Area 51: Excalibur-6 (12 page)

Irvine suddenly realized he had no feeling in his hands. He tried pulling them back, but they were stuck to the ice. With all his will he pulled his arms back.

He blinked with almost bemusement as three fingers on his right hand and two on his left simply cracked off and remained frozen to the ice. He felt no pain, just a distant dullness from his elbows down.

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With great effort he slid to a sitting position between the two bodies. Irvine slumped back against the ice. The rays of the sun were horizontal and soon it would be gone. The wind, strangely enough, had died down. It was eerily quiet; the only sound he could hear was his own gasping for oxygen in the thin air.

He sat back, totally exhausted. Still he summoned the strength to turn his body ever so slightly so that he was looking at the mountain, at Excalibur. A slight smile touched his blood-spattered lips. And that was how he died.

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CHAPTER 8: THE PRESENT

AREA 51

Turcotte ignored Yakov, Che Lu, and Mualama. He walked into the room where Duncan was seated in a chair, a blanket wrapped around her slight frame. His fatigues were dusted with sand from his sojourn into the desert and where sweat had soaked through the camouflage material, the sand was crusted in place.

"You're back," Duncan said, a hesitant half smile on her face. She started to get up. "Mike, I'm telling you the—"

"Shh—" Turcotte said as he lightly put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her back into the chair.

But that didn't stop Duncan. "I'm telling you the truth as far as I know it."

"I know. I think I've got an idea what was done to you. When we infiltrated Majestic-12's base at Dulce," Turcotte said, "we found that they were conducting experiments on abductees, including Kelly Reynolds's friend Johnny Simmons. Mind experiments using Airlia technology."

"Dulce was destroyed," Duncan said.

"Yes, but they got the basic technology from the Airlia. They were working on EDOM—electronic dissolution of memory. Majestic was using it on abductees to wipe out their real memories of being captured by Nightscape, and then implanting false memories of disinformation."

Duncan frowned. "Are you saying my memories are

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false? That everything I know is a lie? Electronic signals implanted in my brain?"

Turcotte tapped the CIA folder. "We know your memories are a lie, Lisa."

A nerve twitched on the side of her face. "I don't have a son?"

"I'm afraid not."

Duncan was shaking her head. "It can't be. It just can't be. I remember him. I remember all of it. Damn it, Mike, I remember giving birth to him. The pain. I watched him grow up. Maybe some of my memories are false, but others true? All of it can't be a lie."

Turcotte remembered how Johnny Simmons, Kelly Reynolds's friend who had gotten her involved in the whole Area 51 mess, had killed himself after they'd rescued him from an EDOM pod at Dulce. To have one's past taken away and replaced with a set of lies was undoubtedly devastating. It took away a person's sense of self.

Duncan had just learned that her family was not only dead, they had never existed.

"It doesn't make sense," she finally said. "Why would Majestic have done this to me? I ended up putting in motion the forces that destroyed them."

Turcotte shook his head. "I'm saying the technology and techniques used on you are similar to the EDOM Majestic used. I'm not saying Majestic was behind it."

"Who, then?"

"That's a very good question," Turcotte said. "If we can figure that out, maybe we can figure out who you really are."

Turcotte went to the door and motioned for Quinn to come in. "How far has Dulce been excavated?" he asked the major.

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Quinn checked his PDA, accessing the CUBE mainframe. "They're down to the bottom level."

"So they've uncovered the EDOM pods and research area?"

Quinn nodded. "And the guardian that corrupted Majestic. It's being held under heavy guard but it doesn't seem to be active. Just like the one in the Mission under Mount Sinai seems to be off-line."

"Where are those guardians now?" Turcotte asked. "I don't know. UNAOC has taken over all Airlia artifacts. Most likely they are still where they were found."

"Do you think it would be possible to reverse EDOM?" Turcotte asked him. He saw Duncan lift her head, listening intently now.

Quinn shrugged. "I have no idea. That's not my field of expertise."

"Find someone whose it is," Turcotte ordered. He nodded toward the door. "Tell the others to come in."

Che Lu, Mualama, and Yakov entered the conference room and sat around the table.

