The Mission a5-3 Read online

  “How hot is this place?” Coridan took his own pack off and sat on it.

  Gergor laughed. “You worry too much. Even though the ban went into effect, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was followed. The Russian military has tried to slip a few tests through here and there. In 1997 researchers recorded what seemed like a nuclear explosion on this island. The Russian government managed to convince them it was an earthquake. The other countries wanted to believe that — what else could they do? — so they believed.”

  “Was it a nuclear test?” Coridan was looking about nervously.

  “Oh, yes. I saw the mushroom cloud.”

  “Then this is hot.” Coridan had brought the conversation full circle.

  Gergor momentarily stopped what he was doing. “Yes, it’s hot. Worse than the nuclear weapons, Minatom, the Russian atomic agency, has been surreptitiously slipping in spent fuel here for many years. This place is an environmental disaster. But what do you expect? People are hardly better than the animals.” “I expect not to kill myself stupidly,” Coridan said.

  “You think you have a right to your life? Your body, your life, belongs to The Ones Who Wait. As does mine. We do as we are ordered.”

  “We did not wait in destroying Section Four,” Coridan noted.

  “There is a reason for everything,” Gergor said cryptically.

  Coridan snorted. “We did not find what we needed. And we killed many in accomplishing that failure.”

  “We succeeded in one way,” Gergor said. “We know one more place where it isn’t. Plus we did get something worthwhile out of there.”

  He returned his attention to the object he had pulled out of the pack. It was a black sphere, fourteen inches in diameter. The surface was completely covered with very thin lines shaped like hexagonals. Gergor pulled his gloves off, ignoring the bitter-cold wind. He turned the sphere in his hands, looking carefully at the very faint high rune writing on it, then pressed down on the top. A red inner glow lit the globe, highlighting the high rune hexagonals. Three panels on the bottom opened, extending short legs.

  “What are you doing?” Coridan was shivering, now that the heat produced by moving was gone and the cold wind was biting through his outer garments.

  “It would be stupid to carry this thing all the way only to find out it doesn’t work,” Gergor said. He had put the sphere down on top of his pack and was reading the markings.

  He pressed. There was a low humming noise. Around the center of the sphere were eight hexagonals. One blinked red, then turned black. The next one did the same. Then the next.

  But the fourth one blinked red and continued blinking. Gergor looked up at Coridan even as the fifth, sixth, and seventh ones all went black. The eighth, and final, hexagonal blinked red, then went down to a steady orange flash.

  Coridan reached forward with a gloved finger and touched the one hexagonal that was a steady red. “How can that be?”

  Gergor turned the sphere off and began repacking it. “You know what that means.”

  “But I thought they were all destroyed.”

  “You thought wrong.”

  “UNAOC is launching the American shuttles to—”

  “I know what UNAOC has planned,” Gergor interrupted.

  “We have to tell Lexina. She has to know this!”

  Gergor had his rucksack back on his back. “We will, but we can’t signal out of this area. When we get to the aircraft, we will call her.”

  “Why couldn’t you have put the aircraft on this side of the test area?” “Because security was the primary consideration,” Gergor said.

  Without a backward glance at the other, Gergor skied into the test range.

  * * *

  Ruiz stared at his arm. A deep trace of black welts crisscrossed the skin. His head was pounding, his throat and mouth were dry, even though he’d just drained a canteen full of water.

  He heard deck boards creak. Lifting his head off his chest, he saw Harrison leaning over the plastic cases.

  “Senor!” Ruiz croaked.

  Harrison slowly stood and turned. Ruiz wasn’t surprised to see the man’s skin had a faint trace of the same welts. The American had a case in his hands. He walked over to the bridge shield and put the case on it.

  “Ruiz.” Harrison nodded.

  “We have it — what the villagers had?”

  Harrison nodded.

  “Did you know?” Ruiz asked.

  “I suspected this might come, but it’s happening faster than I expected.” “You weren’t looking for the Aymara,” Ruiz reasoned out loud. “You were looking for that village. For this—” He held his arms up.

