The Mission a5-3 Page 7

  * * *

  Ruiz rubbed his crotch. His testicles ached. It was not the first time he’d had trouble in that part of his body. He knew the source. That whore from earlier, although he’d never had a reaction this quickly.

  Ruiz cursed. The ache was under his skin, and no amount of scratching was going to make it go away. He checked his watch. He was going to have to get the cure.

  Ruiz walked away to the Vilhena Mission Hospital. A rather ostentatious name for a few shacks sitting off to the side of the Catholic Church that didn’t even have a doctor in attendance. The hospital was administrated by missionary nuns. The primary problems they saw were malnutrition, but they also dealt with every possible type of injury and illness in a country where there was an average of only one doctor per ten thousand people, the ratio ten times worse over a thousand miles from the major cities on the east coast.

  All day long people were lined up outside the hospital. Some had walked many days out of the surrounding countryside to get there. Ruiz took his place in line.

  The young nun working the reception table asked him a few questions. Her face didn’t register anything as Ruiz explained that he had a venereal disease.

  The nun gave him a piece of paper, and he walked over to another table where an older sister held court with a shiny hypodermic needle. She looked at the paper, dipped the syringe in a dish of warm water, then drew out the appropriate medicine from a vial on the shelf behind her. She jabbed the needle into Ruiz’s buttock and pulled it out. He was done.

  As he walked away, the nun dipped the syringe into the warm water, pulled up and down on the plunger to clear out the inside, then checked the piece of paper from the next client, a young boy with an infected hand. She picked up the appropriate vial and gave him a shot, looking up with tired eyes at the line of people behind the young boy. It was going to be a long morning.

  Ruiz walked back to the boat tied up on the river and decided to get some sleep. He did not feel well at all, and surely the American had nothing planned for today. He was probably still trying to find a radio so he could tell the world the tragedy of the village of dead Indians. Ruiz chuckled at that.

  He noted that one of the small plastic cases that Harrison had had on the rear deck was gone, but there was no sign of the American. Ruiz curled up in the shadow of the boat and pulled a poncho up over his head, slipping into a very uneasy slumber.

  CHAPTER 6

  Turcotte stood on the edge of a twenty-foot-wide section of buckled ice. Behind him he could hear the second Osprey landing, the tilt wings rotating upward so that the large propellers brought the craft to a hover.

  The second one settled down next to the first and the back ramp lowered. The scientists and engineers from UNAOC waddled off, swathed in heavy layers of protective clothing. The tractor had gone back for them.

  The lead engineer came up next to Turcotte. He’d been here four days, and the skin on his face was already cracked and blistered from the cold, like the ice that surrounded them.

  “That damn foo fighter did a number on the surface.” Below them, in the center of the trench, the ice had been melted, then refrozen, forming a glassy surface.

  “How about the base?” Turcotte could see his breath forming puffs of white, the moisture immediately freezing.

  “A mile and a half of solid ice is pretty good protection. We’re not sure, but we think it should be in good shape.” He pointed at the jagged gash in the surface. “The foo fighter used some kind of beam. Blasted down about fifty meters, and the shock wave went much farther.”

  “How far are you from getting in?”

  The engineer tapped Turcotte on the arm and led him toward a plowed track in the ice and snow.

  “By the time we get down there, they should be ready to punch through.” The engineer pointed to the right. A twenty-foot-wide cut had been made in the ridge of blasted ice. Turcotte followed him to it. The cut continued down at a thirty-degree slope until it centered over the re-formed ice. A large, two-story metal hangar had been built there. Turcotte held on to a rope as they slithered down to the hangar.

  He could hear the steady roar of several generators as the engineer held the door open for him. Turcotte stepped inside, and the noise was even louder. The engineer threw his hood back.

  “I’m Captain Miller,” the man introduced himself.

  “Mike Turcotte.”

