Area 51: The Truth (2 page)

Despite the Atlantis Truce, each side had continued a subversive war throughout the millennia on Earth. Aspasia’s side was represented by the Mission, led by a continually regenerated human known as Aspasia’s Shadow, who passed Aspasia’s memories and personality through succeeding generations via the ka, a memory device that could be updated much like a computer hard drive. Artad’s side was represented by the Ones Who Wait, Airlia-Human clones, and Shadows of Artad, such as King Arthur and Shi Huangdi, the first emperor of China.

Throughout human history both groups fought covertly, using humans as pawns in their battles. The tenuous truce began to unravel when a guardian computer was discovered at a dig at Temiltepec in South America by Majestic-12 and brought back to Area 51’s secret sister base at Dulce, New Mexico. The guardians were small golden pyramids that had been secreted around the world by the Airlia. When a guardian came in contact with a human it initiated a direct mind-computer interface through which the guardian would take control and turn the person into a Guide, who would do as the computer programmed him or her to. The members of Majestic were corrupted in this manner, prompting Presidential Science Adviser Lisa Duncan to send a covert operative named Mike Turcotte to infiltrate Area 51 and discover what was going on.

Turcotte had learned that Majestic was preparing to fly the mothership on programmed orders from the guardian, most likely to go to Mars and pick up Aspasia and his followers. He also found information on Easter Island that indicated that initiating the mothership’s interstellar engine would attract the attention of the Swarm and bring destruction to Earth. Turcotte foiled that plan and all-out civil war had once more erupted between the two Airlia sides, the human race caught between them, resulting in the Earth’s Third World War.

Prior to the war, Turcotte and the others had discovered much, but they still didn’t know the full extent of this alien interference in human history. What they did know were just terrifying glimpses into a perverted but true history of mankind. They’d learned about the clash between Arthur (Artad’s Shadow) and Mordred (Aspasia’s Shadow) in early England; the development and spread of the Black Death in the Middle Ages by Artad’s followers; the rise of the SS in Nazi Germany, which was manipulated by Aspasia’s Shadow; the invention of the atomic bomb by the Americans prompted by their study of a similar Airlia weapon discovered underneath the Great Pyramid of Giza in the early days of World War II; and many other events throughout history. All of these were the result of efforts by one side or the other to gain the upper hand in the Airlia civil war.

Turcotte and the others had also learned that some of the human survivors of Atlantis had formed a group to monitor the aliens. Known as Watchers, they were former priests who had once worshipped the Airlia as gods, and subsequently tried to monitor their conflict over the millennia.

Turcotte had killed Aspasia and destroyed his fleet coming from Mars, but Aspasia’s Shadow had secreted himself on Easter Island with the Grail in his possession and a burgeoning military force. Aspasia’s Shadow had used a nanovirus and nanotechnology to capture most of the American fleet in the Pacific, invade Hawaii and threaten the West Coast of the United States. And in China, Artad had been awoken by the Ones Who Wait. He had allied with the Chinese government and supported them in their invasions of both Taiwan and South Korea.

Both sides’ efforts had fallen apart when the Area 51 team Turcotte led gained control of the Master Guardian computer and its key, Excalibur, and shut down the alien computers. Artad and Aspasia’s Shadow abandoned their offensives on Earth.

The Third World War had been brief, but what it lacked in length it made up for in savagery and devastation.

Seoul, South Korea, was a ghost town, having been struck by both Chinese nerve agents and American nuclear weapons. The best estimate was at least three million dead and four times that displaced.

Half of Taiwan had been scorched by a nuclear blast in a desperate attempt to stop the invading mainland forces supported by Artad. Scattered fighting was still raging as Taiwanese troops sought out and destroyed remnants of the invading forces. At least two million had died in fighting on that island.

Muslims in western China were rising in revolt, seeing their opportunity as Beijing’s backing of the alien Artad had backfired. That battle was still raging.

