Area 51: The Truth (6 page)

As he retrieved a third bundle, the woman finally stopped dancing and joined him. They worked without a word, completely covering the craft in the red netting. The woman climbed down the slope of the craft and onto the plain while the man reentered the ship.

The craft lifted and went back over the plain. The stones were lifted by the traction beam and placed on the plain above the cavern that had been dug. Two were placed upright, set deep into the ground, while the third was placed across the top, forming a lintel.

Then the craft carefully edged forward into the cavern it had dug, sliding along the bottom of the opening so the netting would not be disturbed. At last, after its long journey, the craft finally came to rest.

The screen once more went blank.

And once more, Garlin pressed the Ark of the Covenant to probe.

Standing on the plain, the woman was watching the stones. Steam began to rise out of one of them. This went on for several minutes. Then the woman stepped forward toward the structure when the outline of a door appeared on the left stone. It slid open and the man exited, a large pack on his back and another in his arms. The door slid shut and the outline disappeared. The two looked at the structure for several moments, then the man gave the woman the pack he had carried. He pointed in a direction and they set off across the plain, leaving the strange marker behind.

The screen flickered and went dark.

The craft was indeed on Earth—and buried. But where exactly were these strange stones that marked the site? That was what the Swarm still had to discover.

Mount Everest

Turcotte was blindly following the furrow in the snow that the SEALs had made earlier and that he and Mualama had trudged up. He reached Morris’s body and paused for a moment, looking at the frozen blood and mangled flesh of the medic. A man dedicated to saving lives, Morris had given his own so Turcotte could make it to the sword. He knelt next to the body and removed the Special Forces crest from his parka and placed it on Morris’s chest.

“De Oppresso Liber,” Turcotte said as he stood back up. To Free The Oppressed. The motto of the Special Forces. Turcotte realized it fit the war he had been fighting against the aliens perfectly. He felt a surge of guilt, standing over the dead man. He had almost given up. He stiffened to attention and saluted. He held his position for several moments, then his hand fell to his side. He spun about and faced downhill.

With some renewed vigor he made his way down the ridgeline until he arrived at the two climbers’ bodies frozen in the snow. They had died years previously in a vain attempt to make the summit. Turcotte stared at them for a few seconds, wondering why people would give their lives for such a selfish pursuit. Was it for the glory, he wondered? Over the course of the past few months, while battling the Airlia and their minions, he had never really stopped to consider how humans might be viewed by other intelligent species. Besides physical appearance, how were we different than the Airlia, he asked himself. Which brought him back to the same question he’d had from the very beginning, once he realized the Airlia had been here so long ago: Why had they come here? What did they want with the planet and with us? The Airlia had had plenty of opportunities to wipe mankind out, but had never followed through completely. Indeed, what he had learned was that it seemed as if both factions of the Airlia had gone out of their way to keep humans around.

Turcotte shook his head, his mind too tired and oxygen-starved to delve deeply into such issues and questions. He used the ice ax to tear the climbing rope from the top of one man’s pack. With great effort he anchored the rope through the harnesses on both bodies, then tossed the end over the side of the ridge, down the southern slope, where the bouncer was. Since both were frozen to the mountain, he felt confident they would serve as a good anchor. He peered down. The end of the rope reached the top of the alien craft.

He looped the rope around a snap link in the front of his harness and turned his back to the open air on the south side of the ridge. He pushed off, rappelling down toward the golden craft wedged into the mountain. He barely had enough energy to pull his rope arm in and brake as he descended. He slammed into the side of Everest, his bulky clothes breaking the fall a little, his body too numb to notice the pain of the impact. He pulled his knees up to his chest while supporting his weight with the rope, then pushed out and away, pushing out his rope arm at the same time so it would slide free through the snap link.

His knees buckled as he landed on top of the bouncer and he continued through the fall, collapsing on top of the alien craft. He lay there for several moments, futilely trying to catch his breath. With great difficulty he unhooked the rope from the snap link. He crawled over to the open hatch and fell inside. He didn’t have the energy to climb back up the ladder and close it. He slid into the pilot’s depression and pulled back on the controls.