Turcotte quickly updated them on what he thought had been done to Duncan.

"But we don't know who did this to her," Yakov said when Turcotte was done. "It could have been Artad's side; it could have been Aspasia's Shadow's."

"Well, we can assume it wasn't Majestic," Turcotte said. "Which means someone else has or had access to the same technology."

"Most likely garnered from Airlia artifacts," Yakov said. Che Lu was rubbing her chin in thought. She looked at Duncan. "This means you cannot trust any memory prior to ordering Turcotte to infiltrate Area 51."

"I can't trust my memory and I don't know what has happened to me." Duncan held her hands up in defeat. "What now?"

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"We need the Master Guardian," Yakov said. "And Excal-ibur. And we do not have much time."

"How long until Aspasia's Shadow's fleet is in range of Pearl?" Turcotte asked Quinn.

"A couple of days."

"Should she be listening to this?" Yakov asked, nodding toward Duncan.

"You want to shoot her again?" Turcotte snapped.

"We don't know who she is," Yakov pointed out. "She doesn't know who she is. And more importantly, we don't know who did this to her or why."

Turcotte rubbed his forehead, trying to relieve a pounding headache. "Let's keep it simple—we've got to do two things. Recover Excalibur and find the Master Guardian, which, according to Kelly, is in the second mothership. Does anyone disagree with that?"

There were no objections.

"I think we all understand the gravity of the situation," he continued. "It's not just the fleet that is approaching Hawaii or Artad's ultimatum to the Chinese government. I want you to think about what will happen if Aspasia's Shadow combines the Grail with the nanovirus he is using to control all those people. He will have an army of unkillable slaves that he can increase exponentially with every battle he wins. On top of that, imagine the horror of being controlled by the nanovirus while being immortal—it would be an eternal hell."

Turcotte placed his hands flat on the table and looked each of the people in the room in the eye, uncertain whether he could trust a single one of them and forced to accept, for the moment, that he had no choice. "So. First. Where is the second mothership that holds the Master Guardian?"

Quinn pulled another folder from his briefcase. "The

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Germans were also searching for a mothership. They zeroed in on the legend of Noah's Ark."

"And?" Turcotte prompted.

In response, Quinn threw a black-and-white photograph of a mountain on the table. "They finally focused their search on Mount Ararat. It's the legendary location for where the biblical ark ended up. And we've learned there's a lot of truth to legends, haven't we?"

Turcotte picked up the photo. "How come no one's found it? Ararat's not exactly the most remote place in the world?"

"It is somewhat remote," Quinn said, "but more importantly, Ararat has always been in the center of political and ethnic turmoil. It's located awkwardly in a part of Turkey that juts between Iran, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. And the locals in the area are mostly Kurds, who have been fighting the Turks for centuries."

"Still—" Turcotte began, but Quinn interrupted him.

"The mothership we found here was hidden in a cavern," Quinn reminded them.

"While there have been a few expeditions that have searched for Noah's Ark on Ararat, they all assumed it would have grounded on the surface after the Great Flood. At worst, they figured it might be covered by several feet of soil or caught in a glacier, not hidden in a cavern deep inside the mountain itself, like the mothership here was hidden."

"All right." Turcotte put the photo down. "Let's say the mothership and the Master Guardian are hidden under Ararat somewhere. What about the key—Excalibur?

What was this stuff about Saga-something or another?"

"Sagamartha," Quinn said. He pulled out another photo. Again of a mountain and tossed it on the table. "That's what the Nepalese call Mount Everest."

Turcotte picked up the picture, recognizing the world's highest mountain.

"Great," he muttered.

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"A bouncer ought to be able to go anywhere on the mountain safely," Quinn noted.

"Why do I have a feeling it won't be that easy?" Turcotte said. "Yakov. The ark is yours."

"By myself?"

"Afraid of a challenge?" Turcotte didn't wait for an answer. "I'll see if I can get you some help. One thing to keep in mind—I don't think Artad has forgotten where he parked the damn thing."

"Understood," Yakov said.

"And Excalibur?" Mualama asked.

