Area 51: Excalibur-6 (31 page)

Colonel Lin. I am in the objective. Over." "Roger. Proceed to river and find crossing sites. Over." He came around a corner and saw the Han River. And the destroyed bridges. He knew he was a dead man and now he also knew the offensive was doomed. The western route was shut and would be shut as long as the radioactivity blocked the way, which would be beyond his lifetime and that of all his countrymen. And even if they won, what would they win? A devastated country full of dead?

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Lin paused, something catching his eyes. A sign on a small store. He staggered over and shoved the door open. The front of the store was empty. He slung his weapon over his shoulder as he walked around a counter and pushed open the door to the rear. There were two bodies huddled together on a mattress on the floor.

An old man, his arms around an old woman.

Lin knelt next to them. He realized he had taken the streets and woven his way through the southern capital to this destination subconsciously. He'd learned the address when he'd been doing intelligence preparation for his mission.

Lin noted how tightly the old man held the woman. He reached down and pulled a wallet out of the man's pants. He flipped it open and recognized the name: his father's brother. Separated over half a century ago.

Lin keyed the radio. "Headquarters. Colonel Lin. It is over. This was wrong. It is wrong." He let go of the key.

The small earpiece squawked, as his superiors demanded an explanation of his strange message. Lin pulled the earpiece out and left it dangling. He threw his pack with the radio in it on the ground. He reached in, ignoring the radio and pulling out a thin blanket. He carefully placed it over the bodies.

Then he sat down on the floor. He put an arm up over the blanket, feeling the cold bodies underneath, and closed his eyes.

TAIWAN

Chang Tek-Chong leaned against the front of the hastily dug foxhole, watching the advancing Chinese forces. They were less than a half mile away. The tactics he had come up with had worked to an extent, but there was no stopping the wave of humanity the Chinese kept pouring ashore behind the shield. His position was located in the foothills of the mountains that ran along the east coast of the island. The entire

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west coast had been overran. The most fertile and productive part of the country was in enemy hands.

Tek-Chong reached up and pulled a heavy piece of plywood over the top of the foxhole, covering it. He heard the ramble of heavy equipment and then the thud as a backhoe dumped a load of dirt on the top of the plywood, burying him and the other occupant of the hole.

Tek-Chong leaned back against the freshly cut earth. He noticed that he was breathing more shallowly, which brought a wry smile to his face. It wasn't as if his partner in the hole was taking any of it. He reached out and felt the cold steel. No comfort.

He looked at his wrist and the small glowing face told him he'd been buried for ten minutes. He thought of his father, who had died fighting the refugees from the mainland who had taken over Formosa. And now he was fighting for that same regime, against another invasion from the same mainland. He laughed out loud at the insanity, and then cut it short, realizing that mainland forces were probably walking right over his site.

He checked his watch again. Given the rate at which the mainland forces had been advancing, he was now inside the shield wall. He reached out like a lover in the dark toward his companion. His fingers lightly reached over the metal to the small keyboard. He blindly tapped in the command.

Tek-Chong died instantly as the nuclear weapon went off. The explosion roared out of the foxhole, incinerating the mainland forces nearby, then rebounding off the interior of the shield wall like a captured tsunami of fire. The effect of the single bomb was multiplied by being captured inside the shield wall and within less than thirty seconds the entire contingent of mainland forces and all surviving Taiwanese inside were dead.

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THE GULF OF MEXICO

Garlin placed the priest's crown on top of Duncan's head. She was strapped to an upright table, her arms and legs bound tightly. He left the room briefly, then returned, wheeling in a cart with a large plastic case on top of it. Duncan's eyes watched his movements, but she didn't say anything. Her previous meal had been dragged, she knew that now, because her last memory was of eating the food Garlin had brought Then she had awoken, strapped down to the table. She blinked as she noted the massive amount of blood that blanketed the top of the plastic case. Fresh blood, glistening under the bright overhead lights.

"What happened?" she demanded.

