Area 51: The Sphinx-4 (19 page)

She left the two and reentered the main control center for the complex. She had no idea what this place had been, nor did she know how the upper portion had been destroyed.

Her job for all her "life" had been to maintain the status quo. It had been easy as long as the truce held, but once the balance had been upset, things had been happening faster than her group could keep up.

She needed help. Taking tissue samples from both

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dying men, she went to a room filled with large vats. She loaded the cells into the base of two of the vats. The controls and setup were similar to what she had had at Scorpion Base. She inserted the samples and turned the machines on.

SOUTH PACIFIC D- 36 Hours

The Southern Star rolled and pitched in the rough fifteen-foot swells. The entire ship vibrated from the engines churning at full speed.

On the bridge, Captain Halls watched the deck as several of the passengers slowly moved along a rope from the forward cargo hatch to the galley below. He felt nothing for them and the misery they were currently experiencing. Idiots, in his opinion.

"Progressives" is what the newspaper called them, and Australia had been hopping full of the lot when he'd left Sydney Harbor to pick up this group in Tasmania. He had the most extreme on board, but there had been thousands of others who would have gladly joined this expedition. Of course, Halls had to be honest with himself: He had those who had been willing to pay the top dollar he had asked.

Despite their money, these people worried him because they believed the aliens held the key to everything good. Halls clutched his side as a spike of pain cut through him.

"Blinking ulcers," he muttered.

"The guardian can cure your problem," a voice behind him startled him.

Halls turned. The Guide Parker had come onto the bridge.

"From the news I'm picking up, the guardian isn't doing much of anything."

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"That is because UNAOC forced it to protect itself." Parker walked up next to the captain and stared out the glass. "Wouldn't you retreat and protect yourself if you were attacked?"

Halls had no desire to get into an argument.

"Whatever pain you feel, whatever trouble you have in your life, the guardian will take care of it," Parker continued. "It holds all knowledge."

"How do you propose to get ahold of it?" Halls asked. "It don't seem to be talking to anybody."

"It is talking to Kelly Reynolds, and she will give us safe passage."

"They're not sure that message was really from her," Halls noted.

"Are you an isolationist?" Parker asked. "Afraid to step out of your cave?"

"I'm just a ship's captain," Halls replied.

"That's not going to work." Parker's gray eyes focused on the captain, and he squirmed under the scrutiny.

"I mind my own business," Halls said.

"You can't." Parker said it without raising his voice, but the words carried weight. "No human can. This will reach into every corner of the planet. No one is unaffected by what is happening. It is time for the human race to move forward," Parker said, his voice almost breaking with emotion. "To gain a place in the stars."

"But to take your line of thinking a step further," Halls said, "what if we go out of the cave and there are lions and tigers and bears?"

"If we go with the aid of the guardian and the Airlia, we will not have to worry about those things you fear."

"But," Captain Halls said, "what if the very things you look to for aid are the very things we should be afraid of?"

"Disbeliever!" Parker hissed.

Captain Halls looked out the forward glass of his

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bridge to the storm-tossed ocean. He wondered what lay ahead on Easter Island.

But Parker wasn't done. "Every human will have to choose soon. You will either be for or against. There will be no hiding." Parker raised his hand toward the heavens. "You will be either a believer or a heretic. And if you are a heretic, you will burn as they burned in the past!"

AIRSPACE WEST COAST, UNITED STATES

D - 35 Hours, 45 Minutes

"There's a message for you." The copilot of the bouncer held out a headset. They were thirty minutes out from Task Force 78 and Easter Island, and Duncan could see the west coast of the United States rapidly approaching. They really had no idea what the fastest speed a bouncer could achieve. Right now they were moving at over five thousand miles an hour, fast enough for Duncan and the pilots, as it almost outstripped the ability of their radar to see ahead of them and give them time to react.

Duncan put the headset on. "Yes?"

