The Fifth Kind

The Fifth Kind begins, fittingly, with a matter of life and death.

I received an email from an archaeologist friend, telling me that he’d be arriving early tomorrow morning by plane to see me. This friend of mine has never been one for haste; for him to reach out so urgently could only mean something out of the ordinary had happened.

I tidied up the documents on my computer, saved a backup of the things I’d written online, and lit a cigarette. As I mused about this old friend, I realized three years had slipped by without notice.

I remembered that three years ago, when we had last seen each other, he had told me he was heading off to study the Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an, following his advisor’s research. Then he vanished for two years, not a word, until last year when he faxed me some internal material on the Terracotta Army. It wasn’t particularly sensitive, but at the end of it, he left a note: some confidential government agencies had sent people to join the research.

I didn’t bother to investigate which agencies these were, since he didn’t specify, and it seemed inappropriate to ask. After that fax, I heard nothing more from him until today.

This story involves the Terracotta Army, so I had to dig out some relevant references:

The Terracotta Warriors are burial pits accompanying the mausoleum of the First Emperor, located about a kilometer and a half east of his tomb. They were discovered in 1974 when local farmers were digging a well. Subsequent drilling revealed three pits in total. The largest, Pit 1, covers 14,260 square mete