Excalibur

CHAPTER 13: THE PRESENT

The capital of South Korea, Seoul, has the disadvantage of being a relatively short distance from the demilitarized zone. As North Korean and Chinese forces poured over and under the border, General Carmody and the South Korean president had to make some quick recalculations based on the dual facts that they had neither tactical nuclear weapons nor American naval and air support from the fleet as expected.

The major advantage they did have in conducting their defense was the land itself and time. A mountainous land, the terrain of Korea lent itself to the defense by channeling attacking forces. And time played a role in that South Korea had had almost fifty years since the cease-fire that suspended the all-out war of their forebears to prepare themselves for another assault.

Unlike the war in the 1950s, both sides were more mechanized, making them more powerful, but also limiting their terrain mobility. As columns of North Korean and Chinese forces moved south, they were first struck by American and South Korean jets. Farther south, engineers placed conventional charges in preconstructed choke points along all major axes of advance.

Sides of mountains slid down onto roads, bridges crashed into rivers below, and dams were blown open, releasing torrents of water. To save their country, the South Koreans were sacrificing a good portion of it.

At the Presidential Palace in Seoul and at Eighth Army Headquarters, men and women hurriedly packed up critical equipment and paperwork as a mass evacuation began. General Carmody was with President Pak, making last-minute decisions as they walked down the steps of the palace. They paused on their way to waiting helicopters as a swarm of Chinese-made M-ll missiles thundered into downtown Seoul, exploding two thousand meters above the ground in a breathtaking exhibition of flashes and bangs.

“I don’t understand,” Pak said, looking up at the sky and the apparently harmless detonations.

General Carmody, dressed in battle dress, flak jacket, and the other accoutrements of his profession, understood exactly. He ripped open the case on his left hip and pulled out the contents, extending it to the South Korean president. “Put this on.”

Pak stared at the gas mask, comprehension dawning. His eyes shifted to the streets of his capital city, home to millions. He slowly shook his head, pushing the mask back toward the American general. “No. This”—Pak spread his hands wide, taking in the city— “is my responsibility. You defend the rest of the country. Make them pay for what they are doing now.”

Carmody, knowing he had scant seconds, slipped the mask over his head. He also pulled his hands — his only exposed skin — into his sleeves. The crews of the helicopters were better prepared, already in their protective suits. They slipped on masks and waved for Carmody and the rest of his staff who had masks to hurry. The general paused, then dashed down the stairs and into the helicopter. The door immediately slammed shut behind him.

On the stairs, President Pak could swear he felt the first drops of the deadly rain touch his skin, although when he looked at his hands, he could see no liquid. The sound of the engines powering up on the choppers mixed with the noise of the blades cutting air as the helicopters lifted off and headed o the south. He could see masked faces in the windows turned toward him.

Pak reached up and rubbed underneath his nose as it began to run. He heard screams in the distance. As he tried to draw another breath, his lungs felt as if strong rubber bands had been placed around them. He struggled to draw in air. Blinking, Pak looked for the fleeing helicopters but his sight was blurred. His field of vision was diminishing, until all he could see was a pinprick of light. He continued to struggle to get air, knowing as he did so that he was simply drawing in more of whatever was killing him.

A spasm ripped through his stomach and intestines as strongly as if he had been cut open with a sword. He dropped to his knees, doubled over in agony. He could still faintly hear the helicopters.

Pak retched at the same time he experienced involuntary urination and defecation, his body trying to expel whatever was killing it, even though the attempt was in vain. He rolled to his side, desperate for air, but his diaphragm was locking up, unable to work the lungs anymore. The president died of suffocation, as did over two million of his fellow citizens in the capital city.

“What do you have?” Turcotte asked into the radio that connected him with Major Quinn. He was doing two things at once, or rather he was doing one thing and having another done to him. He was piloting the bouncer over Africa, still heading east, and Morris had an IV stuck in his arm and was pumping oxygen-rich blood into Turcotte’s veins. Mualama was in the same place, also with an IV in his arm. Although he hoped to be able to go directly to the coordinates that Kelly had sent, Turcotte had long ago learned to prepare for the worst possible contingency, and in this case that was having to spend time on the mountain.

The concept of blood packing was several decades old. Some athletes had tried it in the Olympics, particularly those competing in distance events, before it was outlawed. Since their bodies wouldn’t have time to adjust to less oxygen coming in from their lungs, what normal climbers of Everest spent months at altitude doing, they were going to increase the amount of blood in their systems, trying to keep the amount of oxygen relatively level for a short period of time.

“The North Koreans and Chinese have hit Seoul with a nerve agent,” Quinn’s voice came out of the speaker. “There’re reports of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, dead.”

Turcotte could see the brown sand of the Sinai Peninsula below. He wasn’t far from Mount Sinai, where the Mission had hidden for so many years. “Seoul’s just the beginning. Artad and Aspasia’s Shadow don’t care if they have to stand on the corpses of billions of humans to win their war. We mean nothing to them.” “Why are you so certain of that?” Mualama asked from across the way.

