The Grail

CHAPTER 10

Major Quinn had to almost run to keep up with Turcotte as he walked across the hangar toward the elevator. “Did you get the ring?”

Turcotte held it up briefly, then asked his own question. “What do you have?” Yakov followed behind, walking more slowly.

“We got a team to help you on the Giza mission.”

“Who?”

“A mixed Special Forces-SEAL team from Space Command.” Quinn pointed toward one of the walls that crossed the large hangar. “They’re in there.”

Turcotte abruptly changed direction. Quinn opened a door in the partition and they entered a corner of Hangar 1. Satellite imagery was tacked to a large piece of plywood, the corresponding map sheets covered with acetate pinned next to the pictures. Several men in black jumpsuits stood in front of the maps, marker in hand, comparing them with latest downloaded photos of the same sites.

One of them, a tall man with a shaved head and large black mustache, turned at the sound of the door shutting behind Yakov. He came striding over.

He snapped a salute. “Lieutenant Graves.”

Turcotte returned the salute, then extended his hand. “Mike Turcotte.” Graves nodded. “I heard we’re going after the sons-a-bitches who took out our men on the shuttle. Every man here is a volunteer and eager to kick some ass.”

Turcotte felt at home, having been in this type of planning situation many times before in his Special Forces career. It was called “isolation,” where the team was given its mission statement and the intelligence data needed to plan the operation.

“The last time you tried this mission,” Yakov said, “it did not go well.” Graves frowned at the Russian and Turcotte quickly introduced Yakov.

“What do you have on the underground river?” Turcotte asked.

Quinn pointed at one of the boards as they walked across the room. There was a series of satellite imagery tacked on it. “There’s a KH-14 always on duty over that area, supporting our peacekeeping force in the Sinai. I had a buddy at NSA do a complete spectrographic workout of Giza and the Nile.”

“We’re looking for an underground river running from the Nile, below Giza, and back to the Nile,” Turcotte said.

Quinn didn’t hesitate for a beat. He tapped a color-filled picture. “Thermal. High discretion.” Quinn tilted his glasses, peering at it. “There. See the change. Something’s going on in the river on the west bank — right there. Then see how the shoreline at the spot is a little cooler, then follow the line looping around to Giza and back to the Nile. That’s your underground river.”

“How come no one’s seen this before?” Turcotte asked.

Quinn gave a short laugh. “This is top-secret, top-of-the-line imagery. Like we’re going to give it to someone? And there was no strategic or tactical interest in the Nile and Giza before this.”

Turcotte ran his fingers over the photo, noting the slight change in temperature on the shoreline, a cooler spot where water ran underneath the bank. “That’s how we’re getting in.”

“What do you think we should do for infiltration?” Graves asked.

Turcotte picked up a marker and circled the location where the underwater river branched out from the Nile, two kilometers below the Giza Plateau. “Water drop right here. Then we go into the tunnel.”

“Drop from a bouncer?” Graves asked. Turcotte had given that matter some thought on the flight back from England. “They aren’t rigged for that. We’ll take a bouncer to Israel to save time, but we’ll go in by conventional means from there.”

Major Quinn spoke up. “I’ve lined up an MC-130 out of Germany to meet you in Israel.”

An MC-130 was a specially modified C-130 transport plane, designed to be able to fly in all types of weather and at low level, below radar. Turcotte tapped the map. “We’ll go in low on the C-130 and parachute at less than two hundred feet with multiple drogue chutes rigged for underwater.”

Graves frowned. “Scuba? Why not use what we’re trained on?” He pointed to the wall where black suits were lined up, like an army of drones. “TASC-suits?” Turcotte asked. “What’s that?” Yakov asked. “Stands for Tactical Articulated Space Combat suit,” Graves explained. “Each suit is self-contained.” He looked at Turcotte. “If you’re going with us, you’ll have to run through the mentor program to learn how to operate the suit, which takes about two hours. And then you’re going to have to learn to actually use them in action, which isn’t exactly—”

Turcotte cut him off. “But they give us an advantage, correct?”

“Yes, sir. A lot of advantages. You’ll be completely armored, stronger, and the weapons are extremely accurate when using the suits aiming system. You have a built in rebreather so we can infiltrate directly into the water.”

“And I can learn to use it in a basic mode quickly, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Great.”

Graves turned back to the map. “Once we go into this underground river, do we have any idea where we’re going?”

Turcotte pointed at a surface photo of the Great Sphinx. “As near as we can tell, our objective is directly below that.”

“Does the river run to it?” Graves asked.

“Not directly,” Turcotte admitted, remembering Burton’s account. “We’re hoping we get some more information before we go wheels up. We do have directions once we go up the shaft that Burton came down. That shaft intersects with the river.” Turcotte ran through the account Burton mapped from the Hall of Records chamber to the one he was trapped in. “If his pace count is one hundred and sixteen steps per hundred meters, we can use that to approximate the location of these doors.”

