Area 51 (5 page)

Turcotte held on to the web seating along the inside skin of the aircraft as the nose lifted, and then they were airborne. He caught a glimpse of a bright light somewhere out in the mountains through the far portal. He glanced over at Prague, and the man was staring at him, his eyes black and flat.

Turcotte calmly met the gaze. He knew the type. Prague was a hard man among men who prided themselves on being tough. Turcotte imagined Prague's stare intimidated less-experienced men, but Turcotte knew something that Prague knew: he knew the power of death. He knew the feeling of having that power in the crook of the finger, exercising it with a three-pound pull, and how easy it was.

It didn't matter how tough you pretended to be at that point.

Turcotte closed his eyes and tried to relax. It didn't take a genius to figure out that he wasn't going to get anything up front here. Wherever they were going, he'd find out when they got there. And whatever he was supposed to do when they got there, he'd find out when they told him. It was a hell of a way to run an operation. Either Prague was incompetent or he was deliberately keeping Turcotte in the dark. Turcotte knew it wasn't the former.

VICINITY NEBRASKA/SOUTH DAKOTA BORDER

T-141 HOURS, 15 MINUTES

The V-22 Osprey circled the south shore of Lewis and Clark Lake at ten thousand feet. In the rear the team leader listened on the headset of the satellite radio as he was fed the latest from the Cube.

"Phoenix Advance, this is Nightscape Six. Thermals read clear of humans in MSS.

Proceed. Out."

The team leader took off the headset and turned to the three members of his team. "Let's go." He gave a thumbs-up to the crew chief.

The back ramp slowly opened to the chill night sky. When it was completely open, the crew chief gestured. The team leader walked to the edge and stepped off, followed closely by the other men. He got stable, aims and legs akimbo, then quickly pulled his ripcord. The square chute blossomed above his head and he checked his canopy to make sure it was functioning properly. Then he slid the night vision goggles down over his crash helmet and switched them on.

Glancing above, beyond his chute, he could see the other three members of his team hanging up above him, in perfect formation. Satisfied, the team leader looked down and oriented himself. The target area was easy to see. There was a long section of shoreline with no lights. As he descended, he checked the terrain through the glow of the goggles and started picking up more details. The abandoned ski lift was the most prominent feature he was look ing for, and once he spotted it, he pulled on his toggles, aiming for the high terminus of the lift. There was a small open field there, where years ago beginning skiers had stumbled off as the chairs deposited them.

Pulling in on both toggles less than twenty feet above the ground, the team leader slowed his descent to the point that when his boots touched down it was no more of a jar than if he had stepped off a curb. The chute crumpled behind him as he unfastened his submachine gun. The other men landed, all within twenty feet. They secured their chutes, then took position underneath the top pylon of the ski lift, on the highest bit of ground within ten miles.

From there they could oversee the jumbled two miles of terrain lying between them and the lake.

The area was called Devil's Nest and it was rumored that Jesse James had used it as a hideout over a century ago. The rolling plain of Nebraska abruptly dropped off into sharp hills and ridgelines, starting right where the men were and running up to the edge of the man-made lake--the result of the damming of the Missouri River ten miles downstream. A developer had tried to turn it into a resort area a decade ago--hence the ski lift--but the idea had failed miserably.

The men weren't interested in the rusting machinery, though. Their concern lay in the center of the area, running along the top of a ridgeline pointed directly at the lake.

The team leader took the handset his commo man offered him. "Nightscape Six Two, this is Phoenix Advance. Landing strip is clear. Area is clear. Over."

"This is Six Two. Roger. Phoenix main due in five mikes. Out."

In the air Turcotte watched Prague speak into the satellite radio, the words lost in the loud roar of the engines. He could feel the change in air pressure as the C-130 descended. A glance out the window showed water, then shoreline.

The wheels of the 130 touched earth and the plane began rolling. It stopped in an amazingly short distance for such a large aircraft and the back ramp opened, as the plane turned around, facing back down the runway.

"Let's go!" Prague yelled. "Off-load everything."

Turcotte lent a hand as they rolled the helicopter off and into the shelter of the nearby trees. He was impressed with the ability of the pilots. The runway was little more than a flat expanse of rough grass between dangerously close lines of trees on either side.

As soon as they had the helicopter and equipment out, the plane was heading back down the strip, the ramp not even fully closed as the plane lifted off into the night sky. Less than a minute later the second plane was landing and the process was repeated. In a few minutes they had all three helicopters and personnel on the ground.

As the sound of the second plane faded into the distance, Prague was all business. "I want camo nets up and everything under cover, ASAP. Let's move, people!"

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38 -

3

CAIRO, EGYPT

T-137 HOURS

"I don't know what's wrong with this thing," the graduate student said, twisting knobs and adjusting controls on the machinery in front of him. The sound of his shrill voice echoed off the stone walls and slowly died out, leaving stillness in the air.

"Why are you so sure there's something wrong with the machine?" Professor Nabinger asked in a quieter voice.

"What else could be causing these negative readings?"

The student let go of the controls of the magnetic resonance imager that they had carried down here, with great effort, into the bowels of the Great Pyramid.

The effort had taken two forms: in the past twenty-four hours the actual physical effort of carrying the machine through the narrow tunnels of the Great Pyramid of Giza down to the bottom chamber and, for a year prior, complex diplomatic effort to be granted permission to bring the modern equipment into the greatest of Egypt's ancient monuments and turn it on.