“What do you mean?” Turcotte asked.

Mualama shrugged. “If humans meant so little to them, why didn’t they destroy us long ago?”

“They tried,” Turcotte said.

Mualama shook his head. “No. They controlled the balance of power with things like the Black Death and various wars. At any time in history they had the power to completely wipe us off the face of the planet, as the Mission recently attempted with its plague. But they never did.”

Turcotte considered that. “So we’re important to them?”

“To Aspasia and Artad humans were. Not to Aspasia’s Shadow.”

“Why are we important to them?” Turcotte felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. There was something about the way Mualama was talking that disturbed him.

Mualama shrugged. “That is part of the great truth yet to be discovered.” He spread his long arms. “There is much more to this universe than this planet.” And with that he sank back into silence.

General Kashir had forty men left alive when he reached the rally point at the base of Ahora Gorge. According to the map and the coordinates he had been given, they were still four miles from the target. Four miles that would be gained in over three thousand meters in altitude. The terrain was now so steep, the armored vehicles could no longer negotiate it. He ordered his men to dismount. Helicopters would have been better, Kashir knew, but he didn’t have access to them. He’d used what he’d had, lost over 60 percent of his force getting there, and he’d be damned if he’d stop now. Turkish jets still circled high above, but they were refraining from further strikes. He assumed that Turkish ground forces were on their way to surround the mountain.

He set off up the gorge on foot, his men following.

Efficiency was not a highlight of Chinese military operations, especially this far from the capital on a front facing neither Russia, Taiwan, nor Korea, but rather the splinter states of the former Soviet Union and surrounded by ethnic and religious majorities opposed to Beijing. Add in the two fronts being fought against Taiwan and South Korea, and the country’s resources were stretched to the limit.

Long after the request was put in, the cargo aircraft to carry the waiting commando team had finally arrived at the local military field. More time was wasted as the planes were refueled.

Finally, well after the order had been transmitted from Artad to Beijing to Kashgar, the four planes were ready. The delays, however, mattered little, because the special envoys the commandos were to await had not yet arrived.

The Chinese soldiers did as most soldiers were very used to doing — they waited, lying on the side of the runway, their equipment and parachutes loaded on board the planes. The flight route was complicated, crossing several countries’ airspace, going over Uzbekistan, then Turkmenistan, the Caspian Sea, and into Turkey for the drop.

The soldiers slowly got to their feet as a military transport plane swooped down and came in for a landing. The back ramp slowly lowered. A half dozen figures walked off, having the complete attention of every man present because their proportions obviously weren’t human. Each was covered from head to toe in black armor, the joints articulated. The helmets had shaded visors, hiding their faces.

The six Kortad, each with a brilliant sword attached to his waist and a spear in hand, walked past the staring soldiers and onto one of the waiting planes. The contrast between the advanced armor and the apparently antique weapons was startling. Snapping out of their amazement, officers yelled orders and troops scrambled aboard the planes.

Within minutes all four aircraft roared down the runway and into the air, heading west toward Turkey and Mount Ararat.

Buried alive. Lisa Duncan screamed, the sound echoing around her inside the enclosed space. She tried to move, but her arms and legs were strapped down. There was a pain in her chest, a burning sensation.

Garlin. A pistol. She remembered and with that came the awareness of where she was, inside an imaging machine. She forced her diaphragm to slow down, to stop from hyperventilating. She’d had a tremendous fear of enclosed spaces ever since she’d been trapped in a culvert as a child when — Duncan stopped that train of thought as she realized there was a good possibility it had never happened. But the fear was real, of that she had no doubt. And where had it really come from, she wondered, as she tried to think hard to keep the emotion at bay.

There was light. A faint glow in the direction of her feet, but she couldn’t lift her head because there was a strap across her forehead locking it in place.

“Relax.” Garlin’s voice was low and faint. “It’ll be over in just a minute.” “You—” Duncan began, but Garlin anticipated her anger.

“You would have preferred being told what was going to happen?” “I’ll remember that,” Duncan promised. “Was it worth it?”

“This is simply amazing,” Garlin said. “Yes, we think it was.”

The metal table under her vibrated and she realized she was moving. She slid out of the machine, blinking in the room’s light. Garlin was at her side, unstrapping her. She sat up as soon as she was freed, taking deep breaths. “What did you find out?” Duncan finally asked as her hands automatically went to her chest, rubbing the new skin where the bullet had entered.

“You have telemorase,” Garlin said. “We expected that. But we didn’t understand how your body could so quickly replicate new cells when it was damaged.”

“So you shot me,” Duncan said. “Fatally.”

“We wanted to see how your brain managed to stay functional and how long it took you to come back to life.”

