Area 51: The Truth (3 page)

Maintaining a one-hand grip on the ax handle, most of his weight on the strap from it stretched taut around his wrist, with the other hand he swung Excalibur. The blade severed the rope a second before it was fully extended. Turcotte followed through the swing and jabbed Excalibur at the ice and rock of the ridgeline. The sword cut through the ice and into the rock, penetrating a few inches. Using the leverage of sword and ice ax, Turcotte slowly maneuvered himself off the sheer face and onto the ridge. He pulled the sword out and held it against his chest.

He rolled onto the almost knife edge of the ridge and lay on his back, gasping for air and staring up at the stars. Only twenty-nine thousand feet to go.

The Gulf of Mexico

Three hundred feet under the water, an undersea habitat was joined to the leg of an abandoned oil rig platform. Inside the habitat, strapped to a steel gurney, was Lisa Duncan, former presidential science adviser and the one who had initiated the investigation into Majestic-12 and Area 51. She’d been kidnapped from Area 51 and brought here where she met Dr. Garlin, who claimed to be a member of a new Majestic-12 committee. This had occurred after it was discovered that Lisa was not who she appeared to be. Who she really was, however, remained a mystery. While under the control of Aspasia’s Shadow she had partaken of the Grail, and was now immortal, something that was doing her little good in her present predicament.

She was a slender, dark-haired woman, covered with a white robe. On her head was a crown made of three bands of metal, an ancient artifact that had been carried out of Egypt by the high priest during the Exodus. Leads from the crown went to an object on a gurney next to her, something else that had been carried across the desert millennia ago: the Ark of the Covenant.

The Ark was three feet high and wide by four feet long. Gold plating covered the surface. On the open lid were two sphinxlike objects with glowing red eyes. The wires from the crown ran into the inner lid of the Ark. A thin, previously hidden screen had been pulled down, revealing a slightly curving, black surface. Just below it was a series of two dozen small hexagonal buttons with a rune on each one.

Silver-haired Garlin stood next to the Ark, wearing a white labcoat. He stood perfectly still, watching the black surface as colors flickered across it. His face was expressionless except for a slight twitching on the left side, a muscle out of control, but it didn’t seem to bother him in the least. A thin trail of blood was seeping from his left ear, but that also was ignored.

The black shimmered, flickered, then came alive with an image. Garlin leaned forward to look at what was displayed: a scarred mothership lifting off a planet’s surface. The area around the launch site was crowded with people, troops holding them back. For a moment the vision focused on a small child near the front of the crowd, then it swept back. As the mothership rose, the planet’s landmasses came into focus. Garlin noted the details.

Then the view shifted to the mothership moving through the vastness of space, going from one jump point to another at faster-than-light speeds.

The screen went black and then the mothership appeared again, this time looping into the edge of a planetary system at sub-light speed, but still traveling at a tremendous velocity. A cargo bay door opened and a smaller craft edged out as the mothership passed just inside the farthest planet. The craft was saucer-shaped, with a bulge in the forward center rising up and two large pods in the rear providing power. Like the mothership, its surface had also been damaged in battle. Unlike the mothership, its surface was not black metal, but rather a grayish compound. While the mothership headed back into deep space toward a jump point, the saucer flew on, toward the inner planets.

An image of Earth appeared. The craft was heading for it. Garlin took a step closer to the screen. Duncan moaned and twisted, fighting against the restraints and the invasion of her mind. The vision of the craft and Earth blanked out.

A man appeared on the screen. Stocky, muscular. Dressed in a one-piece black jumpsuit with some sort of insignia on his chest. He was standing on a shoreline. His shadow was diffused by two suns overhead at slightly different angles. The air was tinged with yellow mist. The water was perfectly smooth with a purplish tint. The man was reaching out toward the viewer when the screen flickered again.

The man appeared once more, this time dressed in antiquated armor. The metal was dented and bloody. A wound across his forehead dripped blood. And he was smiling, his eyes dancing with battle lust. In this scene, he only cast one shadow. The trees in the background were bright with the fiery colors of autumn.