The bouncer shuddered and vibrated, but didn’t move. Turcotte leaned on the controls, not accepting defeat now. Ice cracked and very slowly the craft began to break free of Mount Everest. Then with an abrupt snap it was airborne.

There was none of the loss of power he had experienced arriving here. He directed the craft up the mountain toward the location he had just come from.

The magnificent north face of Everest was before him. Even in his exhausted, oxygen-starved state, he couldn’t help but admire the mountain. The peak was above, twenty-eight feet above twenty-nine thousand in altitude. Adjusting the controls, he directed the bouncer back up the mountain, retracing his route down.

Turcotte gasped for breath as he edged the front end in toward the narrow cave where the scabbard rested. Touching the mountain, he released the controls. He clambered up the ladder, out the hatch, and carefully made his way down the top of the bouncer. He stepped onto the ledge. Working as quickly as he could with the ice ax, out of breath and fighting the cold, he dug the scabbard out of its icy tomb, then retraced his steps into the bouncer, putting the scabbard down next to him, leaving the sword’s blade exposed.

Turcotte pulled the bouncer away from the mountain. He pointed the forward edge down and to the southwest, accelerating away from Everest and the resting place of so many who had tried to conquer the mountain and failed.

With his shaking free hand he reached for the mike to the satellite radio. “This is Turcotte,” he whispered.

There was no answer. “Turcotte here.”

There was a burst of static, then Quinn’s excited voice. “Major! Where are you?” “In the bouncer. Coming down.”

“Thank God. You’ve been off the air for a while. We thought you were dead.” “What’s happening?” Turcotte asked. “Easter Island? Qian-Ling?”

“The shields are down in both places. As near as we can tell from tracking their craft, Aspasia’s Shadow and Artad are fleeing.”

“Fleeing to where?” Turcotte asked. “Uh—well, we don’t know. Artad is heading southwest and Aspasia’s Shadow to the west across the Pacific.” “Duncan?” Turcotte asked. “Nothing on her location.”

Victory is fleeting. The thought came unbidden to Turcotte’s mind and he knew he had heard it from someone. Someone important.

There was a voice in the background, yelling something. “Kincaid’s here,” Quinn said. “He says he has to tell you something.”

The hatch on top of the bouncer was open and Turcotte could feel the level of oxygen inside rise as he descended over India. The sun streaming in through the skin of the aircraft brought welcome warmth. It was probably just around freezing inside the craft now, but to Turcotte it was beginning to feel like being in an oven. Snow that had drifted in was beginning to melt, forming puddles of water on the floor.

“Mike, this is Larry Kincaid.” “Go ahead.”

“Mars. What the Airlia from Cydonia are building on Mons Olympus. I figured it out. It’s a transmitter/receiver of some sort. A very, very big one. I assume it has some way of sending and receiving a message across interstellar distances. Possibly faster than the speed of light. I can’t be sure of that, but who knows what technology they have in that area. We assume the mothership was capable of faster-than-light speed, so we have to assume they have some way of communicating like that. I think they had an array at Cydonia, but it was destroyed long ago. Now they’re rebuilding it on Mons Olympus.”

The words seemed to resound in Turcotte’s mind, a jumbled, confusing mess for several seconds before the pieces fell into place. “So.” He drew the word out as the implications sank in. “We’ve won the battle of Earth. But if Artad gets to Mars and gets a message out to his people, we can end up losing everything.”

There was no response to that.

Turcotte glanced down at the green fields flashing by below. He was feeling a bit dizzy. And much too warm. His body felt as if it were burning up. He was nauseous and he twisted his head to the side as he retched, but nothing came up. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He’d survived for too long on too little. Now he was overwhelmed by too much oxygen, too much warmth, too quickly he realized. He let go of the radio and tried to unzip his parka.

“We need to finish this once and for all,” Turcotte muttered, and then passed out, his hand dropping off the controls.

Vicinity Groom Lake, Nevada

1942

Balancing in the open back of the jeep, both hands holding on tight to the M-2 fifty-caliber machine gun, the
OSS
agent imagined himself in North Africa driving across the desert in pursuit of Rommel’s Afrika Corps. The fact that the gun had no rounds loaded was something he chose to ignore.

