Area 51: The Mission-3 (19 page)

Lisa Duncan had her leather jacket zipped up tight against the salt breeze. A briefcase was in her left hand. Turcotte knew they both had to leave shortly, going in different directions once again.

"I'm not sure they're worth that much," he said as she joined him.

"I think they are."

Turcotte looked out to sea. "I don't know. Seems like everything's been moving so fast that it's hard to think. Always something else to do that seems to take precedence."

"Precedence over thinking?"

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"You know what I mean," Turcotte said. "Real thinking. Going a level below."

Duncan slipped her right hand into his left and squeezed. "And what's a level below?"

"I'm not sure I want to know," Turcotte said, hoping she would change the subject, but she said nothing.

Finally, he spoke. "I guess I wonder why."

"Why?" Duncan repeated.

"You know, what's the meaning of it all. You know we've been so focused on who and what and where and when, and we hardly know any of those, but it's the why that's the key to everything."

"I'm not sure I follow."

Turcotte struggled to find the words that would make concrete the thoughts that had been swirling about in his head.

"You know what happened in Germany," he started.

"Something you were involved in?"

Turcotte nodded.

"The incident in the cafe?"

That was a delicate way of putting it, Turcotte thought. He'd been assigned to a classified counterterrorist unit in Berlin. A unit that, once the Wall fell, spent most of its time trying to keep a lid on the piles of weapons from the former Soviet Bloc. It was a joint U.S.-German team. Handpicked men from the U.S. Special Forces and the Germans' GSG-9 counterterrorist force. Their orders were to fire first and ask questions later, especially when they were dealing with weapons that could kill hundreds, if not thousands.

On his last mission before being assigned to Nightscape at Area 51—indeed, Turcotte knew it might well have been because of what happened on that mission that he received the Area 51 assignment—intelligence had received word that some IRA extremists were trying

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to buy surplus East German armament—SAM-7 shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.

The supposition was that they would shoot down a Concorde taking off from Heathrow. The weapons were being transported when Turcotte's team went to interdict.

They set up an ambush, but the terrorists stopped in a Gasthaus just before the ambush point. Getting antsy, the team leader took Turcotte with him to check it out.

With silenced MP-5 subs slung inside their coats, they walked in the combination bar and restaurant. The place was full of people. They saw two of their targets sitting in a booth, but the third was nowhere in site.

And Turcotte's partner froze, his unnatural demeanor catching the attention of the Irishmen. All hell broke loose. Turcotte and his partner exchanged fire with the two in the booth, killing both.

But the third man tried to run out of the bar, and Turcotte's team leader fired at him in the middle of a crowd of civilians also trying to escape.

Turcotte could feel Duncan's hand in his, her skin against the knotted tissue on his right palm—a scar that had formed from the burn he'd gotten when he'd grabbed the gun out of his team leader's hands by the barrel, the red hot steel burning the flesh.

It was only later that Turcotte found out the body count. Four dead civilians.

Including a pregnant, eighteen-year-old girl. To add insult to injury, the powers that be had tried to give Turcotte a medal for the action. Something had snapped in Turcotte after that, and he wasn't sure he had ever put whatever it was back together.

"Mike?" Duncan's voice indicated her worry over his long silence and his mood.

"What about Germany?"

"Nothing," Turcotte said. He felt very tired.

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"Don't give me nothing," Duncan said.

Turcotte sighed. "Those guys I killed in Germany. The IRA gunmen. Their why.

Their motivation. I've thought about it a lot. They thought they were right.

They thought their cause was just and were willing to pay any price to further that cause. Do anything, even if it meant killing innocent civilians."

"Oh, come on," Duncan said. "You can't be comparing-"

"You said you wanted to know what I was thinking," Turcotte said, harder than he intended. "Then you need to listen."

Duncan lapsed into silence and waited.

"Okay," Turcotte said, still trying to rind the words. "The thing is these guys here on this ship. They wear American uniforms. This ship took part in the Gulf War. Bombed the crap out of Iraq. Killed a bunch of Iraqis. But those Iraqis believed in what they were doing, just as much as these sailors and pilots believed in what they were doing. And that's the way it's always been.

