Area 51: The Truth (21 page)

“With this new information the team decided to expand the resources and dig. The thought is that whatever exploded fell to the ground, melted the permafrost, then sank into melted ground. Then the permafrost refroze, effectively burying—and preserving—whatever was there. However, the expedition that went after World War II did extensive digging and found nothing.”

“Because the Nazis had already recovered whatever was there.” Turcotte supplied the missing piece. “It appears so.” Quinn said.

“How were the Germans able to operate so freely in Russia?” Turcotte asked.

“Ah, the 1930s.” Yakov’s voice sounded sad. “A black time for my country. If you remember history, Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler that decade. A most foolish decision given subsequent events.”

“Could there be more to that treaty than meets the eye?” Turcotte suggested. “Perhaps the influence of either the Mission or the Ones Who Wait?”

“That is possible with every event in man’s history,” Yakov said. “Who knows even who Stalin was? Single-handedly he almost destroyed my country. We still struggle to recover from all the policies he enacted; and the millions he killed, they will never be replaced. What he did made no sense.”

“Major Quinn, what did the Germans find?” Turcotte asked. “How intact was the wreckage?” “It was in many pieces,” Quinn said. “The Germans took out as much as they could uncover.” “And it wasn’t a Talon, bouncer, or mothership?”

“Apparently not.”

“Well, what was it exactly? What kind of ship does the Swarm have?” Turcotte asked.

“The Germans never really determined the structure of the craft,” Quinn said. “They didn’t have enough to work with.”

“What was Swarm doing on Earth in 1908?” Yakov asked. “That’s a very good question,” Quinn said.

“An even better question,” Turcotte said, “is how did Tesla destroy their ship in 1908?”

“At the same time as the Tunguska explosion,” Quinn said, “the most significant event occurring in the news was Admiral Peary’s expedition to the North Pole. There are some who speculate that Tesla, desiring to gain publicity for his new device, wanted to send a transmission through the Earth to Peary’s camp, where it would light the entire area.”

“Wait a second.” Yakov was confused. “You said it was a weapon?”

“It depends on the amount of energy transmitted. At a certain low level it could transmit a radio message. At other low levels it could produce a glow. Indeed Tesla claimed shortly after the Titanic disaster that his device—located in the Azores—could prevent similar accidents by lighting the entire Atlantic Ocean at night with a low-level glow.”

Turcotte wasn’t sure how much of this he should believe. A month ago he would have thought it all nonsense, but he had seen so many strange things in the intervening weeks that very little was out of the realm of what he now thought possible. And he desperately needed a weapon, a human weapon, one that was powerful enough to attack the Talons and destroy the Mars transmitter.

“Most of what I am telling you is easily checkable,” Quinn said. “You can look them up in the library or on the Internet. Anyway, these people who believe Tesla was trying to contact Peary speculate that Tesla’s experiment went tragically wrong.

“If you look at a global projection, from Tesla’s tower site on Long Island to Peary’s camp near the North Pole and continuing on a line around the planet, you strike Tunguska straight on. The theory is that Tesla mistook both the power and the direction of his beam and instead hit Tunguska with a powerful electromagnetic pulse, causing the explosion.”

“You sound as if you do not believe that,” Turcotte noted.

“Tesla was a brilliant man,” Quinn said. “Reading his journals convinced me of that. I do not think he made a mistake. I believe the North Pole information was a cover story that was put out to hide the real mission. I think he did exactly what he set out to.”

“And that was?” Yakov prompted. “Destroy the Swarm spacecraft.”

“How did he develop such technology?” Yakov asked. And how could he know the Swarm craft was inbound, then target it?”

“That I don’t know yet,” Quinn said. “I’ve got more research to do. But if he had contact with the Master Guardian in Turkey, he might have been able to find out about the Swarm spaceship being inbound. I’m just telling you all I’ve found out so far.”

“Can we duplicate his weapon?” Turcotte asked. “Can it cut through the Airlia shield?”

