Area 51: The Mission-3 (7 page)

"I am Gergor," he said simply.

The other caught his breath and nodded. "Coridan," he introduced himself.

"Your trip went well?"

"It was difficult," Coridan allowed.

Gergor nodded. "That is why this"—he gestured at the complex—"is here. Not like the Americans putting their Area 51 in the middle of their country where civilians could drive up to the boundary."

"No one will drive here," Coridan acknowledged.

Gergor pointed to his right. "Rest there for a minute."

Coridan didn't do that right away. Instead he pulled a set of binoculars up to his eyes, letting the sunglasses he wore fall to the end of their cord. He scanned the compound. "How many people work there?"

"Forty."

"Security?"

"Half of them. The rest are scientists. This is the core of Section Four."

"It is smaller than I thought," Coridan noted.

"Most of it is underground. Those buildings are just quarters for the security force and supply sheds. That gray concrete building holds the elevator access to the main facility."

Coridan lowered the binoculars, revealing eyes that

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were the same as Gergor's—elongated dark red pupils set against a lighter red eye. His hair was cut short and pure white. His skin, the little that was exposed, was pale.

"We are only two," Coridan noted. He threw his backpack down.

"I have had many years to prepare," Gergor said. "Do not worry. We are enough."

The two sat still for several minutes as Coridan caught his breath.

"It is time." Gergor pushed aside the white sheet and stood, snow falling off of him. He began walking down the hill. Coridan scrambled to gather his gear together.

Gergor was halfway to the Section IV compound by the time Coridan caught up to him.

"What are you going to do?" Coridan asked. "Knock on the front door?"

"In a manner of speaking," Gergor said. He pulled a slim black controller from inside his heavy coat. "Let us knock." He pressed the number one on the numeric pad.

Coridan staggered as the surface buildings erupted in violent explosions.

When the smoke cleared, only the gray building that housed the elevator to the complex was still standing, the other buildings leveled.

"What did you do?" Coridan demanded.

"I told you I have had many years to prepare," Gergor said. He continued walking. "I believe they heard our knock. But I don't think they will open the door. So we must open it."

He pressed the second button on the controller. The steel door on the front of the gray building blew open with a flash. Gergor led Coridan inside.

Two large stainless-steel doors stood at the end of a

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corridor. A security camera was above them, the light on it a steady red.

"The doors are six inches thick," Gergor noted as they walked up to them. "The shaft is eight hundred meters deep. There are emergency explosives planted along the shaft designed to go off and bury the entire complex."

Gergor smiled, revealing very smooth, even, white teeth. "Of course, I disabled the destruct long ago. I imagine someone down there is pressing a red button quite futilely, yet at the same time secretly relieved that it doesn't work."

"There will still be guards below," Coridan said.

"They will be dead guards," Gergor said. He walked to a vent shaft and ripped it open. He pulled a glass ball from inside his bulky clothes. A green, murky liquid filled it, glowing as if it were lit from inside. He dropped the ball into the shaft.

"It will take less than a minute," Gergor said.

Almost immediately screams echoed up the air shaft, horrible undulating cries of pain. As Gergor had promised, though, within a minute there was only silence.

"How do we get down?" Coridan asked.

"We ride," Gergor said, hitting another button on the remote.

The doors slid open.

"Will it be safe?"

Gergor stepped into the elevator and Coridan followed.

"It is safe now," Gergor said as he pressed the down button and they descended.

The elevator came to a halt, but Coridan did not open the doors. He waited, checking his watch, until finally he was satisfied the gas had dissipated. Then he opened the doors.

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"There's Antarctica."

Turcotte looked over the pilot's shoulder, out the front windshield. Dark peaks, streaked with snow and ice, poked through the low-lying clouds, overlooking the ice-covered ocean.

"We'll parallel the shore, then punch in when we're closest to Scorpion Station," the pilot added.

