Read Area 51: The Mission-3 for Free Online

could have come from Atlantis?" Ruiz asked.
    "It is possible. While others look in Egypt and at the ruins of the cities along the coast, what I am searching for here, deep in the jungle, is evidence of what happened to the people.
    "Tiahuanaco is the key, not Tucume. Tiahuanaco once was a thriving city located on a mountain at over twelve thousand five hundred feet in altitude. It has a pyramid over seven hundred feet wide at the base and three hundred feet high. It ruled an empire that extended through the area we are now traveling, hundreds of miles from here to the Pacific Coast. But when the Incan Empire expanded south in A.D. 1200 and came across Tiahuanaco, the city was abandoned, the old empire gone. The people had to have gone somewhere. I think they went into the jungle."
    "Why?" Ruiz asked.
    "Why did they go into the jungle or why did they leave the city?" Harrison asked in turn. He didn't wait for an answer. "Something terrible happened to them. It had to have been very bad for them to give up their magnificent city.
    And why the jungle?" Harrison waved his hands around. "Where else would you go to hide?"

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    "Hide from what?" Ruiz asked.
    "That I will know when I find the Aymara. But it must have been something very terrible."
    "You think ancestors of the people of Tiahuanaco are still alive?"
    "There have been many reports over the centuries of a strange tribe, far up the tributaries of the Amazon—a tribe where the members are white! To me that means they are the ancestors of Kon-Tiki Viracocha."
    Ruiz rubbed a hand through the stubble of beard on his chin. "I have heard stories," he began, but he paused.
    "What kind of stories?" Harrison pressed.
    "Of a place. A very strange place. Where white men live. Have lived for a very long time."
    "The Aymara? Their village?"
    Ruiz shrugged. "People only speak of it in whispers. They call it The Mission. I have met no one who actually has seen the place. There are only rumors. It is said to be a very dangerous place. That anyone who sees it dies. I do not know where this place is. Some say it is deep in the jungle. Others say it is near the coast. Others say it is high on a mountaintop in the Andes."
    "What is this Mission?" Harrison asked.
    "It is said that the sun god, Kon-Tiki, lives there."
    "What else?"
    "I do not know any more," Ruiz said abruptly. He glanced down and noticed his fingernails were digging into the wood on the bridge shield.
    Ruiz looked upriver. He knew it was just an illusion, but the river appeared to be shrinking, getting narrower every second. "Let me see your map, senor."
    Ruiz took the sheet and stared at it. He placed an aged finger on the paper and traced a forty-kilometer circle east of the border of Bolivia and Brazil.
    "We are

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    somewhere here." He shook his head. "There are dangers ahead. The river could close up on us. And there are other dangers. We should go back."
    The last thing Ruiz wanted was to spend the night in this province with a naive American and a crew full of street thugs. They might not even be in Brazil anymore. They were far beyond the reach of civilization, and Ruiz knew that besides the wildlife there were other dangers that lurked in the jungle.
    Harrison was looking for a legendary white tribe, but Ruiz knew for a fact there were other lost tribes of headhunters and cannibals in this part of the world.
    "The river will turn into a stream soon," Ruiz said. "The land will go up.
    There will be rapids. We must go back."
    Harrison stared ahead. "I feel we are on the right path."
    "It will be dark in a few hours," Ruiz said. "We should go back."
    "We go forward as far as we can," Harrison said. He took the map. He slid his finger from the location Ruiz had them plotted to the west. "I think the Aymara are here somewhere."
    Ruiz bit the inside of his lip but he said nothing, letting the purring of the two engines be answer enough as the boat continued upstream.
    A half hour later, they turned a corner in the