The Mission a5-3 Read online

  Lo Fa was a bandit. Or had been. Che Lu found it amusing that while she had lost her prestigious position as a professor, events had changed Lo Fa’s status from bandit to guerrilla.

  She paused in her thoughts as a rocket flashed out of the trees and hit the incoming helicopter square-on. The aircraft careened over, blades splintering treetops, before crashing into the ground.

  The Chinese Army lieutenant and his sergeant stared dumbfounded at the burning helicopter for a few seconds, then they turned and ran in the opposite direction. Directly into Lo Fa’s ambush. They were both cut down in a quick burst of automatic fire. It was all over in less than thirty seconds. Che Lu had seen much violence in her life, and it never failed to amaze her how quickly death could come. She had lived many years, and she always wondered why certain people — like the soldiers who had just died — would never have the opportunity to live as many years as she had been given. She did not know whether it was simply random chance or if there was a higher power that determined the course of things. Or if it was both.

  The longer she lived, the more she realized how little she knew. Discovering the alien artifacts inside of Qian-Ling the previous week when she had entered it on an archaeological dig had certainly proven that truth once more. It was just as well that she would not be back at the university, because she knew that everything she had taught was now questionable. The entire history of mankind was going to have to be rewritten.

  Che Lu arrived at the wreckage of the American helicopter. She looked down at the dead men. Lo Fa grabbed the leather notebook and presented it to Che Lu. “We must be away quickly,” Lo Fa hissed as Che Lu opened the notebook.

  She pointed at Professor Nabinger. “You must bury the American. He was a good man. And he gave us the key to Qian-Ling.” She shook the notebook at Lo Fa.

  “Crazy old woman,” Lo Fa muttered, but he yelled commands to quickly do as she wished.

  * * *

  There was a part of Kelly Reynolds that was still her own. That the guardian couldn’t touch. It wasn’t a large part of her mind, but it was enough for her to still have an “I.” A self.

  And that self, even while the guardian’s golden tendril was weaving its way through her brain, was able to go in the other direction. The mind connection from the guardian, as Peter Nabinger had learned when he “saw” the destruction of Atlantis while in contact with the Qian-Ling guardian, was a two-way street. While the guardian learned from her, Kelly was able to catch bits and pieces from it.

  She saw the long column of men pulling on fiber ropes. Women between the men and the object they were pulling, placing logs under the front end of the stone so it could roll. Slowly being pulled over the logs was the greatest of all the Moai, the stone figures that the people carved.

  Rapa Nui, they called their island. It would be westerners who would name it Easter Island. The stone they were pulling had already been shaped into the long-eared, long-faced, head shape and weighed over ninety tons. It had been carved out of the flank of Rano Raraku, one of the two volcanoes on the island.

  The other volcano, Rano Kao, was forbidden to the people except to worship in the sacred village of Orongo. Also, every year, the cult of the Birdman held its festival, where young men would climb down the side of the volcano, jump into the sea, and swim to the small island of Moto Nui off the coast. The first one to return with a tern egg would be the Birdman for the following year.

  Kelly could hear the people chanting in unison as they pulled the stone. Their destination was several miles away, the shoreline, where they would place the statue into the ground, the frowning face pointing out to sea.

  Kelly now understood the statues. Why these people went through such great efforts. To carve them, to haul them miles to the shore, to place them on their altars. They were warnings. To other people. To stay away.

  * * *

  “Someone was here not too long ago.” Turcotte picked up a frozen cup of coffee from the table. He turned it upside down. There was a date stamped on the bottom—1996—thirty years after Majestic had shut down the base. There was sophisticated communications equipment — top-of-the-line satellite systems and modern computers in the commo room.

  “But they’re not here now,” Captain Miller said. “Must have beat the foo fighters’ arrival.”

  Turcotte walked out of the room he was in and along a corridor. He pushed open the door, stepped inside, then stopped in shock. The large room held ten large vertical vats that were full of some amber-colored liquid. Turcotte had seen this before — at the bottom level of Majestic’s biolab at Dulce. He stepped closer to the nearest vat. It had something in it.

  Turcotte stepped back as he made out a body inside. There were tubes coming in and out of the body, and the entire head was encased in a black bulb with numerous wires going into it. He pulled off his glove and carefully touched the glass — it was very cold, the liquid inside frozen.

  “What the hell is that?” Miller asked.

  “STAAR,” Turcotte said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think this is how they get new recruits.”

  * * *

  Through night-vision goggles, Toland continued to scan the forty-foot section of trail that was directly in front of his position. He knew the exact placement of every one of his eighteen men and their weapons. All they had to do was fire between the left and right limits of the aiming stakes they’d carefully pounded into the ground during daylight and the kill zone would become just that to the party approaching their location.

  Toland had chosen this spot because it was where the trail ran straight, with a steep slope on the far side. Anyone on the trail would be caught between the weapons of Toland’s men and the slope, which was carefully laced with some of Faulkener’s “specials.” The trail ran through the only pass in a hundred miles where people could cross from the eastern, inland slope of the Andes in Bolivia to the western. The terrain was low enough on this eastern approach to be just below the tree line, steep and heavily vegetated. Farther up the pass there was snow on the ground.