  It was only slightly warmer inside. Miller pointed to what looked like a mini oil rig in the center of the shed. “We’ve been drilling for four days nonstop. Since it’s so deep, we had to put in three intermediate staging areas on the way down.”

  Miller led Turcotte up the metal stairs to the first-level platform. Turcotte looked into the fourteen-foot-wide shaft — a white tunnel as far as he could see, straight down. Several black cables were stretched along one side of the shaft.

  “We reached the proper depth an hour ago. My men went horizontal, toward the base, and they’ve reached the edge of the cavern the base is inside. They’re waiting on us.”

  A steel cage rested on the platform. “Ready to go down?” Miller asked. Turcotte answered by getting inside the cage. Miller joined him, pulling a chain across the opening. He gave hand signals and a crane operator lifted them over the shaft.

  With a slight bump, they began descending, the steel cable attached to the roof playing out. It took fifteen minutes to reach the first staging area. The open space suddenly widened to a chamber forty feet wide and thirty high.

  Another derrick was wedged to the right of where the basket touched down. The chamber was eerie, the walls white ice, the light from the spotlights reflected manyfold. Turcotte felt as if he had entered an entirely different world from any he had ever known.

  Two men stood by a heater set on a pallet, warming their hands. “Hey, Captain.”

  “Going down,” Miller said, leading Turcotte over to another cage dangling above the other shaft. They stepped on board and the men turned on the winch, lowering them. Stage 2 was reached after ten minutes, and the process was repeated.

  “Metal soundings we took this morning indicate we’re right next to the base,” Miller said as they descended. He shook his head. “Those guys who got the bouncers out of there in the fifties did a hell of a job. They had to cut a shaft wide enough to fit the bouncers and put in enough stages to lift them out. We tried to find the original shaft, but the explosion from the foo fighter must have filled it with debris and shifting ice.”

  Turcotte knew Scorpion Base was a part of the history of Area 51 even though it was half the world away. When Majestic found the mothership in the cavern in Nevada’s desert, there were two bouncers alongside. Also inside the massive cavern that held the mothership, they found tablets with strange writing on them. It was now known that the writing was the high rune language that had developed out of the Airlia’s own language by early humans, but at the time Majestic had been able to make little sense of the markings. The tablets with the mothership had been warnings against engaging the ship’s interstellar drive or risk detection by an alien enemy, but that had not been discovered until Nabinger had interpreted the runes. Although Majestic’s scientists could not decipher the symbols on the tablets, there were drawings and maps that could be understood.

  There was no doubt that much attention was being paid to Antarctica, although the specific location was not given. Just a general vicinity on the continent. Majestic eventually broke it down to an eight-hundred-square-kilometer area.

  However, those discoveries were made during World War II, and resources were not immediately available to mount an expedition to Antarctica, although after the war it was discovered that the Germans had made some efforts to explore the seventh continent.

  The Germans had been big believers in the mysterious island of Thule. A version of the legend of Atlantis, Thule was supposed to be an island near either the North or South Pole where an advanced, pure civilization had existed in prehistory. The Germans had sent U-boats to bo
th ends of the Earth, even while waging war, to search for any clue to the island’s existence.

  In 1946, as soon as the material and men were available, the United States government mounted Operation High Jump. It was the largest expedition ever sent to Antarctica. It surveyed over 60 percent of the coastline and looked at over half a million square miles of land that had never before been seen by man, but it was all a cover for the true nature of the mission — to find the Airlia cache.

  Finally, right in the middle of the great wasteland of Antarctica, the searchers picked up signs of metal buried under the ice. Turcotte could see Von Seeckt, the old German and a member of Majestic-12, speaking as he had told Turcotte all this shortly after he joined Nightscape, one of the security forces at Area 51.

  The cold air came off the ice around the cage, and Turcotte remembered Von Seeckt describing the unique nature of the seventh continent. The ice layer was three miles thick in places, and so heavy it pressed the land beneath it below sea level. If the ice were removed, relieved of the pressure, the land would rise up!

