Area 51: The Sphinx-4 (15 page)

Now she was seeing something new from the guardian's memory, a vision stunning in its size and realism:

The pyramids of the Giza Plateau gleamed in the early-morning light, the rising sun reflecting off the polished limestone casings. Kelly had been to Egypt and seen the current state of the pyramids, but there was no comparing the present weathered, stripped hulks to these beautifully crafted masterpieces.

Dazzled by the perfectly smooth sides of the pyramids, it took Kelly a little while to notice other startling differences from the relics she had personally witnessed to what she was "seeing" now.

At the very top of the Great Pyramid a capstone added thirty-one feet, bringing it over five hundred feet high above the surrounding sands. The capstone itself was unique. Not made of limestone, it was of a black metal. The very top—

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about four feet on each side, ending in an exact point—was a glowing, dark red and reminded Kelly of the ruby sphere that Turcotte and Duncan had recovered in a cavern in the Great Rift in Africa.

She tried to sort through her memories, feeling the intrusion of the guardian. Nabinger had postulated that the smooth, flat sides of the Great Pyramid had been designed to give a significant radar signature into space. But the small red pyramid at the top suggested something else.

She saw something else that was different. The Great Sphinx.

It was all black, with burning red eyes. Crouched on the desert floor in front of the three shining pyramids on the Giza Plateau like—

A bolt of pain seared through Kelly's mind, shattering the vision.

Kelly's body vibrated against the side of the guardian, spasming from the pain. The only part that didn't move was the metal probe into the base of her skull, the source of the agony.

After a minute the spasming subsided, her body slumped like a rag doll, the brain retreating into the deep inner core and hiding, no longer seeking out images.

AREA 51, NEVADA D - 41 Hours

Major Quinn took the cigarette Larry Kincaid offered and slumped down in one of the leather chairs around the Area 51 conference table. He noted the photos spread out in front of the scientist. "What do you have?" "Imagery the Department of Defense just took of Stratzyda using a KH-14 spy satellite." He handed Quinn one of .the pictures.

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Stratzyda was a long black cylinder drifting against a backdrop of stars. The hammer-and-sickle insignia painted in red on the side of the long cylinder was a throwback to a time when the world stood on the edge of destruction by divisive human hands.

"Where is it?" Quinn asked.

"A free polar orbit."

"And it's been up there for years and we never did anything about it?"

"First," Kincaid said, "the Russians said it was a test platform in preparation for launching Mir. The intelligence guys might have suspected something, but they couldn't be sure. Then the Russians said it was no longer functional after a year or so. What did you want us to do? Go up and park a shuttle next to it and check it out? You know how many things are in orbit? Or would you have preferred we shoot it down? That would have been illegal and started a war in space and probably on Earth, too."

"Will the warheads still work?" Quinn asked.

"Some have probably degraded and are no longer functional, but I suspect more than half will still detonate upon deployment. Knowing the Russians, they built the simplest—and dirtiest—possible weapon with very few parts to break down. And it's in the vacuum of space."

"What exactly is a cobalt bomb?"

"It's a nuke that has a thick cobalt metal blanket wrapped around the core.

The cobalt is used to capture the fusion neutrons to maximize the fallout hazard from the weapon—the nuke guys call this 'salting' the bomb. Instead of generating additional explosive force from fast fission of the U-238, the cobalt is transmuted into Co-60—natural cobalt consists entirely of Co-59. Cobalt 60

has a half-life of five point two six years and produces energetic, very penetrating gamma rays." Kincaid paused

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to see if Quinn was following this technical explanation before he continued.

"The Co-60 fallout hazard is greater than the fission products from a U-238

blanket because most fission-produced isotopes have half-lives that are very short, and thus decay before the fallout settles or can be protected against by short-term sheltering. Also, other fission-produced isotopes which have very long half-lives do not produce very intense radiation. The half-life of Co-60, on the other hand, is long enough to settle out before significant decay has occurred, and to make it impractical to wait out in shelters, yet is short enough that intense radiation is produced. In terms of the people who are in the fallout area, it's the worst of both effects. And although the threat is greatest for the United States from this"—he tapped the photo of Stratzyda—"in reality I think it might be a doomsday device for the entire planet, since no one really knows what will happen."

