The Sphinx

CHAPTER 7

Mualama slid between the sharp shards of shattered ice, the glow from his flashlight reflected a hundred times by the glistening walls of the cavern. The far wall was ten feet in front of him. A circle of blackened stones, where a fire had once burned, was in the center of the floor.

A large stone set against rear of the cavern caught his eye. He went around the fire pit and shone the light on the rock. Etched into the stone was a word in Arabic: Sedgh. Mualama felt a wave of excitement. The word meant truthfulness and honestly, one of the virtues of a Sufi Master.

“Help me move this,” he ordered Lago.

Together they put their shoulders to the boulder and edged it away from the cavern wall. Underneath, an oilskin-wrapped package was revealed. Mualama sat down and got his breathing under control before picking up the package. It was much heavier than what he had found underneath the stone in the Devil’s Throat in South America. Carefully he unwrapped the covering. Inside he uncovered a sheaf of several hundred pages, bound by a red ribbon, preserved by the freezing air.

In bold letters that Mualama recognized as Burton’s handwriting, several words in Arabic were written on the cover page. Mualama translated them as he read:

THE PATH OF A TRUTH SEEKER

BY SIR RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON

Mualama peeled off his glove and carefully turned the page. “Ahh!” he exclaimed as he saw the handwritten script on the next page that began the body of the text.

“What is wrong, Uncle?” Lago asked.

“It has never been easy to follow Burton, and even now he makes it hard,” Mualama said as he quickly began thumbing through the manuscript.

“I have never seen writing like that,” Lago commented.

“I have seen this at a dig in Iraq. It is an extinct tongue. It is called Akkadian and was written and spoken in ancient Assyria and Babylon.”

“Why the title in Arabic and the body of the text in another?” Lago asked. “The title is an arrow pointing in the text. It is Burton’s way.”

“Is there anyone who can read it now?” Lago asked.

“Perhaps,” Mualama said as he stopped on a page where there was a drawing. He held up the piece of paper. “Ah! This is even better for right now. This is the piece I needed.”

“What is it?”

“Burton must have copied this from another source.” Mualama carefully put the page back in the manuscript. “It fits in with two other drawings I found following his trail and tells me where we go next.”

Lago sat on the floor of the cavern, exhaustion etched on his face. “And that is?”

“Home to Tanzania. To Ngorongoro Crater.”

“And what is there?”

“We will know when we find it.” Mualama stood and slapped his nephew on the shoulder. “Come on, young man. You can’t be more tired than I am, and this is exciting! We are on the trail of a great mystery!”

“Forty-nine hours.” Kincaid spun his laptop around so they could all see the screen, although no one other than he could make out what the numbers and lines displayed meant. “Lexina didn’t pull that number out of the air. This is the drifting orbit of the talon and Warfighter… ” Kincaid touched the left side of the screen. His finger moved to the right side. “This is the orbit of Stratzyda. The two will come within two kilometers of each other in forty hours here, over the Atlantic. I assume she’ll use the talon to then take control of Stratzyda and change its orbit to coincide with the talon’s. Then it will take the talon and its new satellite another nine hours to drift east on the talon’s orbit, as the earth turns beneath it, to be in position over the center of the United States to deploy the nukes.”

“Can’t your government bring Stratzyda down before the talon gets control of it? Or change its orbit?” Turcotte asked Yakov.

“It is now out of maneuvering fuel. It has been just drifting up there for the past five years. We have no control over it anymore,” Yakov said. “It was never designed to be able to reenter the atmosphere… the bombs, even unexploded, are simply too radioactive.

“You have to understand that things have changed in my country in the past ten years. There is no money, no working system. Only a quarter of our ground-based missile system is functional… the rest is falling into disrepair. For over two-thirds of every twenty-four-hour cycle, we have no satellite coverage of the United States and are essentially blind, as our surveillance satellites have degraded.”

“Can we destroy Stratzyda before it gets close to the talon?” Turcotte asked Kincaid.

