Area 51: Excalibur-6 (25 page)

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?"

210

'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.

211

CHAPTER 1 4: THE PRESENT

SOUTH KOREA

Alpha Four was built into the side of a mountain fifty miles south of Seoul, not far from Osan Air Force Base. General Carmody saw the devastation that had been wreaked on the Air Force Base by suicide squads of North Korean commandos as his helicopter flew by. Burning wreckage littered the runway and aprons and he could see that there were still pockets of resistance here and there.

Disaster. That was the only word that Carmody could think as the chopper began going around the mountain. So far his command's performance in the field in the face of the invasion had been a disaster. Seoul was practically devoid of life.

North Korean forces were infiltrating behind his front lines. His Air Force power had been severely hamstrung by the unexpected ferocity of the suicide attacks from groups of North Koreans who had been in place prior to the onslaught, combined with the nerve gas rocket assaults by the Chinese, something they had not expected.

The Blackhawk landed on the concrete pad next to a vault door. Bodies were strewn about and it was obvious the North Koreans had sent several suicide squads against Alpha Four, but Carmody had confirmed over the radio that the bunker remained unbreached. The large steel vault door set into the mountainside slowly swung open. A Humvee came racing out, a large plastic case in the back.

Carmody slid open the cargo bay door and helped the crew chief load the nuclear 212

bomb on board. As soon as it was secure, the chopper lifted into the air and the second of Carmody's aircraft landed to on-load its bomb.

"Where to, sir?" the pilot asked over the intercom.

Carmody had already made his decisions on the way down. He gave his pilot coordinates and then radioed the other five helicopters with their own coordinates.

The Blackhawk banked to the north.

TAIWAN

The pattern was one that could not be allowed to continue. Tek-Chong knew that, but he didn't know how to counter the mainland forces' strategy. As soon as he pulled his men back out of range, the shield wall would be turned off, the mainland troops would advance within range, and then the shield would go back on, only coming down when the mainland forces were dug-in and prepared to fire.

He'd already retreated four times, falling back over fifteen miles from the beach.

Through his binoculars, Tek-Chong watched the Chinese forces advancing under the protection of the newly forwarded shield and he noticed something. Machine-gun fire burst out from a buried bunker of his own forces, men who had apparently survived both the bombardment and the shield passing over and had not been able to follow the order to retreat. The bunker was immediately destroyed by point-blank tank fire, but it planted an idea in Tek-Chong's mind.

He immediately issued the orders.

The Taiwanese soldiers dug in, hunkering down in their foxholes and bunkers and remained still. Some were killed by the preparatory bombardment, but most survived. And when the firing ceased, Tek-Chong did not give the order to retreat. Instead, the men stayed in place underground,

213

allowing the shield wall to pass over them as it was moved forward.

After the wall passed over them, they then sprang up and engaged the mainland forces at point-blank range. It was brutal fighting, face-to-face combat not seen since the advent of gunpowder. Small arms, bayonets, entrenching tools, fists, and teeth, it was man against man in the most elemental of combat.

And it worked for the defenders.

The mainland army was forced to slow down, its superior firepower negated by the fact that its front lines were mixed with those of the Taiwanese. The shield wall was negated by the close-in combat.

The mainland advance ground to a halt as the commanders pondered how to deal with this new development.

SOUTH KOREA

Six machine guns were set up in position overlooking the main highway running north to south that bypassed Seoul. Colonel Lin had personally positioned each gun on the hillside and now he watched the road through his binoculars.

Thousands of South Korean refugees crowded the road, making it difficult for American and South Korean reinforcements to make their way north. Lin planned on making it even more difficult.

"Fire," he ordered.

The machine guns erupted, spewing out thousands of rounds per minute. The bullets chewed into the defenseless civilians, killing them by the hundreds, wounding many more. Bodies littered the road, the wounded and the dead.

After two minutes, Lin issued another order. "Cease fire."

When the guns fell silent, the screams of the wounded civilians echoed off the mountains. Lin scanned the carnage

214

with binoculars, seeing the women and children, their bodies torn apart by the large-caliber bullets. Unbidden, an image of his family back in the north came to him and for the first time he wondered what exactly victory would bring for anyone.

MIDWAY

One thousand forty-two nautical miles northwest of the main Hawaiian Islands lies Midway Atoll just short of the International Date Line. Despite the distance, the three Midway islands were actually part of the Hawaiian Island Archipelago. A coral reef surrounded Sand, Eastern, and Spit islands, whose landmass totaled less than sixteen hundred acres. The atoll was first discovered in 1859 and since it consisted of little more than three tiny spits of sand, little attention was paid to them. They were claimed by the United States in 1876 and annexed in 1908.

The first inhabitants were employees of the Commercial Pacific Cable Company in 1903, who'd come to administer the first round-the-world communications cable.

In 1935 Pan American Airways established a base for their Pan-Pacific Clipper seaplanes on the island. In 1938, as tensions rose in the Pacific, the US Navy began building a naval air station. The base was finished in August 1941 and bombed on December 7 of that year.

