The Sphinx

CHAPTER 20

Captain Halls had skirted the American fleet, running to the west of where he guessed it was. He’d maintained radio listening silence the whole way in, but nothing seemed to have changed regarding UNAOC’s stance toward the island or its status.

He knew the Americans might pick him up on radar, but his hope was that he could get close enough to let these lunatics overboard in their rubber zodiacs and then run for home before they sent someone to investigate.

But so far there hadn’t been any sign of the Americans and Easter Island was directly ahead. At least he assumed it was. All he could see out the front of his bridge in the early-morning light was a dark hemisphere on the ocean’s surface.

“Doesn’t look like they want visitors,” Halls said.

“We will be accepted,” Parker said.

A roar overheard startled both of them. An F-14 banked and came around for another run.

“They will not stop us,” Parker said.

Halls watched the plane race by, the pilot wiggling his wings.

“I think he wants to talk to us,” Halls said. He started for the radio room, when Parker put an arm out, blocking him.

“No. We will not be interfered with.” He pointed at the circling jet. “These are the people who attacked the Airlia. Who killed Aspasia. We will not talk to them!”

“Then I suggest you get your people in gear and get overboard,” Halls said. “That plane has got a radio, and I’m sure they’re calling someone.”

Parker left the bridge without a backward glance. Halls watched the progressives climb into their zodiacs, sixteen to a boat. The small convoy circled the Southern Star until all were launched. Then the ten boats headed directly for the black shield. The F-14 came low between them and the island, the pilot almost touching the wave tops, but they went on.

“Turn on the radio,” Captain Halls ordered his first mate. “Put it on the speaker.”

There was a crackle of static. Then a voice came on, speaking urgently.

“Unidentified ship, this is the USS Thorn, representing the United Nations blockade of Easter Island. You are to turn on a heading of nine zero degrees immediately.”

Halls reached down and picked up the microphone on the wall in front of him. “This is the Island Breeze. We will assume a heading of nine zero degrees.”

The voice lost its officialness. “Who am I talking to?”

“This is Captain Halls of the Island Breeze. I am complying with your orders.”

“Captain, this is Captain Norris. We’ve been trying to raise you for the past thirty minutes. Who the hell are in the small boats our pilot sees heading toward the island?”

“I am not responsible for them,” Halls said. “They’re a bunch of progressives going to greet their almighty computer.”

“Good God, man, you have no idea what’s going on and neither do they. You have to stop them right away!”

“They’re not my responsibility.”

“By the law of the high seas, they were passengers on your ship, and you’re abandoning them in harm’s way,” Captain Norris retorted.

“What’s the big deal?” Halls wanted to know. He looked ahead. The first zodiacs were within half a kilometer of the shield. “They’re just going to hit that shield, bounce off, and come on back. They…” Halls paused, his hand still on the send as something came out of the shield. “What the devil is that?”

It looked like a black cloud, but it kept shifting in shape very quickly, as if it were alive.

“Full speed, hard port,” Halls ordered. The nose of his ship very slowly swung in the direction of the zodiacs. Halls could see Parker standing up in the lead boat, hands in the air, as if supplicating the dark cloud.

The F-14 banked hard away from the shield. That made Halls think. “Full astern,” he yelled into the tube leading to the engine room. “Hard starboard,” to the helmsman.

“I’d get out of there!” Captain Norris confirmed his decision over the radio. “What’s going on?” Halls demanded.

“I don’t know,” Norris said, “but whatever is on that island took down the George Washington.”

Halls swallowed. He’d seen the Washington one time in Sydney Harbor. He knew there was no comparing his ship to the carrier.

The black cloud descended onto the boats, swarming over the people inside. As his ship ponderously turned away, Captain Halls watched the people in the zodiacs collapse and flail about.

“Get us out of here, Helm,” Halls said, even though he knew the ship was moving as quickly as possible.

But then the people in the first boat began resuming their positions. Halls pulled up his binoculars. He trained them on that zodiac. Parker was standing once again. The man was looking directly back at the Island Breeze. His body was twitching, but the eyes were steady, glowing with the same insane light Halls had been witness to the entire voyage. But something was different. Halls twisted the focus on the glasses, then his fingers froze on the knobs. The skin of Parker’s face was rippling, as if there were something alive just under the surface. Halls shifted to the other people in the boat… all had the same thing happening to them. One of the women stood up, her hands ripping at her own face, blood flowing through her fingers, her mouth contorted in a scream Halls could not hear. She staggered to her feet, then fell overboard.

In another boat, a man was pounding his chest, screaming. He flopped back, his legs drumming against the floorboards of the zodiac. Then he was still.

The black cloud was gone, but Halls could see that the rubber pontoons of the zodiacs were covered with a black film that was moving on its own in surges.

Halls went back to the lead boat. Parker’s mouth moved; he was yelling something to the people in his boat and the other zodiacs nearby. Halls lowered the glasses. Two of the zodiacs turned and headed for the Island Breeze, throttles wide open, the boats planning out. The others continued toward the shield wall.

