Area 51: The Sphinx-4 (23 page)

"I think there is more to this than simple revenge," Turcotte said. "Where would this device be?"

Yakov ticked off tunnels, reading the sign over each. "Scientific staff lodging. Mess hall. Communications. Research. Engineering. Power. Storage." He headed for the last one, Turcotte and Katyenka following.

They walked fifty meters down a stone corridor. It ended in a vault door that was standing wide open, the body of a guard draped across the threshold.

They went through the entrance. The chamber beyond was over eight hundred meters long, with alcoves cut into either side every ten meters or so, depending on

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what was inside. The alcoves ranged in size from a few meters wide and high to several that were over a hundred meters deep by fifty high.

Yakov was reading the placards above each. He began heading down the central corridor, looking left and right. Turcotte followed. Yakov stopped at one of the smaller alcoves farther on the left. "It was here."

He was pointing at a table that held an empty frame.

"So that's how Lexina got control of the talon and that's why they attacked here," Turcotte said. "Her people took the artifact you had. We've failed. I hope Duncan is having better luck than we are. We need that key now." Turcotte had continued past and paused at one of the small alcoves. It was blocked off by a dark glass wall.

"What's in there?"

Yakov looked at the plaque. "All it says is: 'Recovered from subcellar, Reich Research, Aviation Ministry, Berlin, 30 April 1945.' " He touched the glass.

"It's warm." He looked around and saw a switch. "Here, let's see."

The tank was backlit, rays of light streaming through the greenish liquid that filled the tank. And floating inside were a half-dozen objects.

Turcotte stepped back involuntarily. "What is that?"

Five of the objects were six feet long by about twelve inches thick at one end, tapering to what looked like three six-inch-long-by-inch-thick projections that formed a strange tripod at the other end. These were grayish blue in color.

The sixth object was a ball, yellowish, about three feet in diameter. On the side that Turcotte could see there were, evenly spaced about six inches apart, slits about four inches long. There was also a bump, about four inches high here and there on the ball, with a fold of the yellow material on the bump. The ball—and the other objects—was floating in the green

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liquid, which seemed to be circulating very slowly, moving them ever so slightly.

"Oh my God!" Turcotte exclaimed as the ball rolled and one of the slits appeared—this one open. A dark black eye peered at the glass.

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D- 27 Hours, 30 Minutes

Larry Kincaid had worked around scientists all his life and was a scientist himself, but he had little patience for the intellectual type whose specialty was so narrow they couldn't program their VCR. The scientist in front of him was one of those, and Kincaid had to force himself to try to figure out what the man was trying to say as he babbled at the mouth.

Joe Forrester was a NASA specialist and the head of the Hubble Telescope division. Forrester fit the NASA geek stereotype to a T, even to the extent of the pocket protector holding his pens and the sophisticated calculator behind the protector. His wire-rimmed glasses held thick lenses, and Kincaid found himself disoriented every time he tried to look the man in the eyes.

Kincaid was one of the few left at JPL and NASA from the early, exciting days of the space program. He wasn't a specialist, but a jack-of-all-trades. He had been mission head for all Mars launches, a job that had thrust him into the spotlight when the Airlia base on Mars had been uncovered in the Cydonia region.

He'd brought Forrester to Area 51 to coordinate surveillance on the Airlia base on Mars.

"Hubble is capable of tracking moving targets with the same precision as for fixed targets." Forrester spoke as he typed into his laptop, which was hooked into the secure Department of Defense Interlink. "The images you had of Mars before were just snapshots taken by the Hubble's FOC—faint object camera."

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Kincaid had dealt with men like this for decades, so he knew enough to just let Forrester talk as he worked.

"To track a moving object in our solar system we maintain a FGS—fine guidance sensor—fine lock on guide stars, and drive the FGS star sensors in the appropriate path, thus moving Hubble to track the target. Tracking under FGS

control is technically possible for apparent target motions up to five arcsec."