Nabinger knew enough about the politics of archaeology to appreciate the opportunity he was being given to use this equipment here. Of the original seven wonders of the ancient world the three pyramids on the West Bank of the Nile were the only one still standing, and even in ancient times they were considered the greatest of the seven. The Colossus at Rhodes--which most archaeologists doubted had even existed as reported--the hanging gardens of Babylon, the Tower of Babel, the Tower of Pharos at Alexandria, and other reported marvels of early engineering had all disappeared over the centuries. All but the pyramids, built between 2685 and 2180 B.C. They were weathered by the sand long before the Roman Empire even rose, were still there when it fell, centuries later, and were standing strong as the second millennium after Christ's birth approached.

Their original face of hand-smoothed limestone had long ago been plundered--except for the very top of the middle pyramid--but their bulk was so great that they had escaped most of the ravages of the wars that had swirled around them.

From the Hyksos invasions from the north in the sixteenth century B.C. to Napoleon, to the British Eighth Army in World War II, the pyramids had survived them all.

There were over eighty pyramids still standing in Egypt, and Nabinger had seen most of them and explored their mysteries, but he was always drawn back to the famous trio at Giza. As one came up on them and viewed the three, the middle pyramid of Khafre appeared to be the largest, but only because it was built on higher ground. The Pharaoh Khufu, more popularly known as Cheops, was responsible for the building of the greatest pyramid, farthest to the northeast.

Over four hundred feet tall and covering eighty acres, it was by far the largest stone building in the world.

The smallest of the three was that of Menkaure, measuring over two hundred feet in altitude. The sides of all three were aligned with the four cardinal directions and they went from northeast to southwest, from largest to smallest.

The Great Sphinx lay at the foot of the middle pyramid--far enough to the east to also be out in front of the Great Pyramid, off the Sphinx's left shoulder.

The pyramids drew tourists and archeologists and scien tists and evoked awe among all. For the tourist the size and age were enough. For the scientist the exact engineering defied the technology of the time in which they were built.

For the archaeologist not only was the architecture amazing, but there was the unsettling question of the purpose of the buildings. That was the question Nabinger had struggled with for years, not content with the answers offered up by his colleagues.

They were commonly assumed to have been tombs for the pharaohs. But the problem with that theory was that the sarcophagus discovered inside of each of the pyramids had been found empty. For years that had been blamed on the plundering of grave robbers, until sarcophagi with the lids still on and the seals on those lids still intact were found, and they were empty also.

The next best theory, and one that logically followed the previous one, was that perhaps the pyramids were cenotaphs, funeral memorials, and the bodies had secretly been buried elsewhere to prevent the graves from being plundered.

A more recent theory took a totally different approach.

There were those who postulated that, to the Egyptians, the finished pyramid was not so important as the process of building; that the purpose of their construction was a desire by ancient pharaohs to employ and draw together their people during the annual three months the Nile flooded and agricultural work came to a standstill. Idle hands led to idle minds that could possibly think thoughts the pharaohs would not have approved of. So, this theory went, the pharaohs placed ten-ton blocks of stones in those idle hands.

Another theory favored by the more optimistic traditionalists was that the final resting place of the pharaohs in the pyramids had not been discovered yet. It was perhaps hidden deep in the bedrock underneath the massive stone structures.

There were many theories, but none had yet been proven. It was a search to discover and prove the purpose of the pyramids that drew Peter Nabinger to them every year for six months. The leading Egyptian expert at the Brooklyn Museum, he had been coming here for twelve years.

Nabinger's area of expertise was hieroglyphics: a form of writing using figures or objects to represent words or sounds. His philosophy was that the best way to understand the past was to read what people of the time had to say about their own existence, rather than what someone digging up ruins thousands of years later had to say.

One thing Nabinger found most fascinating about the pyramids was that if they had not been there now, in the present, for everyone to see, it was doubtful anyone would believe they had ever existed, because of the almost total lack of reference to them in ancient Egyptian writings. It was almost as if Egyptian historians of years gone past had assumed everyone would know about the pyramids and therefore there was no need to talk about them. Or, Nabinger sometimes suspected, maybe even the people of the time of the pyramids' building weren't quite clued in themselves as to the reason they were being built. Or maybe, Nabinger also wondered, maybe it had been forbidden to write about them?

This year he was trying something different, in addition to his main project of recording all the writing and drawings on the interior walls of the Great Pyramid. He was using the magnetic resonance imager, the MRIr to probe deep underneath the structures where the eye could not go and physical excavation was prohibited. The waves emitted by the imager could safely invade the depths and tell him if there were more buried wonders. At least that was the theory. The practice, as his graduate assistant Mike Welcher was pointing out to him, was not living up to the anticipation.

"It's like"--Welcher paused and scratched his head--"it's like we're being blocked by some other emission source. It's not particularly powerful, but it is there."

"For example?" Nabinger asked, leaning back against the cool stone walls of the chamber. Despite all the time he'd spent inside the pyramid over the years, there was still a feeling of oppression in here, as if one could sense the immense weight of stone pressing down overhead.

Nabinger was a tall, heavyset man, sporting a thick black beard and wire-rimmed glasses. He wore faded khaki, the uniform of the desert explorer. At thirty-six he was considered young in the field of archaeology and he had no major finds to stake his reputation upon. Part of his problem, he would readily acknowledge to his friends back in Brooklyn, was that he had no pet theory that he desired to pursue.

He only had his pet method, searching for new writings and trying to decipher the volumes of hieroglyphics that still remained untranslated. He was willing to accept whatever they yielded, but so far his efforts had not turned up much.