Garlin frowned. Duncan’s connection with this man was strong, very powerful, overriding his inputs to the Ark of the Covenant. Garlin wanted the location of the craft that had just been shown—where it had landed on Earth and where it was now secreted.

He reached forward and tapped a command on the keys. The saucer appeared once more, heading toward Earth.

Duncan’s back arched, the restraint stretching slightly, then pulling her back onto the gurney. Her head twisted back and forth. She moaned, a low keening sound that a sleeping dog in the midst of a bad dream might make.

The craft disappeared and the man reappeared. This time he was dressed in camouflage fatigues. Garlin leaned forward. There was something different about the man. A brief smile crossed Duncan’s face.

Garlin leaned forward and tapped on the keys once more, directing the Ark to probe for the information he needed.

The man disappeared.

Atlantis, Earth

10,600 B.C.

The magnificent City of the Gods, set in the center of the island in the middle of the great ocean, was surrounded by concentric rings of land and water. On the large hill in the exact center was a golden palace over a mile wide at the base and stretching over three thousand feet into the sky. As magnificent as the building was, it was dwarfed by the large black mothership now descending upon it. The ship’s surface was unmarred, a flat black that seemed to absorb the sun’s rays.

The land in the surrounding rings had once boasted bountiful crops and many villages, but much of the land was blackened and blistered from the ravages of war. The human population was depleted, as many men had been ordered by the Gods off to distant battles and most had never returned.

Directly outside the palace, the streets were choked with people clamoring for entrance into the temple of the Gods. Warrior-priests manned the gates on the outer wall, with strict orders regarding who was to be allowed in and who was to be denied entrance. The latter outnumbered the former by a hundred to one. Some prescient souls were already in the harbor below the palace, buying their way onto sailing ships, but most had their attention on the palace from which the Gods had ruled for so long, unwilling to accept that change was coming and that the Gods would not take care of them.

Prayers were chanted, incense burned, and rich offerings were made to the warrior-priests, but no one was allowed entry unless they were on the list. A pattern soon emerged, as only those who had fought for the Gods and worshipped them with unwavering loyalty were allowed in.

The mothership came to a hover next to the top level of the palace, its center adjacent to the tower. Large hangar doors on the side of the craft slid apart and a narrow metal gangway extended out of the ship to the tallest steeple in the temple. Priests hurried across the gangplank and took up positions in the entrance to the hangar. Four priests carefully made their way across, two by two, on their inside shoulders a wooden pole. Supported by the poles was an object covered by a white shroud. Directly behind the four was a high priest, garbed in a white linen robe, over which he wore a sleeveless blue tunic, fringed in gold. On top of that was a coat of many colors, which glittered in the sunlight. The coat was fastened at the shoulders with two precious stones, carved with runes. On his chest was a breastplate encrusted with jewels. There were two pockets over each breast, each of which emitted a greenish glow thanks to the stones placed inside. On his head was a crown made up of three bands of metal. He was chanting in a strange singsong language as they made their way into the mothership and disappeared into its vastness.

Then the first of the chosen ones were allowed out of the palace, two by two, almost running, eager to be inside the safety of the mothership.

The people outside the walls of the temple had seen the Ark of the Covenant carried across. The Ark was said to hold the Grail, the bringer of immortality, the possibility of which the Gods had held out to man since the beginning of time. If the Ark and Grail were being taken, the people knew that everything was changing and they were being abandoned. Fighting broke out in places along the wall as many of those not selected rebelled.

Almost immediately a small golden orb extended from the pinnacle of the palace. Bolts of gold shot from it toward the troubled areas and when they struck, the resulting explosion killed not only the troublemakers but also hundreds of bystanders. Given such a brutal response, the fighting quickly ceased and the boarding continued uninterrupted.