  The mercenaries had flown separately on commercial flights into La Paz the previous day and assembled at the airport. Toland had hired several trucks to take them as far as the roads would go into the Andes. From there Toland had led his men on foot through the pass.

  Toland heard someone moving behind him. He assumed it was Faulkener, his senior NCO, and that was confirmed when Faulkener tapped him on the shoulder. “Andrews has a message on the SAT. He’s copying it down.”

  Toland twisted his head and looked over his shoulder into the thick jungle. Andrews was back there with the satellite radio, their lifeline.

  No time for it, Toland realized as he heard noise coming down the trail. He returned his attention to the matter at hand. There was the sound of loose equipment jangling on men as they walked; even some conversations were carried through the night air.

  The point man came into view. Jesus, Toland swore to himself, the fool was using a flashlight to see the trail. And not even one with a red lens! It looked like a spotlight in the goggles. Toland adjust the control and looked for the rear of the column.

  There were thirteen men and two women in this group. There were more shovels than weapons scattered among them. They were also carrying two of their number on makeshift litters — ponchos tied between two poles.

  Toland pulled off the goggles, letting them dangle around his neck on a cord. He fit the stock of the Sterling submachine gun into his shoulder. His finger slid over the trigger. With his other hand he picked up a plastic clacker.

  The man with the flashlight was just opposite when Toland pushed down on the handle of the clacker. A claymore mine seared the night sky, sending thousands of steel ball bearings into the marching party at waist level.

  As the screams of those not killed by the initial blast rang out, Toland fired, his 9mm bullets joining those of his men. The rest of the marchers melted under the barrage. A few survivors follow
ed their instincts instead of their training and ran away from the roar of the bullets, scrambling up the far slope, tearing their fingernails in the dirt in desperation.

  “Now,” Toland said.

  It wasn’t necessary. Faulkener knew his job. In the strobelike flashes from the muzzles of the weapons, the fleeing people were visible. Faulkener pressed the button on a small radio control he held in his hand and the hillside spouted flames. A series of claymore mines, which Faulkener had woven into the far slope at just the right angle to kill those fleeing and not hit the ambushers on the far side of the kill zone, wiped out the few survivors.

  “Let’s police this up!” Toland called as he stood.

  He pulled up his night-vision goggles and watched. Faulkener took up position at the other end of the kill zone. Toland’s mercenaries descended like ghouls upon the bodies, hands searching. A shot rang out as one of the bodies turned out to be not quite dead.

  Toland checked the bodies with a red lens flashlight. Various faces appeared in the glow, frozen in the moment of their death. Some of the faces were no longer recognizable as human, the mines and bullets having done their job.

  As he got to the one of the bodies that had been carried, he saw a female’s face caught in the light, the eyes staring straight up, the lips half parted. He could tell she had been beautiful, with an exotic half-Indian, half-Spanish look, but she was covered in blood now and there was a rash across her face — broad black welts. Toland walked over to the other makeshift stretcher. The body in there was in even worse shape. There was much more blood than the round through the forehead would have brought forth. The same black welts across the face. Toland reached down and ripped open the man’s shirt. His body was covered with them.

  “Let’s get a move on!” Toland yelled out. After five minutes, the men began to file by, dropping whatever they’d found in front of him. A stack of plastic-wrapped packages soon covered the sheet.

  Toland stabbed one of the packages with his knife. Coca paste poured out of the hole. “Shit,” he muttered. He looked up at Faulkener. “It isn’t here.”

  Faulkener shrugged. “We were told to stop anyone coming out and find a metal case. What now?”

  Toland pointed to the east, down the pass. “We do what else we were told to.” The patrol began moving toward the border with Brazil.

  * * *

  Turcotte headed back for the Osprey. He’d left Captain Miller in charge of Scorpion Base. Besides the bodies in the vats, there was little else to indicate anything about STAAR. There were several computers in an area that had obviously been a command-and-control center. Turcotte had the hard drives of those computers with him, and he would give them to Major Quinn at Area 51 for analysis.

  Miller was also supposed to remove at least one of the bodies from its vat. That task was going to be harder than it appeared, given that the liquid inside the tank had frozen also. They were going to have to thaw the entire thing out. Turcotte gave the order for the plane he had come in on to head north.

  As the Osprey took off, he looked at the hard drives he had with him. He doubted that STAAR had been stupid enough to leave anything of importance on them, but one never knew. He’d seen some very smart people do some very stupid things over the years when they were in a rush, and with the foo fighter bearing down on their location the STAAR personnel would have been in one hell of a rush.

  The mystery of STAAR would remain a mystery. For a few days longer, at least.

  * * *

  “Major Quinn, this is security,” the voice came over the tiny receiver fitted into the Air Force officer’s left ear.

  Quinn’s station was set on a dais that overlooked the Cube. Since the discovery that the two STAAR bodies weren’t quite human, the entire facility had been shut down, bringing outraged cries from the media that had descended on the place after the “outing” of the mothership and bouncers by Duncan and Turcotte.