Garlin ignored her. He flipped latches and took the top off the case. Duncan recognized the Ark of the Covenant. He reached inside and opened the Ark's lid and pulled out the leads. He carefully attached them to the crown. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing, which Duncan found strange. It was as if he had handled the Ark and crown before.

Whose blood? she wondered.

What the hell was going on?

Her thoughts were cut short by a spike of pain and then a vision of a beautiful white city with a magnificent palace in the center.

Garlin reached up and gripped her chin in his hand, squeezing tight, drawing her attention from the vision inside her head to him. "We want to know where you came from."

It was a straggle to talk, to hold back the vision flooding in through the crown. "What do you mean?"

"We know you're not from Earth," Garlin said. "We want the location of your home world."

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CHAPTER 1 8: THE PRESENT

MOUNT EVEREST

Mike Turcotte sat down in the snow. All he wanted to do was sleep. The snow felt very comforting, like a nice blanket. He leaned back, enveloped in it. So nice.

He remembered Sunday mornings in Maine, his only day off from cutting, when he could sleep in, his body completely worn-out from a week on the saw. This was so much better.

A bolt of pain spiked through his brain.

Duncan.

He sat up, snow falling off his parka. Turcotte opened his eyes, but all he could see was formless white. The pain, though, was still there.

His goggles were frozen over, he realized. He wasn't in Maine. Goggles, why was he wearing goggles? He reached up and fumbled, pulling them down. He was in a depression in the snow. The sky above was clear blue, the clearest he had ever seen. Beautiful. It reminded him of someplace in his past, someplace very safe, very home.

Duncan.

What was happening?

A form intruded on the bluest sky. A figure swaddled in Gore-Tex. It stepped over him and disappeared up the mountain.

Turcotte rolled his head back. Ice. Snow. Rock.

Duncan. The pain was worse than the cold. It brought him out of his desire to sleep, to fade away, to become part of the nothingness that the mountain was part of.

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The mountain.

Everest. He knew where he was. Sitting up again was the hardest thing he ever did.

He got to his feet. Mualama was about ten meters away, moving upslope. The last twenty-four hours with the archaeologist flooded over Turcotte. Mualama reminded him of a sphinx. Silent. Brooding. Waiting. Waiting for what, he wondered.

Lisa Duncan.

Turcotte turned toward the peak. He took a step. He saw that about two hundred feet above them the ridgeline steepened. Turcotte felt a shiver run up his back, not from the cold, but from the man ahead of him.

MOUNT ARARAT

The "elevator" in the strut had started slowly up the massive leg and then begun moving in a horizontal direction as near as Yakov could tell. The pace was incredibly slow, something he found strange for a piece of machinery associated with such a spectacle as the mothership. He had expected to be swiftly transported into the front of the mothership, but instead they seemed to be traversing the entire length of the ship at a snail's pace.

"Do you think there's a control panel that we don't see?" Major Briggs asked.

The walls of the room were smooth black with no visible markings, but Yakov remembered that the door to the room had been invisible on the strut.

"There might be," he acknowledged, "but I do not know how to access it, if there is one."

"We seem to be taking the—" Briggs began, but he shut up as the room came to a halt.

The three faced the door and were startled when the wall

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behind them opened. They spun about, weapons at the ready. An empty corridor beckoned, the walls made of the same black metal.

"Come," Yakov said as he stepped into the corridor. The American and Kurd followed. The corridor curved slightly to the left so he could only see about fifty feet ahead. The sound of his boots hitting the floor bounced off the walls. Yakov came to an abrupt halt as the corridor straightened out.

"Oh, man," Major Briggs muttered as he came up next to Yakov.

The corridor extended straight ahead, for what appeared to the length of the mothership. Close by they could see cross corridors.

"Where to now?" Briggs asked.

Yakov studied the sheet of paper. He couldn't read the rune markings, but he did find the corridor. "That way." He pointed down the corridor. "Thirty-eighth hall to the right."

VICINITY MIDWAY ISLAND

"According to the reports we have," Admiral Kenzie said, "they are going to have to turn off the shield when they launch their aircraft."