After four hours of nonstop loading, there were no more to cross. The gangway retracted and the doors slid shut. As smoothly and quietly as it had arrived, the mothership rose to a hover about a mile above the palace. Larger doors near the front of the mothership now slid apart, revealing a massive cargo bay. On the north side of the palace a set of doors swung open. Two golden flying disks about thirty feet in diameter at the base and sloping up to a rounded top floated out—below them, caught in an invisible field they were propagating, was a large Black Sphinx, over three hundred feet long from the tip of the paws to the rear. The smaller craft maneuvered the Black Sphinx up and into the cargo bay. They set it down, then sped back to the palace, making several more trips, transporting up several twenty-foot-high golden pyramids, and lastly, a blood-red pyramid.

When all was loaded, the cargo doors shut and the mothership began flying to the southeast. It moved across the ocean, passing high over the Straits of Gibraltar and along the barren coast of North Africa until it came to a lush land with a large river running through it. Halting above the river, the cargo bay opened and the two saucers emerged, the Black Sphinx held in their traction beams. They lowered the Black Sphinx into a hole burned in the Giza Plateau, then did the same with the red pyramid.

When that was done, the mothership slowly descended until just above the stone plateau. A gangplank was extended to the ground. First off were the four priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant, followed by the high priest. Behind them came over a thousand people, mostly priests and warriors. Also sneaking off the ship as darkness fell, wrapped in black cloaks, were six strange creatures, over seven feet tall with red hair, red catlike eyes, and six fingers on the end of each hand. They were Airlia, the builders of the mothership, and a race that was spread across many galaxies. They entered a secret doorway into the underground chambers, while the humans remained above ground.

With this off-loading, the First Age of Egypt was begun, the time of the Gods, under the command of the Airlia couple Isis and Osiris, who sneaked in under cover of darkness and would rule through the priests.

The gangplank was withdrawn and the mothership flew to the east, across the Red Sea, and halted at a high mountain peak near the southern end of a desolate peninsula of land. Here a golden pyramid was off-loaded and hidden in a place prepared for it deep inside Mount Sinai. Also placed deep in the mountain were several pieces of machinery. Several of the aliens exited the ship pushing a coffinlike object, which they maneuvered into a chamber far inside the mountain. They hooked it up and swung open the lid. Lying inside was an adult human male with baby-smooth skin and vacant eyes that betrayed no sign of intelligence. His chest slowly rose and fell with each breath.

The leader of the aliens, Aspasia, was now hooked into the machine also. It was activated by one of the Airlia. Aspasia’s memories, his mind, his essence, were transferred into the machine. When that was done, Aspasia stood and walked over to the tube, looking down at the body for several moments before going to the machine. He removed a medallion in the shape of two arms extended outward, a ka, from the top of the machine. It now held all his memories, his personality, and his essence, up to the moment of transfer. He held it in his six-fingered hand for a moment, as if weighing it, then returned it to its slot. He pushed the lid shut on the body, then set a timer on the top of the tube before quickly departing the chamber and returning to the mothership. He was leaving behind the machinations that would produce his Shadow, long after he and his opponent had gone into deep sleep.

From Sinai, the mothership continued on its way around the world, making several more stops. One was at the island farthest removed from land in the southeastern Pacific, which would not be known as Rapa Nui or Easter Island for millennia. Here another golden pyramid was secreted in a chamber deep under an extinct volcano. A handful of humans were deposited on the surface of the island, left to fend for themselves as the mothership moved on to the east.

Another stop was high in the Andes Mountains, where both a pyramid and another thousand humans were deposited, along with one of the aliens named Virachoca, to secretly rule in this most inhospitable terrain. After a few more stops, the ship was empty except for the crew and Aspasia. It headed to the least-populated continent, North America, and to the most desolate and deserted spot in that land.

Hovering next to a barren mountain, a golden beam from the nose of the craft burned a hole large enough for it to fit through and carved out a chamber inside from the solid rock. Using bouncers and their tractor beams, the crew off-loaded struts from another cargo bay and placed them on the floor of the cavern. The large ship carefully edged inside and settled down on the struts. The crew used metal to brace the cavern and built a rock wall, covering up the entrance, leaving one of the golden saucers outside. The mothership was powered down, a low power beacon was activated, and the crew departed via a small tunnel, which they blocked with stone behind them before they got on the golden saucer and flew back to Atlantis.