The Mission a5-3 Read online

  “The Aymara? Their village?”

  Ruiz shrugged. “People only speak of it in whispers. They call it The Mission. I have met no one who actually has seen the place. There are only rumors. It is said to be a very dangerous place. That anyone who sees it dies. I do not know where this place is. Some say it is deep in the jungle. Others say it is near the coast. Others say it is high on a mountaintop in the Andes.” “What is this Mission?” Harrison asked.

  “It is said that the sun god, Kon-Tiki, lives there.”

  “What else?”

  “I do not know any more,” Ruiz said abruptly. He glanced down and noticed his fingernails were digging into the wood on the bridge shield.

  Ruiz looked upriver. He knew it was just an illusion, but the river appeared to be shrinking, getting narrower every second. “Let me see your map, senor.”

  Ruiz took the sheet and stared at it. He placed an aged finger on the paper and traced a forty-kilometer circle east of the border of Bolivia and Brazil. “We are somewhere here.” He shook his head. “There are dangers ahead. The river could close up on us. And there are other dangers. We should go back.”

  The last thing Ruiz wanted was to spend the night in this province with a naive American and a crew full of street thugs. They might not even be in Brazil anymore. They were far beyond the reach of civilization, and Ruiz knew that besides the wildlife there were other dangers that lurked in the jungle. Harrison was looking for a legendary white tribe, but Ruiz knew for a fact there were other lost tribes of headhunters and cannibals in this part of the world.

  “The river will turn into a stream soon,” Ruiz said. “The land will go up. There will be rapids. We must go back.”

  Harrison stared ahead. “I feel we are on the right path.”

  “It will be dark in a few hours,” Ruiz said. “We should go back.”

  “We go forward as far as we can,” Harrison said. He took the map. He slid his finger from the location Ruiz had them plotted to the west. “I think the Aymara are here somewhere.”

  Ruiz bit the inside of his lip but he said nothing, letting the purring of the two engines be answer enough as the boat continued upstream.

  A half hour later, they turned a corner in the stream and the helmsman cut the engines. Ruiz reacted instinctively to the tangle of fallen trees that blocked the stream ahead, pulling his pistol out. He knelt behind the small wall, pointing his weapon ahead, searching for the ambush he expected to leap out of the foliage all around as he yelled for the men on the deck to be ready.

  Nervous eyes scanned the jungle all around them, waiting for the darts and arrows of the headhunters to come flicking out. But nothing happened.

  Harrison was kneeling next to him. “What do you think?”

  If there were any headhunters about, there was no doubt in Ruiz’s mind that the boat’s presence had long been detected and whispering was not needed, but he played along. “I do not know, senor.” He peered at the trees. They’d been hacked down and pulled across the stream. Beyond he could see some smoke, maybe from a cooking fire. There was a small patch of thatched roof visible above the fallen trees. “There is a village there.”

  “An Aymara village?” Harrison asked.

  This was headhunter territory, and Ruiz doubted it would be the Aymara. “I do not know.”

  “Can we get through the trees?” Harrison asked.

  Ruiz took a deep breath. The stream had been blocked for a reason. Any fool could see that. “I will look, senor.”

  He stood and signaled for a couple of men to accompany him. He walked up to the front of the boat, then looked down. The water below was dark brown. He knew from the sounding it was about four feet deep. Ruiz slid over the side of the boat, the warm water embracing him.

  The two men he had chosen looked nervous, and he didn’t blame them. Death was all around them in the form of the jungle. The bottom under his feet was muddy. Ruiz pushed forward, holding his pistol above the water, as did the other two men.

  They reached the block. Ruiz climbed up the tangled limbs and looked. A small village of about ten or twelve huts was in a clearing on the gentle bank that led down to the stream. There was no one moving about. A pile of smoldering logs on the right side of the village was the source of the smoke. There were also the remains of several huts that had been burned to the ground.

  Ruiz frowned. The stream was also blocked on the far side of the village. What had the villagers wanted to stop? And where were they? Who had destroyed the huts?

