Area 51: Nosferatu-8 (26 page)

Yet through the chaos, Nosferatu could see one solitary figure who remained on a distant hill, staring down at the forest of the dying. Even at this distance he knew it was Aspasia's Shadow. And he knew that he would never 224

know peace as long as the Airlia or their minions such as Aspasia's Shadow or the Ones Who Wait walked the Earth. He also knew that he could not take the path that Vampyr had, trying to use humans as pawns in the fight— he would let time defeat Aspasia's Shadow and the Airlia. Nosferatu slipped away that night, riding hard to the south. He had decided he would make his own Haven in the one place he had been where humans did not go: the Skeleton Coast. And he would bring Nekhbet there and wait. It was what he did best.

MOSCOW: A.D. 1533.

Ironic. It was a concept that the man who had been anointed Great Khan by the Mongols was finding more and more applicable to human affairs. He now went by the name Ivan and had been in Moscow for over a century, gathering power. The previous tsar, also an Ivan, had been the one finally to defeat and stop paying tribute to the Golden Horde, the descendants of the Mongols that the Khan had led out of the west so many years before. For that he had been known as Ivan the Great.

In a palace coup the new Ivan had replaced the old Ivan, but the people did not add "the Great" to his name, but rather "the Terrible," as he ruled Moscow and the burgeoning Russian Empire with an iron fist covered in blood. Ivan the Terrible's greatest troubles came from the boyars, Russian noblemen, who knew that there was only so much power to be had, and the more the tsar had, the less there would be for them. This was a different type of power struggle for Ivan than when he had been the Khan, and he used different tactics. To fight the boyars Ivan developed ranks of government bureaucrats who owed their 225

jobs, and thus their loyalty, to him. He also took land from the boyars and gave it to generals loyal to him.

Russia's power grew as the years of his rule stretched on. He pushed Russia's borders south and west into Siberia. He opened commercial trade routes with England through the treacherous White Sea. He brought foreigners in for technical and military advice, something later monarchs, especially Peter the Great, would imitate.

None of these efforts, naturally, was what gained him the name appendage of

"the Terrible." He earned that because of his nature. He was only about at night and, of course, in dark chambers of the Kremlin, he fed on the blood of criminals brought to him. He routinely ordered mass executions at whim. Perhaps most disastrous, he began a system of serfdom, tying workers to landowners, something that would boil over with stunning results centuries later.

He continued in this manner, his rulings growing more and more outrageous, his murderous decrees growing broader and more capricious until one morning, after he had left the throne room, the captain of the palace guard led a dozen of his bravest men in an assault on the room deep under the Kremlin to which Ivan the Terrible retired every time the sun rose. They carried flickering torches to light their way in the dark warren of tunnels, swords to slay the tsar, and chains to weigh the body down, as the plan was to throw him in the river.

They broke down the door to the room where they had determined the tsar hid every morning and were briefly stunned to see a stone coffin resting on a pedestal. Since there was no other way out of the room, and they had seen Tsar Ivan go in, they had to assume he was inside. Throwing off their shock, they wrapped the iron chains they had brought for the tsar's legs and arms 226

around the coffin and locked them in place. They were rewarded with the lid lifting the inch of slack that was in the chain and their tsar screaming dire threats at them, demanding that they remove the chains.

Having committed themselves, they knew they could not turn back. They dragged the coffin out of the room as the tsar continued to scream at them. They pulled it along the tunnels built under the Kremlin by the tsars, and those before the tsars, as escape routes in case of exactly what was happening at that moment—a coup—or invasion. They reached a deep, narrow shaft that went down over 150

feet. It was the remains of an attempt years earlier to reach water before someone realized the Moscow River was not even that far away laterally and a tunnel was dug to that water source.

The captain of the guard had the men place the coffin on the lid of the well.

This was better than the river, he decided, thinking of the long walk back to the surface.

They tipped the coffin on edge. It wavered, then turned vertical, sliding down out of sight, just a bit smaller than the circumference of the shaft. Seconds later the thud of the coffin hitting the bottom of the shaft reverberated up to them.