“I’m speculating that the Swarm craft must have been guarded by some sort of similar shield,” Quinn said. “Tesla’s weapon seems to have worked on that.”

“Can we duplicate it?” Turcotte asked once more.

“I’m working on the data and construction details,” Quinn said. “His energy projector doesn’t appear to be very complicated.”

“Why has no one tried to duplicate it then?” Turcotte asked.

“No one really appears to have looked,” Quinn said. “As I said, his papers were taken by the Yugoslavian intelligence service and locked away. I’ve put out some feelers for experts on Tesla’s science. There’s one more thing,” Quinn added.

“And that is?” Turcotte asked.

“Tesla traveled to England in 1924.” “So?”

“That’s the same year Irvine left England to try to climb Everest. Tesla mentions in his journal that he met Irvine prior to his departure, but he doesn’t say why.”

“That’s not just a coincidence, is it?” Turcotte asked. “I don’t think so.”

Turcotte leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. “Where are they now?” “Excuse me?” Quinn asked.

“These other Watchers,” Turcotte said. “Where are they now? How come they haven’t done anything?”

Yakov shrugged his large shoulders. “I have not met any of them or seen the results of any of their actions in my years tracking the aliens. Perhaps Tesla was the last?”

Turcotte turned back to Quinn. “Can we make this weapon?”

“I’ve got someone coming—a professor from
MIT
who has done a lot of work with things Tesla worked on.” Quinn checked his Palm Pilot. “A Professor Leahy. Should be here very soon.”

Turcotte stood. “I hope so. Because we’re taking off within the hour.”

Barksdale
AFB
, Louisiana

The two Air Force officers walked to the surface entrance of thee Final Option Missile Launch Control Center (
FOM-LCC
). Both were dressed in black one-piece flight suits. On their right shoulders each wore a crest with a mailed fist holding lightning bolts and the words Final Option. A Velcro tag on their chests gave their names, ranks, and units. One was Major Bartlett, the other Captain Thayer.

The surface entrance to the
LCC
was set in the middle of an open grassy space, about a hundred meters square, surrounded on all sides by thick forest. Twenty meters from the edge of the forest on all sides surrounding the surface building was a twelve-foot-high fence topped with razor wire. One gravel road led to the building. NO
TRESPASSING
and
DEADLY
FORCE
AUTHORIZED
signs were hung every ten feet on the fence. Video cameras, remote-controlled machine guns, a satellite dish, surface-to-air missiles, and a small radar dish were on the roof of the building, the latter three pointing at the cloudless sky.

The two officers had arrived moments ago in a pickup from Barksdale Air Force Base, where the 341st Missile Wing was headquartered. The pickup was parked right behind them, waiting to take the off-shift crew back to base. The
LCC
was located eight miles from the main air base, one of a dozen launch control facilities scattered about the post. Each control facility was in charge of six silos, each housing an intercontinental ballistic missile.

One of the officers punched a code into the panel next to the outer door and it opened. They stepped into a short hallway and approached a massive vault door guarding the elevator. The Final Option Missile crest was painted on the elevator door. The first officer put his eyes up to the retinal scanner on the left side of the door. A mechanical voice echoed out of a speaker.

“Retina verified. Major Bartlett. Launch status valid.”

The second officer followed suit, raising his glasses so his eyes could push up against the rubber. “Retina verified. Captain Thayer. Launch status valid.”

There was a brief pause, and then the computer spoke again.

“Launch officers on valid status verified. Please enter duty entry code.”

On a numeric keypad next to the vault door, Bartlett entered the daily code they’d been given when departing Barksdale.

The unemotional voice of the computer echoed in the lobby. “Code valid. Look into the camera for duty crew identification.”

Bartlett and Thayer stepped back and looked up into a video camera hanging from the ceiling. The image was relayed below them to the current crew on duty.

“On-duty crew identifies,” the computer intoned. “Opening door.”

The vault door slowly swung open. They walked into the elevator and the door shut. The elevator hurtled down a hundred feet and abruptly halted, causing them both to flex their knees.

