The Peking Papers

When the remains of Peking man were unearthed from the limestone hills outside the quaint Chinese village of Choukoutien, in the 1920’s and 1930’s, anthropologists realized that the discovery of this link in the evolutionary chain was of profound importance. Fossil evidence indicated that the hidden secrets of mankind’s beginnings were about to unfold.

Before studies of the site could be completed, however, Japanese expansionism loomed threateningly on the horizon. When Japanese soldiers invaded the Chinese mainland they brought with them a reign of terror, and took away cultural treasures and works of art valued as priceless. In late 1941, with occupation only days away, the Chinese decided that the Peking man remains would be safer in the United States. Preparations for shipment were made.

Then came the day of infamy--for the peace of the world as well as for the enlightenment hoped for by the scientific community. The fossils disappeared. During the war years no word of there whereabouts was heard. Afterward, no sign of them was seen. They were history. Gone, but not forgotten.

Half a century passed--a blink in the eyes of geological process but generations to the human species. The passage of time changes everything regardless of the scale of events. New and abrupt intelligence brought Peking man out of the past and into the unsettled world of international intrigue. The search for the fossil remains was reincarnated with vigor--only this time with guns, grenades, bombs, and rockets.

When anthropologist and underwater archaeologist William Waldo Hutchison III was “enlisted” to lead the search, he had no idea what he was getting into. He waded into the conflict with seven league boots that were so full of leaks he was soon drowning in contention. Along with two companions (a secret and secretive special agent known only as Cody, and a Naval intelligence officer whose voluptuousness matched her intelligence) Hutch embarked on a cruise of the South China Sea to investigate a number of sunken ships that may have had the long lost fossils on board at the time they went down.

What follows is a game of deep adventure and more thrills than Hutch ever bargained for. He is fragged, shelled, shot at, and stranded on a jungle isle; he is pursued by radicals who are more concerned with his extinction than that of Peking man; he dives into the deep blue sea and penetrates far into the collapsing corridors of rotten, rusting hulls. And all the time he is pursued relentlessly by multinational adversaries who also want to solve the mystery of Peking man--and who are not beneath killing for the solution.

Hutch’s scientific inquiry into the understanding of man’s past quickly becomes a struggle for personal survival. But at the end of the action--if he lives to write about it--is the answer to an age old riddle: where did man come from and where is he going? Somewhere, deep underwater, the past is about to catch up with the present. And the truth portended is ominous.