A round of applause for our friends at FedEx,” Scott chuckled.
The delivery guy took off his cap and gave a bow on his way out, to the delight of the audience. Meanwhile, Scott's
assistant had dumped the package and was vaulting onto the stage.
Scott cupped his hand over the microphone. “Thanks.”
She was a bright girl, November Dryden, very bright. Very attractive. But more importantly—very patient. “Knock 'em dead,” she said, returning to her seat with a smile.
With his lecture back on track, Scott shared an amused jibe with the audience. “I think, on balance, ancient manuscripts are a lot easier to handle,” he said.
Another ripple of laughter bounced around the auditorium as the audience settled down and the first slide popped up onto the screen.
Scott was a linguistic and cultural anthropologist by trade. He studied social structures, law, politics, religion and technology, but his specialty was language. He was an epigraphist who spent years deciphering ancient inscriptions. Yet despite the confidence he had in his own work, he'd worried about this lecture more than any other. It might be dangerous to his health, because this was the Bible Belt. A lecture on newly discovered ancient manuscripts that called the Bible into question, wasn't going to cause lively debate, so much as explosive disagreement. And then there was the other issue—
“To begin again,” Scott continued. “In the beginning was the word. And that word is ‘unbeliever.' Let me start my lecture today by being very honest about my beliefs.” He took a deep breath. “I don't believe in Jesus Christ.”
There were stunned expressions in the audience. Scott shuffled his papers.
 
“The Gospels,” he explained, “were written in Greek. Where we have ‘word,' the Greeks have
logos
. But
logos
means more than just ‘word.' It means thought, deed, action. It means ‘word in action.' It's the same in Hebrew and in Aramaic. Some have recognized this dilemma and opted for the word ‘act.' In the beginning, there was the act. But that still doesn't convey the full meaning of
logos
. Christians wanted to attract Jews to their faith; Jesus was, after all, a Jew. So Christianity—like all great religions—borrowed from its
predecessors both the language and imagery of what had gone before. Hence, in the beginning was
logos
because to the Hebrews, this was nothing new. In Proverbs it's the wisdom motif.
“To entice Pagans, all they did was move into a bunch of old churches and not bother redecorating. All those vast mosaics of Christ, the bearded savior—those are portraits of Zeus and Jupiter. Those churches are Greco-Roman. So Christianity then, is the earliest known example of religious recycling. However, how
much
it borrowed has always been a source of debate. But today I brought the answer with me. And, if I may, I'd like to share it with you.”
Scott sipped his water. Partly to quench his thirst, but mostly to gauge his audience.
Ancient texts. They had been calling Christianity into question now for decades. The first had turned up in 1947. A shepherd boy by the name of Muhammad adh-Dhib, or Muhammad the Wolf, of the Ta'amireh tribe of Bedouin, had passed by the ancient settlement of Qumran, by the Dead Sea, and stumbled upon ancient scrolls in some clay jars in a cave. The most recent, the
Istanbul Genezah
, had been found in a chest in the roof of a mosque. A
genezah
was a collection of prayer scripture—stored but no longer used, usually because they were worn out. These things hadn't seen the light of day in at least 1,500 years.
Throughout this time the Christian establishment had suppressed any information that questioned its religion. But since the mid-1980s a small academic fringe had seen it as their duty to reveal Christ as merely a man. It was a viewpoint Scott hadn't entirely shared to begin with, but things had changed.
“So,” he continued now, “if we've got problems with just one word, think about the sort of problems we have when we consider that the Bible contains hundreds of thousands of words, and all of them from mostly dead languages. We have to admit that our interpretations, from any point of view, are going to be open to error. For example, how many of you know somebody who speaks fluent Aramaic and uses it in everyday speech?” He let slip a smile. Time for an anecdote.
“Okay, how many of you here speak German?”
There was a flutter of hushed conversation from the assorted nervous academics.
“Don't worry, I'm not going to call you up on stage and saw you in half. Just give me a round figure. One, two? Six?” He could see a few hands slowly go up. He nodded. “Six. Right. Okay—out of an audience of maybe two hundred. In Europe, maybe a hundred million people speak German. Maybe more, I don't know. To tell you the truth, I don't care. The point is, if you wanted to know how to speak German you'd ask a German, right? I mean, they use it every day.”
Sounds of agreement.
“Which is ironic, because people still get it wrong. Even when it comes to the simplest phraseology. Like President Kennedy when he went to Berlin back in the middle of the last century. What did he do? He got up and addressed thousands of Germans, intent on telling them that he was willing to embrace Germany after all the ill-will of the Second World War. Intent on telling them he was one of them. He wanted to say that he understood them. That he too was a Berliner, you know, as opposed to a New Yorker or a Londoner. He wanted to say: I am a Berliner. So right off the cuff he announced:
Ich bin ein Berliner!”
He paused. “For those of you who don't know,
ich
means ‘I.'
Bin
means ‘am.' You know,
ein, zwei, drei
—one, two, three. Well,
ein
also means ‘a.' And ‘Berliner' does indeed mean ‘coming from Berlin.' So on the surface of it Kennedy said exactly what he wanted to say, right?” There was murmuring, but these were academics. They knew they had been led into a trap. And some of them were old enough to remember the trap the first time around. But for the gullible in the audience, Scott carried it through. He let his face fall. Let his voice go very quiet.
“Except that it doesn't quite take into account the nuance of German grammar. By placing
ein
in front of
Berliner
, President Kennedy turned Berliner into a noun instead of an adjective. He'd already said ‘A Berliner' by using
bin
. But by using the word
ein
it turned
Berliner
into a thing, not a place. And a Berliner is a very different ‘thing' to the capital of Germany.
“What President Kennedy actually proclaimed, when he
stood up in front of the world's media that day, was:
I am a doughnut
.
“I leave it to you to decide which of the two statements was more accurate.”
 