UNAOC had confirmed the location of the secret base STAAR had been headquartered in with a flyby. The flyby had also noted that the foo fighter had blasted the surface over the base badly. It had been impossible to determine from that, though, whether Scorpion Base had also been destroyed. The American Navy had airlifted an engineering unit to the site that had confirmed that the entranceway to the base was destroyed. The unit had begun digging, trying to get down the mile and a half of ice to the base.

As always, Turcotte knew, it was going to require someone on the ground to find out what the situation was. And, as he was used to in his military career, he was the person who got that honor.

Turcotte checked the map as they continued south and more peaks appeared along the coast. To the right was the Admiralty Range facing to the north; then the shoreline turned and headed south into the Ross Sea.

A single massive mountain appeared straight ahead, above the clouds, set apart from the others to the right: Mount Erebus, which actually formed an island just off the coast of Antarctica—Ross Island. Turcotte knew that McMurdo Station was on the far side of Ross Island, the largest man-made base in the continent. But where they were heading was far beyond that base, deep inside the continent.

Looking over his shoulder to the back of the Osprey,

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Turcotte could see the Special Forces team in the cargo bay. He had no idea what they would find inside the base, so it was best to be prepared. The Osprey was a tilt-wing aircraft, capable of landing like a helicopter. A second Osprey followed them, carrying a HUMMV and a squad of Air Force Engineers to supplement the group already there.

Turcotte watched the slopes of Erebus come closer and then they punched into a thick cloud layer and all view was blanketed. The nose of the plane tilted up as the pilots made doubly sure they had plenty of sky between them and the mountain.

"The engineers have a beacon on the spot," the pilot said. He pointed at his control panel. "We're about two hours out." The pilot turned his wheel and the plane headed over the coast and toward the interior of Antarctica.

They crossed the shoreline mountain range, and as far as they could see in front of them was just a rippling white surface.

"Hey, Captain," one of the men in cockpit called out from his communications console. "Just got a message for you."

"Go ahead," Turcotte said.

"From a Lisa Duncan on board the George Washington. Says there is radio traffic between the guardian on Easter Island and Mars."

"Both ways?" Turcotte asked.

"Both ways," the man confirmed. "And also the guardian on Easter Island was into the Interlink and Internet for a while. They've cut off that link."

"Great," Turcotte muttered.

Turcotte went back into the rear and sat down on the red web seating along the inside skin of the plane. He was tired. Upon getting back to Earth after destroying

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the Airlia fleet, he had been whisked to Washington for an in-depth debrief.

He'd had only the one day off, shared with Lisa Duncan in her mountain home, before starting on this mission.

Despite his weariness, he was grateful simply to be alive. He knew others who had not been so fortunate.

He could clearly see Colonel Kostanov from Russia's Section IV of the Interior Ministry—their version of Area 51. He had died on the slopes of Qian-Ling fighting off the advancing Chinese forces. Peter Nabinger was dead, his body unrecovered in the wreckage of the helicopter crash in mainland China. Kelly Reynolds was in the grasp of the guardian computer under Easter Island and had not been heard from since she radioed him to not destroy Aspasia. Von Seeckt was still alive, but barely, in the base hospital at Nellis Air Force Base outside Area 51. Of the original group that had uncovered the secret of that mysterious base, it looked as if only he and Duncan were still in the fight.

And from Duncan's message it appeared the fight would go on.

Kincaid threw the imagery down in disgust. Wherever TL-SAT-9-3 was, he wasn't going to be able to find it this way. The area he had had the spy satellite check showed only thick jungle. Using thermals or infrared wouldn't help on an inert piece of metal.

TL-SAT-9-3 had been swallowed up by the jungle.

Kincaid's computer beeped. He eagerly checked his e-mail, hoping he had another message from Yakov. When he had first received the e-mail message, Kincaid had checked in with Lisa Duncan and she had told him that Yakov was a Section IV operative. Given what had happened in China with Colonel Kostanov, another Section IV operative who had given his life so that Mike 56

Turcotte and Peter Nabinger could escape from Qian-Ling, Duncan had told Kincaid to take Yakov seriously and check out the information.