Midway, though, is most famous for the sea battle that took place in its vicinity in June 1942. The remnants of the United States fleet that had survived the disaster at Pearl Harbor just six months previously had sallied forth to meet another Japanese onslaught. Three American carriers—the Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown—waited near the island for an invasion fleet using intelligence gathered by American code breakers.

A much stronger Japanese fleet approached the atoll, led

215

by four aircraft carriers and numerous other ships. In a desperate series of strikes and counterstrikes the Americans delivered a stunning defeat on the Japanese, sending all four carriers to the bottom of the Pacific while losing the Yorktown. The Battle of Midway shifted the tide of war in the Pacific and marked the beginning of the setting of the Rising Sun of Japanese imperialism.

Perhaps it was memories of that battle that had caused Admiral Kenzie to make Midway the destination for his fleet, even though the naval base there had been abandoned in 1997 and the entire area turned into a national wildlife refuge.

Kenzie positioned his fleet to the northwest of Midway, escort ships surrounding his lone surviving carrier, the Kennedy. Linked back to the mainland by satellite communication, he remained up-to-date on the burgeoning world war.

He'd already received contradictory orders from Washington—one set from the Pentagon directing him to sail west and support American forces in South Korea, another order from the National Security Advisor directing him to sail east to San Francisco to defend the West Coast.

He ignored both sets of orders and maintained radio silence, listening to the satellite communications but sen'ding nothing. All of his ships were powered down, running on the minimum required energy. Kenzie was more tuned in to the mood of his sailors than to the information coming in from the satellites. Many had left family behind in Hawaii. Fear, anger, despair, confusion—all floated through the fleet like a dense fog.

PEARL HARBOR

Captain Lockhart was to receive her first command. Despite being corrupted by the nanovirus and even knowing deep inside that she was aiding and abetting the enemy, a small part of her was thrilled. Especially this command.

216

She was on Ford Island, in the center of Pearl Harbor, surrounded by a cluster of similarly infected sailors. Waiting. Behind them were two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles, forgotten in a storage area in the rush of the fleet departing.

Several dozen compressors were pumping air into hoses that ran from the island into the water.

Just offshore, the white memorial building was gone, the material stripped and used by the nanotechs. The dark water was boiling as if some great beast were stirring below. Lockhart took an involuntary step backward as a metal mast appeared, poking up through the surface and rising.

Slowly, as air filled sealed chambers, the reconstructed USS Arizona saw the light of day for the first time in well over half a century. As the ship's main deck became awash, Lockhart supervised the sailors in transferring over the cruise missiles as the nanovirus began construction of launchers for them in place of the guns that had once graced the ship's decks.

Where oil-burning conventional engines had once been, the nanotechs were changing rusted metal into a modified version of the engines that had been developed on the Springfield and its clones. Lockhart had her orders via the nanovirus from the guardian—as soon as the Arizona was seaworthy she was to put to sea and join the Alien Fleet that was now off to the south of Oahu. The mission: search for and assimilate the remains of the American fleet.

THE GULF OF MEXICO

"What the hell is that?" Lisa Duncan asked as Garlin opened a door to a room she hadn't been in before. A long, coffinlike object was in the center, next to a control console with what appeared to be numerous computers stacked around it.

217

"That's how we're going to try to break through this programming in your brain,"

Garlin said.

"And I'm supposed to trust you?"

"We don't care if you trust us or not," Garlin said as he walked over to the control console and hit a button. The lid of the tube slowly swung open, revealing a contoured interior, roughly the size of a person, but someone much taller than Duncan.

Duncan didn't move from the door. "That looks very similar to what Mike Turcotte told me was being used in the lab in Dulce."

"Very good," Garlin said. "It is."

"Where did it come from?"

"We recovered it from the ruins at Dulce. Where else?"

"That thing caused people to go crazy."

"It can be used for that," Garlin acknowledged. He turned from the machine toward Duncan, who still had not moved. "You have good reason to be afraid of it. We think it's what was used to give you your false memories."

"That makes no sense," Duncan said. "Why would Majestic have done that to me? I ended up investigating them."

Garlin shrugged. "Remember that Von Seeckt was a renegade from Majestic. We think it might be possible he used you as the key to get the government to prevent the mother-ship from flying. Or there may be a similar but different machine like the one at Dulce that was used on you."

"You don't know much, do you?"

Garlin took a step closer to her and shook his head, a strange smile on his lips. "For someone who has false memories, you're very sure of yourself. You don't know who you are. And let me tell you something else you don't know. You don't know who Turcotte is either."

218

"What do you mean?"

"After we discovered you weren't who you appeared to be, we checked everyone else. Turcotte's past—it's all fake too. He was never in a classified antiterrorist unit in Germany. That charming story he tells about trying to save the pregnant woman... never happened. He's as false as you are."

Duncan didn't believe him. Why that thought came to her with absolute certainty, she wasn't sure. Turcotte was who he appeared to be. But accompanying the thought was an almost overwhelming sense of guilt, which confused her. What about Turcotte did she have to feel guilty about? That she had involved him in this? But the feeling was much stronger than that.