  Harrison paused, then nodded. “Yes.”

  “Who are you?” Ruiz asked. “You are no university professor.”

  “I am a Watcher,” Harrison said.

  Ruiz staggered, bending over double and vomiting over the side of the boat. When he looked up, Harrison had a videocamera in his hands, the lens pointed at Ruiz. He pulled out a tripod and set the camera on it, locking it down, then adjusting the focus.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We have to let others know the threat.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The patrol looked like a party of ghouls as the sun revealed details. Most of the men were splattered with dried blood and all were covered in mud. They’d made good time in the darkness, following the pass down from the site of the ambush. The stream in the center of the ravine had grown larger as they went lower, until now it was almost a river.

  Steam was rising off the surface of the water, mingling with the trees that hung over it. The foliage almost touched in the middle overhead, making the band of water a dark tunnel with splotches of light playing along the surface.

  “All right. We’ll break here,” Toland called out. Daylight revealed him to be more than just a voice in the dark. He was a tall, thin man, his hair completely white — unusual for a man of thirty-six, but not for someone in his line of work.

  Faulkener placed out flank security on either side and the rest of the men slumped to the ground, exhausted. Faulkener was the opposite of Toland in body type: short and stocky with heavily muscled arms and legs. He’d been the heavyweight boxing champion of the regiment before Toland.

  “I suggest everyone take a bath and get cleaned up,” Toland said.

  “Hell, we’re just going to get dirty again,” one of the new men replied, pulling his bush hat down over his eyes. Those who had served with Toland before were already beginning to strip down.

  “Yes, but cleanliness is very important,” Toland replied, keeping his voice neutral.

  “I’ll clean when I get out of this pigsty of a country,” the Australian joked.

  Toland pulled the bolt back on his Sterling, the sound very loud in the morning air. “You’ll clean now.”

  The Australian stared at him. “What the hell, mate? You queer or something?”

  “I’m not your mate. I’m your commander. Take your clothes off, put them on the riverbank, then get in line.” He centered the muzzle of the submachine gun on the man. “Now strip.”

  Soon there was a line of naked men standing waist deep in the water. The white ones had farmer’s tans, their torsos pale, their faces and forearms bronzed from the sun. Toland and Faulkener went through the men’s clothes and gear, very slowly and methodically.

  Toland held up a plastic canteen and shook it. He turned it upside down. No water came out. He took his flashlight and peered in. “Ah, what do we have here?” Toland asked. He drew a knife and jabbed it into the canteen, splitting the side open. A plastic bag full of brownish powder fell out.

  “Whose gear?”

  The men all turned and looked at one of the Australians who had just joined them for this mission. The one who had complained about taking a bath. “Come here, mate,” Toland called out with a smile.

  The man walked out of the water, his hands instinctively covering his groin. “I told you no drugs, didn’t I?” Toland asked.<
br />
  “I didn’t—”

  The first round caught the man in the stomach, and Toland casually raised his aim, stitching a pattern up the chest. The man flew backward into the river, arms splayed, blood swirling in the brown water.

  The men redonned their clothes and gear. “Make sure you drink upstream from that,” Faulkener advised the men, pointing at the body of the Australian, which was slowly floating away downstream. “We’ll rest here for a few hours.”

  Toland retired to the shade of a tree. Faulkener joined him there and handed him a sheet of paper. “The message Andrews received last night.”

  Toland looked at it — a long list of letters that made no sense. “They encoded it. Must be getting worried about someone listening in.”

  Faulkener didn’t reply. He took his knife out and began sharpening the already gleaming edge.

