Origins: The Reich (12 page)

Frank pulled the phone away from his ear to avoid the deafening blast of static feeding back through the device.  He terminated the call and attempted to dial again and raised nothing but static.  He tried another number, but got the same result.

“Try yours,” Frank asked of Chin.

A subtle shake of his head preceded a dejected frown.  “We are cut off, probably along with most of the country.  Coordinating a counterstrike will be nearly impossible now.”

“Not to mention that the outside world will only have rumors of activity with little or no proof,” Frank added.

“I know I wouldn’t believe it, even if I saw a live video of events,” Alex said softly.  “Who in their right mind would?”

“It sounds to me like the key to everything happening here is centered around Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum,” Professor Russell offered.  “No one knows that massive burial mound better than the four of us.  We should head back there to see what can be done.”

“You want us to go back into the hornet’s nest?” Alex asked as though he just suggested she join him on a journey to the center of the earth.  “You saw what they did back there in the command center, right?  We wouldn’t last two seconds.”

“I can round up what soldiers and vehicles we have left to make a push,” Chin offered.

Frank gave the suggestion a moment’s pause, but cast it aside with a shake of his head.  “No.  As long as we don’t look threatening, they should leave us ‘harmless flies’ alone.  That means no heavy vehicles or guns, but I do think you’re right, Prof.  We need to get back to the burial mound and see if we can be the one horse fly that manages to get under their saddle and cause this bronco to start buckin’.”

“Without weapons we aren’t going to have much bite,” Chin protested.

“I doubt a bunch of backpacks carrying explosives would look very threatening to them,” Frank said with a sly grin turning up the corners of his mouth.  “Alex, see if you can hotwire us a few innocent looking cars while the rest of us follow Chin to the armory and machine shop.”

An hour later, the group of four approached Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum riding in a black panel van Alex ‘borrowed’ for the occasion. Sitting in the passenger seat, Frank said to Alex,
“
Kill the headlights and pull off to the side of the road another hundred yards up.”

As she brought the van to a stop, Frank looked behind him at Professor Russell.  “Are you sure about this? I saw at least three, maybe four, clay soldiers patrolling outside the visitor center of the Qin Shi Huang mausoleum.  If they spot us, we’re dead.”

“Just get me that laptop,” Professor Russell responded with confidence.  “I know there are other tunnels, but we need the mapping coordinates to see exactly where they are.”

With that resolved, Frank looked over at Chin.  “You ready?”

“Ready enough,” the petite man responded.  He then opened the back door to the van without another word and stepped out.  Frank followed close behind and shut the door behind them.  The two covert operatives moved in tandem toward the tent set up along the eastern edge of the pyramid that the archeologists used earlier in the day to map the structure’s interior.

Frank ran ahead thirty feet until he reached a set of dense bushes.  He checked the immediate surroundings for any sign of patrols.  Once satisfied the coast was clear, he waved Chin to move on ahead.  He then snuck past Frank in a hunched over run until reaching a pine tree with a trunk thick enough to conceal him.  Then it was Frank’s turn once again.

The men leapfrogged each other’s position for a quarter mile until they came to a clearing that spanned over fifty feet across.  At the end of the grassy field stood the target tent, but there was absolutely nothing in between to provide cover.  The only saving grace was that there did not appear to be any security patrols.  Then again, why would there be? 

The Terracotta warrior museum was well defended since it served as the only direct entrance into the burial chamber the Alpha used to regenerate.  The quarter mile square, two hundred foot tall mound of rammed earth on top of the burial chamber was a different matter entirely.  Its very existence provided all the protection they needed against intruders, or so they thought.  Moreover, what military commander would consider a lonely fabric tent in the middle of a field to be a credible security threat?

Frank made eye contact with Chin, pointed to himself, walked his fingers across the air and then finished the silent communication by pointing to the tent.  Chin nodded with agreement and brought the shotgun slung across his back around to a ready position.

The crossing proved uneventful.  Frank covered the fifty feet in a matter of seconds.  Rather than barging in through the front door, he opted to lay flat and peek his head under one of the side panels.  Inside he found an empty tent lit by a screen saver line dancing across the laptop screen.

He was about to get back on his feet and move around to the tent’s front entrance when a set of heavy footfalls approaching from that direction drew his attention.  A clay soldier armed with an AK-47 and a radio headset entered the small clearing headed toward the tent.