His senior air officer, the CAG, or Commander Air Group, considered that. "We'd have to be close by and act quickly."

Kenzie nodded. "It's our only shot to get at those ships."

They had the Alien Fleet positioned eight hundred air miles to the southeast according to the intelligence report radioed back by Seawolf. The news of the destruction of two alien submarines by the attack sub had raised morale a little, but everyone was also aware that the subs hadn't been shielded.

"I want half your planes in this initial assault. Launch in 269

five minutes. We hold half back just in case—" He didn't finish the sentence. No word had been heard from the Area 51 survivors and the messages coming out of Washington were garbled at best. "Get to it."

MOUNT EVEREST

The Kanshung Face extended to the SEALs' left and down over a mile. It had never been climbed for the simple reason it made absolutely no sense to climb it, as pretty much any other approach to Everest was less difficult. McGraw and Olivetti had taken the easiest route they could to get to the same height as their goal, and now they had about fifty meters of lateral traverse across a ledge near the top of the face to their objective.

McGraw put in the first piece of protection, hooked a rope through it, attached a sling from his harness to the rope, and set out onto the Face. When he put the second piece of protection in, Olivetti clipped into the rope and began following.

Lexina looked dispassionately at a body clad in ancient clothing lying in the snow. That humans, rogue Watchers, had climbed this high so long ago in their attempt to hide Excalibur, she found quite remarkable, but foolish. That no one had removed Excalibur in the millennia since it was hidden wasn't due to the efforts of these humans but rather the fact that the sword was so critical that any attempt by either side to recover it would have resulted in what was happening now: all-out war. And that had been avoided for one major reason—they had no idea what the status of the other war was.

Lexina could hear the Chinese climbers talking excitedly among themselves about the body, but she simply stepped over it. Aksu snapped out orders and the men fell silent,

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continuing along the ridge until they came to the edge of the Kanshung Face.

Lexina pointed out along the Face. "It is out there." Aksu nodded and edged out onto the Face, putting in protection.

Left. Right. Left. Right. Stop. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Left. Right. Left.

Right. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

The rhythm was like a drumbeat in Turcotte's head, propelling him up the ridgeline. A distant part of his mind knew he should be alert for ambush or another trip wire across the path cut in the snow that he was following, but a larger part almost wished a mine would explode in front of him and put him out of this miserable state of affairs.

He could barely see five feet in front of him because his head was bowed, his eyes focused on a spot just ahead of where his next step would be. Beyond that he dared not look or else he feared he would lose what little energy he had left.

Left. Right. Left—Turcotte paused, right foot lifted barely six inches, all he could manage. The trail disappeared, because the mountain disappeared. Ridgeline gave way to vertical face. Turcotte slowly lifted his head. A rope was clipped into the mountainside. Looking farther, he could see two figures edging their way along the rock face, attached to the other end of the rope. They were about fifty meters away and, even as he watched, the first one disappeared around a cornice of rock and ice.

Turcotte fumbled for his MP-5, bringing it up to his shoulder. The oxygen mask was in the way as he tried to sight the weapon. As he tried to unhook the mask, the second figure also went out of sight. He became aware that Mualama was just in front of him. Turcotte shifted the aim of the weapon toward the archaeologist's back and his gloved finger touched the trigger.

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Turcotte let the gun drop on its sling. Then he hooked into the rope and moved out onto the Kanshung Face following Mualama.

MOUNT ARARAT

The first Chinese commandos into the cavern were cut down by well-disciplined bursts of fire from the Delta Force men. It was a massacre and over a dozen Chinese lay dead in the entrance.

Then the first Kortad entered, spear leveled under its arm. Bullets hit the black armor, ricocheting off. As each Delta man shot at it, the Kortad would shift the point of the spear and fire a golden pulse. The flash of gold would hit the American soldier, briefly envelop him, and then he would drop, unconscious.

It was over in less than twenty seconds.

The rest of the Kortad entered and the rock floor flowed with blood as they decapitated the unconscious men. The surviving Chinese forces took up defensive positions.