"This is Major Quinn. I've got a strange report that was forwarded to us via the Pentagon."

"Go ahead."

"There's a Professor Mualama who claims to have discovered an Airlia artifact in Tanzania."

Duncan leaned forward, hands over the headset so she could hear clearly. "What kind of artifact?"

"It wasn't specified. The person who sent it mentioned Professor Nabinger."

Nabinger. Duncan remembered the archaeologist who had been with Turcotte and Kelly Reynolds and von Seeckt in the attempt to stop Majestic-12.

Duncan pulled up the mouthpiece, leaned forward,

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and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. "Change in course. Tanzania."

The pilot nodded, already used to the strange requests and destinations he had shuttled Duncan and the other members of her team.

Duncan pulled the mouthpiece back down. "Who knows about this?"

"It was relayed through the Pentagon intelligence channels," Quinn said. "So everybody and their grandmother."

Duncan remembered both her friend at USAMRIID being killed and the betrayal within the SEAL team on one of the shuttles. There was no doubt the military was thoroughly infiltrated by all three groups—The Ones Who Wait, The Mission/Guides, and the Watchers. She wondered which of those she was racing to Tanzania right now. The only advantage she had was the speed of the bouncer.

"Anything from Turcotte?"

"Nothing."

"Keep me apprised of any changes. Out." She took off the headset. "A little faster if you please, Major Lewis," she ordered the pilot. The southwestern United States flashed beneath them in a blur and they were over the Gulf of Mexico.

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MONTANA D - 35 Hours

The High Plains that ever so gradually sloped up to the Rocky Mountains contained more than just hundreds of miles of rolling grasslands. Buried into the rocky soil, hundreds of missile silos held the remnants of one of the three legs of America's nuclear triad that had maintained the status quo of mutually assured destruction for decades.

Recent treaties with the other major nuclear powers had downgraded the alert status of the ICBMs nestled in the silos and caused their onboard targeting systems to be directed away from their war targets in Russia and China and left toward what were called Broad Ocean Areas—open spaces of ocean where a launch by mistake would cause the least possible destruction.

In the remote eastern Montana countryside, one of those missiles had been specially modified not to target a location on the surface of the planet but to break the bounds of gravity and go into space with its nuclear payload. This had been done as part of an experimental program designed to come up with ways to try to stop or deflect an incoming asteroid. Whether such a missile would work or not was a matter of debate among the scientists working on the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) program.

Today, however, as the clock ticked down on Lexina's threat, the crew manning the Launch Control Center (LCC) for this missile, code-named Interdictor, were

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programming it with space coordinates for a different mission.

The surface entrance to the LCC was set in the middle of an open grassy space, about the size of a football field, surrounded on all sides by a twelve-foot-high fence topped with razor wire. No Trespassing signs were hung every ten feet on the fence. The signs also informed the curious that the use of deadly force was authorized against intruders. Video cameras, remote-controlled machine guns, a satellite dish, and a small radar dish were on the roof of the small entrance building, the latter two pointing at the cloudless sky.

A hundred and fifty feet underground, the two members of the LCC crew were dressed in black one-piece flight suits. On their right shoulders they wore a patch showing Earth in the center with a lightning bolt coming off the surface into space. A Velcro tag on their chest gave their name, rank, and unit. Captain Linton was a skinny, dark-haired man. He sported Air Force-issue, black-framed, thick-lensed glasses. The LCC commander was Major Louise Greene, a tall blonde with a no-nonsense attitude befitting her position.

Rows of machinery lined the forty-by-forty room. There was a gray tile floor, and the walls were painted dull gray up to three feet, then Air Force blue to the ceiling. Twelve years before, when Greene started in missiles, the LCCs had been painted colors that psychologists had determined would be conducive to the crew's mental health during their extended tours of duty. That policy had been rescinded because of budget cutbacks and a change in command that had brought in a no-frills policy.