  He signaled for the two men to follow. He climbed along the logs until he was on the same shore as the village. He pushed through the undergrowth until he reached the clearing. Then he caught a scent in the air and stopped in midstep. He didn’t recognize the smell, but it was terrible. He continued on.

  Reaching the village, Ruiz first looked more closely at the pile of logs. He gagged as he now saw the cause of the awful smell. They weren’t wood. They were bodies, piled four deep, smoldering.

  He heard the two thugs begin praying to the Virgin Mother, and he felt like joining them. Ruiz went to the first hut and used the muzzle of his pistol to push aside the cloth that hung in the doorway. The stench that greeted his nostrils there was even worse than that of the burning flesh. The walls were spattered with blood. There was a body on the floor.

  Ruiz had seen many bodies in his time, but this one did not look as if it had been killed by an explosion. However, that was the only thing he could think of that would cause the mangled flesh and the amount of blood splattered all around the interior.

  Ruiz moved to the next hut, but paused as he heard Harrison’s voice. “What is going on, Ruiz?”

  “I do not know, senor.” He looked back. Harrison was on the shore, walking toward him.

  Harrison wrinkled his nose. “What is that stink?”

  Ruiz pointed. “Bodies. Burning.”

  The American’s eyes narrowed. “What has happened here?”

  Ruiz felt fear now, an icy trickle running down his spine and curling into his stomach. He cared nothing for legends right now. He pulled aside the curtain to the next hut.

  A family lay huddled together. All dead. Covered in a layer of blood. Ruiz forced himself to stare and take notice. Blood had poured out of all of them. From their eyeballs, their nostrils, ears, mouth, every opening. Skin that wasn’t covered in blood had angry black welts crisscrossing it with open pustules.

  Ruiz finally turned away. Harrison was staring. Ruiz grabbed his arm. “We must go, senor! Now!”

  “We must look for survivors,” Harrison said.

  Ruiz shook his head. “There are none.”

  “We must check all the huts.”

  Ruiz frowned. “All right. I will do it. Go back to the boat. We must go downriver as soon as I get back.”

  Ruiz quickly ran to the next hut. It was empty. The next four held bodies, or what had once been bodies but were now just masses of rotting flesh and blood. In the next-to-last hut there was a person lying on the floor. A young woman. She turned her head as Ruiz opened the curtain. Her eyes were wide and red, a trickle of blood rolling like tears down her cheeks. Her skin was covered with black welts.

  “Please!” she rasped. “Help me.”

  Ruiz stepped in, every nerve in his body screaming for him to run away. He knelt next to the woman. Her face was swollen and her breathing was coming in labored gasps. From the smell, there was no doubt she was lying in her own feces.

  Suddenly the woman’s hands darted forward and she grabbed the collar of Ruiz’s shirt. With amazing strength she half pulled herself off the fouled mat, toward Ruiz’s face. Her mouth opened as if she were going to speak, but a tide of black-red matter exploded out of her mouth into Ruiz’s face and chest. He screamed and slammed his arms up, but couldn’t break her grip. Struggling to his feet, he moved backward to the door, but the woman was still attached to him.

  He jammed the muzzle of his pistol into her stomach and pulled the trigger until no more
rounds fired. The bullets literally tore the woman in half, but even in death her hands held on. Ruiz threw his gun out the door, then pulled his bloodied shirt up and over his head and left it there, clutched in her dead fingers.

  He staggered out into the clearing river, heading toward the block and the boat. “We must go back!” Ruiz screamed in the direction of the boat as he wiped at the blood and vomit on face. “We must go back!”

  CHAPTER 4

  Yakov was seated on a stone block, his flashlight wedged between his large feet, pointing straight ahead. He had a camera in his hands and he shot several pictures of the flat stone set into the wall in front of him. Satisfied, he put the camera away. Then he pulled out a notebook and a pad of paper.

  The notebook held copies of high rune symbols — the language of the Airlia — and the translation of those symbols, at least those Section IV had been able to make over the last fifty years, which was to say less than 25 percent of those they had found.