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THE PRESENT

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The Skeleton Coast, West Africa

Gentlemen, are we in agreement?" Nosferatu sat down in the chair at the head of the table and shifted his gaze between the two men.

"I will do my part," Tian Dao Lin said. Both then turned and looked at Adrik.

"I can recover that which the KGB has," Adrik said. "What is your timetable for all of this?",

"The X-craft launches in three days. It will take it about twelve hours to rendezvous with the derelict mothership and drain the bodies. Then it will land at an airfield close to here. At that time I will begin processing the blood.

Ninety hours."

"That is not much time to get someone up Everest to recover the blood from the Ones Who Wait," Tian Dao Lin said.

"No, but it is possible," Nosferatu replied.

"I will make it happen," Tian Dao Lin averred.

Nosferatu stood. "I will see you gentlemen back here in four days."

Puget Sound, Washington

Four days. Vampyr stared at the intelligence report that had just been forwarded to him, then walked over to

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the large bay windows in his mansion overlooking Puget Sound and the lights of Seattle beyond. It was a magnificent view, one that he had enjoyed for the past ten years, ever since purchasing his own private island in the Sound at an outrageous cost.

Money meant nothing to Vampyr. His assets were under so many different names and umbrella corporations that it would take a roomful of accountants several lifetimes to figure it all out, which was appropriate in Vampyr's view, as it had taken him the equivalent of many lifetimes to accumulate it.

He did not pursue money for itself, but for what it could bring, which was a form of power. There were many forms of power and Vampyr, since his time in Sparta, had dedicated large amounts of his time to studying them all.

He had used his money to hide himself, most particularly during the recent world war in which the humans, most surprisingly, had defeated the Airlia. In all his long life Vampyr had never anticipated that the humans would be capable of such a feat. He had prepared for one side or the other of the Airlia to gain the upper hand if they ever came out of their deep sleep underneath Qian-ling or on Mars but the human victory was totally unexpected.

The Grail was lost. Lisa Duncan had made sure of that, taking it and the second mothership down with her into the array on Mars. In Vampyr's opinion, a most brave but stupid action. He did appreciate that she had stopped the Airlia from getting a message out to others of their kind, but losing the Grail was a tremendous blow. It had always been his primary plan to recover the Grail once it was located and use it to gain the immortality the high priests had chanted about since Atlantis.

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Now he felt like he had come full circle. It was all about blood. But Airlia blood now. He knew exactly what the Eldest, Nosferatu, wished to do. But he had learned one thing over his many incarnations among the humans—power could only be wielded by one. While the Eldest was so focused on bringing back Nekhbet, Vampyr did not trust him. And then there was Tian Dao Lin and Adrik. Four was three too many in Vampyr's opinion.

He turned from the large, bulletproof windows and went over to the large globe in his study. The walls of the room were lined with books, many of them ancient, original texts that scholars would weep with envy just to be given a glimpse of. They were not for show, as Vampyr had read all of them.

Vampyr placed his hands on the globe and slowly spun it.

Everest. Moscow. And in the derelict mothership in orbit.

Nosferatu and the other two were moving. Vampyr knew that power, like chess, was all about move and countermove. And allowing one's opponent to set his own destruction in motion.

Patience. Four days was but a blink of the eye in the eternity that Vampyr had lived, but he knew it was long enough.

Time to move a few pieces.

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The Highest point above the surface of the Earth is the peak of Mount Everest.

At 29,028 feet high, it is the highest and most inaccessible place on the surface of the planet. The perfect place to hide the key to the Master Guardian, which controlled all of the Airlia computers—the legendary sword of Arthur: Excalibur.

The race to recover it had been brutal. On one side had been Mike Turcotte and Professor Mualama. On another, two Navy SEALs turned into Guides by a Guardian computer and questing for the key in order to bring it to Aspasia's Shadow. On the third front, Chinese military forces led by three Ones Who Wait, human-Airlia clones who served Artad. Even on Turcotte's end all had not been as it appeared, as it turned out that Mualama had been corrupted by a Swarm tentacle and had tried to destroy the sword, only to be thwarted by Turcotte at the last moment.