The entire facility was a capsule suspended from four huge shock absorbers, theoretically allowing it to survive the concussion of a direct nuclear strike overhead. The theory had yet to be put to the test, and there was much

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speculation among missile crews as to whether that bit of 1960s engineering was outmoded.

The main feature of the control room were the two consoles at the front of the room. Above those consoles, various screens showed scenes from the surface directly above, and the adjacent silo this center controlled.

Greene's and Linton's attention was focused on a flashing red light that had just come on.

"Verify Emergency Action Message," Major Greene tersely ordered as she reached over her shoulders and pulled the straps for her seat down and buckled them in, pulling the slack out. The red light was flashing and a nerve-jarring tone was sounding throughout the LCC. She locked down the rollers on the bottom of the seat. Then she hit the keys on her computer.

"I have verification of an incoming Emergency Action Message," she announced.

Linton was reading his terminal. "I have verification of an Emergency Action Message."

The screen cleared and new words formed. "Emergency Action Message received,"

Greene said. She pulled a sealed red envelope out of the safe underneath her console and ripped it open. She checked it against what was on the screen. "EAM

code is current and valid."

"Code current and valid," Linton repeated, checking his own envelope.

Greene's fingers flew over the keys. The blinking message on her screen cleared and new words flashed:

EAM: LAUNCH INTERDICTOR AS TARGETED

"EAM execution is to launch Interdictor," Greene announced. "Give me the launch status."

"Interdictor silo on line. Missile systems show green."

New words formed on the computer screen. "I have

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confirmation from National Command Authority that this is not a drill," Greene announced. "Open silo." "Opening silo."

Four hundred meters from the surface entrance to the Interdictor LCC was another fenced compound. Inside the razor wire topping the fence, two massive concrete doors slowly rose until they reached the vertical position. Inside a specially modified LGM-118A Peacekeeper ICBM missile rested, gas venting.

"I've got green on silo doors," Captain Linton announced, verifying what one of the video screens showed.

"Green on silo," Greene confirmed.

Deep underneath Ngorongoro Crater, Lexina put down the communicator that linked her to Etor. She turned the seat toward the large display panel in front of her. She had the view from Warfighter's imagers relayed to the board and they were zeroing in on eastern Montana—to the coordinates she'd just received.

The excellent equipment put into space by the Department of Defense clearly showed the silo doors opening. Lexina sent her commands to the talon to be relayed to Warfighter.

Inside the LCC there was controlled tension as the pair of officers ran down their checklists.

"Confirm targeting on talon." Greene was never one to leave anything to chance. Even though they'd spent four hours working with Space Command under Cheyenne Mountain to ensure that the Interdictor was targeted on the alien spacecraft, she wanted to check one more time. The talon and Warfighter was passing over the western coast of the United States, and this

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would be the only time the target would be in range until the deadline, when it would have Stratzyda under control. There was a narrow window to launch, and they were going to get only one chance.

"Targeting coordinates confirmed," Linton announced.

"To launch control," Greene ordered. Unlocking their seats, they both rolled along their respective tracks to the middle of the launch control room. The launch consoles faced each other but were separated by ten feet and a Plexiglas, bulletproof wall bisecting the room. A speaker in the wall allowed Greene and Linton to communicate. They locked their seats down in front of their respective consoles.

Greene put her eyes against the retinal scanner and the computer's voice echoed out of a speaker on the console.

"Launch officer verified. You may insert key."

Greene pulled her red key from under her shirt and inserted it into the appropriate slot.

The computer verified Linton's retina and instructed him to insert his key.

"All set," Linton said.

"Let's do it," Greene said, staring through the glass at Linton. "On my three to arm warhead timer. One. Two. Three."

They both turned their keys at the same time.

The LGM-118A was primed to launch. Inside the nosecone was a ten-kiloton warhead, the warhead now live and scheduled to go off on a preset timer when its projected trajectory took it less than four hundred meters from the talon in six minutes.