Despite her anger Duncan was also fascinated, especially since she also had no idea what her body was doing when she “died” nor how it repaired itself. Plus there was the possibility that her immortality might have some flaws in it. “And?” she prompted.

“You had no life signs after you were shot.” Garlin had a stack of images in his hands and he was looking through them. “You were in the MRI within forty seconds and we were getting some imagery. You were dead but — but—” he emphasized, “there was still movement in your circulatory system. Your heart wasn’t beating yet the blood still moved.”

“How?”

“You’ve been infected with a virus.”

Duncan remembered something. “Von Seeckt. That’s why he survived so long.” Garlin nodded. “He had trace amounts of Airlia blood in him. According to Majestic’s records there’s a good chance this vampire myth of immortality sprung up from the long-lost fact that Airlia blood has this immortality virus. Maybe the priests on Atlantis knew this. It’s certain that the SS searched for any trace of Airlia blood, even from the hybrid Ones Who Wait during the thirties. And they had ceremonies where blood was transfused.”

“What do you know about the virus?”

“It’s in your bloodstream and can actually keep your blood flowing at a very slow rate when your heart isn’t beating. How it does that we’re not sure yet. It also seems to be able to manufacture oxygen at a sufficient level to keep cells from dying, particularly in your brain. It’s like a cancer, but a good cancer.” He showed her an image of her brain. “You were technically dead when this was taken, yet your brain is still oxygenated enough to keep it from degrading.”

He showed her another picture, this one of her chest. “The virus also stimulates cell growth in areas of damage.” He then showed her four more of the same shot. “Look at this activity and cell growth.”

“How long before my heart started beating?” Duncan asked. “Two minutes.”

She frowned as she considered the implications. “Still — there are ways I could die, aren’t there? Decapitation? I don’t imagine this virus could grow me a new head. And what if I were to be burned?”

“Interesting, isn’t it?” Garlin said. “Those are the ways you are supposed to be able to kill a vampire. Perhaps the stake through the heart must stay to keep the heart from regenerating?” He shrugged. “We don’t know. We agree — there are probably injuries you could not recover from.” He held up his hand as she began to say something. “Don’t worry. We don’t plan on testing those theories. You were shot where you had been before. We knew you could recover from that.” Duncan put her finger in the bullet hole in her shirt. The skin was completely healed. “What now?”

“Now we try to get your memory back,” Garlin said. “Your real memory.”

The mountains first appeared as a slight white bump on the horizon. Turcotte had spent time in Colorado, climbing in the Rockies, and he’d always been impressed at being able to see Longs Peak and Pikes Peak, over two hundred miles apart, from Denver. But what was rising in the distance made the Rockies look like the sculpting of a child, while these were the work of God. Even Professor Mualama was leaning forward, staring through the front of the bouncer at the sight.

On average twice as high as the range that ran through the western United States, the Himalayas soon filled the view to the front. Turcotte slowed the bouncer as they passed over the foothills in northern India, approaching the border of Nepal. The magnitude of the mountains ahead amplified the warnings Colonel Mickell had given him.

“Everest is there.” Morris was pointing to the right front.

What surprised Turcotte more than the sheer size of the mountain was the multitude of other peaks in the area almost as tall. He couldn’t imagine entering the area on foot. He turned to Morris. “You were one of the two guys Delta sent to climb it?”

Morris nodded. “Last year. Made it to within two hundred meters of the top.” “And?” Turcotte asked.

“We turned back.”

Mualama turned and looked at the medic. “Why?”

“We passed our window of opportunity, so we turned around.”

“What do you mean?” Mualama asked.

“You’ve got to get down from elevation before dark. That’s why climbers leave base camp at two in the morning to try to reach the top before noon, so there’s time to turn around and get back down. We had rough going, bad weather, worse conditions than we expected. Besides the altitude, the wind is the great enemy on Everest. You feel as if it is always in your face, trying to keep you from going up. When the beeper went off on our watches and we weren’t at the top, we turned around.”

“But you were within two hundred meters,” Mualama said.

“That’s how people die. Breaking the rules on the mountain. It’s unforgiving. On the way back we were passed by two New Zealand climbers. They kept going. And they never came back down. When you die on the mountain, your body stays there, frozen forever. There are quite a few bodies up there.”

Turcotte had the bouncer at a complete halt now. Morris’s words and the sight in front of him were causing him to rethink his plan. He respected what the medic was saying about turning around no matter how close they had gotten. A plan had to be followed. But he also knew they weren’t going to have the option of turning back.

Morris pointed. “That’s Changtse to the left at seventy-five hundred meters high; Lho La between it and Everest at just above six thousand meters, then Everest, then to the right there, Nuptse at over seventy-eight hundred meters.” Turcotte didn’t feel anxious to move forward. The mountain range intimidated him and he had a feeling it wasn’t going to be as easy as flying the bouncer to the grid coordinate and picking up the sword. “Tell me about the mountain’s history and climbing it,” he said. He’d learned in his special operations career that knowledge was power and he had a feeling he was going to need all he could get to accomplish his mission. Also, if Excalibur had been up there so long, he wanted to know if anyone else had gone up after it and failed.

