Area 51: The Sphinx-4 (5 page)

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background. His short black hair was sprinkled with premature gray.

He turned and looked back at the Pool, the lines around his dark eyes creasing as the sun hit them. "I thought what happened in Germany when I helped stop the IRA terrorists was as bad as it was going to get—"

"Mike, it wasn't your fault innocent civilians were killed," Duncan interrupted.

"You did the best you could."

"Did I?" Turcotte asked. He didn't wait for an answer. "I really considered quitting, resigning my commission. But I didn't have time to think too long, because right after that happened you sent me to Area 51. And I've been on the move ever since." He pointed to the sky. "I've even gone into space, when I stopped die alien fleet of talon spacecraft" He looked down at Duncan. "I'm not sure how much further I can keep expanding my horizons."

'Come on, Mike." Duncan took his arm and turned him back toward the monument.

She led him up the stairs and through the Doric columns that lined the monument—one for each state in the country, both north and south, at the time of the president's death—halting just in front of the nineteen-foot-high statue of the seated Lincoln.

"When Hived in- Washington, 1 always came here when I needed to think," Duncan said. She nodded up at the statue. "He was a very smart man, perhaps the most brilliant mind this country has ever had. He used his brainpower, not like Einstein in the physical sciences, but on the more complex problems of people.

He saw tins country through a civil war and led it to a point where the two sides could even reconcile after his assassination. Every issue he dealt with was multifaceted, with no absolutes. The only thing he had going for him was his beliefs. That's how he made decisions."

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Lisa Duncan was slightly over five feet tall and slender. Her dark hair was cut short and her face pale with fatigue and stress. She pointed to the inscription carved on the south wall. "There's the Gettysburg Address. Given in November 1863, five months after that momentous battle, where there were over sixty thousand casualties—all of them Americans. Imagine the weight of that on your shoulders.

"At the dedication ceremony for the National Cemetery for many of those dead, the keynote speaker talked for over two hours. Lincoln followed him and spoke for less than two minutes. It was perhaps the greatest speech ever given. He cut to the essence of what the battle was about and what the future needed.

"We have to do the same thing," she said. "We have to make sure all those who have died so far in this struggle have not done so in vain. From Peter Nabinger and Colonel Kostanov in China, the crew of the Pasadena off Easter Island, to the people of Vilhena in the Amazon rain forest. And the untold millions over the centuries who have been victims of these aliens and their minions."

"A lot of Americans died after Lincoln made that speech," Turcotte noted.

"Always the optimist," Duncan said.

"It's my job."

"It's your nature."

"I've read a lot about the Civil War," Turcotte said. "It always fascinated me—the bloodiest war in American history was the one where we fought each other.

And we're not even clear who the enemy is in this war we're engaged in."

Duncan placed her hand on the stone wall. "I'm afraid more people are going to die before this is over. We have to take to heart Lincoln's last line of the address, 'that the dead have not have died in vain,' but

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even more important, the last eight words. Literally." She ran her hand along the words she had indicated. Turcotte looked at the bottom of the inscription: THE PEOPLE SHALL NOT PERISH FROM THE EARTH.

"That's what it's about. Majestic-12 trying to fly the mothership reignited the smoldering remnants of the millennia-old war between the Guides and The Ones Who Wait Aspasia came at us with the fleet from his base on Mars, and you stopped that. The Mission tried to wipe us out with the Black Plague and we just barely stopped that, but we know they—and the others—will come at us some other way.

Until we know the truth, what really happened in (he past, we have to keep fighting and trying to survive.

"I've got to go there"—she pointed to the east, along the length of the Mall, past the Washington Monument; to the Capitol Building—"and testily about what just happened. Then meet with the President about what needs to happen. From there I'll go to New York and meet with Peter Sterling and the rest of UNAOC."