“More speed!” Halls yelled into the tube to engineering.

Halls knew the zodiacs could catch his slow-moving freighter. He focused on the lead boat chasing him. A man was standing in the prow. As Halls watched, the movement under the man’s skin stopped. The man’s face twitched in a wide smile that was not pleasant at all.

The two zodiacs had already halved the distance to the Island Breeze. Halls knew there was no way he was going to escape.

The F-14 Tomcat came in so low that Halls thought it clipped his mast. There was a line of smoke on the left side, and Halls could hear the whine of a highspeed gun firing.

The 20mm bullets hit the surface in a column of water spouts until they struck the lead zodiac. The milk-bottle-size bullets made short work of both the rubber boat and the people in it. The F-14 climbed and turned.

Halls pulled his binoculars up. The second zodiac had not wavered in the slightest, completely ignoring the fate of its partner. It was less than three hundred meters from the Island Breeze and still closing. Each of the people on board was totally focused directly ahead at the ship, their faces blank of expression.

The Tomcat came in from the left this time and ripped the boat to shreds. Halls saw one of the people take a direct hit from the 20mm round, the upper chest completely disintegrating and the body flying forty feet before landing in the water.

The Navy jet made two more runs, bullets churning up the sea where both boats had gone down.

“Goddamn,” Halls exclaimed, watching the merciless strafing.

The radio crackled to life. “This is Captain Norris. You are to maintain a heading of nine zero degrees until in sight of my ship. At that time you will be prepared to be boarded. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly clear,” Halls replied.

“This is not good,” Yakov said.

Mike Turcotte stared at the pile of fresh rubble that blocked the tunnel in front of them and didn’t have the energy to respond to that most brilliant observation. They had gone about a quarter mile from the scene of their fight with Katyenka, the tunnel slowly bending to the left and still descending. They had not passed a single door or side passageway in the time it had taken them to traverse that distance to the other blockage Pasha had initiated. They had already dug through one pile of rubble, eating up precious time. Now here was a second.

Instead of answering, he grabbed a block of concrete, picked it up and carried it about twenty feet back the way they had come, and dropped it. He returned to the blockage and picked up a second piece. By the time he dropped it, Yakov had picked up a hunk of rubble and joined him.

They worked in silence and in a small dust cloud for an hour, slowly making their way farther down the corridor. Finally, Turcotte sat down and took a break, Yakov joining him. The Russian pulled his always-ready flask out of a pocket and offered it to Turcotte, who shook his head.

“Did you suspect Katyenka was one of The Ones Who Wait?” Turcotte asked.

Yakov sighed, then answered. “If I had suspected, I would never have allowed her that close, and certainly never allowed her to, how do you say, get the drop on us back there.”

“Then my next question is, why didn’t you suspect her?” Turcotte rubbed some dirt off his forehead. “You’re the one that’s been lecturing me all along to trust no one.”

Yakov was silent for a long time before answering. “She seduced me.” He forestalled Turcotte by speaking with a wave of his hand. “Not so much with the body… although she did do that, but here.” Yakov thumped his hand on his chest. “I have spent so many years doing this, traveling all over the world. I thought I was a man with no heart, but every man has a heart. I realize now I was hard on you about Dr. Duncan, because in my own mind I knew I was being foolish with Katyenka, allowing her too close. But I could not admit it to myself. It is an old Russian saying that when something another person is doing bothers you, look to yourself. Because I did not, here we are, trapped.”

Turcotte stood. “Let’s get untrapped.”

Colonel Tolya’s patience was running out. His patrol of twenty commandos was gathered behind him as he kneeled next to the engineer lieutenant, trying to make sense of the various plans unrolled before them on the tunnel floor. The earth underneath Moscow was a warren of tunnels, shafts, and man-made caverns burrowed out over decades of Cold War survivalism.

“Which way?” Tolya asked for the third time since they’d halted. The dot had not moved except in relation to their moves. But it seemed as if every time they got close, they had to take another tunnel that took them farther away.

Sweat dripped off the lieutenant’s chin… even though it was cool in the tunnel… and splashed onto the top map. “Sir, I think we need to backtrack to the last intersection. I believe we should have taken a right there, not a left.”

“You ‘believe’?” Tolya checked his watch. Katyenka had instructed him to be no more than five minutes behind, and he had been close behind the walls outside the Kremlin to her group entering the tunnel. He had a feeling things had not worked out the way Katyenka had planned.

Tolya reined in his anger. He pointed back the way they had come. “Let’s go.”

“What were you going to say about the Knights Templar?” Duncan asked. The bouncer was at 40,000 feet altitude, moving swiftly west to east, already over the Atlantic, approaching Africa.

Professor Mualama had been unusually silent as they left the hospital at Nellis Air Force Base and boarded the bouncer for the trip to Egypt. Duncan had not interfered with that silence, as she was also trying to sort out the information von Seeckt had given them. Quinn had informed her that Turcotte was not answering his SATPhone, which was further unsettling news.

