The Alignment Ingress Read Online Free Page A

Nubia was home to three Kushite kingdoms during antiquity, the last of which was centered in the “Island of Meroe.” It was debatable as to whether or not it actually was an island in the Nile at some point, or whether it appeared that way due to its unique position between the Nile and two other rivers. It had been a thriving city of 25,000 with a great Temple of Isis, a rich gold and iron trade with India and China, and enough wealth and power to rival its northern neighbor Egypt in the ancient world.
    The real mystery was where the people of Meroe came from, and why they vanished from history.
    Nobody knew.
    All that remained of the once-great civilization were the 200-plus Nubian pyramids Conrad could now see rising along the east banks of the Nile like black heaps of rubble against the starry night.
    The sandstone block pyramids were much smaller and more sharply angled than those built in Egypt 800 years earlier. Many stood at only half their height thanks to the notorious 19th-century Italian explorer Giuseppe Ferlini who smashed the tops off 40 of them in a quest to find treasure. Despite a haul of some notable jewelry from one of the queen pyramids, however, Ferlini discovered that the graves had already been plundered in ancient times and left to the elements.
    Conrad had set off from Sudan’s capital of Khartoum as soon as his plane landed, not stopping to pick up a visitors permit for the pyramids from the Antiquities Service, but drove the whole day, the road following the railway line along the Nile, until he reached the town of Shendi, where he had turned off toward the pyramid fields.
    Now at last he arrived at the gate with only his bogus ID from the German Archaeological Institute.
    “Entrance fee,” he told the gatekeeper in German, flashing some euros.
    The gatekeeper took the money and said, “No cafes, no toilets.”
    Conrad nodded. The infrastructure was poor because tourists were in short supply here in Sudan compared to the big pyramids in Egypt. Visitors rarely topped 30 a day, if anyone bothered to show up at all.
    Which was exactly what he was counting on tonight.
    “I have my own food and drink, and plastic bags,” Conrad told him in Arabic with a made-up German accent.
    “You should have the place to yourself,” the gatekeeper said and waved him through.

CHAPTER 4
    Congo
    A fter a few days of collecting crew and gear at the site, the City of Sheba set was almost finished. It looked just the way it was supposed to: convincing and interesting to the average viewer and absolutely bogus to the scholar and analyst. Hank Johnson had learned years before that the best way to conceal any truth was to make it appear fake. The ancients were masters of deceit.
    Hank glanced over the script again in his trailer. It was exactly what he wanted. Pure reality show fare. The beginning was him presenting a theory. The middle was him “looking for the site”—drone shots mostly, along with some machete stuff through bushes. Some dark caves. A couple brushes with death. Shots of any weird creatures he’d found. Then, at the end of the first act, he would “discover” something. And no recaps. He hated the reality show recaps.
    Hank stepped out of his trailer and onto the set and smiled.
    Everything was in place. Now, to find the holy grail of adventure archaeology since H. Rider Haggard speculated on it in his novel
King Solomon’s Mines:
    The legendary mines of the Queen of Sheba.
    “We’re 500 miles from any other known stone structures of similar size and intricacy, yet there does not seem to be any evidence of a nearby civilization.”
    As he spoke Hank looked into the lens of a Sony PDW 530 news broadcast video camera. His camera assistant Dow Scott posed in front of some overgrown, fiberglass “stone” ruins. The red light of the camera signaled they were recording.
    “In short, somebody came out here in the middle of nowhere, built a wonder of the world and then vanished. Why? But