Area 51: The Truth (7 page)

Cavanaugh reached between the canvas seats and grabbed a Thompson submachine gun. He pulled the charging knob back, putting a round in the chamber. He noted that Kramer’s normally ruddy cheeks had gone white. “Let’s go,” he ordered.

Kramer grabbed his own Thompson and clumsily did the same. Cavanaugh looped the sling over his shoulder and grabbed hold of the rope. When he saw Kramer sling his own weapon, Cavanaugh paused. “How about covering me until I get to the ledge, then I’ll cover you?”

Kramer nodded nervously, unslung his weapon, and backed up a few feet, putting the stock in his shoulder and squinting up. Cavanaugh had a moment of doubt, wondering if it might be better to not have Kramer below him with a gun in his hands, then decided to trust that the
OSS
training had had some effect. He grabbed the rope and began climbing.

Just before he got to the ledge, Cavanaugh considered his dilemma. If the German was waiting for him, he was a dead man. Of course, then the German was trapped, with Kramer waiting below near his car. He remembered something an instructor had said during his training: Too much thinking made a man fearful. Easily said in a classroom.

Cavanaugh pulled himself onto the ledge, springing to his feet and unslinging the Thompson as quickly as he could. There was no one. Directly ahead a charge had obviously been placed in a crevice and a dark hole beckoned. Cavanaugh let out a deep breath, then glanced down. Kramer was in place, submachine gun tight to his shoulder. Cavanaugh signaled for him to climb up.

As soon as his partner was with him, Cavanaugh moved forward into the crevice, the muzzle of the Thompson leading the way. He could smell something familiar, then realized it was the odor of the demolitions range during
OSS
training.

It grew darker as he got farther into the mountain and he briefly debated going back for the flashlight he had left in the jeep. Then he caught the shimmer of a light ahead so he pressed on.

He came out of the crevice into an open space and he immediately saw the German, ten meters away, flashlight in hand, looking at some sort of console.

“Don’t move!” Cavanaugh yelled, as Kramer came up on his left.

The German spun about, shining the light directly at them, and Cavanaugh was blinded. His finger twitched on the trigger, uncertain what to do. A shot rang out and Cavanaugh pulled the trigger, the Thompson bucking in his hands as it spit out .45-caliber rounds toward the light. His firing was echoed by Kramer to the right and together they emptied their twenty-round box magazines in less than four seconds.

The beam swung upward as the German was hit and slammed back against the wall, blood spattering the rock. The sound of the guns echoed from a long distance but Cavanaugh didn’t notice that at first. Kramer started to move forward but Cavanaugh stuck his arm out.

“Reload first.”

Both men pulled another magazine from their packs and slammed them home, pulling back the cocking knobs.

“Cover me,” Cavanaugh said. He moved forward carefully. He had little doubt that the German was dead, but caution had been pounded into him during training.

He reached the body and knelt, picking up the flashlight. The German was indeed dead, the heavy slugs having torn flesh and smashed bone to the point where the man was almost unrecognizable. A Luger was clutched in one dead hand. There was a dagger in a sheath on his belt.

He slung his Thompson and retrieved the dagger with his free hand. A small, realistically carved ivory skull was at the top of the handle. Swastikas were carved into the bone grips along with lightning bolts, which Cavanaugh knew represented the SS, the Schutzstaffel, run by Himmler. He turned the knife and examined the steel blade, which had intricate detailing. Something was written and he held it close to make it out: Thule.

Cavanaugh turned it over. A word was on the other side. Steiner. He assumed that was the dead man’s name. Thule vaguely rang a bell, but he couldn’t place the name. He tucked the dagger into his belt, then checked the body once more. A backpack, riddled with holes and soaked with blood, was on the man’s back. Gingerly, Cavanaugh removed it.

Inside was a leather journal and a half dozen flares. The journal was in a style of writing that Cavanaugh couldn’t read—definitely not German—so he tucked it under his arm while he took out one of the flares. He ripped the top open and ignited it.