Forrester looked up. "That is how we were initially able to follow the talon fleet as it came toward Earth.

"However, as happened in that case, this technique becomes unfeasible for targets moving more than a few tenths of an arcsec. What we do then is begin observations under FGS control and then switch over to gyros when the guide stars have moved out of the FGS field of view. If sufficient guide stars are available, it is possible to 'hand off from one pair to another, but this will typically incur an additional pointing error."

With great difficulty, Kincaid still said nothing.

"Targets moving too fast for FGS control, but slower than seven point eight arcsec, can be observed under gyro control, with a loss in precision that depends on the length of the observation."

"Can you see Mars?" Kincaid finally asked.

"We've always been able to see Mars," Forrester said. "What you want is to see it with the full capabilities of Hubble, and I'm trying to explain to you what is needed to accomplish that." Forrester continued without missing a beat. "The track for a moving target such as Mars is derived from its orbital elements.

Orbital elements for all of the planets and most of their satellites are available at STScl. Moreover, STScl has access to the ASTCOM database, maintained by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory—which you have so kindly provided me with through the Interlink—which includes orbital elements for Mars."

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Forrester hit a key. "And thus we can get a tight shot, with the best that Hubble has to offer, of the target area in the Cydonia region you gave me. Much better resolution than we had before."

Kincaid stared over the man's shoulder as pixels changed color on the screen and a picture began to appear.

The most noticeable thing that became coherent in the image was the bright reflection from the large solar array from the open "pyramid." It was still intact, no damage from the nuclear explosion apparent. The "Fort" where the talons had taken off from also became visible, the roof still open, the interior empty.

"At least they have no backup ships," Kincaid muttered.

The "Face" on Mars, a massive structure two and a half kilometers long by two kilometers wide, and over four hundred meters high, appeared next.

"I wonder what that thing is," Kincaid said.

"We've taken quite a few shots of the so-called Face," Forrester said. "To those pictures we've applied bit-error correction, reseau removal, and brightness alteration. Then we've projected the images to a standard Mercator view. Two things we didn't do that had been done with the previous photos of the Cydonia region—and which caused much of the controversy whether there was an actual 'face'—were contrast/brightness enhancement and image sharpening. The reason we didn't do those is that using those techniques would create different images, depending on the monitor on which they were viewed, and NASA didn't want to get embroiled in the controversy.

"Another problem with much of the earlier imaging was the problem of accounting for shading. For example, light on one side of a slope can greatly distort the image of a hill. To account for this, we use a technique called

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shape-from-shading. We have even been able to project images of the Cydonia region so that it appears as if you are viewing it from a ground-level view."

Kincaid waited, still not having received an answer. He often wondered about these men who called themselves scientists—to Kincaid they were technicians, experts at their field of study but with little interest in fields outside their own, and worse, little imagination.

The image of a "face" on Mars had been noted as far back as the 1970s, when the first Viking orbiter had taken pictures. The fact that NASA had never investigated the strange anomaly further until now and called it a natural phenomenon Kincaid knew lay with the influence of STAAR.

"So what is it?"

"Here." Forrester turned his laptop so Kincaid could see the screen.

"Looks like a bunch of rubble," Kincaid said.

"It is," Forrester said.

"Rubble of what?"

"We have no idea."

"Can you print me a copy?" Kincaid asked.

"Certainly." Forrester hit the enter key on his laptop. The printer hummed and a piece of paper rolled out. Kincaid looked at it. Something wasn't quite right.

He grabbed a magnifying glass and studied the image. He pulled open a file folder and retrieved an image of the same area made by Surveyor before it was destroyed. He put the two side by side and began comparing them.

"What the hell is that?"

There was something in the new image, to the side of the solar panels and Fort, in the direction of the Face. It wasn't there in the earlier Surveyor picture. It could be an equipment problem, but Kincaid had a feeling it wasn't.

"Can you get a better image of this spot?" Kincaid

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asked, pointing to the small, darker-colored area that disturbed him.