  Slowly and carefully, Yakov began translating the runes on the stone. It was frustrating work and would have been impossible, except that Yakov had a very good idea of what he was looking at.

  It was a record of history. Or, more appropriately, the end of a history for a people. Tiahuanaco had been founded in 1700 B.C. Historians agreed on that. But when the Incans began expanding their empire and came across the city in the thirteenth century, they found an empty place, devoid of human life. Sometime around A.D. 1200 this teeming city, home to several hundred thousand souls, and the empire it commanded for over 2,500 years, running along the Andes, down to the Pacific Coast in the west and deep into the Amazon rain forest in the east, had simply disappeared.

  What had happened to the people? It was a question no one had the answer to.

  Except now, translating the stone as best he could, Yakov had that answer, and it was one he had feared to find. There were two symbols that he had seen before, at other places on the planet’s surface, that he recognized all too well. It gave the reason:

  The Black Death.

  * * *

  Rain lashed the enormous flight deck of the aircraft carrier, battering it with sheets of water so thick that visibility was less than a hundred feet. Despite not being able to see the forward end of the ship, Lisa Duncan was staring straight ahead through the thick windows of the USS George Washington’s bridge as if she could actually see the volcanic peaks of Easter Island. She knew that they were twenty miles from the island and even if the weather were clear, the land would be over the horizon. In the water around the flagship Washington were the other warships of Task Force 78.

  A carrier task force was the most powerful military force the world knew. Centered around the Nimitz-class Washington were two guided-missile cruisers, three destroyers, two frigates, and two supply ships; under the waves, two Los Angeles-class attack submarines prowled the depths, while overhead planes in the CAP, covering air patrol, guarded the sky. One of those subs was going to make the attempt to get close to the island underwater and launch a probe.

  The Washington itself carried the task force’s most powerful punch in the form of its flight wing: one squadron (12) of Grumman F-14 Tomcats, three squadrons (36) of McDonnell-Douglas F/A-18 Hornets, 4 Grumman EA-2C Hawkeye surveillance aircraft, 10 Lockheed S-3B Vikings, 6 Sikorsky SH-60B Seahawk helicopters, and 6 EA-6B Prowlers. But at the present moment, Duncan knew this powerful force was impotent.

  “Kelly?” she whispered under her breath toward the dark gray sky as if that person could hear her. The events of the past several weeks had shaken Duncan badly, and she felt a momentary wave of loneliness and weariness sweep over her as she thought of the others who had been with her when they tore the curtain of secrecy surrounding Area 51 asunder.

  Deep under Rano Kau her friend Kelly Reynolds was trapped by the guardian computer. That Kelly was trapped because she had gone there of her own free will in an attempt to stop Duncan and Captain Mike Turcotte from defeating the Airlia invasion was something Duncan had thought long and hard about over the past several days, ever since Turcotte had destroyed the incoming Airlia fleet.

  Thinking of Turcotte, Duncan’s mind drifted south, where she knew he was joining the task force seeking to uncover the secret of Scorpion Base, where the mysterious STAAR organization had had its headquarters.

  She could feel the power of the ship’s engines vibrate up through the deck under her rubber-soled shoes. She knew she looked out of place on the ship’s bridge, among all the sailors dressed in their uniforms. She could sense the military’s inherent distrust of civilians from the moment she came on board. It was something she had experienced before and knew there was no way to counter. “Ms. Duncan?”

  The voice startled her. She turned toward the interior of the bridge where naval personnel bustled with the activity necessary to operate this floating city.

  “Yes?”

  A young ensign stood five feet behind her. “The admiral would like to see you in the commo shack.”

  Duncan followed the officer through the bridge and through a door at the rear. Shack was a bit of a simplification for the room she entered. Able to communicate securely anywhere on the planet, the “shack” boasted top-of-the-line equipment, including numerous direct uplinks to various satellites.

  Admiral Poldan, the officer who had commanded the last failed strike against the guardian computer on Easter Island, had not been a happy man the past few days. He led a task force capable of devastating whole countries, but the alien shield that surrounded the island had withstood the best his fleet could send at it short of nuclear weapons. Duncan knew he was itching to throw that last punch, but UNAOC — for the moment — saw insufficient threat from the Easter Island guardian to authorize such a drastic move in the face of political realities following recent events.