  Toland retrieved a Ziploc bag from his breast pocket. Inside it was a small notepad. He turned to the eleventh page — equaling the day of the month they received the message on — and began matching the letters of the message with the letter on the page. Then, using a tri-graph, a standard page that had three letter groups on it, he began deciphering the message. It was slow work, made more difficult by the need to figure where one word ended and the next one began. After twenty minutes he had it done:

  TO TOLAND

  FROM THE MISSION

  LINK UP WITH PARTY VICINITY PACAAS NOVOS ACROSS BORDER IN BRAZIL AT COORDINATES SEVEN TWO THREE SIX FOUR EIGHT IN TWELVE HOURS

  FOLLOW ALL ORDERS OF PARTY TO BE MET

  BONUS ASSURED A MILLION A MAN

  TIME IS OF ESSENCE

  CONFIRM ORDERS RECEIVED

  END

  Toland pulled out his map and looked at the coordinates. About fifty kilometers north and east. He handed the message to Faulkener.

  “Why don’t they just drop this party off at one of these dirt runways in-country?” Faulkener asked.

  “The Americans have this area blanketed with radar. To track drug runners. Whatever The Mission is up to, they must want to keep it secret.”

  Faulkener looked at the map. “It’s a long walk and not much time. What’s the rush?”

  “We can do it.” Toland rubbed the stubble of his beard. “I wonder what they want us to do after we link up with this guy?”

  Faulkener nodded toward the merks. “Some of these boys won’t want to go farther into the jungle.”

  Toland laid a hand on the stubby barrel of his Sterling. “Anyone says anything, they can talk to my complaint department. We move out in fifteen minutes.”

  * * *

  “They are afraid.” Lo Fa lowered the binoculars. “But they are many. More than we have here.”

  “Are you afraid?” Che Lu asked.

  Lo Fa laughed. “Mother-Professor, I am not one of your stupid students to be manipulated so easily by your words.”

  He pointed to the west, where the bulk of Qian-Ling was highlighted against the setting sun. It rose out of the countryside, over 3,000 feet high, so large it was hard to imagine that human hands had made the mountain. And it was not a mountain, but a tomb, a monument built before the birth of Christ to honor the Emperor Gao-zong and his empress, the only empress in the entire history of China.

  Or at least that was what Che Lu had thought. Now she wondered why it was really built and who was behind the building. The man-made hill dwarfed even the Great Pyramid of Giza, making it the largest tomb in the world. The amount of labor needed to move that amount of dirt and rock was staggering to conceptualize. Trees and bushes had taken root on the mountain, and it looked almost natural except for the symmetrical shape. Around the tomb were various statues, particularly on the wide road leading up to it, where rows and rows of statues were lined, to symbolize all the people and officials who had come to honor the funeral procession of Gao-zong when he was buried in A.D. 18.

  What Lo Fa was pointing to, though, was not the tomb or the statues, but the soldiers, tanks, and trucks surrounding the tomb.

  “They fear to enter, but they will kill us to keep us from doing so,” Lo Fa said. “And your ridicule will not make me throw myself under the treads of one of their tanks. I have not gotten to be this old without a little bit of common sense.”

  Che Lu shook Nabinger’s notebook in front of Lo Fa. “But we have to get in.”

  Lo Fa squatted. His guerrilla band was spread out around in the grove of trees they were hiding in. They were five kilometers from the tomb, having force-marched here after recovering the notebook.

  “I came here because you insisted,” Lo Fa said. He looked around to make sure none of his men were listening. “I came because I respect you, Che Lu. We made the Long March together.”

  Che Lu looked at her comrade in surprise. In all their years he had never called her by name.

  Lo Fa continued. “But if I am to go further, if I am to ask these men to go further, I must know why. I must know what is so important about this old tomb. What was so important for the Russians and the Americans to send men to die getting into and out of it? Why does the army flutter about like moths around a fire — attracted but scared of the flames?” He leaned close, his wrinkled face close to hers. “Tell me about Qian-Ling.”

  Che Lu rested her back against the rough pack she had carried. She was not young anymore. Her body ached from the march. “You have a right to know, old friend. I will tell you as much as I know and as much as I can guess. But the truth is inside, and that is why we must get in.

