Chapter Ten
The North Atlantic Ocean
It was dark outside the porthole-sized window and all Nate could see was the blinking light on the wing of the plane.
Fortunately, he was in an aisle seat, which allowed him the opportunity to occasionally stretch his legs by pacing the narrow aisle.
He had managed to doze off for a few minutes watching a movie on the back of the headrest in front of him, but sleep still remained elusive.
Today, however, it was excitement that kept him awake.
After spending the morning with Frank and Janet he had ridden back to Boston, using the time on his bike to think things through.
Though he hated to admit it, Dr. Martinez was right.
There were pieces of the puzzle that were missing, and the evidence he had was circumstantial at best. Nate had assumed he would be able to piece more of it together on the ground using modern techniques to search for answers to an ancient question, but that line of thinking had caused him to overlook some of the most obvious avenues of additional information.
He decided he would email Ahmed and ask him for the imagery of the camel trails.
The Saudi officer was still in the service and could easily get his hands on it.
But Nate also knew he could pursue an avenue more academic in nature.
Thomas became intrigued by the city when one of his local guides pointed to a series of ancient tracks that disappeared over high sand dunes and explained that the road led to Ubar, a once great and wealthy city.
Thomas had followed those tracks, and they led him in close proximity to the area known as Al Hadidah, nearly intersecting with the route Philby would take two years later.
There were a few books published by Thomas, and Nate had studied them in great detail, but he felt there had to be more.
A man with an obsession such as Ubar would not simply let it go.
Nate should know. Thomas was intrigued enough to write to T.
E. Lawrence of WWI fame and lay out plans for an expedition.
Lawrence planned one himself and devised a strategy using airships to observe the area from above, as he was sure this would help pinpoint the location of the lost city.
Of course, his untimely death meant that the expedition never took place, but the logic was sound and was a point that stuck in Nate’s mind.
There were things that were difficult to see, both on the ground and from space. But at several hundred feet? There was no telling what might be visible, and to his knowledge no one had tried such a technique in the area while searching for evidence of a lost city.
Another British explorer Nate had researched in detail was St. John Philby.
Philby launched an expedition in 1932 to search for Ubar, instead discovering the Wabar craters.
He had catalogued his findings extensively, as he was a meticulous man obsessed with academia as well as Arabia.
He was also an anti-Zionist and was criticized for his loyalties, which lay more with the Saudis than the British Crown, though Nate was less concerned with his personal shortcomings and more with his academic findings.
As such, he had read everything the man ever wrote, which was an extensive list of works.
It had been enlightening and provided a wealth of information about the area, the people, and the explorer’s feelings on both.
Philby’s discovery of the Wabar craters proved to be the most valuable piece of information provided by the explorer.
He originally thought the site must have been a volcano, and he sketched two large craters out in detail.
Additionally, he wrote about the big pieces of iron in the area, and the black glass thought to have been the sands transformed by intense heat.
Philby brought back chunks of iron as proof and, after submitting them for analysis, learned the truth that the craters were caused by a meteorite that had impacted the area.
This was a significant discovery not only as a geological curiosity, but because the stories of Ubar all spoke of the city being swallowed by the sands.
While there were many interpretations, a meteorite impact certainly could have carried enough force to have a significant effect on the terrain and cause such a calamity to occur.
The fact that the Wabar craters were located at Al Hadidah, a location historically associated with Ubar by the locals, was also intriguing.
And it was a story backed by Ahmed and his people.
However, the date of the impact was highly disputed.
A large fireball was recorded seen over Riyadh sometime in 1863 or 1891, heading south into the desert, although this was circumstantial at best. The locals told a different tale, claiming the impact was thousands of years old.
Science routinely split the difference, with analysis of glass fragments dating the impact to thousands of years ago, and the examined rate of fill-in as only a few hundred years.
The bottom line was that the evidence was inconclusive.
The volume of writings from these two men is what led to Nate’s increased interest in them.
Thomas had published some works that mentioned Ubar, particularly Arabia Felix, but not nearly as much as Nate would have expected.
After some digging, he was able to learn that the University of Cambridge in England held the original copies of the notes of Bertram Thomas.