"I can try different spectrums," the scientist said. "Also, we'll get some slightly different angles due to Hubble's and Mars' relative positions changing.

Not much, but some." He typed in some commands. "By the way, you were quite correct about the Face."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, it's not a face carved into the surface, as many UFOlogists wanted to believe. But it's not natural either. It does indeed appear to be rubble. As best we can determine, there was a larger structure or mountain there and it was severely damaged."

"By what?"

"We don't know. There doesn't appear to be any volcanic activity in the region, so perhaps an earthquake?"

"Or maybe the Airlia?" Kincaid didn't wait for an answer. "Any idea at all what was there originally?"

"No."

Another piece of paper came out of the printer. The black smear was still present.

"How large is this black area?" Kincaid asked.

The scientist looked at it, then pulled out a clear plastic rectangle with various measurements on it. He measured, then punched into a calculator.

"About five hundred meters long by sixty wide."

"Any idea what it is?"

"No, but it appears to be moving." Forrester pulled a picture out of his briefcase. "This is imagery from last week. Notice the change in location.

Appears to be moving from the Fort area toward the Face."

Kincaid tapped the photo. "Keep Hubble on that site."

Forester looked as if Kincaid had just asked him to commit a felony. "Hubble's time has been locked in for over two years. Taking it off-line like that—well, there's

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going to be a lot of very upset—" The scientist paused when he saw the look on Kincaid's face.

Kincaid returned his attention to the imagery for several seconds, deep in thought. What the hell were the Airlia doing? What had been where the Face was now? And what had destroyed that object, whatever it was? And why were the Airlia sending something across the surface toward it? And what were they sending?

Kincaid reached into a drawer and pulled out a handful of ibuprofen and popped them into his mouth, washing the painkillers down with coffee, hoping it would help with the raging headache these pictures had incited.

He looked up as another of his specialists entered the Cube. This one did not look like the scientist geek; he sported a Fu Manchu mustache, his long hair was tied in a ponytail, and he wore torn jeans and a black T-shirt.

"Give me some good news, Gordon." Kincaid had taken over all scientific aspects of the Airlia investigation for Major Quinn. The newcomer was the computer expert into whose care the STAAR hard drives from Scorpion Base that Turcotte had recovered had been entrusted. The drives had been hastily wiped clean as STAAR abandoned the base, but Gordon was trying to recover the "shadow"

of the information that was on them. The major problem he'd run into was that it seemed STAAR had also been trying to recover lost information, so they were two steps removed from what they wanted.

"We're still tracking keywords according to Dr. Duncan's instructions—Key, The Mission, and Ark." Mike Gordon sat down across from Kincaid and rubbed his hands across his eyes.

"Anything?"

"Nothing on those words."

"What do you have?"

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"That name of the Guide from the Inquisition— Domeka—we've found it again in a couple of places." Kincaid held out his hand. "Give me what you have." Gordon handed over a file. Kincaid pointed a finger. "Get back to work."

STANTSIYA CHYORT

(RUSSIAN AREA 51),

NOVAYA ZEMLYA ISLAND

D-27 Hours, 30 Minutes

"It's dead." Yakov tapped the glass, as one would the side of an aquarium to get the fishes' attention.

"What is it?"

Katyenka had turned on the small computer terminal at the base of the tank.

The screen glowed with Cyrillic writing. "It says here it is called Otdel Rukopashnyi."

"What does that mean?" Turcotte asked.

Katyenka translated. "Literally that means 'sections of hands.' They shortened that here to Okpashnyi. According to what I'm reading, they had no idea what it is."

"I heard nothing of this being found," Yakov said.

Katyenka had scrolled down. "As you noted, it was recovered at the end of the Great Patriotic War from the rubble of Berlin."

"Ah," Yakov said. "That makes sense. As I told you earlier, Section Four began during the war, when our aircraft encountered what you call foo fighters. But we had no idea of the scope of what we were dealing with, until we found what the Germans had."