Mualama stretched his long legs out in front of him. “I think the answer to that lies in Burton’s manuscript. We are searching for pieces just as he did over a century ago. He dedicated a lifetime to it.”

“What pieces?” Duncan asked.

“Pieces of legend and myth that are something else entirely. I think Burton discovered how many of the pieces ended up where they currently are. Learning that will tell us something of where they came from, which will tell us, perhaps, how they should be put together, which, in the end, I believe will be the most important thing.”

Duncan followed that line of reasoning to an extent. “Why did Burton make such a secret of what he was doing?”

“He made a promise not to reveal something he had learned. Also, you have to remember there was no urgency to his revealing the truth. The world seemed unaffected by the aliens or their followers during his day.”

“Lucky him,” Duncan said. “Let’s hope we do a better job than our predecessors, because we don’t have much more time.”

Captain Billam had a map of the world spread out in front of him on top of the conference table located just off the Cube.

“Big operational area,” his team sergeant, Greg Boltz, noted.

“We can make it smaller,” Billam said.

“How?” Major Quinn had just walked in the door along with the bouncer pilot, Major Remmick.

“Duncan is going to Cairo and Turcotte is in Moscow.” Billam placed a finger on each location. He turned to Major Remmick. “How long can you hover?”

“If I let go of the controls,” Remmick said, “we remain stationary until I touch the controls again. So we can ‘hover,’ as you put it, forever.”

Billam slid his two fingers together. “If we stay here, over the Black Sea, we’ll be halfway between Duncan and Turcotte and a hell of a lot closer than we are now.” He looked up at Quinn for approval.

“Get moving,” Quinn ordered. He held up his hand as they headed for the elevator to Hangar One. “Two things. I’ve got your SADM waiting up there for you. And I put it in a rather interesting package.”

The two bodies were fully formed inside the clear tubes filled with an amber liquid. Lexina recognized the figures, even though both heads were covered with a black helmet from which numerous leads extended through the top of the tube to the console in front.

She had watched Coridan and Gergor, comrades for many years, die just hours before. And now she was watching the completion of the rebirth of their bodies. There was only one more step and it would be done.

Lexina took out the two Ka necklaces she had removed from around her comrades’ necks. Going in front of Coridan’s tube, she slid the two upraised hands into a receptacle on the console. They fit perfectly. A golden glow suffused the panel as the memories and personality encoded on the Ka were sent to the blank mind that waited under the black helmet.

Lacking, of course, were the memories the two men had accumulated since the last time the Ka were updated. And even the original programming had degraded over generations of use as bodies wore out and new operatives were needed. Lexina herself knew there were gaps in her own mind, things she should know and didn’t. Skills she should have… that generations of Lexina’s back to the beginning of The Ones Who Wait had had… that were no longer present.

After several minutes, the glow went away. The amber fluid drained out of the tube. Lexina opened it and removed the helmet from the body, cradling the new Coridan in her arms as she took him out and laid him on the floor.

Coridan gasped for air, the eyes flickering open.

“Welcome back, old friend,” Lexina greeted him.

The USS Anzio was a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser. It cost over one billion dollars to build, and its primary purpose was to be a carrier battle group’s primary defense against air attack. Its job was to defend the battle group’s aircraft carrier at all costs… a job that, it could be argued, it had failed in, given that the Washington was lost.

That fact did little to improve the morale or temper of the crew. That no one could have guessed the returning Global Hawk was the threat it had turned out to be did little to assuage that feeling. The presence on board of more than eight hundred survivors of the Washington not only crowded the ship, it added to the burning desire for revenge.

The Anzio had already earned a battle star in the war against the Airlia by dropping the nuclear weapon that had… they thought… destroyed the foo fighter base north of Easter Island.

When the message came in, via high-frequency radio from Pearl Harbor, for it to prepare a nuclear weapon to be fired against Easter Island, the initial feeling among the crew was one of anticipation. But when the fact that almost two thousand members of the crew of the Washington were missing behind the black shield they were now ordered to penetrate and destroy, sunk in, the mood became more somber.

As they had against the foo fighters’ base, the weapons specialists on board the ship opened up one of their BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missiles and began disabling the electronic guidance equipment.

The captain of the Anzio also sent a message to the long-suffering crew of the Springfield to prepare for action.

In response to the command she had slipped into the system, the microscopic machines that had thoroughly infiltrated Kelly Reynolds’s body began to leave, traveling through her bloodstream and out the needle that had been inserted in her neck by the guardian.

When the last one departed, the part that was still Kelly Reynolds was now larger and stronger than it had been since she’d come down into the chamber deep under Rano Kau. She still had the mental link via the golden tendril coming out of the guardian itself, but that was weaker than before, because the alien computer had relied on the nanovirus to a great extent after infecting her with it.

With her small degree of freedom, Kelly now tried something new.