David Golemon - Event

Jack said nothing; he just looked the senator in his one good eye, looking for that flicker of untruth.

Suddenly, Garrison Lee deftly tapped the tip of the cane against another button on the control panel. Collins watched as another camera, from higher up in the vault, he assumed, came on and produced an image of an object that caught the major off guard. He didn't quite know what it was he was looking at, but it was enormous and undoubtedly ancient. Its raggedness gave the giant object a ghostly appearance. Without knowing he was doing it, Jack stepped closer to the large screen. A deeply buried, almost familiar memory started to burrow its way out of his mind. It was an unclear, distant thought, or was it a memory? Perhaps a memory of something he had seen as a child. But the harder he tried to remember, the more elusive it became; like the feeling of deja vu, it came and left, leaving only a bare trace of its being there at all. Jack furrowed his brows and peered harder at the screen.

Lee stepped back to admire the view the vault camera gave them. Technicians were milling around it. Some were chipping away at it with instruments Collins had never before seen, others were writing on clear plastic clipboards, while still more manned huge diagnostic systems arrayed against one of the far walls. The giant object looked as if it had been made out of wooden beams of some kind, but had long ago petrified into near rock. The beams were curved and swept, high at one end and sloping down at a great angle toward its torn and sheared opposite end. As he watched, a three-man tech group was in the interior of the enormous object. They had a small chemical lab set up right there and were analyzing substances he wouldn't even guess at. He looked more closely at the exterior. There were massive holes in its side and on what Collins assumed was its sloping floor, or was it a deck? It now hit him that he was looking at part of a vessel of some kind. The petrified planks of what was once wood were laid out perfectly as a deck would be. It was long, at least three hundred feet from the view they had, and looked as if it was only half there as it ended in a jagged wreck. He was still struck by how ancient the object looked. But that feeling of knowing still struck him like a hammer inside his head. He couldn't help but get goose bumps when he gazed at the strange and mysterious object.

"What is it?" Collins asked of the hauntingly familiar shape.

"Don't you know, Jack?" the senator asked, still smiling at him. "Well, in all actuality neither do we. There are a lot of opinions, but one thing we do know, we can't tell the people of the world we have it, it would stir the souls of men, and we just can't predict how they would react."

Collins continued to study the image as the old man looked as if he was thoroughly enjoying the moment.

"The reason I am showing you this particular vault first, Major, is twofold. Number one, this was the very first Event. And number two, it shows the value of the military in our fieldwork. And believe me, Jack, fieldwork is even far more dangerous today than it was in Mr. Lincoln's time."

Collins's eyes never left the senator's lone one. He nodded in understanding, but said nothing.

"It started in 1863," Lee said, still looking at the major before letting his eye go back to the screen. "After the battle of Gettysburg, when the war had finally turned in the Union's favor, the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, was persuaded by a discredited Norwegian immigrant, a history professor from Harvard, to put together an expedition to what was then known as the Ottoman Empire." The senator paused and turned from the screen and limped the short distance to his high-backed chair beside Niles's desk.

"This meeting between the professor and the president brought forth an unusual truce between North and South the history books will never mention, and one you will find no documentation for in the National Archives, save for ours," Lee added. "A meeting was engineered through the office of the then U.S. secretary of state, William Seward, and the expedition was on. It would be mounted by six hundred Union soldiers and captured Confederate prisoners, and six American ships of war."

At this, Collins turned and looked at the man sitting behind that huge desk, then up at the portrait of Lincoln above the man's head.

"Their task," Lee continued, "as ordered by the president, was to search for, find, and bring back an object believed by some to be the greatest archaeological find of all time--not one that would fill the depleted U.S. treasury with riches for pockets already lined beyond measure." Lee had picked up a pen and was tapping it against his blotter. "The mission was to bring back the object you see there before you."

Collins looked at the screen, paused a moment, then glanced back at the senator. Then, slowly his eyes were drawn back to the large monitor.

"In short, Major, the president didn't really believe they would find anything of value. To his way of thinking, just the effort of two warring factions to come together would help in reuniting the North and the South after the war. There was one thing Mr. Lincoln overlooked, and that was the tenacity of the men involved. They brought back to this country, at the loss of three-quarters of the men and four warships, a relic that had sat atop a mountain in eastern Turkey for over ten thousand years. A lot of good American boys were left on that summit and in the slopes and valleys of that harsh and desolate place. And what they brought back, to what turned out to be for a murdered president and a country still divided, where hatred reigned unchecked, was the artifact you see before you. Some think it the Ark of the great flood, the ship that was supposedly built by Noah himself."

Collins saw it as soon as it was said out loud by the senator. All the pictures he had seen in Sunday school, the stories he was told as a child, the ridiculous tales and movies of his adulthood, they all rushed in as if a dam had burst inside his mind.

"You mean to say this... this thing is Noah's Ark?" he finally asked, his eyes glued to one spot on the viewing screen.

"As near as we can determine, the vessel is of pre-Sumerian origin, basically the cradle of civilization found between the Tigris and Euphrates river basins. The size, shape, and material of which it is made are a precise match to all biblical detail. Carbon-14 dating places it at some eleven thousand six hundred years in age, give or take a century," the senator said in a more technical tone. "We haven't any firm belief from science who built it; we have the legends of Gilgamesh and the Noah accounts, but that's not the approach we take here. Science says it's an ancient wooden vessel that's so old it petrified after it somehow landed on top of a mountain."

Collins turned and walked back to his chair in front of the senator and sat heavily.

The senator smiled over at Jack. Every time he had shown this for the first time, he had seen it in their faces: amazement, awe, and fear wrapped up into one thought.

The senator stood and limped to a cabinet next to the credenza with the coffee on it. He reached down, took out a glass, and poured the major a glass of water. He limped back and placed it in Collins's hand. Jack quickly drained it and was glad for the break in conversation. It had been a long time since he could remember being caught totally unaware. This was more than just a little unnerving, yet extraordinary at the same time. The senator started talking again while adjusting himself into his chair.

"Now, do we here at Group live in awe of this one artifact, or do we learn from it? We have gathered so much data it's coming out of every file cabinet we have. The reason this is so important to this country, Jack, is the mere fact that we have learned that the dangers are there and are very real that we could be hit by similar floods in the future. This report has gone up the chain and plans have been made on how to deal with a similar Event if it happens. Before I let you catch your breath, Jack, I must tell you that the finding of the Ark, or vessel, was the first file in the Event Group's long and wondrous history. Altogether there are more than 106,200 files, from everything religion-oriented to possible werewolf attacks in France during the time of the black death, from possible sightings of electrically powered submarines during the American Civil War to a major conflict between Viking clans in Minnesota involving Sioux Indians seven hundred years before Columbus."