  Quinn was actually happy they were closed off to the outside world. His years of working for Majestic-12 had left him ill-prepared to deal with the reporters who had tried poking their noses into everything. UNAOC and Washington both felt the STAAR story needed to be kept under wraps for now, and for that Quinn was grateful.

  “This is Quinn,” he replied into the small boom mike in front of his lips. “What is it?”

  “We’ve got an intruder.”

  “Location?”

  “Well, sir, he just drove up to the main gate.”

  “Turn him over to the local authorities,” Quinn said irritably.

  “He’s asking for a Larry Kincaid and a Lisa Duncan, sir.”

  Quinn pursed his lips. “What’s his name?”

  “He refuses to give it, sir. But he’s not American. He says he’s from Russia. From something called Section Four.”

  “Bring him in.”

  CHAPTER 7

  “Mike.” Lisa Duncan wrapped her arms around him and squeezed tight.

  Turcotte returned the hug, half lifting the much smaller woman off the flight deck. They stayed that way for a few seconds, then Duncan was the first to let go, conscious of the eyes watching them.

  “Come on.” Turcotte gestured toward a hatch in the island on the right side of the flight deck. The John C. Stennis was a sister ship to the carrier Duncan had left; a Nimitz-class carrier, the top of the line of the U.S. Navy. The class of carrier was not only the largest warship afloat, it was considered the most powerful weapon on the face of the planet, carrying over seventy war-planes capable of launching weapons up to and including nuclear warheads.

  The Stennis’s flight deck was 1,092 feet long and 252 feet wide. The plane Duncan had flown in on was already disconnected from the landing cable and being towed to the large elevator that would bring it to the deck below for service. F-14 Tomcats and F/A-18 Hornets crowded the deck, jammed in tight.

  Turcotte led the way to a conference room just off the communications shack that the captain had reserved for his use. Turcotte had arrived on the Stennis a half hour before from his Antarctic expedition, only to learn that Duncan was en route and that the Easter Island Task Force was in a communications blackout owing to the NSA shutting down the FLTSATCOM satellite.

  As Turcotte poured them both a cup of coffee, Lisa Duncan took off her leather jacket and put her briefcase on top of the conference table.

  “Nothing from Easter Island?” Turcotte asked.

  “The Sea Eye torpedo went through the shield. But that’s the last we’ve heard from it. The Springfield cut the wire.”

  “And the Springfield?”

  “Sitting on the bottom, just outside the shield. Three foo fighters are around it.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “I’d say from Easter Island. Maybe the guardian made some.”

  “Made some,” Turcotte repeated. “That’s not good. How long can the sub just sit there?”

  “Months if necessary,” Duncan said.

  “I wonder what the hell is going on with Kelly,” Turcotte said. “I’m sure she was in contact with the guardian.”

  Duncan accepted the coffee and took a drink. She wrapped her fingers around the mug, feeling the warmth. “She could be dead.”

  “She could be, but I don’t think so. I think the guardian would find her too useful.”

  Duncan didn’t like dwelling on that, so she changed the subject. “I got your report on Scorpion Base.”

  “I’m having the computer hard drives forwarded to Major Quinn at Area 51. Maybe his people can pull something out of them. We’ll have to wait on the bodies until they can thaw those tanks out and remove them.”

  Lisa Duncan held up a sheaf of faxes she’d received in flight. “This is only a partial listing of what the guardian got into on the Interlink and Internet before it got cut off.”

  “Anything significant?”

  Duncan snorted. “Yeah, everything’s significant. Classified-weapons programs. Research information. It accessed the skunkworks and got perform
ance data on all the classified-aircraft programs. It completely went through NASA’s database and got everything on the space program. Department of Defense records.”

  “A recon,” Turcotte summed it up.

  “Exactly.”

  “But for what purpose?” Turcotte mused. “Simply to gather information, or does it have something planned?”

  “Probably both,” Duncan said. “The guardian also went into the Internet.” “And?”

  “NSA is still trying to track everything it did. But the disturbing thing is that it appears the guardian sent some e-mail messages.”

  “To who?”

  “NSA hasn’t tracked that down yet, and they’re not sure they’re going to be able to as the addresses no longer exist.”

  “What were the messages?”

  “They were encoded. NSA is still trying to break the code.” Duncan shoved the papers aside. “There’s more.”

  Turcotte rubbed his eyes. “What?”

  “I got a strange call.” Duncan told him of the brief conversation with Harrison.

  “Anything on this Harrison guy?”

  “I’ve had Major Quinn check. Nothing.”

  “And his claim that Temiltepec was not the site the guardian was found at?”

  “Major Quinn’s got someone checking on that, but Majestic didn’t keep very good records the last year and a half at Area 51 on all that — it was all at Dulce.”

  “And the shuttles?”

  “NASA is doing a dual launch. One shuttle from Cape Kennedy, the other from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The Columbia will rendezvous with the sixth talon. The Endeavor will go to the mothership. I talked to Larry Kincaid about it and he says UNAOC has put a blanket of secrecy over the whole thing, but his opinion is that the whole operation, starting with the dual launch, to trying to make the rendezvous, is very dangerous and he hasn’t really heard a good reason why there is such a rush to accomplish this.”