Area 51: The Sphinx-4 (20 page)

Major Greene looked up at the status board. Red digits were clicking down from six minutes, ten seconds.

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"Ten seconds to launch," she announced. "On my three, turn to launch initiation."

"On your command," Linton echoed.

She watched the number pass through six minutes, five seconds, and her fingers tightened on the key.

Traveling at the speed of light, the laser from Warfighter hit the rocket. The laser cut through the missile, destroying vital components.

Inside the LCC, Greene and Linton caught a glimpse of the laser beam on one of their video screens. Their control board screamed red lights and Klaxons wailed.

"Turn!" Greene yelled.

They both twisted the key to initiate launch. Silence greeted their efforts.

For a few seconds Greene and Linton sat absolutely still, looking at each other through the thick glass that separated them. Greene was the first to react. She quickly unbuckled her seat belt, snatching a small radio headset off the side of the console. She glanced at the timer, which was passing through five minutes, fifty seconds.

Greene ran to a hatch on the side of the LCC, punching in her access code.

Slowly the heavy steel door swung open. Before going into the tunnel that beckoned, she turned to Linton. "Shut the silo doors." She put the headset on.

"I'll be on channel one."

Linton nodded, and Greene was gone, sprinting down the tunnel that linked the LCC with the Interdictor silo. The sound of her boots echoed off the reinforced concrete walls of the tunnel and another steel door a hundred meters in front of her and rapidly coming closer as she picked up the pace, her mind counting off the seconds, estimating she now had less than five minutes.

She reached the door and punched in her code. The door slowly opened, and Greene slithered through as

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soon as there was enough room. She was at the midpoint of the silo, the bulk of the rocket directly in front of her, five feet away. She turned and closed the hatch behind her, then began climbing up toward the bright daylight above her head.

Inside the LCC, Linton typed in the command for the massive doors to close.

Greene climbed as fast as she could, but it took a precious minute for her to reach the top gantry, which led to the nosecone. She paused for a second as a shadow cut across the silo. The doors were coming down, blocking off the daylight.

She edged out onto the narrow gantry to the access panel for the nosecone.

Using an Allen wrench from her harness, she furiously began unbolting the panel, seconds ticking away.

With a solid thud the doors shut, leaving her trapped inside with the missile.

The earpiece came alive with Linton's voice. "Two minutes, thirty seconds."

There were six hex nuts to remove, and she had two out. She scraped her hand, drawing blood, but didn't notice any pain. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion.

"Two minutes," Linton announced.

She had two more nuts out. As she worked, she mentally ran through the procedure for disabling the timer. In training she had done it in twenty-two seconds. The fifth nut was out.

"One minute, thirty seconds."

She put the Allen wrench into the sixth hex nut. She twisted, but it didn't budge. Greene cursed, putting more pressure on the wrench, feeling the pain as the metal dug into her fingers. Nothing. She paused and took a deep breath.

"One minute."

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"Come on, come on," Greene whispered as she torqued the wrench. With a slight pop, the wrench broke in two, a piece of it still stuck in the hex nut. Greene stared at the piece in her hand in disbelief. A simple, dollar-ninety-nine piece of metal.

"Thirty seconds!" Linton's voice had an edge of hysteria.

Greene clawed at the broken piece, trying to get it out of the nut.

"Twenty seconds!"

A fingernail ripped off and she didn't even notice. A part of her mind knew it was too late.

"Ten seconds! Are you in?" Linton's voice was loud in her ear. She took off the headset, wanting one last moment of silence.

Greene slumped back, sitting on the metal gantry. She looked down at her bloody hands and the broken piece of metal. She closed her eyes and unconsciously hunched forward, as if preparing for a strong wind.

The missile, silo, and Greene were vaporized. The LCC, two hundred meters away, was destroyed by the shock wave radiating out. The thick twenty-ton surface doors to the silo were blown into the air and were found half a mile away, but they did help contain some of the blast. A hundred-meter-wide crater, over sixty meters deep, was all that remained where the silo had been.