In the end, Turcotte had emerged victorious, literally the last man standing on the mountain, Excalibur in his hand, and that had allowed Yakov, inside the last mothership hidden in Mount Ararat, to gain control of the Master Guardian, and thus all other guardians, allowing the world to win World War III and compel the alien forces to leave.

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Littered on the slopes of Everest were the bodies of those who had failed in this quest: SEALs, Chinese, Mualama, and—last but not least—the three Ones Who Wait. They mingled with the bodies of 160 climbers who had died in their attempt at summiting over the years. Most of those bodies lay in the "death zone" above 25,000 feet.

Everest was not considered a particularly difficult climb in terms of technique, but the collection of avalanches, crevasses, winds up to 125 miles an hour, storms, temperatures that went down to forty degrees below zero and oxygen depletion make it the deadliest place on the planet. In the death zone the air holds only one-third the oxygen present at sea level. As a result high-altitude pulmonary edema (when the lungs fatally fill with fluid) and high-altitude cerebral edema (when the brain, starved for oxygen, swells) are common, often causing death unless the person is quickly brought down the mountain, something that is practically impossible as the death zone is above the reach of even the best helicopter's altitude ceiling.

High overhead was a spy satellite launched by the Russians. Its mission was to monitor southwest China. Within its zone of observation was Everest. Under orders relayed covertly from Moscow, the high-resolution camera turned its attention to the slopes of Everest and began quartering the snow-covered terrain. Since Turcotte had been the only one to come off the mountain alive, no one knew exactly who had fallen where.

It took over four hours, but a complete image of the mountain had been accomplished. The data was digitized, then transmitted to Moscow military headquarters, where it was forwarded—with a healthy kickback of cash going the opposite direction—until it ended up in the hands of the one who had requested it.

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Adrik sat behind his desk and stared at the file marker on his computer screen. It had cost him one phone call and over 1.6 million US dollars to get this imagery. He didn't even bother to open the file and look at what his money had bought. Instead, he had it electronically transferred to Hong Kong. Then he sent the file to a second destination.

Earth Orbit

It was the largest object in Earth orbit, far eclipsing the collection of pods that made up the International Space Station. The mothership was over a mile long and a quarter mile wide at the center, coming evenly to points at both ends. In the forward portion there was a huge gash in the black metal where Mike Turcotte had set off a nuclear charge supplemented by an Airlia fuel pod inside a cargo bay. Floating inside the bay were also mangled Talon spacecraft—

Aspasia's fleet from Mars, which had come to recover the mothership. In one fell swoop Turcotte had managed to destroy most of one side of the millennia-old Atlantean Civil War.

Now the mothership floated dead, a symbol of mankind's victory over alien forces. Inside the Talons were dozens of Airlia bodies, preserved in the cold vacuum of space. And inside their frozen veins were the scant remnants of the virus that Nosferatu and his comrades sought.

Hong Kong

Nima Namche wasn't used to the ill-fitting suit he was wearing or the low altitude. Even though the anteroom

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he was waiting in was on the forty-fourth and top floor of a skyscraper in the center of Hong Kong, it was still at least three miles lower than where he lived, in the Khumbu Region of the Himalayas. He was a Sherpa, one of the mountain people, and his motivation for coming to Hong Kong was a simple and ancient one: money.

A Sherpa, Tenzig Norgay, had been at Sir Edmund Hillary's side when he became the first to summit Everest and they had been part of every expedition ever since, or at least the ones that were known about. Namche knew that others had climbed Everest for reasons other than summiting, but among the Sherpas those climbs were not spoken about openly.

He'd been approached by a well-known Sherpa whose job it was to coordinate guides for expeditions— except this proposal had been very different. Namche was given one hundred thousand US dollars simply to fly to Hong Kong, an unheard of sum, with the promise of another nine hundred thousand US upon acceptance of the climb. Who he was to guide and when he was to do it were two questions he hoped to have answered soon.