Excalibur a5-6 Page 10

  “What the hell are they building?” he wondered out loud as the printer spit out the latest picture.

  Pacific Ocean

  As the two attack submarines headed northwest toward Hawaii, they increased speed. The nanotechnology was monitoring performance, transmitting the information back to the guardian on Easter Island. The alien computer then sent back the new design orders increasing the submarines’ maximum speed.

  The changes increased the subs’ speed to over seventy-eight knots.

  Area 51

  Turcotte looked up from the computer screen as Quinn appeared next to him. He had just finished typing in a brief query to Kelly Reynolds and was ready to hit the enter key, sending it through satellites into the stream of traffic going between the Alien Fleet and Easter Island. The US military was in a quandary about the message flow because if they cut off the Alien Fleet’s access to the MILSTAR communications system, they would also have to cut off all their other forces, thus making the system useless. So far, they had elected to keep the system running and send messages to forces using ground encryption.

  Turcotte hesitated because he was afraid the message might get noted by the guardian or Aspasia’s Shadow, who might retaliate against Kelly. He’d phrased his query in a way that he thought only the reporter would understand and would seem innocuous to any sniffer program, but he understood he was risking her life with the message.

  “What’s up?” Turcotte asked.

  The major pointed toward the status board at the front of the room. “We’ve got a dozen inbound choppers along with a large fixed-wing plane.”

  “Reinforcements?” Turcotte asked. Area 51 was operating at below bare minimums as far as personnel went, as orders from Washington had stripped most of their personnel. They had a half dozen people left from a regular staff of over three hundred.

  “I’ve been trying to get us people,” Quinn said, “but I haven’t received any acknowledgments from the aircraft. They aren’t responding to hails.”

  “Range?” Turcotte’s attention was torn away from the message he’d been composing.

  “Ten klicks and closing fast.”

  Turcotte was surprised to feel a kick of adrenaline, similar to what he had always felt before going into action. He knew that Washington — every government — was infiltrated by both alien groups in various ways. And even worse, there were the various human factions inside of each government now lining up in one of four ways: to side with Artad; to ally with Aspasia’s Shadow; to try to be neutral; or to fight both alien groups and their minions.

  Three out of four options did not bode well for what they were trying to do there at Area 51, Turcotte thought. Not good odds.

  “Have you copied everything onto CD-ROM?” he asked Quinn. “The archive material, Burton’s manuscript, all the Majestic records? Everything?”

  “Yes.”

  Turcotte could see the small dots on the large screen closing. The choppers were over the lake bed.

  “Take the disks, get the others, and go to a bouncer,” Turcotte ordered. “What do—” Quinn began, but Turcotte cut him off.

  “Do it now!”

  Quinn still paused. “The doctor took Duncan to the medical hangar on the surface to run some tests,” Quinn said. “I can get Che Lu, Kincaid, and Mualama.”

  “Then do it!” Turcotte yelled as he hit the send key for the message, then ran for the surface elevator.

  Five Apache helicopter gunships led the way, followed by five UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters carrying troops. They were low over the desert floor, less than twenty feet up and moving fast.

  Ten miles behind them was a specially modified C-130 transport plane with large red crosses painted on the wings and high tail. Turcotte could hear the choppers as he ran across the sand toward the medical building. It was about a quarter mile from the hangar doors and next to the runway tower.

  An Apache helicopter swooped in front of him, 30mm cannon aimed directly at him.

  Turcotte ignored it, trusting that American soldiers, regardless of their orders, would not fire at an unarmed man. He reached the door of the medical building as a Blackhawk landed fifty meters away in a swirl of blowing dust. A dozen men dressed in camouflage jumped out.

  Turcotte threw the door open. “Lisa!”

  There was no response. He ran down the hallway and twisted the knob on the lab room. It was locked. Turcotte slammed his boot into the door, right above the knob. The wood splintered. He shoved it open and stepped inside. Duncan was on the examining table, her eyes closed. Turcotte rushed to her side.

  “Lisa?”