“I don’t know about this stuff you’ve told me about Merlin and all that,” Morris said. “As far as history records, the mountain was first mapped in 1590 by a Westerner. He was a Spanish missionary to the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar. The Brits were the first to identify Everest and make a calculation as to its height in 1856. But nobody got close to it for a while after that. It wasn’t even so much the difficulty of the terrain, but rather politics. Tibet and Nepal, which bracket the mountain, didn’t welcome visitors. The Brits had to get a special dispensation from the Dalai Lama in 1921 to send a team in via Tibet. Up till then Everest was just a location on a map. No one really had any idea if it could be approached, never mind climbed.”

“But we think Merlin and others climbed it well over a thousand years ago,” Turcotte said.

“If they did, they never made it public,” Morris said.

“Most likely because they climbed it,” Turcotte said, “but only went up and never back down.”

“Everest has claimed many.” Morris was sitting on one of the plastic cases he’d loaded on the bouncer, his eyes on the mountains, his voice low, as if in respect for what nature had laid out before them. “Most climbers approach from the south,” Morris said. “The north face is more technical. What’s the location you were given?” Morris asked.

Turcotte hadn’t had a chance to decrypt the coordinates. Letting go of the controls and leaving the bouncer at a hover, he took the sheet. Quinn had sent it in the only format that couldn’t be decrypted even if intercepted, using a onetime pad. There were only two copies of the pad. Turcotte had one, Quinn the other. They had been given to him by Colonel Mickell since they had no doubt any communications they had were being intercepted.

He matched up the correct date using a trigraph, which had three-letter combinations. He aligned the letter from Quinn’s message, with the letter on his onetime pad, and used the trigraph to come up with the correct letter/number. It only took a few moments, as it was just a two-letter/eight-digit grid designator. Turcotte handed the result to Morris, who had a 1:50,000 map of Everest spread out on the floor of the bouncer. “Damn,” Morris muttered as hemade a small mark on the map with his pencil. Mualama was looking over his shoulder.

“What do you have?” Turcotte asked, unable to see from the pilot’s seat.

“North side. At the top of the Kanshung Face. That explains why no one’s stumbled across it.”

“Is that spot bad?” Turcotte asked.

“The first major attempt to climb Everest in modern times was by George Mallory and Sandy Irvine in 1924,” Morris said. “They approached from the north because of politics. And when they did their reconnaissance of the area during the 1921 and 1922 trips, they kept moving up the mountain in that direction. They even made it as far up as the North Col in 1923. But even Mallory said the south appeared to be the more desirable direction to approach the mountain from and subsequent mappings and climbs have confirmed this.”

“What happened to Mallory and Irvine?” Mualama asked.

“No one really knew for a long time except that they never came back down.” Morris shook his head sadly. “They were last seen alive disappearing into clouds just before the Second Step, which is high up on the north side. Mallory’s body was found by an expedition in 1999.” Morris ran his finger along the map. “Here. Far below the second step. The body was in bad shape. They buried it on the mountain. Some say he might have summited and been on his way down when he fell. Irvine’s body has never been found.”

“Curious,” Mualama said.

“Others tried to climb the mountain over the years,” Morris continued, “but the first true summit came in 1953 by Sir Edmund Hillary and a Sherpa, Tenzig Norgay. Since then about seven hundred people have summited while several hundred have lost their lives attempting it.” Morris looked at the map once more. “This spot is not on any route, even the most difficult ones. I’m not surprised no one’s seen Excalibur.”

“What’s the best route to the coordinates?”

Morris looked up. He pointed. “Let’s follow the West Ridge, then go over it near the top.”

General Carmody, Eighth Army commander, could hear his own breathing echoing inside his gas mask. He brought the panting under control, then picked up a headset off the firewall of the Blackhawk and slipped it on.

He was patched into the Eighth Army command frequency and could hear reports from his senior commanders over the secure network. The massacre in Seoul was being buried under frantic calls for reinforcements from forces in the Uijongbu Corridor, northeast of the capital city. The North Koreans and Chinese had used both nerve and chemical agents in their initial assaults, and while the American and South Korean military forces were prepared, the dual assault degraded their ability to defend.

The fact that it degraded the ability of the assaulting forces to be as effective as possible didn’t seem to matter as four corps worth of PKA/Chinese troops poured across the border into the choke point where Carmody had planned to deploy his tactical nuclear weapons. Fierce fighting raged in the corridor, between the Taebak Mountain Range in the east and an estuary of the Han River. The corridor had always been a major advance route for invaders, from Mongols and Manchus to the North Koreans in 1950 to the present.

Eighteen South Korean divisions along with the American Second Infantry Division were now engaged along the entire 151-mile-long border from coast to coast, but Carmody knew Uijongbu was the key.