"But if the bombs go off only over the States, how can it destroy the rest of the world?" Quinn asked.

"The idea for a cobalt bomb originated with Leo Szilard, who theorized such a thing in 1950 to point out that it would be possible in principle to build a weapon that could kill everybody on Earth. To design such a theoretical weapon, he needed a radioactive isotope that could be dispersed worldwide before it decayed. Such dispersal through the atmosphere takes months, perhaps even years, so the half-life of cobalt 60 was the ideal choice. At detonation, gamma radiation from an equivalent-size normal fission-fusion-fission bomb is much more intense than Co-60: fifteen thousand times more intense at one hour; thirty-five times more intense at one week; five times more intense at one month; and about equal at six months. Thereafter fission drops off rapidly, so that Co-60 fallout is eight times more intense than fission at one

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year and one hundred and fifty times more intense at five years.

"We thought no one had ever really developed a cobalt bomb because its effects weren't really useful—in terms of military objectives, that is. We also thought no one had ever built one or tested one, never mind deployed them. Then again, the Russians never thought we'd put a functional laser weapon in space, either. We sure managed to fool each other, didn't we?"

"These bombs hit the States, the entire continent will be uninhabitable for decades." Kincaid lit another cigarette. "Makes me glad I didn't quit smoking."

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VICINITY EASTER ISLAND D- 41 Hours

"What's the status of the Springfield'?" Duncan asked. She felt a depressing sense of deja vu. She had been here before, in exactly this same place, prepared to watch almost exactly the same thing occur. She was a firm believer in the adage that doing the same thing would produce the same results. Unfortunately, she had found over the years, working within the government bureaucracy, that few others thought the same way. The President had asked her to be present for the latest attempt to penetrate the shield around Easter Island at the conclusion of the conference call. His concern had been not so much the actual attempt but rather for her to gauge the mood of the military on blockade duty, to see how close they were to violating orders and attacking the island.

Her conference call with the National Security Council had yielded little.

There was even disagreement that the threat from Stratzyda was real, despite the example set by Lexina through Warfighter. The only agreement was that word of Stratzyda not be leaked. Even the cause of the explosion of Atlantis was being kept under wraps, with a cover story of a one-in-a-million catastrophic lightning strike during rollout being fed to the media.

The President had been in contact with the Russian president, who had vehemently denied that Stratzyda was what Yakov claimed. He stuck to the old cover story of its being an experimental platform for Mir.

Lies fighting lies, Duncan thought to herself. She was

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beginning to understand how easy it had been for the alien groups to manipulate mankind when truth was such an ephemeral ideal.

Admiral Poldan, the commander of the task force, was seated in a black leather chair that was elevated so that he could oversee all that was happening in the combat control center, deep inside the island bridge of the USS Washington. He turned slightly in his chair to look at Duncan, and his gaze was not kind. Since arriving on board the aircraft carrier via bouncer flight from Area 51, Duncan had received a chilly reception from the military personnel who manned the ship.

She had also found that to be the norm. Anyone not in uniform among a large group of others who did wear one, was bound to be looked at strangely. The Navy found it convenient to blame her for the loss of the Pasadena, destroyed by the foo fighters, and the entrapment of the Springfield. Even more than that, they were angry over having their hands tied, unable to strike back with all the numerous weapons at their command.

The Washington was one of the most modern ships in the Navy, a Nimitz-class carrier that cost over three billion dollars to build, the most expensive weapons system in the world. It was the core of Task Force 78, surrounded by two guided missile cruisers, three destroyers, two frigates, and two supply ships.