Frank was completely exposed and would be easily spotted in just a few short seconds.  However, if he moved too much the motion would give him away even sooner.  Out of options, he pulled up hard on the side panel of the tent and managed to lift it high enough to squeeze under and into the tent.

Inside, the dim blue lighting from the monitor cast long shadows all along the perimeter of the tent giving, Frank plenty of places to hide.  He felt good about his chances to remain hidden if the soldier poked its head in for a quick look.  If the sentry opted to have a detailed look around with a flashlight or possessed some sort of night vision ability, Frank was toast.

Long seconds ticked by as the ground vibrations of the heavy creature’s footfalls drew near.  The front door swung open and a dark figure, backlit by the dim moonlight, stood in the open doorway.  A set of pounding heartbeats later, the door closed and Frank felt the ground impact of the creature walking away.

With his eyes now fully adjusted to the dim lighting of the tent, Frank had little difficulty collecting the laptop and its power cord.  He made a mad dash back to Chin’s position and together the two men made their way back to the van without incident.

Chin opened the back door of the van and followed Frank into the vehicle, quietly closing the door behind him.

“I don’t plan on doing that again anytime soon,” Frank declared while handing the valuable piece of technology over to Alex to work her magic.

“I suppose retrieving the set of sunglasses I left on the table next to the computer will just have to wait then,” she teased.

The jest caught Frank completely off guard, and before he could formulate a retort, the young woman had the sonic density mapping results on screen.  The dotted pictorial showed a subterranean tunnel leading from the Terracotta Warrior pits up to the expansive room that served as Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s burial chamber.  Above that rose a one-hundred foot tall pyramid that the Alpha allegedly constructed to house their relics and regenerating equipment.  His untrained eye saw very little else, but then again archeology was not his profession.

“You see?  There, right there,” Professor Russell exclaimed pointing to a seemingly insignificant haze of random dots around the perimeter of the burial chamber.  “Everything I’ve ever read about this mausoleum said that it was set up like the emperor’s palace with outer walls for protection. That rectangular shaped haze must be those walls.”

“So what?” Frank and Chin replied in stereo.

“Emperor Huang was a megalomaniac obsessed with his own security in the afterlife,” the professor instructed.  “It would stand to reason that there would be passages for his clay army to reach those walls to defend his postmortem palace.”

“Alex, see if you can zoom in along the north side between the buried wall and the burial chamber itself,” Professor Russell said.  “There. 
There!
”

Sure enough, the faint outlines of a straight-line passageway leading from the outer wall sloping upward toward the burial chamber were visible.

“Great, we have another way into the burial chamber.  Now how do we get to it?” Frank asked of no one in particular.  “Those passageways run underneath the burial mound, hundreds of feet of packed earth and tree roots.”

“Maybe not,” the professor countered.  “When the pyramid was built two thousand years ago, it stood over four hundred feet tall.  Now due to the erosion from water, wind, and time it has shriveled down to a little over two hundred feet.”

Chin added his concerns to the conversation.  “That is still a whole lot of digging.”

“It might not be as bad as you think,” Alex said while typing away on the computer keyboard to bring up a broader view of the entire burial mound.  “The south side looks to have taken much more damage than the rest.”

She zoomed in the map view again to focus on the southern passage leading back to the burial chamber from the outer wall.  “There’s a fairly deep crater near this tunnel.  I’ll bet there’s only ten or twenty feet of ground between the passageway and the surface.”

Frank looked to Chin with a smile brimming with optimism.  “It’s a good thing we brought along those EFPs.”

“What is an EFP?” Professor Russell asked.

“Explosive Formed Penetrator,” Chin answered.  “Get us to that crater, and you’ll see exactly what we mean.”

Colonel Azire tightened
the draw straps on either side of his head to pull the black rubber oxygen mask tight against his face to establish a good seal.  He then focused on his field of vision through the face-length piece of transparent plastic that more or less allowed him to see normally.  The only flaw came along the sides where the rounded surface had an odd distortion that made him constantly think a funhouse mirror was just inside the limits of his peripheral vision.

With the mask secured, his next priority was breathable air.  Azire opened the flow nozzle and instantly coughed at the sensation of hot air rushing to fill his mask.  Though his lungs protested, he breathed deeply and took comfort in the fact that it was preferable to the oxygen-deprived conditions outside the mask.