The driver, Special Agent Cavanaugh, usually tried to do his best to ignore his younger partner. But when, above the never-ending sounds of the wind, he could swear he heard him making rat-a-tat-tat noises, Cavanaugh tapped the brakes, causing his partner’s chest to bang against the back of the gun painfully. Cavanaugh then slowed the jeep to a halt. He got out of the driver’s seat and walked ten feet away, before pulling out his compass to make a map check. He wanted to be sure they could find their way back.

They were northwest of the newly established Nellis Air Force Base tracking a plume of dust several miles ahead of them. They’d been following the German agent from New York, via train to Salt Lake City and then by car to this area and now by jeep into the desert. Cavanaugh couldn’t imagine what the hell the German was up to in this godforsaken place, but they had their orders from Wild Bill Donovan himself.

The OSS—Office of Strategic Services—was a new entity, developed in response to the war and mimicking the British
SOE
, Special Operation Executive, an organization designed to do the dirtier work of warfare. Donovan, the head of the
OSS
, had told Cavanaugh that the arrival date and time of the German agent in New York had been forwarded from the British, but there was no clue as to the agent’s mission.

“Kramer,” Cavanaugh called out.

His partner was rubbing his chest. “What?” “You need to look at this.”

Reluctantly, Kramer gave up the gun position and climbed out of the jeep. “What is it?” Cavanaugh simply held out the compass. “Yes?”

Cavanaugh held in his sigh of contempt. “The sun is there. North is that way.” He pointed in the direction indicated by the compass, one hundred and eighty degrees out from north.

“There must be a large ore deposit nearby,” was Kramer’s best guess.

Cavanaugh looked about, then checked the map. They were on a dry lake bed, marked Groom Lake on the surveying map they’d been given. The compass was pointing at a mountain to their south.

Cavanaugh rubbed away some sand stuck to the sweat on his face. Both men were sunburned, tired, and worn. And subconsciously feeling guilty that they weren’t at the front, whether it be in the Pacific or Atlantic. When he’d joined the
OSS
, Cavanaugh had envisioned parachuting into Europe to work behind the lines, not driving across the desert in Nevada. He checked his watch, then walked back over to the jeep and picked up the handset for the radio to make their check-in with Nellis.

When he keyed the handset a sharp burst of static came out of the speaker. Cavanaugh cursed and fiddled with the frequency knob, checking to make sure it was set correctly. When he tried again, he still found only static. He switched to the alternate frequency but the result remained the same.

Cavanaugh looked at the mountain to the south. He pulled a set of binoculars out and focused them. He couldn’t see the German’s car, but he could see the dust trail it was kicking up. Straight for the mountain. “Let’s go.”

They hopped back in the jeep and Cavanaugh held the speed down to keep their own dust cloud from being too large. He felt exposed, but there was no other way to do this. He slowed as the plume ahead disappeared. At the base of the mountain. He stopped the jeep. “What now?” Kramer asked.

“We wait a little bit,” Cavanaugh said for lack of a better plan. “What the hell is this guy doing out here?” Kramer asked.

Cavanaugh shrugged. Nellis was nearby and it was a large air base, but there was nothing out here as far as he knew. He pulled up the binoculars, but he was too far away to make out anything.

Kramer was swinging the fifty-caliber around, shooting at imaginary enemies. Cavanaugh wondered how the man had made it through the screening process to be allowed into the
OSS
. He started as the crack of an explosion rolled across the desert. Cavanaugh looked through the binoculars and could see the dust cloud coming off the lower side of the mountain.

He started the jeep’s engine and threw it into gear, nearly knocking Kramer out of the rear as he hit the gas. He was trying to figure out what the German was up to, but he couldn’t even come up with possibilities.

He drove between two large boulders and skidded to a halt, seeing the German’s dust-covered car and thirty feet above it, on the side of the mountain, blasted rock, indicating where the explosion had gone off. A rope dangled from a ledge, but he couldn’t see what was just above the ledge.