  “There is more in Qian-Ling than a tomb.” She proceeded to tell Lo Fa what she had discovered on her last trip inside — the hologram of the alien that warned in the strange tongue in the central corridor that led to the lowest chamber; the beam that had cut one of her students in half that guarded the way beyond the hologram; the large chamber full of containers that she suspected were Airlia machines and equipment; and through it the chamber holding a small guardian computer.

  “But it is the lowest chamber, the one we were not able to get into, that is the key.” She held up the notebook once more. “Professor Nabinger could read the high runes. He made contact with the guardian computer inside Qian-Ling. In here he wrote some of what he knew before he died.”

  Lo Fa waited, his dark eyes meeting hers.

  “In the lowest chamber”—Che Lu’s voice quavered—“in the chamber, according to Nabinger’s writings, I believe there are aliens — more Airlia. Along with their leader Artad. Waiting to awaken.”

  Lo Fa spit. “So?”

  Che Lu was indignant. “So? So! What—”

  Lo Fa hushed her. “Shh. Listen to me, old woman. Why would you want to go down there? Why would you want to waken these sleeping beings?” He pointed up. “I have not been ignorant. Others of these woke on Mars. They came here to destroy the planet. Their dead ships circle our world.”

  Che Lu smiled. “Because these ones”—she pointed at the fading bulk of Qian-Ling—”these ones are the ones who saved us long ago. And maybe they can save us again.

  “And there is more down there than just the aliens. According to what Nabinger was able to decipher, there is the power of the sun. Power, Lo Fa. Would you not agree our people need power now? Maybe they can give us the power we need to defeat the government and bring China back the glory it once was! Because if Artad and other Airlia are in Qian-Ling, does it not make sense that the Airlia were instrumental in making China the Middle Kingdom so many years ago?”

  * * *

  The twenty-foot-high pyramid that housed the guardian computer under Rano Kau was now the core of a bizarre structure of which Kelly Reynolds’s body was just one part. Metal arms reached out of the side of the pyramid, made out of parts cannibalized from the material UNAOC had left behind.

  Microrobots scurried about the cavern. A line of them went up to the surface through the tunnel UNAOC had drilled. They carried small pieces of stone and returned on the opposite side, each one carrying something taken from the surface, like an
army of ants returning from a feast. Most of them brought their scraps to a line of differently shaped microrobots that were aligned along the wall. Taking the raw material brought to them, these made more of their own kind, shaping the various material into bodies, computers, and energy packs.

  There were several types of microrobots. The carriers, about three inches long, had six metal legs, and two arms for grasping and holding that could reach forward, then rotate back and hold whatever they picked up on their backs. The makers, six inches long, had four legs and four arms. The arms were different on each, depending on what function they served in the production line.

  Another type of microrobots disappeared into a hole in the floor of the cavern — the diggers, with eight legs spaced evenly around a central core body that was two inches wide and eight long. At the very front each one had a set of small drills on very short arms. Those diggers coming out of the hole each carried a small piece of rock. They dumped it in front of the carriers, who picked up a piece and headed for the surface.

  The hole was already four hundred feet deep — the goal, a plasma vent two miles down. The guardian needed more power, because this was only the beginning and the UNAOC generators had gone off-line, running out of fuel. The fusion plant that had been left by Aspasia to power the guardian was low on power and needed to be supplemented.

  Some of the UNAOC computers were now hardwired into the guardian. Across the monitors information flashed, faster than a human eye could follow as the alien computer sorted through what it had learned from its foray into the human world via the Interlink/Internet. Already it was putting some of that information to use, but there was so much more.

  And it maintained its link to Mars, to its sister computer deep under the surface and the alien hands that controlled that computer.

  A metal probe came out of the golden pyramid. It hovered overhead, then approached Kelly. It halted an inch from the center of her back. A thin needle came out of the end of the probe. It punched through skin, into her spine. Wrapped in the golden glow, with wires and tubes spun around her body, Kelly Reynolds twitched, like a person experiencing a bad nightmare. The needle came back out, retracted into the probe, and was then pulled back inside the guardian.