You know—God was on both sides. How come one side ends up winning, then?

"I guess the why I'm wondering is what's behind it all? I've been reacting to this Airlia thing with the basic philosophy that they aren't us—humans, that is.

But is that so much different than being an American and thinking an Iraqi is different? I don't know. Now Yakov is here telling us that it's more about a long battle among us—humans—than the aliens."

"But the aliens are manipulating us," Duncan said. "STAAR isn't exactly human, and these Guides—like Majestic-12—their minds have been manipulated by the guardian."

"So they're just pawns?" Turcotte asked. "What are we? We can't even go to UNAOC or our own govern-

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ment for help now. We can't trust anyone, as Yakov says. I was paranoid when I was working Special Operations, but this is ridiculous. There's got to be something more. Something different."

"Why?"

The word caught Turcotte by surprise. "What?"

"I'm asking the same thing you started this with," Duncan said. "Why does there have to be something more? Something on another level?"

Turcotte blinked. "Don't you think there has to be a purpose to all this? All our efforts?"

Duncan spread her hands. "There might be. I don't know what it is right now except we have to do the next right thing."

A small smile crossed Turcotte's lips. "The next right thing. I like that."

They stood there in silence, the ocean breeze of the mid-Pacific cool against their faces.

"There's something else," Duncan finally said.

"Yes?"

"Yakov."

"What about him?"

"Do you trust him?" Duncan asked.

"He told us not to," Turcotte said.

"I agree with him," Duncan said.

"Why?"

"I spoke with Larry Kincaid and Major Quinn privately before they left, while you and Yakov were talking to Von Seeckt. Kincaid did a check on the Earth Unlimited satellite's path prior to coming down, backtracking through Space Command's database."

Turcotte waited.

"While it didn't get close to the mothership or the talon, he found the point at which the satellite's orbit abruptly began to change and deteriorate. It was over a

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place called Sary Shagan in central Asia. That's Russia's primary ABM and ASAT

research test site. ASAT stands for antisatellite. There have been reports from both the U.S. and NATO countries of their satellites that pass over that site being interfered with. Some suspect a low-power laser. Others, electronic jamming."

"So you're saying this satellite was interfered with by the Russians?"

Duncan nodded. "Kincaid definitely thinks so. Quinn has tried tapping into the intel network reference at the Ariana Launch Site at Kourou—the point of origin of the satellite—and he wasn't able to find out much, but one thing he did learn was that this specific satellite was supposed to stay in orbit another day, then come down for an ocean recovery in the South Atlantic—just like the previous two Earth Unlimited satellites.

"The satellite had its own maneuvering rockets, and the DSP tapes show they fired during the descent, so Kincaid thinks the Russians damaged it, then The Mission brought it down as best they could, given it was going to come down anyway."

Turcotte looked out to sea and considered that information. "So the Russians interfered with the satellite and The Mission brought it down early and not in its recovery zone. And maybe Section Four getting destroyed was in retaliation for that. If Yakov is telling the truth and it was destroyed. Perhaps Yakov knows more than he's telling us."

"That's the way I see it. Maybe he made a mistake and he's here to get us to clean it up for him since he doesn't have the resources anymore."

"But the good thing is that this plan of Earth Unlimited, whatever it is, got screwed up."

"Yeah," Duncan acknowledged. "But the bad part is that maybe this satellite wasn't supposed to come down

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on land. Maybe something was in that satellite that wasn't supposed to get out.

And now it's out and everything's out of control."

"Jesus," Turcotte said. He rubbed his forehead. "So perhaps The Mission isn't on top of the situation either."

"Or Yakov is lying and there is no Mission," Duncan suggested.

"Or Yakov is one of them."

"Them?"

Turcotte laughed, not from humor, but rather futility. "STAAR. Guides. Section Four. The KGB. Hell, he could be a double, working for the CIA. Who the hell knows? Or he could be what he says he is. It doesn't matter," he finally decided. "Those people are dead in South America, and we've got to find out what the hell was on that satellite, whether it was the Black Death or something else."