The Washington carried the task force's most powerful punch in the form of its flight wing: one squadron (12) of Grumman F-14 Tomcats, three squadrons (36) of McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornets, four Grumman EA-2C Hawkeye surveillance aircraft, ten Lockheed S-3B Vikings, six Sikorsky SH-60B Seahawk helicopters, and six EA-6B Prowlers.

And all that power had been doing for the past few days was steaming in a circle twenty miles away from Easter Island.

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"She's on the bottom, not moving," Poldan said gruffly. "No change there. No change here. We're just wasting time."

"What change would you like to see?" Duncan asked.

"I say we hit the island with everything we have."

"Including nuclear weapons?"

"Including nukes," Poldan confirmed. "The Secretary of Defense agreed with me just this morning."

"And he was assassinated on his way to tell the President that," Duncan noted.

"All the more reason to blast this rock out of the ocean."

"You received the imagery from China. Firing a nuclear weapon at Qian-Ling didn't do much."

"Nuking the foo fighter base worked," Poldan countered.

"Did it?" Duncan asked. "Then where did the foo fighters that are covering the Springfield come from? And the foo fighter base probably didn't have a guardian computer and shield." She wondered how he would react if he knew the threat from Stratzyda.

Poldan ignored her, turning his attention to the operations center, and gave orders, preparing the carrier to launch the latest attempt to see beyond the shield.

Duncan stepped closer to his chair and lowered her voice so only he could hear. "Admiral, do you think this is smart?"

A muscle in the admiral's jaw quivered. "Lady, you have the clearance to be here and you have presidential authority, but I have approval from the National Security Council, which the President also heads."

"I'm not ordering you to stop," Duncan said. "I'm just asking you to think about it. What makes you think this will be any more successful than your attempt under the water with Sea Eye?"

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"Global Hawk is unmanned," Poldan said. "It fails, we lose nothing but a piece of equipment."

"Admiral, I think that—"

"I allowed you to try to contact Kelly Reynolds," Poldan countered. "You've received no response. Now we try it my way." Poldan turned to an officer seated at a console in the front of the operations center. "Do we have a link with Global Hawk?"

"Yes, sir."

"Assume control."

Global Hawk had been developed by Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical and Raytheon E-Systems to fit a very specific requirement proposed by the Department of Defense. The need was for what was called in military procurement jargon a HAE

UAV: high altitude endurance, unmanned aerial vehicle.

It was shaped like the famous U-2 spy plane, except slightly smaller and having no need for the cockpit since it was flown remotely by a pilot or computer on the ground. Long black wings stretched almost 120 feet, with a thin body, all painted flat black. A pod in the bottom held the imaging gear, controlled by a central computer. A jet engine gave the aircraft power.

Global Hawk was currently at sixty thousand feet and descending rapidly. Speed was relatively slow, about 120 knots. The long, wide wings gave the aircraft plenty of lift and the small jet engine had to put out little thrust to keep the vehicle moving. It had been launched from Edwards Air Force Base in California the previous day and had been controlled via satellite link from Edwards, directed to fly toward Easter Island.

As it got closer to Easter Island, the satellite link with Edwards was cut and it entered a glide path that had been determined by the computer. The jet engine cut off

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and it swooped down, heading for the dark gray clouds below and the island hidden underneath them.

"See those four lines that center up?" The officer who had answered Poldan inclined his head at the screen. "That's the glide path."

As far as Duncan could tell, the lines did little good, as the entire screen was filled with gray cloud. The pilot was sitting in a padded chair, surrounded by flight instrumentation and computer screens. Directly in front of him, a joystick, such as Duncan remembered her son using for computer games, rested on a small platform. The pilot's right hand was wrapped around the stick.

"I'm ready to fly it by keeping the small red figure that represents Global Hawk centered on those lines, which are projected by the computer using a satellite uplink to a global positioning satellite." He reached forward and flipped a switch with his free hand. The gray was gone. A black bubble on a blue field filled the screen. "We're looking forward now from the Global Hawk using a thermal imager. That's the shield surrounding the island. The blue is the ocean surface outside of the shield."