And then he heard the voice of the artillery commander of the Second Infantry Division come over the net. North Korean soldiers were appearing behind his batteries by the hundreds, no thousands, the excited voice reported.

Carmody knew immediately what had happened. During the years since the signing of the armistice dozens of tunnels had been discovered being dug from north to south. But he knew, and his intelligence staff had briefed, that they would never find them all. Now one had obviously opened up to the rear of his frontline defenses.

“Alpha four,” Carmody yelled, his voice carrying out of the mask, into the mike pressed against it.

The pilot twisted his head, appearing like a machine with his mask and helmet, not a single bit of skin exposed. “Sir?”

“Alpha four. Now.” “Yes, sir.”

The Blackhawk banked, the other three carrying his staff following. Carmody knew all his forces were tied up and he had neither reserves to throw into the breach nor spare helicopters to do what needed to be done. As the helicopter flew to the destination he had ordered, Carmody accessed the computer bolted in front of him, bringing up a tactical display forwarded to him from Eighth Army’s battle headquarters.

Images flashed across the screen, satellite photos from a KH-14 spy satellite in orbit overhead. He had never expected to be in this position, without the support of the Seventh Fleet. His options to stem the flow of forces he could see building up behind his artillery were limited.

The blades were struggling to find purchase in the thin air, just as the engine strained for oxygen to combust the fuel. Below lay the Rongbuk Glacier, a desolate stretch of ice, snow, and rock, caught between ridges. Directly ahead, Mount Everest blocked the horizon.

Neither SEAL glanced down as the helicopter passed over the desolate site of the Rongbuk base camp where most of those who attempted Everest from the north side made their first acclimatization stop. It was empty now, just a scattering of ruined tents and abandoned gear, as it was too late in the season for any sane person to attempt Everest.

The pilot yelled something in his native tongue, the fear obvious even if the words meant nothing to either SEAL. The engines were skipping slightly, a sign the helicopter could not go much higher. They were less than fifty feet above the glacier.

Olivetti pointed ahead with one hand, while jabbing the barrel into the pilot’s ribs. From the information the guardian had given them about the traditional north route, it was a three-day march from the Rongbuk base camp, up the glacier, to the Advanced Base Camp that was at the foot of the north face of Everest itself. Every meter the helicopter gained up the glacier meant that much less time they would have to spend climbing.

On the right, Khumbutse appeared, and on the left, Bei Peak. The two mountains framed the north face, which was mostly hidden by blowing snow and clouds. McGraw had a map out and was orienting it to the terrain. A thin red line was drawn on it, the route they were to take. He leaned forward between Olivetti and the pilot and pointed to the right. The pilot turned in that direction. Everest was now off to the left and a long, sloping ridgeline ascending toward it was ahead.

The engine stuttered, went out for a second, then was restarted by the desperate pilot. McGraw pointed down, at a relatively smooth stretch of ice on the glacier. Gratefully the pilot descended quickly. They touched down hard, the impact jarring all on board. The pilot flipped switches and the loud whine of the engine was suddenly gone. The only sound now was the wind, the constant companion of those who came near Everest.

McGraw slid open the cargo bay door. The wind whipped inside, icy fingers clawing at any exposed skin. He tossed out their two heavy rucksacks of equipment. McGraw exited the copilot’s seat and easily lifted one of the 180- pound packs, throwing it on his shoulders. The pilot was slumped in his seat, thankful to have made it that far.

McGraw went to the engine compartment and unlatched it. The pilot heard the noise and turned. Startled, he opened his door and came up to McGraw. The SEAL put a finger to his lips, indicating for the man to shut up. McGraw reached in and removed a small piece of the engine. The pilot’s eyes went wide and he shook his head, protesting.

McGraw stuffed the piece in his rucksack. He then faced the pilot and held up two fingers, then pointed at himself, toward Everest, then back at the helicopter. Then he jabbed his finger in the pilot’s chest and indicated the helicopter.

The pilot looked back down the miles of torturous glacier he had just flown up, knowing there was no way he could make it down on foot. Not dressed like he was. McGraw took him to the cargo bay and pointed inside. There was a sleeping bag on the floor. Then McGraw once more held up two fingers. He then picked up his pack and put it on his back. Without a backward glance, the two SEALs set off up the last part of the glacier, heading toward the West Ridge.

“Most go that way on the northern approach.” Aksu pointed through a narrow gap between Bei Peak and the ridge they were on to another ridge ten miles away. “The West Ridge, via Rongbuk Glacier. It is safer, but it is slower. It is the way Mallory and Irvine tried so many years ago.”

Lexina didn’t say anything, a tall figure swathed in cold-weather gear, her face hidden behind dark goggles and a face mask. Coridan and Elek flanked her like sentinels, also silent. They were standing on a knoll on the Northeast Ridge, buffeted by the howling wind. Twenty meters below, a line of fourteen of Aksu’s men made their way along a narrow track just off the knife edge of the ridge.