The slide up on the screen was of a small fragment of papyrus.
“This was found in 1920 in Nag Hammadi, Egypt,” Scott told his audience. “It dates from 100-150 of the Common Era, or C.E. I use C.E. instead of A.D. and B.C.E. in place of B.C. I don't think dates should hinge on the birth of Christ.” The audience definitely did not like that. “So what does this papyrus tell us? In short, that John's Gospel was written at least fifty years
after
the death of Jesus. It's therefore not an eyewitness account, and must be suspect.
“Think about it … all that. From one tiny piece of papyrus.”
For Scott it also confirmed that John was written at a time when the Roman Empire was considering adopting Christianity to maintain its grip on power by representing the masses. John, therefore, was probably written by a Roman, since it was fundamental in describing Jesus's role, and the rules governing Catholicism—a Rome-orientated institution. As a religion it looked to Scott like it had very little to do with God and a lot to do with politics.
“The Nag Hammadi scrolls are interesting because among them was found a complete Gospel of Thomas consisting of one hundred sayings of Jesus—a Gnostic text that pre-dates the Gospels yet the Catholic Church has branded it heretical. Historical fact is
heretical
?
“Okay, since there are freshmen in the auditorium today, you'll forgive me if I over-explain terminology. ‘Gnostic' is Greek and means ‘hidden knowledge'—usually, hidden knowledge of the divine. Why do we know there's hidden knowledge? Because the language of the text has quite clearly been manipulated. It uses imagery as its weapon. After all, this was a new religion. In order to lure in new worshippers they needed to make them feel comfortable. So when, for example, Jesus Christ—Christ simply being Greek for ‘Messiah' and Jesus being Greek for the name Joshua—when
Joshua
walks in the wilderness or walks on
water … there's only one other guy who ever did stuff like that, and he too was a prophet. He was never played up to be supernatural although he
was
played by Charlton Heston. I am, of course, referring to Moses. So what better way to enhance your power than by being likened to the best—that went
before
you?”
Scott took another sip of water and eyed the audience. A couple of people were walking out. He wasn't surprised. He was, however, surprised that there hadn't been more. He waited for the door to close gently behind them. People had a peculiar habit of conveniently forgetting even the most widely accepted facts. After all, hadn't the Egyptian goddess Isis promised an afterlife that was better than this life, thousands of years before Christ?
Scott smiled, warmly. This was where the fun began. “The Nag Hammadi scrolls are also interesting because they're Coptic—written in the later form of Egyptian which used a Greek alphabet. But Joshua and his contemporaries spoke Aramaic, so was it unusual for people who spoke Aramaic to write everything down in Greek? Well, actually no. If we think about present-day Belgium, no one writes in Dutch or Flemish, they write in German or French, or more often than not, English.
“Although none of the Gospels are written in Aramaic, we know the writers spoke that language because Aramaic language structures are hidden within the text. Remember my point about German grammar?”
He keyed the machine and another slide popped up into view—an ancient scroll covered neatly in ordered brown script. “But, that,” he said, “is the opening page of a lost book. One I think you'll all find quite fascinating.
“For years there's been speculation about a lost book of Q, or Quelle, which was extensively researched by John Kloppenborg in the mid-1980s. Kloppenborg believed that somewhere, there must be the original first-hand account of Jesus before the writers of the Gospels had their say. The consensus was that
The Book of Q
, which has shaped our culture, was a
verbal
history, which may initially have been written in Aramaic.
“But that page,” he pointed to the screen, “proves something else entirely. It is not, and I stress
not, The Book of Q.
It's much older, as indicated by Chlorine 36 isotope tests. The genetic deterioration shows it was written on the skin of a very old goat. And it proves for the very first time that Christ borrowed his ideas
from the cult of Mithras.
This book dates from four to five hundred years before any such Jesus Christ was ever born. Yet the New Testament shares its imagery and its symbolism almost perfectly, almost word for word. It is
not
a Mithraic text, and it is
not
Christian. It's a combination of the two. It's the proverbial missing link. And it was written in Aramaic.”

Other books

The Only One by Samanthya Wyatt
Earth & Sky by Draper, Kaye
Exposed by Kimberly Marcus
The Fairbairn Girls by Una-Mary Parker
People Trafficker by Keith Hoare
Then She Fled Me by Sara Seale
Ride On by Stephen J. Martin
Death in High Heels by Christianna Brand