  Despite intermittent attempts, it took nine years before Majestic could get another serious mission launched to recover the bouncers. In 1955 the Navy launched Operation Deep Freeze, under the leadership of Admiral Byrd, the foremost expert on Antarctica. As a cover, the operation established five research stations along the coast and three on the interior.

  The first plane to land at this site fixed the position of the metal under the ice, but the crew was killed when a storm blew in and froze them to death.

  Scorpion Base was the ninth base established, under a tight veil of secrecy. Von Seeckt himself went there in 1956 after engineers spent all of 1955 drilling the same ice that Turcotte was now going down through. In 1956 they broke through into a large cavern inside the ice.

  Inside were seven bouncers lined up. It took Majestic three years to bring the bouncers to the surface. First the engineers had to widen the shaft to forty feet circumference. Then they had to dig out eight intermediate stopping points, in order to bring them up in stages. Then it was necessary to tractor the bouncers to the coast and load them onto a Navy ship for transport back to the States. Actually being here, Turcotte realized what a fantastic engineering job those men had done decades before.

  But Von Seeckt had also told him that once the bouncers were recovered, Scorpion Base had been closed. As far as Majestic had been concerned, the base was no longer an issue.

  But Majestic had also heard rumors over the years about the existence of another secret government organization called STAAR. And Major Quinn at Area 51 had tracked back communication between STAAR operatives and this isolated location.

  “Staging area four,” Miller said as the cage stopped on an ice surface.

  Turcotte looked around. The shaft dug out of this staging area was horizontal. About forty meters down the tunnel, a cluster of men were waiting next to several large drills.

  Miller led the way. Large lights were rigged, their output reflecting off the cut surface.

  As he waited, another cage came down, disgorging the six Special Forces men with their weapons.

  Miller watched them approach with a questioning look.

  “We don’t know who or what is in there,” Turcotte said as he deployed the men behind the engineers.

  “We’re ready whenever you are,” Miller said.

  “Go ahead,” Turcotte ordered. The sound of the drills drowned out any possibility of further conversation as Miller gave the order.

  After a minute the whine of the drills suddenly went lower. One of the men, covered in ice shards, was waving for Captain Miller. “We’re through!”

  Miller ordered his men to pull their gear back, leaving the end of the tunnel open. Turcotte walked forward, the team behind him. He pulled off his right mitten, keeping on the thin glove he wore underneath, and slipped his finger in front of the trigger of his submachine gun.

  There was a small opening in the ice, about four feet high by three wide. Darkness beckoned beyond it. Turcotte took a flare out of his backpack, lit it, and tossed it through. The sputtering light was a halo in the darkness.

  Turcotte stepped through. As far as he could see in the limited glow of the flare, there was open space.

  “Miller!” Turcotte yelled over his shoulder.

  “Yes?”

  “Can you get some light in here?”

  “One second.”

  The rest of the Special Forces team stepped through, deploying around Turcotte, the sound of their feet moving on the ice echoing out to some great distance.

  A bright light flashed on behind Turcotte, a powerful searchlight spearing through the dark.

  “Jesus!” one of the Special Forces men muttered.

  The light went for almost a half mile before touching the far wall of the ice cavern. Like a toy town set on the icy floor, a small group of buildings sat in the center of the cavern about two hundred meters ahead.

  Turcotte waved the men to follow him as he headed for the nearest building.

  * * *

  Lisa Duncan was slammed back as the catapult pulled the E-2C Hawkeye down the deck. Her stomach flipped as the plane dropped off the front end of the flight deck. The nose of the plane lifted and it began climbing through the rain.

  The pilot banked the plane hard as he turned toward the south. Duncan looked over her shoulder at the George Washington, then the carrier was gone in the mist.