In the Pacific, the US Navy’s Task Force Eighty, centered on the super-carrier
Kennedy
, was linking up with Task Forces Seventy-eight and Seventy-nine. The latter two had been released from alien control and their crews once more had free will, as Aspasia’s Shadow’s nanovirus had been rendered inert without input from the Guardian computer. The US once again ruled supreme in that part of the world.

Iran and Iraq were still fighting, and other Middle Eastern countries continued to stand on the edge of war as diplomats desperately tried to avert disaster. Israel had its nuclear arsenal fully deployed for the first time in history and it was only that threat that kept the surrounding Arab nations from invading.

Still, the world was slowly backing away from the precipice of complete disaster and the two alien sides were fleeing.

With the aliens and their followers defeated, the Third World War was officially over, although the world was far from peace.

The toll: at least twelve million dead with twice that many wounded and countless more displaced from their homes.

If the First World War had started with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the Second World War with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland (although many would argue that the Second was actually begun with the end of the First and the Treaty of Versailles), then the Third World War had begun at a remote desert site in the United States called Area 51, with the discovery of an alien mothership by the United States government. That event started a low flame boiling underneath an uneasy truce that had spanned millennia. It took over fifty years for the lid to blow off, but in terms of millennia, that was a relatively short period of time.

Unfortunately, while the Third World War was over, the First Interplanetary War for Earth was looming as a very real possibility, a fact known only to a select few. And this danger was not currently known by the man who had retrieved Excalibur, the key to the Master Guardian, from its hiding place near the top of Mount Everest, and who now sat there, unconscious, slowly freezing to death.

Mount Everest

Mike Turcotte muttered irritably, wanting nothing more than to be left alone. He was wrapped in a warm blanket and felt very comfortable. A Sunday morning in Maine, the one day of the week he was home from the logging camp and didn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn. He was wrapped in his mother’s handmade comforters. He so badly just wanted to continue sleeping. A dream kept intruding, an insistent, irritating buzz in his subconscious. A woman with dark hair, dressed in a white robe, standing on a beach. Looking at him. Her mouth was moving, saying something, but he heard nothing. There was something wrong about the place though. The shadows, the water. All wrong.

He focused on her lips and he knew he had tasted them many times. They were thin and pale, her face angular. He had known her—

“Get up.”

He didn’t hear as much as knew that’s what she was yelling at him. “Get up.”

Turcotte didn’t want to. He could never remember feeling as secure and comfortable as he did right now. He’d been so tired, he knew that, and however long he had rested, it wasn’t near enough.

“I need you.”

She had saved him; he knew that, although he could not recall details. Beyond that, he knew they had done much together, and been many places. And he had loved her fiercely. That emotion roared through him, shaking him out of his stupor.

Turcotte opened his eyes but all he could see was white. He blinked, feeling something wet on his face. He shook his head, slowly realizing it was snow on his skin. Panicking, he sat up abruptly, six inches of snow falling off the upper half of his body.

He looked about. Open air directly in front. Rock behind.

He was flanked by bodies. Frozen solid. One dressed in a black robe with silver fringe. Another in ancient leather armor. And a third in early-twentieth-century climbing gear—Sandy Irvine, who had disappeared in 1924 while attempting to summit with George Mallory. With a smile frozen forever on his face. That shook Turcotte. He knew he’d have died with a smile on his face also if he hadn’t woken. He could feel the cold throughout his body now. It was excruciatingly painful as his nerve endings came awake.

He looked down and could just make out the sword across his knees. Excalibur.

The key to the Master Guardian that he had freed from its scabbard, activating it.

Reality came rushing back to him. Yakov had to be in the mothership with the Master Guardian. Duncan was missing. And he was high on Mount Everest.

Next to the sword was a SATPhone, its surface frozen and covered with ice. With stiff hands he reached out and picked up the phone, shoving it inside his parka. The cold made even the slightest act extremely difficult.