By speaking with members of the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department, he was able to ascertain that not all the notes had been scanned and presented for the public record, and Nate had a hunch that there was more in the man’s notes that would shed some additional light on his expedition.
The same was true of St. John Philby. His private collection of notes was held at St Antony’s College, Oxford University, in the Middle Eastern Centre Archive. However, notes related specifically to his travels in the Rub’ al Khali were housed at the Royal Geographical Society in London.
So Nate had arranged to go and view the material in conjunction with his dissertation research as a doctoral student at Harvard.
The credentials had gotten him in the door, and he hoped they would not call his department at the university to verify.
He had not told his dissertation advisor that he was continuing with his thesis.
In fact, he hadn’t told him anything. Professor Rogers would likely assume Nate was taking a week or so to regroup and come up with a new topic, and that was just fine as far as Nate was concerned.
The next time he saw his professor, he would have definitive evidence that couldn’t be ignored.
That newfound motivation, largely inspired by his talk with Frank and Janet, had caused Nate to max out his credit card and book a British Airways flight for the following Monday from Logan International Airport to Heathrow.
Nate just knew that he was onto something.
There were pieces of the puzzle he was missing, and he was relying on those who had searched for the lost city before him to reach out through time with the answers.
Nate’s flight touched down at London’s Heathrow Airport at 7:50 a.m. local time.
The airport was one of the busiest in the world, with international traffic passing through at all hours of the day in an endless wave of flights arriving and departing.
This morning was no exception, and several other international flights appeared to be deplaning around the same time.
All of the passengers, travelers from all corners of the globe, moved together, herded through hallways and doors toward the customs and immigration counters.
There was an expedited line for UK citizens as well as citizens of the European Union, but visitors from the United States did not merit faster entrance.
Once upon a time, Nate would have had to wait in line for half an hour or more only to be asked a basic question or two and released into the country.
Nowadays, everything was automated. A simple scan of his passport and biometric scan of his face, and he was on his way.
Several signs pointed him toward the baggage claim area.
He had packed light for this trip, carrying only an Osprey backpack and a Buffalo Jackson Dakota Reserve canvas duffel bag with a gray Brooks Brothers suit and a few changes of clothes stashed inside.
While the ticket he purchased was open-ended, Nate didn’t intend to stay for longer than a week or two.
He was fairly certain he would be able to obtain all the information he needed in that time span, and he had left a little wiggle room to revisit either institution if need be, as well as some time for sightseeing.
This was far from his first trip to the UK.
As a child his father had taken him here several times on academic outings, and the two of them toured the sights of London, traveled to Stonehenge, and spent time in Scotland visiting old castles.
He returned as a young adult with some buddies from college and they spent a summer traveling around Europe in the most stereotypical way possible: a large backpack and a slew of hostels.
That trip had been less informative, to say the least. During his military career he had attended a course run by British special operations personnel for a few months and later returned for training with the SAS and Wally’s troop.
It had been a few years since he’d been back, but he always enjoyed the country, no matter his reason for being there.
He hoped that pattern would continue this time around with a successful visit.
After claiming his luggage, Nate proceeded to the car rental service to pick up his vehicle.
There were cursory forms to fill out, and then he was handed the keys to a Volkswagen Golf.
He decided that it would do nicely for his purposes, as he needed to travel out of town to Cambridge but would also need something compact enough to easily park in London.
Nate had adjusted years ago to driving on the right side of a vehicle, as many of the cars and trucks they had used while deployed to the Middle East were arranged in such a manner, but driving on the left side of the road was still somewhat tricky.
As he pulled out of the lot and made his way toward the airport exit, it all came back to him, the movements becoming more natural as he went.
Nate glanced at the clock on the dashboard, noticing that it was only 9:00 a.m. His appointment wasn’t until noon, and the trip would only take him an hour and a half at the most, once he managed to escape the London traffic, which was continuing to build even at this hour.
He would need to find a place to kill some time, but didn’t think that would be too difficult.
He hadn’t eaten much on the plane and his stomach was already starting to rumble.
“Just hang in there,” he muttered to his stomach as he pulled onto the M25 and headed north.