  Duncan nodded at the admiral, who was giving orders to one of his men. Done, he gestured for her to join him in front of a large computer display.

  “The guardian is talking” was his greeting. “The National Security Agency is picking up alien transmissions.”

  “To who?” Duncan asked.

  “The guardian on Mars.”

  “Was there a reply from Mars?”

  The admiral nodded. “Yes. Yes, there was.”

  Duncan considered that piece of bad news. The nuclear attack on the Airlia compound on Mars via the Surveyor probe had been kept secret by the UNAOC for several reasons.

  One reason had been not wanting to admit that the attack had occurred under the direction of STAAR, an organization about which they still knew practically nothing. The fact that STAAR had placed the nuclear bomb aboard the probe prior to launch, two years before, indicated that organization had been far ahead of any government in recognizing the threat the Airlia posed, or that there was even an Airlia base on Mars, something that seemed to have eluded NASA for years.

  There was also the issue that there was still a sizable percentage of the world’s population that believed the Airlia represented good; that the destruction of the Airlia fleet was the most heinous act mankind had ever committed. The progressives, as they were called, felt that a remarkable opportunity for great strides in science — not to mention first contact with an alien race — had been destroyed.

  Duncan had been hearing reports that a major reason Admiral Poldan wasn’t given the green light to nuke Easter Island was a powerful progressive lobby in the UN. This lobby felt that the guardian computer under Rano Kau was irreplaceable. While that looked clear on the surface, Duncan was concerned that there was more to the progressive camp than was readily apparent. The plan by UNAOC to send up space shuttles to rendezvous with both the mothership and talon seemed a bit rushed to her. Her paranoia, justified in her investigation into Majestic-12, was still alive and well.

  There was a growing movement in the progressive camp making an icon out of Kelly Reynolds. Nuking the island would undoubtedly kill her — if the nuke got through the shield — and UNAOC was very concerned t
hat would bring about a martyrdom that might incur severe repercussions from the progressive camp.

  Several countries, most notably Australia and Japan, had threatened to pull out of the United Nations to protest the preemptive strike against the Airlia fleet commanded by Aspasia.

  Duncan had been as surprised as Mike Turcotte at the backlash in the wake of the destruction of the Airlia fleet. It wasn’t that Turcotte had expected a parade down Fifth Avenue for his daring mission aboard the mothership, but he had not expected to be vilified in so many quarters. Nabinger’s interpretations from the guardian computer under Qian-Ling in China had been greeted with much skepticism, given that Nabinger had never made it out of China alive and they had only Turcotte’s word that Aspasia had been the enemy of mankind. The fact that the Airlia had destroyed a navy submarine near the foo fighter base had been explained away as an automatic defensive reaction by the guardian computer — as was the wall they now faced around the island ahead of them.

  On the other end of the opinion spectrum the isolationists were pressing the UN to forget about the Airlia. They wanted Easter Island and the other Airlia artifact sites ignored. The isolationist thinking was that these artifacts had been on Earth since before recorded history — it had been only man’s interference that had caused all the recent problems. In Duncan’s opinion, the isolationists wanted to put the cork back in the bottle after the contents had already spilled out.

  China had already pulled its representative from the United Nations and completely closed itself off from the rest of the world over the matter. The fact that the UN had launched a mission deep into China to uncover information in Qian-Ling about the Airlia had poured fuel on the fire. There were confusing intelligence reports that there was much fighting inside China, particularly in the western provinces where ethnic and religious groups were trying to break away from the central government using the uncertainty of the current world situation as their window of opportunity. Duncan, talking to several of her contacts in Washington, had heard rumors that the CIA and other intelligence agencies, particularly that of Taiwan, were aiding in this destabilization. So even as she had to concern herself with the alien situation, she knew she had to always take into account the fact that governments were going to act on their base, selfish interests first, and look at the larger, worldwide picture second.