The elevator doors opened to the rear of the launch control center. To the left of the elevator, a door went to a small area that contained enough stores for the crew for three months. To the right another door went to a small room that held two bunks, a bathroom, and a kitchen area. The two men walked into the Final Option Missile Launch Control Center, a forty-by-forty room filled with rows of machinery. The entire facility was a capsule resting on four huge shock absorbers, theoretically allowing it to survive the concussion of a direct nuclear strike. Like the Space Command facility at Cheyenne Mountain, it had originally been built early in the Cold War, when there were those who thought such a thing was possible. Even with retrofits of stronger armor and better shocks, the crews of the
LCC
knew their survivability rate would be very low given an all-out nuclear exchange.

The dominating feature of the control room was a wide console at the front of the room, divided in half by a bulletproof glass wall that went from floor to ceiling and extended back eight feet. A chair was on either side of the glass, the duty stations for the crew. The glass prevented one crewman from access to both key controls and also from holding a gun on the other crew member to get him to turn the key.

In front of the console, various screens showed scenes from the surface directly above and the silos the center controlled. Many of the screens had the brightly colored display that indicated thermal imagery. The
LCC
crews, along with the rest of the military, had been on the highest alert during the recent world war, and the status had only been downgraded one level since the apparent end of hostilities.

A lieutenant stood up and saluted Bartlett. “
FOM-LCC
is yours. Nothing of note in the duty log. Status green. Still at stage three alert. Targeting matrices are still hot.” He reached inside his flight suit and removed a set of two keys, one red, one blue, on a steel chain from around his neck and handed it to Bartlett. His partner did the same with Thayer.

Bartlett looked over at the large red digital clock overlooking both consoles. “You stand relieved as of zero-six-zero-four.”

He looked over at the consoles as he passed over the pickup truck’s key. “How’s the computer acting?”

On top of the main computer console there was a sign spelling out the acronym:

FINAL
OPTION
COMMAND
MATRIX
TARGETING
AND
EXECUTION

The relieved officer pocketed the truck key, anxious to be gone. “Fine. No glitches. Have a good shift.”

He and the other officer walked to the elevator and got on board. The doors shut and they were gone. Bartlett and Thayer took the seats at their respective terminals, separated by the glass wall. Bartlett watched the video screens, seeing the two crewmen get off the elevator in the upper facility. One screen showed the pure video feed, the other the thermal. On the thermal screen the two men were glowing red figures against a blue background. When they got in the truck the thermal sight picked up a perfect outline of their sitting forms. Then the engine started, showing up as a bright red glow in the front of the truck.

“Surface door secure,” Thayer reported. “Hatch secure.”

On the screen, the pickup truck pulled away. The gate in the fence closed behind it automatically. “Fence secure,” Thayer said. “
LCC
secure.”

“Turn the sensors, missiles, and automatic guns on,” Bartlett ordered.

Thayer threw a switch activating the machine guns and surface-to-air missiles on the roof of the
LCC
building. The former were slaved into motion sensors and would fire at anything moving inside the perimeter. The latter were directed by the site radar and could be launched by the crew against any air infiltration.

There was a moment of quiet and, in the background, the two men could hear the rhythmic thump of the powerful pumps that drained the water that flowed from the high water table in this part of Louisiana into the space outside of the
LCC
. They were only thirty miles from the coastal swamp that extended for sixty miles before hitting the Gulf of Mexico. Not the smartest place to build underground control centers and silos, but pork-barrel politics had determined the location, not military practicalities. It was theorized that if the pumps ever broke down or lost power, the
LCC
would be submerged within four hours. However, there were backups to the pumps and two powerful generators standing by in case power was lost.

Bartlett pulled out a binder. “Let’s run through our checklist and make sure we’re running smoothly.” He flipped open to the first page. “Cable link to National Command Authority?”

Thayer looked at his console. “Cable link check.” “Satellite dish link to MILSTAR?”

“Satellite dish check.”