“Geez!” Kramer’s exclamation startled Cavanaugh, then he turned to look into the cavern and saw what had caused it. He took an involuntary step back as in the sputtering light of the flare he saw the mile-long black ship resting in its cradle. In the limited light he could barely see the end, but it seemed to extend forever.

“What the hell is that?” Kramer asked.

Cavanaugh swallowed, trying to find his voice, but bis mouth was dry as the desert outside. “The map,” he finally got out.

“What?”

“The map,” Cavanaugh repeated. “What’s this place? What’s it listed as on the map?”

Kramer came closer and unfolded the Nellis Range map they’d been given at the base. He ran his finger across and came to a halt. “It’s a training area. Only has a number. Area 51.”

Mars

In 1999
NASA
launched the Mars Climate Orbiter. The stated mission was to put a satellite into orbit for one Mars rotation around the sun, the equivalent of two Earth years, to study the atmospheric conditions on the Red Planet. That was a lie.

When the orbiter approached Mars to go into orbit, contact with it was lost and never recovered. The explanation eventually given by
NASA
was that a data transfer during the preparation stages of the mission between the orbiter team in Colorado and the navigation team in California was flawed. According to the after-action report, one team used English units of measure, while the other used metric units for a key spacecraft operation. This mistake caused the orbiter to plummet into the surface of the planet rather than achieve a stable orbit. A rather startling and elementary mistake by the scientists involved if true. However, this also was a lie.

In reality, the Mars Climate Orbiter project was conceived by Majestic-12. Its highly classified mission was to overfly the Cydonia region of Mars and carefully examine the area with top-of-the-line imaging equipment. Cydonia had always fascinated observers from Earth because of the several apparent anomalies that appeared to be too linear and symmetrical to have been formed naturally. The primary one was a large outcropping labeled the “Face” because of its unnatural shape mimicking that of a massive visage peering up from the planet’s surface. It was over two and a half kilometers long by two wide by five hundred meters high. The second was a large pyramid not far from the Face. There was also the “Fort,” four straight lines like walls, surrounding a black courtyard.

For years
NASA
scientists had ridiculed any who postulated that these objects were anything other than natural formations. At the same time, it seemed curious that not a single one of all the various probes launched to check out the fourth planet had ever successfully orbited over the site for a closer look. While NASA’s public records indicated that no craft had ever been programmed with such an orbit, the truth was, several, like the Climate Orbiter, had secretly been given the task.

The early Viking missions had succeeded in getting two landers onto the surface of the planet but far removed from Cydonia. Pathfinder, with its Rover, also landed far away from the site. Many on the outside felt these were deliberate attempts on the part of
NASA
to avoid getting better information about Cydonia. They were half-right.
NASA
did deliberately avoid Cydonia with the Viking and Pathfinder probes. But it did so because Majestic’s first attempt to get a close look at Cydonia in 1975 using the prototype of the Viking orbiter and landing had resulted in the loss of both as it came within orbiting range of Mars. Majestic did not think this was an accident but it waited almost twenty-five years before trying again with the Climate Orbiter, hoping a higher orbit might protect the craft.

Again, it was stymied.

The Russians at Section IV, their equivalent of Majestic-12, had also tried to take a closer look. Stretching from the late 1960s to the present, the Russians had launched ten unmanned missions toward Mars. Two exploded on takeoff. They lost control of two and couldn’t get them out of their intermediary orbits around Earth to make the journey to the Red Planet. Two more missed Mars entirely with haywire guidance systems and for all the Russians knew were still hurtling outward from the solar system. Three made it to Mars orbit but promptly went dead, transmitting no data. They actually did get one lander into orbit and were sending it down toward Cydonia when it began sending back very strange data before also going off- line.

The Russians had speculated that the missions lost on Earth or en route had been sabotaged by the Ones Who Wait or Guides from the Mission. Because of the lack of data from Mars, they could only guess that there was some sort of defensive mechanism in Cydonia that destroyed craft that came close.

