The Mission

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 both 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.

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 followed 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.”