"While you're going to South America," Duncan said, "I need to go back to the States to do some checking."

"On what?"

"First, I have to stop at Vandenberg Air Force Base. One of the shuttles is being launched from there. I still work for the President, and he wants me there for the launch. I also want to get an idea of what the UNAOC people involved in the talon and mothership missions are up to. Then I want to go on to Area 51. I think that's the best place to coordinate everything from once you find out what is going on. Plus I want to see if I can't find out any more about Dulce and Temiltepec."

Turcotte nodded. "All right. I'll return with Yakov to Area 51 once we do our recon."

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Since getting his marching orders Norward had been on the move, gathering equipment and packing. To go to the target site and collect what was necessary—without becoming infected themselves in the process—they needed specialized gear. They would have to take bio-safety Level 4 precautions with them.

Norward had let Kenyon take charge. The other man had much more experience in traveling and going places. In fact, Norward was now counting his blessings that Kenyon had gone on the "jaunt" a couple of years before. The jaunt was part of the lore at the Institute, and Norward had heard more than a few stories about it.

There were two things that were of primary importance to be discovered when a new biological threat appeared. The first, of course, was to determine exactly what it was. To isolate it. The second was to find out where it came from. With those two facts, they at least had the basics needed to try to defeat the bug.

Two years earlier a virus had erupted out of southern Zaire. Of course, since southern Zaire wasn't a media hot spot, the word got out slowly. The disease burned along the Zaire-Zambia border with a kill rate of over 90 percent of those infected. Thousands upon thousands of people died.

After two weeks ripping through the countryside, the virus made a toehold in the Zambian city of Ndola. The Zambian president had the city cordoned off by troops. Roads were blocked, the airport was shut down, and travel was prohibited. The president was prepared to lose the city to save the country.

And just as swiftly as it had appeared, the virus went away. The last of the victims died and their bodies were burned. Life went back to normal along the border, except for the forty thousand people who had died. But 167

forty thousand dead in Africa barely made a blip on the world media. Except for those at the Institute.

From Zairean doctors, they managed to get samples of the virus in the form of frozen tissue samples sent by plane. They quickly isolated the deadly virus. It was a filovirus, a cousin to Marburg and the two Ebolas. But it wasn't any of them, and for lack of a better name, the new virus was christened Ebola3. A filovirus was derived from the Latin—thread virus. If they had not already seen Marburg and Ebola at the Institute, they might not have so quickly caught on to Ebola3, but as soon as the strange, thin, elongated forms showed up in the electron microscope they zeroed in on it.

They had Ebola3, but they didn't know anything else about it other than it killed and killed well. So Kenyon proposed to go track down where the virus had come from. He took a trip to Zaire and investigated. Like a detective, he backtracked the line of death that the few survivors remembered. Kenyon found that Ebola3 had probably originated not in Zaire but somewhere on the southeast side of Lake Bangweulu in Zambia. He hired a small plane pilot to fly him up there. They flew over mile upon mile of swampland bordering the lake. It was a dismal-looking place, full of wildlife and little visited by man. Kenyon tried to get the pilot to land at a small town on the edge of the swamp they overflew, but as they descended, the odor of rotting corpses was so great they could smell it in the cockpit of the plane and the pilot refused to land.

Kenyon came back to the Institute and proposed an expedition to Lake Bangweulu to find out the birthplace of Ebola3. His justification was that if it had come out once, it might come out again, and the next time it might not go away. Forty thousand dead and a 90 percent kill rate made for a very effective argument. The 168

funds were appropriated, and Kenyon went back to Zambia with a team of experts and the proper gear to work with Level 4 bio-agents in the field. Something that had never been done before.

They went into the swamp and, after two weeks of searching, found an island where Kenyon suspected the disease might have originated among the local monkey population. A few local survivors told him that swamp people went to that island occasionally to capture monkeys for export to medical labs for experimentation.