“We’re a little slim on orbital vehicles right now,” Kincaid said. “Lexina made sure of that. I’ll check into it, but I wouldn’t count on it. Also, we’d have to go through other agencies, most likely the Air Force, to get help and…”

Duncan supplied the answer. “And there’s a good chance any plan might be compromised, as the Atlantis launch obviously was.” She shook her head. “Forty-nine hours until we die.”

“Actually,” Quinn said, “forty-eight hours and twenty minutes now.”

“Is there a way to find Lexina? To stop her control of the talon?”

“It is possible there is a device that might control the talon,” Yakov said. “Where?” Turcotte asked.

“Section Four recovered an alien artifact that they believed might be some sort of remote piloting device.”

“Wouldn’t any archives have been destroyed when the base was destroyed?” Duncan asked.

“The archive area was far underground. It might have survived intact.”

Duncan nodded. “All right. You go to Russia and see if you can get control of the talon from Lexina. Any other ideas on what the key is or where it might be if Yakov doesn’t succeed?”

“Obviously, the key would be an Airlia artifact,” Major Quinn said. “I’ll inquire throughout the intelligence community to see if anyone has found anything new regarding the Airlia or if someone has been holding artifacts in secret.”

“I’ll double-check the hard drives we recovered from Scorpion Base,” Kincaid said.

“Anyone else?”

“Maybe the guardian on Easter Island might have some information,” Quinn added.

Duncan nodded. “I’ve already thought of that. If the guardian is using Kelly Reynolds to send out information, maybe we can make a connection the other way. I’m going to Easter Island to see if I can contact Kelly. The Navy has a new plan to penetrate the shield around the island and find out what is going on. If they can get through, maybe I can make contact with her.”

The look on Turcotte’s face indicated what he thought of that plan of action. “The Navy already tried that once, and the Springfield is still sitting at the bottom of the ocean, trapped by foo fighters.”

“I think Easter Island is important,” Duncan said. “It’s the center for Aspasia’s faction here on the planet, just as Qian-Ling seems to the center for Artad’s faction. We can’t get close to Qian-Ling again due to the Chinese nuking it, but we can get close to Easter Island. As Yakov noted, maybe the enemy of our enemy can give us some information.

“Status of the Airlia base on Mars?” Duncan had already moved on to Kincaid.

“We’re watching it,” Kincaid said. “No visible activity. Communications between the Cydonia guardian and the one under Easter Island have continued on a pretty regular basis. The NSA still hasn’t been able to decipher the code.”

“Mike?” Duncan had made it around the table.

Turcotte shrugged. “I’m just the hired gun. Sitting around waiting for the next crisis. There’s nothing new with me.”

“Your Special Forces team just arrived.” Major Quinn was looking at the screen of his laptop, which was connected to the Cube operations center. “I’ll check them out,” Turcotte said.

Yakov stirred. “Until the next crisis arises, I would like Captain Turcotte to accompany me to Russia. I could use some… how do you say… backup? I do not think I will get much support from my government, given all that has happened.”

“Is that all right with you?” Duncan asked.

Turcotte nodded. “Sure.”

Duncan stood and leaned forward, putting her hands on the top of the conference table that the men of Majestic-12 had sat around for five decades. “Gentlemen, we’re it. The five of us. I told you the President is caught in a political quagmire. UNAOC is hamstrung by isolationist governments. The message from Easter Island with Kelly Reynolds’s byline will only make that worse. I’ll inform the President of the new threat from Lexina and The Ones Who Wait, but I honestly don’t think he can muster enough support to take decisive action before it’s too late. And after what happened to the shuttles, we always have to be worried that any support might well be compromised by the Watchers, The Mission, or STAAR.”

“In other words,” Yakov said, “we can trust no one outside of this room.”

Duncan nodded. “We keep what we know to ourselves. The President is trying to keep a lid on what happened to Atlantis, and I’m sure he’ll definitely want to keep the information about Stratzyda secret to prevent a panic.

“We have to find this key.” She pointed at Major Quinn. “How much time?”

“Forty-eight hours, twenty minutes until Stratzyda deployment.”

“Let’s get moving,” Duncan ordered.