"You have to go to Area 51 and make sure we're secure. I'll be there as soon as possible. Then We need to decide what to do next to make sure people do not perish from the Earth,"

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In the cold vacuum of space, the only visible remains of the space shuttle Columbia were a few twisted pieces of metal drifting alongside the source of their destruction. Dwarfing the human wreckage, the alien talon spacecraft took its name from its long, slightly curved shape that tapered to a point on one end like an oversized claw. Over two hundred miles long, by thirty meters at its widest, the craft's black metal skin absorbed the sun's rays that struck it.

Three hundred miles below, a dark crescent bisecting the East Coast of the United States indicated dawn sweeping westward across Earth. Man's most marvelous piece of technology had been destroyed in the blink of an eye by a blast from the tip of the talon, stopping the attempt to recover what had been considered a dead ship. The alien ship was indeed lifeless, the crew killed in the explosions initiated by Turcotte that had wiped out its eight sister ships as they converged on the mothership, which was also floating dead in orbit. But as the shuttle wreckage indicated, that didn't mean the ship was completely nonfunctional. Eighty miles from the drifting talon, the Warfighter IV satellite flew on a polar orbit, its imagers shifting from their task of watching the surface of the planet below to taking a look at the talon as the orbits of the two closed on perpendicular courses.

Thermal infrared imagers pointed at the talon along with low-light-level cameras, recording what they saw and passing it to stations on Earth. Over sixty feet long and fifteen wide, the Warfighter was larger than the

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Hubble space telescope. It weighed twenty-three tons, a third of that weight fuel for the maneuvering thrusters designed to place it over any spot on the globe within two hours of notification from the ground.

It boasted the full complement of imaging hardware that the latest U.S. spy satellite, the KH-14, contained, but the primary mission of the Warfighter wasn't to spy but to destroy. The imagers were for pinpointing targets; due to both its size and proximity, the talon was easily acquired as Warfighter closed to within sixty miles. The last one-third of Warfighter's weight was a small nuclear reactor hooked to a powerful high-frequency overtone laser.

Launched covertly from Vandenberg Air Force Base two years previously, Warfighter IV was the culmination of decades of classified work funded under the Star Wars program. Designed to destroy enemy satellites in space and missiles in flight in the atmosphere with the laser, its presence in orbit' broke every treaty the United States had ever signed regarding the militarization of space.

The nuclear reactor also violated every space launch doctrine ever established.

The imagers had a solid target lock on the talon, and the reactor began powering up the laser as Warfighter closed to within forty miles. As the power level passed through fifty percent, a golden glow suffused the tip of the talon. A thin line of power leapt at the speed of light from the talon to Warfighter, enveloping it in a stasis field. All contact the satellite had with its human controllers on the planet below was severed in the blink of an eye. The power buildup held at fifty percent. Slowly the talon used the field to draw Warfighter to it until the two were in orbit less than fifty meters apart.

They moved in tandem that way for fifteen minutes As the Earth rotated below and the two drifted, their relative position to the planet changed. Soon they were

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over the western United States. The golden beam slowly rotated Warfighter until it was once more oriented toward the planet below. The imagers locked on a target on the Earth's surface.

The nuclear power buildup was released, and power surged to the laser. With a bright flash, a bolt of high energy arced toward Earth.

AREA 51, NEVADA

Area 51, located approximately ninety miles northwest of Las Vegas, on the edge of a dry lake bed nestled between mountains, consisted of three major parts. The most visible was the seven-mile-long concrete runway that extended across the dry Groom Lake flats. It was the longest runway in the world, used to launch and land the most sophisticated aircraft American designers could make.

The next most noticeable feature from above was the physical plant on the surface, consisting of hangars, support buildings, and tower for the runway.

The third—and invisible from above—part was the two hangars built into the side of Groom Mountain and the underground facilities that had housed the agency that had controlled Area 51 and the alien craft headquartered there—Majestic-12—for over five decades.

The normal operations at Area 51 came to an abrupt halt as a flash of light seared down from above, hitting one of the hangars. It was through the roof in a flash.