  He started as he felt a sharp jab in his right arm. He spun, open left hand slamming into the doctor’s chest. The white-coated figure flew backward, syringe falling from his fingers. The doctor tried to get up and Turcotte hit him hard on the side of the head, knocking him unconscious.

  Turcotte turned back to the table, trying to scoop Duncan up, but his arms were weak. He couldn’t lift her. Turcotte strained, putting every ounce of effort he could muster into it. He slumped to his knees, leaning against the table.

  He sensed people behind him. He collapsed, body turning as he did so. He was seated on the floor, his back against the table, unable to move at all. He couldn’t even move his eyeballs. He could see a half dozen soldiers fill the room. Two of them picked up Duncan and carried her out. An officer knelt in front of Turcotte. The officer checked his pulse, then looked over his uniform, noting the various patches. The man bit his lip with indecision. Then he stood.

  “Let’s go,” the officer ordered.

  “But, sir, we’re supposed to arrest all—” one of the men began. “That’s an order,” the officer said.

  The men and doctor exited the room, leaving a helpless Turcotte.

  * * *

  “Come on.” Quinn ripped the laptop computer out of Che Lu’s hands to lighten her load as they ran across the hangar floor toward the waiting bouncer. Yakov, Mualama, and Kincaid were already climbing up the side of the bouncer. The massive doors were partly open and they could all hear helicopters close by. The snout of an Apache helicopter poked through the empty hangar doors. The multibarreled 30mm chain gun under the nose of the craft snooped about, linked to the sight flipped down in front of the gunner’s eye. Wherever the gunner turned his head, the barrel of the chain gun followed. And the gunner was obviously now watching the five members of the Area 51 team scurry onto the bouncer.

  Balanced precariously on the top of the bouncer, Yakov pulled a pistol out and aimed it at the gunship.

  “No!” Quinn yelled as he reached the side of the craft. Yakov’s finger was on the trigger, but he hesitated.

  Inside the Apache the gunner had Yakov square in the reticules of his HADSS — Helmet and Display Sighting System — a monocular just inches from his right eye. “Warning rounds,” the pilot ordered over the intercom.

  The gunner turned his head slightly and squeezed the trigger. A burst of 30mm rounds — each the size of a milk bottle — ripped through the air and hit the skin of the bouncer five feet to the right of Yakov, ricocheting off.

  Major Quinn was knocked off his feet onto his back as Che Lu slammed into his chest. He blinked and tried to get up, but the Chinese scientist was on top of him. He felt something wet soaking into his chest and when he looked down saw that a round had punched through the old woman’s slight frame.

  “Oh, God,” Quinn whispered as he slid her to the floor.

  Yakov slid down the bouncer and joined him, kneeling next to Che Lu and tenderly placing a large hand around her neck, searching for a pulse.

  “She’s gone,” Yakov said.

  “It can’t be,” Quinn whispered.

  “Get on board,” Yakov stood, the pistol in his hand. He brought it up and aimed at the cockpit of the Apache. He squeezed off six shoots in rapid succession. They impacted harmlessly on the armored cockpit.

  Quinn tried to ignore the blood soaking through his uniform as he climbed onto th
e side of the bouncer, reaching up and taking Mualama’s outstretched hand. The African literally pulled him up and tossed him into the open hatch. He quickly slid into the pilot’s depression, taking the controls into his shaking hands. Mualama was down next, followed by Yakov. Kincaid was strapping down gear as Quinn lifted the bouncer off the floor of the hangar. He accelerated directly toward the Apache blocking the opening. It bobbed left, narrowly missing getting rammed.

  Two other Apaches made gun runs at the bouncer as it exited the hangar, firing just in front of the alien craft. Quinn ignored them, pressing forward on the control stick.

  Everyone flinched as the Apaches circled back and fired once more, rounds slamming into the side of the alien craft, the impacts visible via the strange ability of the skin to act like one-way glass.

  Quinn accelerated the craft and they were moving over six hundred miles an hour within ten seconds, leaving Area 51 and Che Lu’s slowly cooling body far behind.