“I was the first to complete this route,” Aksu continued. “It is faster, but more dangerous, especially if the wind picks up.”

Lexina broke her silence. “How long?”

“We will make it to a camp spot I know on the ridge by dark. We will rest four hours. We will then depart at 0300 for the final assault to the location you have given me. It will require some technical climbing to get across the top of the Kanshung Face.”

Lexina nodded.

“I must warn you,” Aksu said, “that without acclimatization you will not last long on the mountain.”

“Our blood—” Lexina began, then halted. “You need not worry about us.” She then left the knoll, joining the end of the column. Aksu paused, looking to the southwest toward the mountain hidden in the clouds. The weather was bad, that was obvious to his experienced eyes. He could see a twenty-mile-long plume of snow coming off the top of the peak. If it was the same in the morning, they would not be able to make the attempt, as the Northeast Ridge was too narrow to chance with a strong wind. However, he also knew that Everest was fickle. The weather could change in a flash. There was nothing to do but continue on for the moment.

The controls were getting sluggish, something Turcotte had experienced once before in a bouncer, but that had been when he had taken one as high as it would go, away from the surface of the planet, much higher than their present altitude. He saw no reason why it should be happening, so close to their goal. They were just south of the West Ridge, flying parallel to it, a route suggested by Morris.

“We’ve got a problem,” Turcotte announced as he pushed on the controls, edging them closer to the ridge.

“What’s wrong?” Morris asked.

“We’re losing power.” Turcotte looked to the left, searching for a level spot. “Buckle up,” he advised the medic and Mualama.

With his free hand, Turcotte tightened down the straps holding him in the depression in the floor of the bouncer. “I’m open for suggestions where to put this down.” All he could see was an extremely steep snow- and ice-covered slope leading up to the ridge above them. About two thousand feet below them was a wide glacier, but Turcotte didn’t want to descend, knowing that however far he took the bouncer down, they’d have to make up for on foot.

“Can you put it on top of the ridge?” Morris was pointing up.

Turcotte pulled on the controls, but not only wouldn’t the bouncer rise, he realized they were losing airspeed and descending. He knew he needed to do something before they completely lost power.

“Screw it,” Turcotte said. He pushed over on the controls and headed for the slope. “Hold on!”

The edge of the bouncer hit hard, digging into the ice and snow, striking rock. The alien metal gouged into the side of Mount Everest as Turcotte kept his hands on the controls. The bouncer came to a stop and he slowly let go of the controls. The bouncer was stuck into the side of the ridge, enough power in the craft to keep it in place. Turcotte looked up. The top of the ridge was out of sight above them. Looking down, he could see that there was an almost vertical drop below. “Let’s gear up.”

Morris checked his watch. “It’s late. We’ll have to camp on the mountain.”

“Let’s get as high as we can before dark,” Turcotte said. He had some experience of cold-weather operations from his time in Special Forces, so he carefully put on the layers of clothing Morris had brought. First they all put on skintight underwear that would wick any perspiration away from their skins. Turcotte knew one of the great dangers of operating in the cold was sweating and then stopping and having the moisture freeze next to the skin. Next were several more layers of specially designed clothing, topped by a Gore-Tex outer shell.

Morris had laid out the three packs and filled them during the flight. Each contained several oxygen cylinders, a sleeping bag with waterproof shell, and a little food. Turcotte strapped his MP-5 submachine gun to the outside of the pack. He knew he had to keep it away from his body or else the gun might “sweat” and then freeze up. A clanging clutter of climbing gear was also on the outside of each pack.

“Here.” Morris held a canteen in each hand and a packet of pills. “Put the canteen in the inner front pocket of your parka. Anyplace else and the water will freeze. The pills are amphetamines. Take them only if you absolutely need a surge of power. They’ll give you a couple of hours of energy, but coming down from the high will be bad.”

Turcotte stowed the canteen and sealed the Velcro flap to the pocket. Then he took the harness Morris gave him and put in on over all the clothes, making sure it was tight. He stepped into crampons and cinched them to his boots. He put a lined helmet on, then attached the oxygen mask over it. Morris adjusted the flow for both him and Mualama.

“Most people couldn’t last more than a couple of minutes up here going from ground level to this altitude,” Morris said, his voice muffled by his mask. “The acclimatizing that is done on a normal Everest climb is primarily to get the blood to change; after several weeks at altitude you develop twice the number of red blood cells that carry oxygen. The blood packing we did on the way here accomplished the same thing — the problem is that the doubling is artificially produced, not by your own body. So it isn’t being renewed. We’ve got a forty- eight-hour window. Past that, your blood will start thinning and you’ll be in big trouble.”

“How much trouble?” Turcotte asked. “You’ll die.”