“And the ring which helps find these doors and open them?” Graves asked. Turcotte reached into his pocket and pulled out the Watcher key.

“And exfiltration?” Graves asked.

Turcotte had been expecting that. It was something every special-ops man asked when given an assignment, and something that was rarely given in the mission briefing as higher commands always were much more concerned about getting the men in than getting them out.

“Helicopters from the peacekeeping force,” Turcotte said. “They can come in from South Camp and retrieve us. But we have to be in the river, ready to be picked up an hour before dawn. If we’re later than that, forget about getting out by chopper, and it’s a long walk.”

“Roger that,” Graves said.

“And Easter Island?” Yakov asked. “Qian-Ling? What is going on there?”

“Let’s go down to the conference room for that,” Turcotte suggested. He slapped Graves on the shoulder. “Keep planning and get my suit ready to be rigged.” He pulled one of the large-scale images of the Giza Plateau off the board.

“Yes, sir.”

Turcotte, Yakov, and Quinn headed for the elevator. “Uh, sir—” Quinn paused.

“Yes?”

“There’s some interesting material in the folders you took from the Russian Archives.”

“Such as?”

Quinn opened a folder. “The file which held the photo of Mount Ararat… was the search for Noah’s Ark. Hitler sent teams around the world looking for the place it supposedly came to rest. Naturally, Mount Ararat was one of those places.”

“Did they find it?”

“It doesn’t appear so.”

“Why would they be looking for Noah’s Ark?” Turcotte asked.

“Perhaps it is something else,” Yakov said, “as all other legends have turned out to be.”

“What else do you have?” Turcotte was studying the Nile imagery, committing it to memory. Quinn closed the folder. He had one more that he hadn’t opened yet. Quinn hesitated, fingers running along the edge of the manila folder.

“Well?” Turcotte pressed as they reached the elevator.

“I was checking CIA case files on the Watchers, seeing if I could find another ring. When I pulled what they have now, it was cross-referenced with some other files, um—” He paused.

“What other files?” Turcotte checked his watch.

“It’s just a list,” Quinn said, “of people the CIA thought needed watching; targeting people who they suspect had some sort of connection with The Watchers or The Mission or The Ones That Wait. You have to understand that they did this in a rush after the revelations of what was here.”

“And?” Turcotte was surprised at Quinn’s sudden reticence. The elevator doors opened and they got in.

“Doctor Duncan’s name is on it.”

“For suspicion of what?” Turcotte snapped.

“Just as requiring further investigation,” Quinn said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

Turcotte took a step toward the smaller major. Yakov put out an arm across Turcotte’s chest. “Easy.”

“It’s bull,” Turcotte said. “Clowns In Action — I worked with them before and they couldn’t—” He caught himself. “We’ve got more important things to do.”

As he walked out of the elevator toward the conference room, Quinn gave Yakov a questioning glance. The Russian merely shrugged his large shoulders.

Popeye McGraw stared down at the Easter Island International Airport as Olivetti recorded the scene on a digital recorder.

“Damn,” Popeye said.

The fact that Olivetti said nothing in response indicated the depth the effect of the scene below had on the larger SEAL.

A strange collection of people and equipment were all over the airfield and the surrounding area. Six-legged machines stalked about on their tasks, while people moved around as if in a stupor. Various aircraft from the Washington lined the runway in different stages of either assembly or disassembly, it was hard to tell.

“They ain’t normal, those people,” Olivetti muttered.

Popeye raked the area with the binoculars, checking everything. There were several clusters of people staked out next to the runway, heads all pointing inward as mechanical robots walked by, spraying something over them.

He could see the entrance to the tunnel that led to the guardian computer chamber. A squad of marines with M-16s stood there. Popeye twisted the focus. The men had blank expressions, but their hands held the weapons tightly.

Popeye had often boasted in bars that a Navy SEAL could kick butt on a dozen marines. But that was in a bar. Automatic weapons were a great equalizer.

“What the hell is going on?” Popeye muttered. During the mission briefing, they’d read the report about the people who had come to Easter Island on the Progressive trawler who had been taken over by some sort of black cloud. Popeye pulled the glasses away from his eyes and rubbed a hand across his forehead, smearing the camouflage paint.

Olivetti waited patiently. “The crater,” Popeye said.

Olivetti didn’t even nod, but hoisted his pack containing various gear and his tanks onto his back. They turned away from the airfield and headed farther up the slope of Rapa Karu.

Kelly Reynolds twitched. Consciousness seeped into her brain. She had no idea how long she had been out. For just the slightest of moments she was home in Nashville, snug in her bed, buried under a down comforter.

That image was ripped asunder as the flow of data through the guardian cascaded over her. She knew where she was, she just didn’t know what she was anymore. How long had she been here?

She paused her racing mind. What had woken her? The torrent of data was a river pouring past her, and it was like trying to find a slight disturbance in the flow.

She began searching.