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DAR ES SALAAM, TANZANIA

D- 34 Hours, 30 Minutes

Six hundred pounds of Semtex, a Czech-made plastic explosive, welded to the body of a water tanker truck, had formed the bomb that destroyed the United States Embassy in Dar es Salaam in 1998. Colonel Nakibsu Balele, an officer in the Tanzanian army, had overseen the import of the explosive from a source in the Middle East and personally wired the fuses into the plastique once it was in place on the truck.

That the blast killed only eleven he saw as something of a failure, but whether the goal of the person who had hired him was achieved was not important.

The key thing was that he had been paid quite well.

While still a junior major he had been given a cellular phone by a strange man along with a bundle of money. How the man had selected him, Balele never knew.

The money was to carry the phone with him at all times, the man had explained.

There would be more money, much more, if he followed the instructions relayed by whoever was on the other end when it rang. Balele had not asked what would happen if he didn't answer the phone or follow the orders—he was not that naive.

The man had scared him more than anyone else he had ever met. Balele had heard whispers of the man, a figure revered in the terrorist world of the Middle East who went by the name Al-Iblis.

The phone had rung only once in the four years since he was given it, with instructions to pick up the Semtex,

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wire it, and arrange for the driver to take the bomb to the embassy.

The Americans had blamed Bin Laden, an Afghani, for the embassy attack in Dar es Salaam and Kenya, which was fine with Balele as it kept him in the clear.

Now, as he sat in his office, reviewing training records, the cell phone rang for the second time.

NGORONGORO CRATER, TANZANIA D - 33 Hours

Professor Mualama and Lago stared in fascination as the disk silently flew into the crater. It was thirty feet wide at the base, sloping up to a small rounded top. The skin of the bouncer was silver and perfectly smooth, without a single seam to be seen. The only thing that marred the perfection of the alien craft were the bright red cargo straps that were wrapped over the rim of the disk.

The craft came to a halt near their position, then came straight down, lightly touching the ground. A hatch opened in the top side and a woman climbed out.

"Good day!" Mualama greeted her.

"Good day, Professor Mualama. I'm Dr. Lisa Duncan from UNAOC." She looked toward the pit and the objects on the ground next to the hole. "Is that what you called us about?"

"Yes."

Mualama and Lago led her over to the coffin and tomb marker. The top was closed, and the long black tube appeared unmarked by time.

"What is it?" Duncan asked.

Mualama answered that by opening the top, revealing the skeleton inside.

"An Airlia!" Duncan knelt down next to the coffin and examined the corpse before turning to the red stone. "What about the marker? Can you read it?"

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"Some of it," Mualama said. "I was hoping that with your access to Professor Nabinger's notes, we could decipher the entire message."

"We have accumulated a limited high rune symbolic vocabulary at UNAOC,"

Duncan said. "But critical parts of Professor Nabinger's notes were lost when he was killed in China. Nabinger was onto something, some way of understanding it beyond the symbols, but whatever that was died with him and he never had the time to tell anyone. He also had the largest high rune database on the face of the planet, and that went down in that helicopter in China with him."

"He made no copies?" Mualama was surprised.

"None that we've found." Duncan stood up. "We're backtracking, looking where he looked, and we've gathered a large amount of information." She pointed down.

"This will help."

"With what you do have," Mualama said, "can you make anything of this?"

"That will take some time," Duncan said. "We'll have to take all this back with us."

"This is an archaeological site, protected by the laws of Tanzania," Mualama said.

Duncan arched an eyebrow. "Have you heard what happened in South America with the Black Death?"

"Yes, but I don't see what that has to do with this," Mualama said.

"It's war," Duncan said. "And any piece of information is important. We don't know much about these Airlia, and this"—she pointed at the skeleton in the coffin— "is the first true Airlia body we've gotten our hands on. Examining it could help us greatly in our struggle."

Mualama nodded. "I am willing to give you what I have found if you give me access to whatever notes of Nabinger's you have."

"What we really need," Duncan said, "is a key."

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"A key?" Mualama repeated.