Yakov stumbled as the MC-130 banked hard right. The interior of the plane smelled of vomit and sweat. As experienced as the Delta men were in this type of low-level flight, this one had exceeded even the wildest they’d ever been on.

The pilots had surpassed the standard safety margins in effect during training and pushed their training and equipment to the limit, rarely climbing more than one hundred feet above the ground. Just a year previously such a flight would have been impossible, owing to the likelihood of either striking the ground, a tower, a building, or high-tension wires as they infiltrated Turkey. But a year earlier, NASA had launched an eleven-day operation called the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission.

The mission had mapped over 80 percent of the planet’s landmass using C- and X-band interferometric synthetic aperture radars to produce a digital map of the planet’s surface. The accuracy of the results was far beyond anything done previously. Altitude data was within sixteen meters’ absolute accuracy and horizontal data was within ten meters. This led to the MC-130’s crew’s ability to fly at double that possible error with no fear of striking anything. The pilots had a three-dimensional display of the terrain ahead on their monitors. The aircraft’s computer also had the data loaded and was constantly using a ground-positioning receiver, updated every half second, to monitor the route and warn of possible collisions.

There was the slightest of possibilities that something might have been constructed along the flight route since the shuttle mission, but it was a risk the crew would rather take to avoid being picked up on Turkish radar and having fighters scrambled to intercept.

Yakov reached inside his parka, pulled open the Velcro on an interior pocket, and pulled out a flask of vodka. He extended it to the Delta commando next to him, indicating he should partake. The man looked at him incredulously, the front of his own parka speckled with vomit. Yakov shrugged, unscrewed the cap, and took a deep swig. He extended it around to all the men close by, but all passed. Yakov put the top back on and slipped it back inside.

The man next to him slapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the rear. One of the Delta men was on his feet and yelling something, the sound lost in the roar of the engines. However, he also had both hands extended, fingers spread, so Yakov assumed they were ten minutes out from the drop. The interior of the plane was dimly lit with red lights. A violent cut to the right by the pilot slammed the jumpmaster against the side of the plane. The man regained his balance, wrapping both hands around the static line cable.

Yakov swallowed, tasting bile, but he smiled broadly as the man next to him passed the time warning. He tested the straps of his parachute once more, making sure they were snug. All he wanted was to get out of the plane. He didn’t care if there was a division of Turkish soldiers on the drop zone. His stomach was pressed downward as the plane’s nose went up.

The jumpmaster was holding up six fingers. He then pantomimed more jump commands and Yakov simply did what the man next to him did, getting to his feet and hooking his static line to the cable. His knees buckled as the plane once more made a violent maneuver.

The roar inside increased as a sliver of daylight appeared in the rear of the plane. The rear ramp slowly went down until it was level, the upper half ascending into the tail of the plane. The nose of the plane was angled up about forty degrees and getting steeper as they ascended the side of Mount Ararat. Looking out the rear, Yakov could see the mountainside less than three hundred feet below. Looking to the side, Yakov blinked in disbelief. They were going up a narrow gorge with the sides above the aircraft and less than ten feet from either wing. He trusted that the pilots knew what they were doing. He was slammed against the side of the aircraft as the MC-130 banked hard right, angling the wings so that they passed through a narrow spot in the gorge.

The man in front of Yakov slammed a fist into his chest to get his attention. Yakov looked to the rear. The jumpmaster had a single finger extended. One minute. Yakov realized he was hyperventilating and fought to control his breathing. Both his large hands were wrapped around the static line, using it to keep his balance. The man in front of him moved and Yakov edged closer toward the rear of the plane. He glanced up, noting the red light above the ramp. It went out and a green light flashed on.

The jumpmaster was gone, stepping off the ramp. Yakov shuffled forward as the commandos went, and before he was ready was at the edge of the ramp. At that moment the plane banked hard and Yakov stumbled to his knees, then pitched forward off the ramp into the air. The static line unraveled on his back to its full length, then ripped the parachute out of its casing.

Yakov was knocked breathless as he went from a free fall to a controlled descent. He barely had time to take a couple of breaths before his feet hit the ground hard. He collapsed to his right, doing a parachute-landing fall as he’d been taught in the Russian army’s airborne school so many years previously. The trip wasn’t over, though, as he slid down a steep ice- and rock-strewn slope while scrambling with his feet to stop his descent. He came to an abrupt halt as he tumbled into a boulder, the wind getting knocked out of him for the second time.

Yakov lay still on the ground for several moments, savoring the experience of facing death and living. He tried to get his breath back, then slowly got to his feet and looked around. They had planned to drop right next to the location Che Lu had plotted. He was high up on the side of the mountain, the peak less than a half mile away to the southwest. He saw why the plane had made such an abrupt maneuver, as an almost vertical wall was less than a quarter mile away. The ground sloped steeply down in the opposite direction and he was flanked by two steep ridges. The surface nearby was a jumble of boulders, ice, snow, and rock face.