As everyone headed for the door, Turcotte went to the end of the table, grabbed a chair, and sat down, watching as Duncan put her papers back in her briefcase.

“What?” Duncan finally asked, noting his stare.

“So how are you doing?” Turcotte asked. Duncan paused, hands on the top of the table. “You weren’t happy that I picked you to infiltrate Area 51, remember?”

Turcotte nodded.

“Well, I’m not thrilled that the President picked me to be his science adviser, then tossed me the hand grenade of dealing with Area 51, and now he’s backpedaling. Especially considering the ultimatum we just received.”

“He didn’t expect you to uncover what you did,” Turcotte noted. “It would have been better if we had just discovered the bodies of a couple of little green men at Area 51 instead of what we did. Do you think he will take action with this new information and the threat from Stratzyda?”

“He has to make a decision, Mike.” Duncan was exasperated. “Straddling the fence isn’t going to work. While the isolationists and the progressives argue, The Mission and The Ones Who Wait are moving forward with their plans. We’re caught in the middle, and the stakes are getting higher.”

“You sound like me a week ago,” Turcotte said. “What’s really wrong?”

“On the flight here I was wondering if we did the right thing.”

“It’s a little too late for that,” Turcotte said.

“I know that, but…” Duncan’s voice trailed off.

“The real problem is you’re tired,” Turcotte said. “When I was in Ranger school, part of the philosophy of the course was to make the students exhausted, to deny them food and sleep, then see how they made decisions, how they operated while under that stress. Sounds stupid, but given that they were preparing us for war, it actually made sense. I’ve seen people make tremendously stupid decisions when tired. You have to think everything through carefully.”

“You think going to Easter Island is a mistake?”

“No… more a waste of time… but I wasn’t talking about that. I was referring to the speech you made at the Lincoln Memorial. Don’t you think there were times that Lincoln doubted his course of action, even considered trying to make peace with the South to save the lives of his people?

“How do you think he felt when he received the casualty list from the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history… September 17, 1862? Twenty-three thousand Americans killed or wounded in one day. Do you have any concept of the scope of that, especially given the weaponry of the time? That’s nine times the number of casualties we took on the Longest Day at Normandy during the Second World War.

“You think about things like the Gettysburg Address,” Turcotte continued, “while I think about the poor grunt on the ground. In the Bloody Lane at Antietam, a quarter-mile-long stretch of road, more men were killed or wounded in three hours than in all the years of the Revolutionary War. Blood ran like a stream in that lane. You think numbers like that didn’t make Lincoln sit down and ponder what the hell he was doing? If he’d made the right decisions, done the right things?”

Duncan nodded. “I’m sure he did. And he used that battle, which was a victory, although by the narrowest of margins, for the North, to be the impetus for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, not to make peace with the South.”

Turcotte had hoped she would make that connection. “Which broadened the scope of the war to a moral issue and kept England and France from giving aid to the South, as they were contemplating. He used a terrible thing in a positive way.”

“And the Civil War lasted two long years after Antietam,” Duncan noted.

“Is the glass half full or half empty?” Turcotte asked. “Let’s try to be positive.”

Duncan finished putting her papers away. “So it was your turn to give the pep talk,” she said with a smile.

“Hey. I’m just one of the infantrymen,” Turcotte said. “I just want to make sure I’m on the same sheet of music as my boss.”

“‘Your boss,’” Duncan repeated, glancing at the door to make sure it was closed. She ran a hand through Turcotte’s close-cropped hair. “Is that what I am?”

“Only during duty hours,” Turcotte said. “Off-duty we can flip for who wants to be boss.”

Duncan laughed, the lines of strain disappearing from her face for a moment. Turcotte wrapped her hand inside of his own. “Speaking of which… ” He paused as her cell phone rang once more.

Duncan pulled it out of her pocket and flipped it open. “Duncan.”

She listened for a few seconds, then shut it, her face tight. “Duty calls,” she said to Turcotte. “The Secretary of Defense was just killed, apparently by a Guide.”

“Jesus,” Turcotte muttered. “Why?”

“The Mission killed the Secretary of Defense to keep the President from taking decisive action about Easter Island.”