"I'm going after it," Turcotte said.

"I will help you," Mualama said.

Turcotte's instinct was to decline the offer, but he didn't want to leave Mualama alone. "All right. And check Burton's manuscript to see if that sheds some light on any of this. It would be nice to have an idea where exactly on Everest it is." He turned back to Quinn. "How soon can you have a bouncer ready for me?"

"Thirty minutes."

"OK." Turcotte looked around at the small group. "The plan is Yakov gets to the ark and the Master Guardian. I get to Excalibur and free it so that Yakov can use the Master Guardian to shut down Artad's and Aspasia's Shadow's guardians."

He focused on the Russian. "You should be able to drop the shields and stop the nano-virus."

Yakov laughed. "That is all you want me to do?"

Turcotte slapped the Russian on the shoulder. "Hey, I only have to climb Everest. Want to swap?"

Yakov pretended to consider the proposal seriously for a few seconds, then shook his head. "I am much heavier than you. It is best you do the climbing."

"Always the practical one," Turcotte said.

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• • •

Down the hall, Larry Kincaid was doing something he had spent a career at NASA and JPL doing: looking at imagery of an object in space. In this case, the object was Mars as viewed through the Hubble Space Telescope.

The deeply rutted track in the red surface of Mars going from Cydonia to Mons Olympus was obvious. He had taken the time to count the number of mech-robots and come up with over three thousand, but the amount seemed to be growing hourly—more were leaving Cydonia than returning.

He could see the massive cut in the Mons Olympus escarpment. And now he saw the destination as the first of the carriers began dumping their black cargo high up the slope before turning to head back. The site was less than a mile from the volcano's crest.

Other mech-robots were digging into the side of the volcano, excavating.

"What the hell are they building?" he wondered out loud as the printer spit out the latest picture.

PACIFIC OCEAN

As the two attack submarines headed northwest toward Hawaii, they increased speed. The nanotechnology was monitoring performance, transmitting the information back to the guardian on Easter Island. The alien computer then sent back the new design orders increasing the submarines' maximum speed.

The changes increased the subs' speed to over seventy-eight knots.

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AREA 51

Turcotte looked up from the computer screen as Quinn appeared next to him. He had just finished typing in a brief query to Kelly Reynolds and was ready to hit the enter key, sending it through satellites into the stream of traffic going between the Alien Fleet and Easter Island. The US military was in a quandary about the message flow because if they cut off the Alien Fleet's access to the MILSTAR communications system, they would also have to cut off all their other forces, thus making the system useless. So far, they had elected to keep the system running and send messages to forces using ground encryption.

Turcotte hesitated because he was afraid the message might get noted by the guardian or Aspasia's Shadow, who might retaliate against Kelly. He'd phrased his query in a way that he thought only the reporter would understand and would seem innocuous to any sniffer program, but he understood he was risking her life with the message.

"What's up?" Turcotte asked.

The major pointed toward the status board at the front of the room. "We've got a dozen inbound choppers along with a large fixed-wing plane."

"Reinforcements?" Turcotte asked. Area 51 was operating at below bare minimums as far as personnel went, as orders from Washington had stripped most of their personnel. They had a half dozen people left from a regular staff of over three hundred.

"I've been trying to get us people," Quinn said, "but I haven't received any acknowledgments from the aircraft. They aren't responding to hails."

"Range?" Turcotte's attention was torn away from the message he'd been composing.

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'Ten klicks and closing fast."

Turcotte was surprised to feel a kick of adrenaline, similar to what he had always felt before going into action. He knew that Washington—every government—was infiltrated by both alien groups in various ways. And even worse, there were the various human factions inside of each government now lining up in one of four ways: to side with Artad; to ally with Aspasia's Shadow; to try to be neutral; or to fight both alien groups and their minions.

Three out of four options did not bode well for what they were trying to do there at Area 51, Turcotte thought. Not good odds.

"Have you copied everything onto CD-ROM?" he asked Quinn. "The archive material, Burton's manuscript, all the Majestic records? Everything?"

"Yes."

Turcotte could see the small dots on the large screen closing. The choppers were over the lake bed.