But the message wasn't from Yakov. Instead, it was from the CIA. He had asked for a check into the background of that satellite.

He read the short message: TL-SAT-9-3 had been launched by Ariana, the European Space Consortium, under contract to a civilian firm. No details about the satellite itself were available. The company that owned the satellite was called Earth Unlimited, and the report speculated that since that company dealt in mining, the satellite had been a ground-imaging sensor.

That didn't make sense to Kincaid. Why would they have brought it down after only two days if its job was to take pictures from orbit? He scanned the rest of the message, which gave some information about Earth Unlimited. He paused as something caught his eyes. Nestled among a listing of two dozen subsidiaries of Earth Unlimited, a name jumped out at him: Terra-Lei. The same company that had discovered the ruby sphere in the cavern in the Great Rift Valley.

Yakov listened to the hiss of static coming from the earpiece of the SATPhone for ten seconds before pushing the off button. He knew he had dialed the right number—it was the same number he had used for two decades—but he carefully punched it in once more. And again, his ear was filled with static.

In those two decades the other end had always been answered by the second ring. Yakov knew there could only be one reason it wasn't being picked up now—there was no one alive on the other end. Yakov had worked in the covert world long enough to know that, like an animal in the wild, a good operative had to ad-

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just quickly and efficiently to any change in the environment they operated in.

He didn't want to accept what his ear was telling him, but he did. He shut the phone off, tucked it into his backpack, and continued on his way, already making new plans.

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-5-

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The Springfield had listened as its sister ship, the Pasadena, had been destroyed by the foo fighters. Like their brethren on the fleet above them, the crew of the submarine felt no affinity for the Airlia or the alien race's machines. They would have much preferred loading a live torpedo in the tube and firing it toward Easter Island rather than the device that was currently being manhandled into the number one tube.

Sea Eye was developed to be a remote probe that the submarine could launch and use as a stand-off surveillance device. The housing for the device was a conventional MK-48 torpedo. Nineteen feet long by twenty-one inches in diameter, it fit perfectly into the firing tube.

Inside of the casing, the torpedo's propulsion system and wire-guidance spool remained intact. The warhead, however, had been removed and an array of surveillance equipment took its place.

The Springfield was currently at two hundred feet depth and cruising just on the edge of where the shield guarding Easter Island was plotted.

"We have a direct link to the Springfield and through her to the Sea Eye," the young lieutenant seated in

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front of the computer informed Duncan. "They're closing on their launch point."

"How close will they get?" Duncan asked.

"The wire link is over eight kilometers long," the lieutenant said. "They will get within two kilometers of the shield to launch. That gives them plenty to work with. The Springfield is taking a course that will follow the shield around for the length of the mission. She's running on minimum thrust and power.

Stealth mode."

"Won't the shield react to the torpedo as a threat?" Duncan asked.

"We're going to try to float the torpedo through, with the power off,"

Admiral Poldan said. "Once it clears the shield, we can activate it through the trail wire and take a look."

"Two minutes to shield," the lieutenant announced. He hit a button on his console. "Entry program is loaded and ready to run."

Duncan looked once more at the imagery of the shield. The guardian had made the shield opaque after the last failed attack by Admiral Poldan's fleet. Up to that point, it had been invisible. The best guess UNAOC scientists had been able to come up with was that the field that comprised the shield was similar to the electromagnetic used by the bouncers—the small Airlia atmospheric craft that Area 51 had had control of for forty years. The fact that in all the years Majestic had worked on the electromagnetic gravity drives of those craft not a single clue as to how they actually worked had been discovered told Duncan that the key to the shield would not suddenly reveal itself.

"Torpedo launch!" the lieutenant announced.

The torpedo was spit out of the launch tube with a gush of compressed air. It ran straight for two hundred

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meters and then began curving to the left, approaching the shield.

When it was less than a hundred meters from the shield, the electric motor went dead. The torpedo's momentum kept it going forward.