“We’re getting it from both sides,” Turcotte said. “The Ones Who Wait and The Mission are trying to keep us from stopping them in their war.”

“I have to sit in on a conference call with the National Security Council, reference this new development and the Warfighter situation, and give them the good news about Stratzyda.”

“Always duty first.” Turcotte removed his hand from hers and stood.

She tucked her briefcase under her arm and was all business once more. “You better go check out those Special Forces guys before you head to Russia. Get Major Quinn to give them a SATPhone, disseminate the number among those who were in this room, and direct the team leader to respond to any requests for assistance he receives. Also have Quinn dedicate a bouncer to the team for their transportation.”

”Roger that,” Turcotte acknowledged. As she turned for the door, his voice stopped her. “Lisa… ”

“Yes?”

“Be careful.”

“You too.”

Turcotte watched the door swing shut and took a moment to collect his thoughts, then exited the conference room. He took the elevator up to Hangar One. Of the nine bouncers, four were present. There was also a group of twelve soldiers in camouflage. Even from a hundred yards away, Turcotte knew they were Special Forces, even though they had black watch caps on instead of the traditional green beret. They gave off an air of confidence and competence that most Special Operations soldiers were cloaked in.

He walked up, and a man with the railroad tracks on his collar indicating he was a captain stepped forward. “Major Turcotte, I’m Billam. Colonel Mickell said I was to report to you and follow any orders you issued.”

Turcotte took the other man’s hand and shook it. Billam was a stocky man with thinning black hair. He looked old for a captain, somewhere in his late thirties. Turcotte assumed that meant he had been enlisted and gone through either ROTC or OCS to get his commission.

Billam quickly introduced his A-team.

“This is my executive officer, Chief Tabor; operations sergeant, Master Sergeant Boltz; weapons men, Sergeants Truskey and Dedie; commo, Sergeants Prevatil and Garza; medics, Sergeants Rooney and Askins; demolitions and other nefarious acts, Sergeants Metayer and Jones. Team 055 at your beck and call, sir.”

Turcotte picked up no trace of sarcasm in Billam’s voice, but he was sure they probably weren’t thrilled to death about getting such a vague assignment. He knew Mickall had probably picked a good team, but also a team selected somewhat randomly and secretly to prevent infiltration.

Turcotte relayed Duncan’s instructions and gave them directions to link up with Major Quinn and get their SATPhone and billeting information. He could see Yakov over by one of the bouncers, talking to the pilot, and he knew the Russian was anxious to go.

“Any special instructions,” Billam asked, “or just be ready for anything?”

Turcotte shrugged. “I wish I could be more specific, but you guys are basically our ‘if things go to crap’ option.” He could see the acknowledgment of that on the faces of the men. “If you get called by any of us, things are real bad, so be prepared to come in hot. Major Quinn will brief you on everything that’s happened so far. I’ll try to keep you updated so you can at least war-game some options for action, but we’re pretty much flying by the seat of our pants here.” Turcotte turned to head off toward Yakov when something occurred to him. “Captain, are any of your men trained on SADM?”

That brought Billam’s eyebrows arching up. “Sir, that mission has been phased out of Special Forces.”

“I know that,” Turcotte said, “but do you have anyone that was on a SADM team?” SADM stood for strategic atomic demolition mission… backpack nukes, which had been a Special Forces mission prior to the advent of cruise missiles, which could do as good a job placing a nuke deep behind enemy lines and with less cost in manpower. But Turcotte didn’t think they could count on getting a cruise missile strike when they needed it and where.

Billam nodded. “Sergeant Boltz served on a SADM team in 7th Group, and I served on one when I was enlisted in 10th Group. The rest of these guys are too young to have done that.”

Turcotte pointed toward the elevator. “When you meet Major Quinn, see if he can rustle you up a nuke or two.”

Billam blinked. “Are you authorized those weapons, sir?”

“We won’t know until you ask. Quinn got me some nukes when I needed them before,” Turcotte noted. “Like the Boy Scouts, I want to be prepared. Just in case.”