  * * *

  Squads of soldiers entered the CUBE, arresting all those who had been left behind. They planted small explosive charges on every computer and communications device. As the red digits slowly counted down to detonation the men expeditiously exited the complex.

  On the surface, the C-130 rolled down the runway and came to a halt, where the squad of soldiers waited with Duncan. The back ramp came down and touched the concrete. Four white-coated figures rolled a gurney off the ramp and up to those waiting. They put Duncan on the gurney and strapped her down. Standing inside the cargo bay was a fifth white-coated figure, a tall man with shockingly white hair and piercing blue eyes.

  When they rolled the gurney onto the plane, he leaned over Duncan, checking her vital signs, even as the ramp began to close and the aircraft began turning.

  As it roared down the runway, the charges inside of Area 51 detonated.

  Inside Hangar One lay the body of Che Lu. From the Long March in 1934, through the agony of World War II and the subsequent Communist regimes, to watching her students die in Tiananmen Square, to the thrill of entering Qian-Ling, her journey was finally over in the most unlikely of places.

  CHAPTER 9: THE PRESENT

  Pearl Harbor

  Roberta Lockhart wore with pride the four stripes on the cuff of her blue jacket that indicated she was a United States Navy captain. From the streets of south-central Los Angeles, through the rigors of the Naval Academy, to the subtle racism and sexism of the active Navy, she had followed two rules her mother had taught her with unswerving obedience: Do your job better than anyone else and treat everyone with respect.

  At the moment she was standing behind another black woman, twenty years her junior, a new rating assigned to SOSUS-PAC, Lockhart’s command. To Lockhart the new sailor’s sex or race made no difference — she was doing her job making sure the newcomer was trained as well as possible.

  SOSUS stood for sound surveillance system. The first SOSUS systems were put together in the fifties and the sixties and laid along the Atlantic Coast — SOSUS- ATL. Then the Navy emplaced Colossus, which is along the Pacific Coast. Both were linked lines of passive systems submerged in the ocean, designed to listen for the movement of submarines through the water.

  Those first two systems guarded both coasts of the United States, but as the Soviets deployed ballistic missile submarines that could stand far off the coast and lob their nuclear warheads into the heartland of America, it was realized they weren’t enough.

  In response the Navy emplaced systems just off the Russian coast, near the two major Soviet sub ports at Polyarnyy and Petropavlovsk. Since then, the Navy continued to add to the worldwide SOSUS web. A line of devices was emplaced off the Hawaiian Islands. Each receiver consisted of a cluster of hydrophones inside submerged tanks as large as the oil storage tanks just outside of Lockhart’s command. The tanks were sunk to the bottom, anchored, then linked by cable. The cables were buried as the Soviets — and the Russians afterward — had a tendency to send trawlers dragging cable cutters near the systems.

  All the systems were coordinated so that not only could SOSUS detect movement, but by comparing pickup timing from various sensors, Lockhart’s people could draw at least two lines and pinpoint the emitter’s location.

  There was only one problem with the system: differentiating between friendly and enemy submarines. As part of their security, American ballistic submarines patrolled within large assigned areas at the discretion of their commanders, where it was more than likely that a potential enemy submarine would be in the same area.

  The solution was simple but effective. Every friendly submarine had an ID code painted on its upper deck with special laser reflective paint. SOSUS could pinpoint a sub, then a FLTSATCOM satellite could fire a laser downlink toward the indicated spot using a high-intensity blue-green laser, which could penetrate to submarine depth and read the code.

  Lockhart had been in Admiral Kenzie’s office earlier in the day along with all the other senior military commanders on Oahu. The information that the fleet would sail the next day and essentially leave the islands undefended by sea had been met with shocked silence.

  Even the Army’s main unit on the island, the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division at Schofield barracks was on the move. All day she’d watched truck after truck of soldiers come into the port and troops walk up gangplanks onto the Navy ships.

  Absolute secrecy had been Kenzie’s number one directive. Only those in the room knew what was to happen but the media had picked up the activity and over the entire island there was a sense of near panic. Despite a blackout on news, rumors were rife of naval disasters and pending doom.