  She settled back in her seat. She felt slightly guilty. It would have taken only several more hours for Turcotte to return to the John C. Stennis and catch a flight to the Washington, but she didn’t want to wait. According to flight ops, she would land on the Stennis, its battle group in the South Pacific about a thousand miles east of New Zealand, just thirty minutes after Turcotte returned from Antarctica. Once she linked up with him, they could formulate the next step before she left for Russia. The fact that foo fighters were active, although sticking close to Easter Island, was unsettling. It also bothered her that the guardian had been into the Interlink for a day before anyone at the NSA noticed. She found that very hard to believe.

  “Can you connect me with the NSA?” she asked the crewman seated next to her. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied.

  While she waited, she felt a vibration on her thigh. She pulled her SATPhone out of her pocket and flipped it open.

  “Duncan.”

  “Dr. Duncan, it is my pleasure to speak with you.”

  Duncan tried to place the man’s voice but couldn’t. Her SATPhone number was classified and only a few people had access to it.

  “Identify yourself.”

  “That is not important, Dr. Duncan. I am unimportant.”

  “Then I guess I don’t have a need to speak to you,” Duncan said.

  “If it matters to you, for the purpose of this conversation, you can call me Harrison.”

  “And what can I do for you, Mr. Harrison?”

  “The shuttle launches. Why is UNAOC in a rush to get back to the mothership?”

  That was a question Duncan herself had.

  “There is danger there,” Harrison said.

  “What kind of danger?”

  “The same danger there always was,” Harrison said. “The mothership’s drive must not be activated.”

  “The ruby sphere was destroyed,” Duncan said.

  “Do you think there was only one?”

  Again Duncan had no answer.

  “Why do you think there is a rush to get to the mothership?” he asked once more.

  “I don’t know,” Duncan said. “Why don’t you tell me.”

  “There is a plan. It must be stopped.”

  “Whose plan?”

  “The guardian. Aspasia’s guardian. There is much you don’t know. Majestic did not uncover the guardian computer they brought to Dulce in Temiltepec.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Look to the south, Dr. Duncan. Look to the south. If you find where it came from, you
can find the history, and history is most important.”

  “Where did the Dulce guardian come from?”

  “I don’t have much time. There is danger,” Harrison said. “The Black Death is coming once again.”

  “What are you talking about? Who are you?”

  “I will send you proof. Then you must act before it is too late. It is already too late for me. I am violating an oath in speaking to you, but we underestimated what would happen and how quickly it would come. There was interference.”

  “Who is ‘we’? What are you talking about?” Duncan asked, but the connection was cut.

  * * *

  “Must you kill?” Che Lu asked.

  Lo Fa spit into the bush he was hiding behind. “Old woman, I do not tell you how to dig in those old places you root around in. Do not tell me how to do my business. You told me to have my people find this place. We have found it — but the army was here first. If you want what is there”—he pointed to the wreckage of the American helicopter—“then we must get rid of the army people.”

  “There has been so much killing,” Che Lu said, but it was an observation, not an argument. She knew the old man was right. This was his business, and the stakes were too high to take chances.

  They heard the incoming helicopter, and Lo Fa gave his final orders. Two of his men dashed to the left, an RPG rocket launcher in the backpack of one of them. Lo Fa led the way to the right, closer to the crash site and the two Chinese soldiers. Che Lu followed. She had done the Long March with Mao; she could walk a little farther before her days were done.

  Che Lu was seventy-eight years old, bent and wrinkled with age. Her eyes, though, were the same they had been when she had walked across China, six thousand miles, as a young girl — bright and sparkling, without the need of glasses to aid her vision. She was — had been — the senior professor of archaeology at Beijing University. Now she knew she could never go back to Beijing. Even here, far in the western provinces, they had heard of more rioting in the capital city, of students again being gunned down in the streets. But this rebellion did not look as if it was going away as quickly as the one in 1989. Not when men like Lo Fa were picking up arms in the countryside.