It was only after the current war with the aliens began that the true nature of what was at Cydonia was revealed, as Aspasia and his followers came out of their millennia-long sleep, powered up their Talon spacecraft hidden underneath the Fort, and headed for Earth, leaving behind only a token crew to man the base. When Turcotte destroyed this fleet by booby-trapping the Area 51 mothership, the Airlia left on Mars were stranded but not inactive.

They sent a small army of mech-machines from Cydonia across the surface of the planet toward Mons Olympus while other robots tore into the Face, pulling metal parts out of the wreckage of whatever had once been there.

At Mons Olympus, the mech-machines had begun the greatest engineering feat in the solar system as they built a ramp up to and through the four-mile-high escarpment surrounding the peak. After making a way through the escarpment, the mech-machines had continued up the long, gradual slope to a point just below the summit of the extinct volcano. There they dug out a deep, dish-shaped depression, while lining it with a latticework of black metal. At three points around the circumference, the base for a massive pylon tower was put in place and two of the pylons were now completed.

When Yakov used the Master Guardian to shut down the Cydonia guardian, which controlled the mech-machines, the dish array was already complete and two of the three towers finished. The third pylon towered over eight hundred meters high in the thin Martian atmosphere, but needed another two hundred meters of work to be completed.

Without the aid of the mech-machines, there was only one option for the surviving Airlia—to complete the last tower and emplace the transmitting array by hand. Tracked surface vehicles that had long gathered dust in an underground depot were serviced and started. Space suits and portable surface habitats were checked and tested.

Within eight hours of the guardian’s shutdown, a convoy of twenty vehicles carrying sixty Airlia departed Cydonia, heading toward Mons Olympus to finish the array.

Airspace Iran

Someone was pounding on the door, very loudly.

Mike Turcotte opened his eyes to the unique vision of floating in midair, a thousand feet above a desert with a jet fighter roaring toward him at five hundred miles an hour, spraying bullets. The rounds slammed into the side of the bouncer and ricocheted off, producing the noise that had brought him back to consciousness. His eyes followed the jet as it narrowly missed his craft. Iranian markings. At least that gave him an idea of where he had been when he passed out. Other than the noise, the rounds had no apparent effect on the surface of the alien craft.

He shook his head, immediately regretting the act as his head throbbed painfully. Coming down off the blood doping and amphetamines he had taken in order to survive on Everest was proving as painful as climbing the mountain had been. At least he wasn’t cold, his body drenched in sweat inside his heavy clothing. He took a moment to take off the outer garments. As he did so, he saw sunlight glinting off metal close by.

He turned, reaching out for the sword that lay next to the slight depression in the center of the bouncer, wrapping his fingers around the handle. Reality and the immediate past came back to him in fragments. Excalibur. Sword of legend, made by aliens. The key to the Master Guardian hidden for generations on the nearly inaccessible north face of Mount Everest.

That told him why he was where he was and where he had been heading. The Master Guardian. Yakov—the Russian must have made it into the second mothership, known as Noah’s Ark in legend, and located the alien computer. Turcotte briefly closed his eyes and brought up a mental image of this part of the world. Turkey was west and slightly north of Iran. And Ararat was in eastern Turkey.

The jet was coming in for another gun run, this time from the opposite direction. Turcotte pressed forward on the control stick. The bouncer accelerated and easily outdistanced the jet as it reached two thousand miles an hour. The ground was zipping by below. The Iranian jet faded in the distance behind.

Turcotte grabbed the mike and keyed it. “Quinn, this is Turcotte. Over.”

An excited and concerned voice answered. “Geez, Major, we thought we lost you again. You just dropped off the air.”

“Have you heard from Yakov?”

“Negative. We haven’t received communications from him or any of the Delta men who went with him. I’ve intercepted some National Security Agency intelligence briefs indicating a lot of military action around Ararat. I don’t think we were the only ones going after the Ark and Master Guardian. Fortunately, it appears Yakov got to it first.”

Which meant Ararat—and the mothership/Master Guardian—weren’t secure yet, Turcotte realized.

“Do we know anything about Duncan?”

“Not much more than we did,” Quinn admitted. “I’ve been checking and there is no indication there is another Majestic-12. No one knows who took Duncan but I don’t think it was any government agency.”