"The key to the lowest level of the tomb of Qian-Ling."

"Qian-Ling is in China," Mualama noted. "Why would there be a key for that here?"

"Because it's Airlia!" Duncan was frustrated, her hope crushed. "Who knows where all their artifacts are now."

"I think that . . ." Mualama paused and cocked his head.

"What is it?" Duncan asked.

Mualama held up a hand, hushing her as he slowly turned in a circle. He stopped, facing southeast. "Someone is coming."

Colonel Balele saw the bouncer on the floor of Ngorongoro Crater first. He had seen pictures of the alien craft on TV, but to see one here, now, gave him a moment's pause as the Hind-D helicopter he was on swooped over the rim of the crater toward the craft. The voice on the other end of the phone had told him to interdict removal of an artifact from the crater and to kill all involved.

The voice had also promised one million dollars U.S. if he achieved this goal—more than enough for him to leave Tanzania and retire in style. Also in the message he had read the implicit threat: fail and be killed.

"Sir?" The pilot of the Hind was looking over his shoulder at the colonel.

Balele was standing in the small opening that led to the rear of the chopper, where six armed infantrymen from Balele's command sat.

"Destroy the craft and the people."

The pilot nodded.

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Mualama shaded his eyes. "It's a helicopter with army markings."

"I think we'd better get out of here," Duncan suggested.

"If we leave this"—Mualama pointed at the stone and coffin—"they will impound it or, worse, destroy it."

"We have no weapons," Duncan said. "The bouncer is unarmed."

The decision was made for them as the 12.7 mm machine gun in the nose of the helicopter cut loose. The burst hit Lago, the large-caliber bullets knocking his body to the ground and then, in a grotesque dance, pushing it along the dirt, shredding flesh and bone.

"Nephew!" Mualama headed toward the body, when Duncan grabbed his arm.

"He's dead! With me!" She pulled him toward the coffin.

Mualama rolled into the coffin, Duncan on top of him. She pulled shut the lid—just in time, as the metal reverberated with the impact of the bullets.

The copilot of the Hind armed both outer Spiral antitank missiles. He received a lock-on confirmation from his sight on the grounded bouncer.

"Firing one," he announced. Immediately he hit the missile fire lever again.

"Firing two."

As both missiles streaked toward their target, the pilot fired another burst from the nose-mounted machine gun at the long black pod.

Hanging on to the door frame between the pilots, Balele watched both missiles impact on the alien craft. A cloud of dirt and debris obscured the target area.

"Land us next to that black thing," Balele ordered. "We will . . ." He paused as something blinded him. He blinked, and in that time period the unscathed bouncer had halved the distance between the two craft.

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"Evade!" was all Balele had time to scream before the forward edge of the saucer-shaped craft sliced into the front windshield of the Hind. The chopper's blades splintered off as they hit the alien metal, and in less than a second the helicopter was cut in half, both parts falling like so much deadweight the three hundred feet to the ground.

Duncan heard the explosions, then seconds later the sound of something heavy hitting the ground nearby and secondary explosions. She felt Mualama below her, the top of the coffin pressing against her back, her eyes seeing nothing but absolute darkness.

"Is there a way to open this from the inside?" she asked.

"I've never been inside before," Mualama replied in a subdued voice, "so I regret to inform you that I do not know."

Duncan reached around Mualama, feeling the bottom of the coffin. She arched her back, pressing against the top, but the metal was unyielding. "This is not good."

"It is better than what happened to my nephew," Mualama said sharply.

The sudden release of pressure on her back was not as surprising as the sunlight that momentarily blinded Duncan. She rolled on her side and blinked.

"Ma'am, I think we'd better get the heck out of here." Major Lewis held the lid up and offered her a hand.

Duncan climbed out of the coffin, noting the burning wreckage of the helicopter and the unmarked bouncer.

She stepped aside as Mualama pulled himself out. The tall African straightened and then gave a slight hiss of pain and doubled over.

"What's wrong?" Duncan asked.

Mualama pointed toward his back.