  Lockhart knew she and her people would not be with the fleet when it sailed. She also knew what had happened to Task Forces seventy-eight and seventy-nine. Along with an Air Force AWACS flying patrol to the southeast, her people were the warning line for the island chain.

  In Hawaii, particularly at Pearl Harbor, early warning was something on the order of a religion. Despite being over sixty years in the past, no one forgot what had happened on December 7, 1941. The Arizona Memorial was a daily reminder in sight of every person at Pearl.

  “Anything?” Lockhart asked. It was a sign of the stress of the times that she asked. She knew her sailors would report anything out of the norm. She also knew the report from the satellites was that the enemy fleet was slightly more than two days out. Still.

  “No, ma’am,” the rating replied.

  Lockhart walked across the dimly lit room to the other occupant, her senior enlisted man, Markin, and best “listener.” She leaned close so the rating wouldn’t hear. “Anything?”

  “Pod of whales here.” Markin tapped his screen, indicating a spot southwest of Maui.

  “Maybe you should get some rest,” Lockhart said. “There should be nothing—” Her mouth snapped shut as Markin held up a finger, indicating the need for quiet. She waited.

  After five long minutes, Markin slowly pulled off his headphones. “There’s a strange sound southeast.”

  Southeast. Where the enemy was coming from, Lockhart thought. “Range?”

  He checked his computer. “One hundred seventy-five miles, ma’am.” Too close, she thought. Too close. “What is it? Submarine?”

  “I’ve never heard this before,” Markin said. “Give me a minute, ma’am.” He put the headphones back on and closed his eyes.

  Lockhart walked over to her new rating. “Anything strange?” she asked.

  The young woman hadn’t heard the exchange with Markin, but she had seen that something was up. Her face tightened as she listened.

  “There’s something, ma’am,” she finally said.

  Lockhart noted that Markin had taken off his headphones and was looking toward her. She was torn. “What do you think it is?”

  “Water, high pressure,” the rating said.

  Lockhart frowned, then went over to Markin. “What do you hear?” “I’ve never heard anything like this before,” he said.

  “W
ater under pressure?” she asked loud enough to be heard by the rating. Markin nodded. “Yes.”

  “Ma’am,” the rating called out. “I heard something like this in school in Orlando.”

  “And?” Lockhart and Markin waited.

  “The instructors had a tape of what they called prototype sounds. They said the Russians had a new type of sub on the boards that would utilize water-pressure propulsion. This is a very similar sound.”

  Lockhart frowned. “Range?”

  “One hundred and sixty-five miles,” Markin said.

  “You just said 175,” Lockhart said. “And now it’s 165, 164,” he corrected.

  “What can move underwater that quickly?” she demanded. “Nothing man-made,” Markin said.

  “How fast is the contact?” she asked. “Almost eighty-seven.”

  “Oh, my God,” Lockhart muttered under her breath so no one could hear. “Any satellite scan?” she called out.

  “Positive scan on both targets,” another sailor responded.

  Lockhart waited. “Report,” she finally ordered when he didn’t say anything further.

  “Uh — ma’am, both have the same ID tag. The Springfield. But—” he paused, then blurted out—“the Springfield can’t move that fast. And how can there be two?” Captain Lockhart’s face was hard as she picked up the hot line that connected her to fleet headquarters.

  Area 51

  Feeling had been returning to Mike Turcotte’s body for the past hour, from his extremities inward. He’d already tried getting to his feet a dozen times to no avail. He reached up and grasped the edge of the table and tried once more. He managed to pull himself up so that he was leaning against the table.

  He felt hungover, his head pounding, his body unsteady. He looked about the examining room. A clipboard was next to the sink and he went over to it. Flipping it open, he noted several medical forms — results of tests the doctor must have run, along with two pages of notes in handwriting he could hardly read. There were also several X rays clipped to it. Turcotte ripped the papers and X rays out of the clipboard and shoved them in the cargo pocket of his pants.