He could see parachutes scattered about the area as he unbuckled his harness. He untied the MP-5 submachine gun from above his reserve and pulled the bolt back, putting a round in the chamber. He threw his rucksack over his large shoulders and pulled out his ground-positioning receiver, checking his location and finding the assembly point. He was less than eighty meters from the spot they had designated for the team to rally.

Yakov carefully made his way to the point, at times having to use his hands to keep himself from falling. Sixteen of the eighteen Delta men were assembled when he arrived.

“Where are the other two?” he asked.

“We’ve got an injured man,” one of the commandos replied, pointing to the right. “Broken leg. One of our medics is working on him.”

Yakov nodded, but his mind was already racing ahead. This was the place, but all he could see was rock, ice, and mountain. He realized he was breathing hard, his lungs straining for oxygen, as he was at about sixteen thousand feet in altitude. The coordinates that Che Lu had come up with were toward the peak, inside the vertical wall. The sun was low and darkness would descend soon. Yakov pointed toward the wall. “Let’s go and find our keyhole.”

Turcotte kicked the toe of his crampons into the ice wall and edged up another ten inches. Looking up, he could barely see Morris ten feet above him. It was getting dark and visibility was rapidly decreasing. The top of the ridge was still over a hundred and fifty feet above. Glancing down and following the rope he was hooked into, he could see Mualama’s form. The bouncer had faded into the darkness although Turcotte knew they were less than a hundred and fifty feet above it.

Turcotte felt as if he had entered a surreal existence. His entire world seemed to consist of this ice wall. He could hear every breath he took as the regulator added oxygen with each intake. Morris had set the flow on what he said was the minimum they needed. Figuring they would have to spend the night on the mountain and each carried only three cylinders in his pack, he estimated they would have just enough to get to the site and return to the bouncer. Despite the additional oxygen and the blood packing, Turcotte felt as if he was suffocating, his lungs straining. He had a pounding headache, worse than any he had ever experienced.

Still he kept moving, one foot up, kicking in, putting his weight on it, then the other foot. Creeping up the side of Everest.

Just on the other side of the ridge Turcotte and his companions were climbing up, “Popeye” McGraw and Olivetti had stopped for the evening in a small divot along the ridgeline. They slid into their sleeping bags and immediately fell asleep, their modified lungs allowing them to breathe relatively easily without any additional oxygen.

Their sleep, though, was not so easy, as their sleeping minds were troubled with the battle between memories of self and the part of the mind subordinated to the nanovirus and guardian programming. Both men moaned and kicked in their sleep, but the nanovirus and guide programming remained firmly in control.

On the northeast ridge, Lexina collapsed to the ground as Aksu called a halt. His men quickly set up tents and rigged stoves, brewing hot soup. She couldn’t even drag up the energy to speak, gratefully accepting a steaming cup from Aksu. Despite the additional lung capacity from being part Airlia and the beneficial effect of the half-Airlia blood, the climb had been a strain.

The climbing leader pointed in the darkness. “We must start climbing in six hours. Three o’clock. I will wake you and your companions prior to that so you will be ready. We must make your location just after dawn so we can be down before tomorrow evening. Do you understand?”

Lexina nodded. All she wanted to do was sleep. Aksu reached down and pulled up her dark goggles. Her eyes were closed. He lifted an eyelid and hissed as he saw the red within red eye.

“What are you?” he asked.

She pushed the empty cup back toward him, then turned her back. Aksu looked at her companions, Elek and Coridan. Both were already asleep — or unconscious. He had seen many strange things on the mountain and knew the dangers. He knew he should check both for signs of cerebral edema but her eyes and her attitude put him off. It was not his business.

Something lightly hit Turcotte’s head and he paused in his climbing. He looked up. Morris was just slightly above him, hammering pitons into the ice. Grateful for the halt, Turcotte leaned against the mountain, breathing hard, his lungs trying to get every molecule of oxygen. He glanced to his left. Mualama was steadily coming toward him, closing the gap.

Morris slipped a nylon strap through a snap link attached to one of the pitons, then clipped the other end into Turcotte’s harness. He did the same with another piton-sling combination. When Mualama arrived, Morris did the same, leaning around Turcotte, who tried to help even though he couldn’t quite figure out why the medic was doing this. He realized that he was having a very difficult time focusing his mind. Morris then pulled Turcotte’s pack off his back and hooked it to a third piton sling, so that it dangled right next to him.

Turcotte pulled his oxygen mask to the side. “What are you doing?”

“This is it for the night,” Morris said. “What?”

“We stay here for the night,” Morris repeated. “You can sleep in your harness. Get your bag out and snap it around the safety lines. Five hours.” He reached up and checked Turcotte’s oxygen flow, then swung around him on his rope to check Mualama’s and repeat the instructions.

Turcotte looked down in the fading light, then up and to each side. The view was the same. A sheer rock wall mostly covered with ice and snow. “Great,” Turcotte muttered into his mask.