The initial blast was followed by a string of secondary explosions, and in less than ten seconds there was no longer a hangar and it would take days to recover the pieces of bodies from those who had been inside.

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MATO GROSSO, BRAZIL

It was after three days of difficult journeying that the falls finally came into view. They had been audible for hours during the approach. There was no mistaking the sound of over two million gallons of water tumbling over the edge of the Parana Plateau of South America, cascading down 270 feet onto the rocks below—a natural thunder that abated only once every forty years during a dry season in the middle of a drought upriver.

The vision matched the awesome sound. It was as if an ocean met an abyss, as the Iquaca River in southern Brazil tumbled over a wall of 275 individual falls, stretching two and a half miles wide, most separated only by a few craggy rocks with some trees struggling to grow in the watery mist.

Downstream, on the west bank of the river, the small party stood in silent awe for minutes, simply watching the power of nature. Finally, one of the figures, the tallest of the group, shifted his gaze from the fails to the narrow gorge beneath them, where the water was carried away.

"Garganta del Diablo!" the native guide, Bauru, yelled in the tall man's ear, struggling to be heard as he pointed at the gorge. "That is what you seek, Professor."

"The Devil's Throat," the tall black man translated. Professor Niama Mualama was over six feet six inches in height. Be was slender but not skinny, with broad shoulders and muscles packed on his frame like whipcord. His face was broad and friendly when he smiled, which was just about all the time. The only indication of his age

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were the thin tines around his eyes and a touch of lightness in his closely cropped black hair. He was old enough to have a one-year-old granddaughter back home in Nairobi, from his only daughter. His wife had died three years before from cancer, and since the funeral and the mourning period afterward, he had spent all his time pursuing his life's obsession.

Mualama was an anthropologist affiliated with the University of Dar es Salaam on the east coast of Tanzania. The fact that the university had barely a thousand students and Mualama had been one of only two professors in the anthropology department had done nothing to dint his enthusiasm. He had gone to graduate school in the United States and England and had returned home to help run the department. Recent changes in the government had caused severe cutbacks to what the ruling powers considered unessential programs at the university, and Mualama's department had been one of the first to fall under the ax two years ago.

No longer able to teach, he had devoted all his time to his studies and research, traveling extensively around the world, searching for answers to a mystery he had stumbled over as a young man. Mualama had spent two de cades following clues scattered about the world. The last clue had led him to this location, and recent events regarding the alien presence on Earth had given a particular urgency to his mission.

He turned back to the thundering water. "The first European to see the falls—a Spaniard, Alvar Nunex de Vaca in 1541—called them Salto de Santa Maria, the Falls of Saint Mary."

Bauru shrugged. He had never heard that. They had always been the Iquaca Falls, from the local tongue, in which Iquaca meant "great water." Bauru was of Indian-Spanish descent. He was a short, stocky man with dark skin. His most distinguishing feature was his bald head.

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His hair had begun falling out several years before, and he'd decided to complete the process on his own. He shaved it every day, even when he was in the wilderness.

"Let's go." Mualama shouldered his pack and headed toward the gorge, where the surging water passed between rock cliffs on its journey to the Orinoco River, the third-largest river in South America, and a long journey to the distant Atlantic Ocean.

Bauru led and the two porters he had hired followed, scrambling across rocks, then into the thick jungle as they swung around the most immediate cliffs.

It was an arduous three-hour journey that covered less than a mile before they came back out on the edge of the gorge, the water fifty feet below them. The sound of the falls was only slightly diminished.

"That is what I wanted to see," Mualama said.

The rock he was pointing at was twenty feet long by fifteen wide, with a perfectly flat top. It sat about eight feet out from the edge of the gorge in the river. Mualama eyed the water. It was fast moving and full of stirred-up silt, making the water reddish brown in color.

Mualama slipped his pack off and pulled out a leather-bound notebook.