Mike Turcotte forced himself to get to his feet, Excalibur gripped tightly in his right hand, an ice ax in his left. He knew he had passed the peak of power the amphetamines had given him and that the oxygen richness of the blood doping was fading. How long had he sat there, he wondered. It couldn’t have been too long because he still had some feeling in his hands and feet. He checked his mask, but there was no oxygen flowing. The tank on his back had to be empty by now.

He knew, as surely as he could feel the sword in his hands, that he could not make his way along the ledge or down the mountain in the same manner he had climbed up. He glanced down once more at the three bodies frozen next to him. They had known the same thing. And they had never woken from whatever their last pleasant dreams had been.

He closed his eyes and tried to force his oxygen-starved brain to think through the overwhelming exhaustion and pain. He’d trained in high altitude and the cold many times in his Special Forces career and he tried to recall what he had learned. He was higher than he had ever been. His instructors had beaten one thing into him about working in the mountains—gravity could be your friend or your enemy, depending on which direction you were heading and how fast. He considered those words of wisdom. He needed to go down, and do it quickly. He looked below at the Kanshung Face on the north side of Everest. Gravity could be bis friend, but one slip and he would fall for a very, very long time.

There was one option. In a way Turcotte was glad he couldn’t really think it through and figure the odds of success, because he had no doubt they would be very low.

He hooked the ice ax onto his harness and grabbed the nylon strap attached to the front of it. He clipped the snap link on the end of the strap to the safety rope. He paused for a moment, amazed that he had succeeded against the other groups that had raced to this spot to try to claim the sword. The corrupt SEALs from Aspasia’s Shadow; the Chinese and the Ones Who Wait, sent by Artad; and his climbing partner and former watcher, Professor Mualama, who had been corrupted by a Swarm tentacle—all were now dead, their bodies scattered about the mountain.

Turcotte took the end of the rope, where the one
SEAL
had cut it, and laboriously tried to make a knot, thick enough so that it would not fit through the snap link. It took him several attempts and almost ten minutes of work before he achieved this simple task.

Taking the ice ax in his free hand again, Turcotte put his back to the mountain and faced outward, staring out over the Himalayas below him. It was dark, dawn still hours off. The stars glittered overhead and the moon was low to the west, its beams reflecting off the snow-covered peaks. Other than the nearby bodies, there was no sign of mankind as far as he could see. The silence was overwhelming, not even the wind, which had been his constant companion on his way up the mountain, was blowing. It was the most peaceful scene Turcotte had ever witnessed. It was serene and it was deadly.

Turcotte jumped outward with all his might.

The first piece of climbing protection—a piton—already weakened by Mualama’s fall, tore free of the mountain. Like stitching being ripped apart, the rope popped succeeding pieces of protection from their perch and Turcotte fell, swinging to the west as each piece held for just a moment, the effect jarring him slightly and curving his trajectory before free-falling again. His climbing harness dug into his thighs and waist, but the pain was barely noticeable.

Turcotte slammed against the side of Everest, on the sheer Kanshung Face, still falling, still being swung to the west. The impact knocked what little breath he had out of his lungs and he gasped for air. He came to a halt for a moment as a piton held for a few seconds. He twisted and looked about, mouth open, lungs straining. The northwest ridge was twenty meters away. So close, yet so out of reach.

Then Turcotte dropped abruptly as the next piton holding him pulled free. The pendulum effect swung him toward the ridge and he reached the last piece of protection, where the ridge met the face. It held for the slightest of moments. Enough for Turcotte to get his bearings—he was less than two meters from the ridge. Very close, yet still too far. He braced his feet against the Kanshung Face and as the last piton gave way, he pushed off, leaping to the side, swinging his ice ax, arm fully extended.

The tip of the ax caught for a moment in the ice at the very edge of the ridge, holding him in place as the rope hurtled by. Then the ax gave way and he slid, desperately slamming it at the ridge time and time again. It caught once more and he hung there, dangling from the ax. He twisted his body to face the rock.

Dully, he realized the rope would now be heading down and when it reached its fullest extension, the weight would pull him off the mountain and he would follow the equipment to his death.