He stole a glance at the volume gauge of his tank before hoisting the cumbersome object onto his back; the fact that he could visually see the indicator moving toward empty was quite alarming.  His best guess was that the tank would afford him up to an hour of breathable air before running out, and the clock was ticking.

Military discipline was not lacking in Colonel Azire’s men.  All eight donned their masks in record time without panicking.  Two of them even took the initiative of jamming the butts of their rifles against the trap door’s seam to see if they could move it. The other six stood at attention looking toward their commanding officer, assuming he had a solution to their predicament.

“Any give?” Colonel Azire asked knowing full well the answer - of course not.  If the door could bend those two braces into massive horseshoes, the stock of a Kalashnikov was not about to make any progress.

“No, nothing,” came a reply sandwiched between grunts.  “Maybe if we all work together?”

“No.  Get up, save your air and let the rest of us have a look,” Colonel Azire ordered in a calm, level tone that conveyed a confidence he certainly did not feel at the moment.  It was bad enough he was experiencing a mild panic attack; he did not need all of his men to do the same.  Instead, he put on a brave face and stepped forward to stand over the hatch now covering the exit ramp.

The first feature that struck him about the hatch was the difficulty he had trying to focus on it. With all the shoulder-mounted flashlights of his men pointed toward the metal hatch, the light reflected back was nearly blinding.

For comparison, he looked back at the impenetrable vault door and saw it reflected almost no light.  Azire recalled that the metal lining of the tunnel below had also absorbed nearly all of the light directed at its surface.

“I think this trap door is made of different material than the vault door,” Azire announced, drawing several additional light beams to focus on the vertical door.  “Let’s see if the thermite is able to cut through it.”

“Even if it is the same, since this door is lying flat the molten slag will stay in one place and continue burning rather than sliding down,” one of his men offered while pulling out a brick-sized charge from the nearest duffle bag and running out the magnesium fuse.

“Let’s see if Allah is on our side today,” Colonel Azire said.  He squeezed his eyelids closed, placed his free hand over the facemask, turned his back, and pressed the ignition switch with the other to bring the dormant brick to life.

The initial spark was bright enough to be visible for about thirty seconds even through his covered eyes, but soon settled down to a bright orange pile of liquid metal still burning at several thousand degrees.  As Azire turned around and stepped forward to have a closer look, he noticed the pile of slag was sinking.  Slowly at first, but after a few seconds the entire pile vanished from view leaving the chamber whistling with the sound of air rushing in through the hole.

Colonel Azire did not even bother with a detailed inspection of the results.  He just gave the order, “Line the entire perimeter of the trap door with charges.”

Five minutes later the chamber was an unbearable inferno as twenty thermite charges cut their way through the hatch covering the exit ramp.  After a few minutes, the glowing embers dropped away from the door’s perimeter.  There was a sorrowful groan as the door’s weight sagged lower and lower until all four edges gave way, resulting in a jarring thud onto the ramp below.

Azire was the first to brave the environment outside his mask by removing the awkward facemask.  His men soon followed suit upon seeing that their commanding officer had no difficulty breathing.

“You two are with me,” Colonel Azire ordered and proceeded down the newly opened exit ramp where he found an American soldier crouched on one knee in front of the descending tunnel ladder with his weapon trained on them.  By the look in the soldier’s eyes, it was impossible to tell if he had orders to shoot the colonel and his men or if he was just taking a precaution in case the aliens were the ones exiting the chamber.  He decided to see which was the case.

“Don’t shoot, it’s just me and my men,” Azire announced in English while continuing to descend the ramp.

“Thank God.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure how we were going to get you guys out of there.  Let me call it in that you’re out,” the soldier said as he lowered his weapon and reached for the microphone attached around his neck.

“That won’t be necessary,” Colonel Azire responded while his right hand drew the pistol from his hip holster and fired a round through the American’s forehead.  The blast echoed around the tiny chamber like a blast from the deck cannon of a battleship, and drew the rest of his men down the ramp.

“What have you done?” one of them reflexively asked.  “The Americans are guests in our country; our allies.”

“I’m taking back the initiative from a dangerous invader,” Azire responded without emotion.