Popeye McGraw and Olivetti went over the lip of the crater, their wet suits soaked with sweat, but their breathing almost normal. They’d done things in training that made the climb look like a weekend jaunt. Two hundred feet below, the surface of the lake filling the crater was totally smooth. They didn’t even pause, but began clambering down.

Within a couple of minutes they reached the water. Packs were dropped and cached under some rocks, tanks were put back on, and they slid into the water.

Working off the information they had been given in their mission preparation, they searched for the tunnel entrance at the bottom and found it relatively quickly.

They swam into it, navigating by feel through the darkness. Both men had been in dark water before, and they moved forward without fear.

Kelly Reynolds saw what the guardian had noted. A woman, one of the ones brought by the Southern Star, among the third wave infected by the nano-virus, had caught a glimpse of a light reflecting off glass high on the flanks of Rapa Karu. The woman, a former nurse from Australia, of course, had no idea of the import of what she had seen. She’s simply continued on her task of dragging food supplies for other humans from the UNAOC supply depot.

But the guardian, capable of two billion calculations per second, had reacted differently. Within three seconds, the event had worked its way through various layers to the forefront of the computer’s attention. None of the nanovirus slaves were on the slope. Neither were the mech-robots.

The conclusion — an unknown variable.

The guardian didn’t know what it was, so Kelly didn’t either. But the guardian began reacting.

The two SEALs headed toward a small dot of light. It grew brighter as they approached, and in a minute they surfaced inside a cavern. The light came from a glowing orb on the ceiling. They swam over to a lip of rock on one side and got out of the water. A tunnel was cut into the wall in front of them. They secured their weapons and headed into it. The ground sloped up slightly, then turned to the right. It was lit by thin strips of glowing material set into the ceiling.

They entered a cave, about a hundred meters wide and long. The walls were of rock, except for the far one, made of black metal with control panels built into it. Their eyes were focused on what was in the forefront. The body of a woman was splayed against a twenty-foot-high golden pyramid. Near it, a hole was cut in the floor of the cavern into and out of which a steady stream of small robots flowed.

Slung over Olivetti’s shoulder was a satchel containing explosives. He’d already prewired several different charges, and already mentally calculating what he would need to destroy this chamber and the pyramid.

Both men started, swinging the muzzles of their weapons about as something moved to their right. A young boy dressed in brown walked out of the shadows.

Kelly Reynolds saw the two SEALs through the guardian. She fought to open her eyes, to be able to control her lungs and mouth. To shout a warning.

“Are you all right?” Popeye McGraw asked the boy.

There was no answer as the boy came forward, now less than twenty feet away. He was pale and thin, a ghostly stick figure in the chamber’s glow.

“How did you get here?” Popeye asked, his finger still over the trigger, eyes shifting from the boy, to the pyramid/woman, to the unceasing line of robots.

“My parents,” the boy said in a cracked voice. “Please help me.” He held up his hands as he continued to walk toward them.

“Where are your parents?” Popeye asked.

“The machine,” the boy whispered as if the pyramid could hear. He reached out a hand and Olivetti instinctively lowered his weapon and reached forward with his left hand to the boy.

Flesh met flesh and Olivetti cursed, trying to jerk his hand back from the sharp burning sensation searing his palm. But the boy’s hand was like a vise as the nanovirus tore through the child’s flesh and bore in the SEAL’s palm, infiltrating his veins, racing for the brain.

“Get him off me!” Olivetti had let go of his weapon and was trying to peel the boy’s hand off with his free hand.

Popeye had the boy in his sights, his finger on the trigger.

“Get him off!” Olivetti spun about, the boy airborne but still keeping the grip.

The flesh in Olivetti’s arm crawled as the nanovirus swarmed up it, underneath the skin. The boy let go and turned toward Popeye, dead eyes reflected in the glow of the orb.

McGraw pulled the trigger, the rounds smashing the boy onto the floor. Along with the blood, a black stain poured out of the wound and headed across the floor toward McGraw — the nanovirus seeking a new host. Olivetti dropped to his knees, hands pressed against his temples.

“Run!” The voice was barely audible.

McGraw turned, surprised. It came again — from the woman on the pyramid. “Run!”

Popeye turned and dashed back down the corridor he had come in.

The huge doors were wide open, but the light from the chamber could not penetrate the blackness behind the doors. It was not solid, but rather as if the air itself had lost all ability to allow light to travel through it. A straight wall of darkness.

“What is this?” Gergor asked.

Lexina was puzzled. “I don’t know.”

Gergor stepped forward and reached out with his hand toward the darkness. “Don’t do that!” Lexina ordered, but Gergor ignored her. His fingertips touched and he turned to look at her. “It’s not solid. It’s warm. There’s—” A look of surprise passed over his face, which quickly changed to one of terror as the black around his arm turned bright red, spread down the arm, and enveloped him in less than a second. He screamed as skin disintegrated.

Within another two seconds there was nothing left of Gergor but his clothes in a small pile just in front of the once more smooth black wall.

Carefully Lexina knelt and felt the cloth, searching. She found Gergor’s ka.