Area 51: The Mission-3 (13 page)

The young woman nodded.

Parker reached out and took her hand. "Another Great Flood is coming. Not of water, but just as deadly. And the chosen ones will have to rise above the flood to survive. If you believe, you will be saved. If not . . ." He didn't finish the sentence, and when he spoke again, he pulled his hand away and his voice hardened.

"Do you understand free will? Everyone on the planet knows of the Airlia now.

They cannot claim ignorance. Everyone has a choice. It is our job to tell people of their choice. But it is their choice, just as it is your choice." Parker's voice slowly changed timbre and the room seemed to close in. "But once the choice is made, each person must bear responsibility for their actions. And the weight of that responsibility if they choose wrong will be most dire!"

Yakov leaned back in his seat, and they could all see how weary he was. It was as if after making his pronouncement of doom, he had lost what little energy he had left. "I don't know where to begin. I've told you there are these Guides.

People who have been directly affected by a guardian computer and do the bidding of

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the aliens. They are not many in number, since access to the guardians is very limited. And then there are the STAAR. Humans who are cloned."

"Not just cloned," Major Quinn interjected.

Yakov raised his eyebrows at that.

"Go ahead, Major," Duncan said. She wanted to give Yakov a chance to get his energy back. She also wanted a chance to think. First this stranger, Harrison, calling about Black Death, and now Yakov using the same term.

Quinn ran a hand through his thinning blond hair. His thick, tortoiseshell glasses reflected the lights inside the room. "We did an autopsy on the two STAAR personnel."

"And?" Duncan prompted.

"They're not human. Not exactly."

Turcotte glanced at Duncan before speaking. "How are they not exactly human?"

He remembered Kostanov telling him that Section IV had captured a STAAR

operative in the early nineties, and that Russian scientists had discovered that the man was a clone. But a clone was still human. Turcotte had assumed that the bodies in the tanks at Scorpion Base were human clones; this shed a different light on that assumption.

"We're not sure exactly," Quinn said. "UNAOC pathologists and other scientists are still working on the bodies, but the first thing we noticed was that their eyes were red with elongated pupils. They'd been wearing cosmetic contacts and, of course, the sunglasses. Red eyes are definitely not human."

Turcotte remembered the holographic figure that had guarded the passageway in Qian-Ling. It had had the same type of eyes. "They're Airlia?"

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"We think they are a mixture of Airlia and human genetic material," Major Quinn said.

"Any indication of cloning?" Turcotte asked.

Quinn nodded. "Both bodies' genetic material are almost identical. That indicates they either are twin sisters or else they were—shall we say

'developed'?—out of the same genetic material. So, yes, cloning is a very real possibility.

"The scientists are still working to determine what the exact percentages are, but it appears they are mostly human. However, we do have to assume that the Airlia were capable of surviving unaided on this planet, given that they established a base here and kept it going for several millennia. Plus the figure you saw in the holograph was shaped roughly like a human. Their genetic background can't be too far off from ours."

"Interbreeding?" Duncan wondered out loud.

"It's possible," Quinn said. "The scientists think it's more likely, though, that the Airlia played with human DNA, mixing in some of their own, and came up with these STAAR people."

Yakov shook his head. "The STAAR operative we captured did not have these eyes. He was a perfect clone, one hundred percent human."

Quinn raised his hands to indicate it was beyond him. "I'm just telling you what we found."

"Did you see this body?" Duncan asked.

Yakov turned in her direction, his eyes narrowing. "No." Before she could say anything else, he raised his hand. "Point taken."

"Maybe the ones you examined at Area 51 were sleeping like the Airlia on Mars," Turcotte said.

Duncan shook her head. "No, they've been awake at least since 1948. When Majestic got formed, STAAR was also formed as the Strategic Advanced Alien Re-

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sponse team, but as Yakov says, I think it existed before that."

"Zandra told me that STAAR existed in case of alien attack, but now that we know they were part Airlia we know that's a bunch of bull," Turcotte said.

"Maybe not," Duncan interjected. "Maybe they were to guard against a specific alien attack?"

"Against Aspasia?"

"Zandra didn't seem too keen on him coming here in the talons," Duncan said.

Turcotte considered that. "That means STAAR was Artad's version of the foo fighters and guardian. Left here to keep a watch on things, to make sure the truce between Artad's faction here on Earth and Aspasia's on Mars was maintained."

"That's possible, but we need to know more," Duncan said.

"We've only got the two bodies," Quinn said. "We're still working on them."

"You'll have more bodies soon," Turcotte said. "We found ten at Scorpion Base.

I'll have them shipped to Area 51 once the engineers unfreeze them."

"That might help," Quinn said.

"No further intelligence on STAAR itself? Where the rest of it went?" Duncan asked.

"UNAOC has contacted the intelligence agencies of every country and requested any information they have, but the response has been slow. Nothing significant so far."

"UNAOC has no idea where STAAR is now?" Turcotte pressed.

"None."

"What 'do you know of STAAR?" Duncan asked Yakov.

"STAAR is one of the many names that group has

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gone under," Yakov said. "STAAR is the enemy of The Mission and the Guides.

Artad versus Aspasia. The two warring alien groups in their civil war."

"Great," Turcotte muttered.

"All right," Duncan said. "Yakov, you said this thing in South America is the Black Death. What is it and how do you know that?"

"History." Yakov poured himself another glass of water and downed it quickly.

"I should have said another Black Death."

"Another?" Turcotte was looking at the imagery of the dead village.

"The Black Death we know from history books devastated the world in the fourteenth century like nothing before and nothing since," Yakov said. "I have done some research on it, because I believe it, too, was caused by the Guides."

"No." Duncan shook her head. "The Black Death was Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague. It was spread by fleas on rats."

"Yes, that is how it was spread," Yakov agreed, "but what caused it? What started it? Where did it come from? Historians still aren't certain. The first Western recorded instance of the plague was during the reign of the Emperor Justinian in A.D. 542. Why did it not devastate the world then as it would eight hundred years later? I believe that someone was experimenting, working with the organism that causes the plague. Plus, they might not have had orders to use it then."

"They?" Turcotte asked,

"The Guides. The Mission. It is most commonly accepted that the Black Death as we call it in human history started in China in 1346. China, my friends. How did it get from Rome to China in those intervening years? And I believe we all agree that the Airlia had a

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presence in China. Some of you were inside of Qian-Ling. I think there was more going on with the Airlia in China, though, than just the guardian in Qian-Ling.

I think there was a presence from both sides of the Airlia civil war in ancient China.

"The Black Death spread from China along the Silk Road through Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. In January of 1348, the plague reached Marseille in France and Tunis in Africa. By the end of 1349 the Black Death's deadly fingers had reached all the way to Norway, Scotland, and Iceland, blanketing Europe and reaching even into my own Russia.

"Less than ten years after it started, it had killed over half of Europe's population. The mortality rate of those infected ranged between seventy-five and ninety percent. The final toll is estimated to be 137 million dead. This is at a time when the entire world's population was less than five hundred million people. Can you imagine the devastation? The Black Death was probably the greatest event in mankind's history."

"But man survived," Turcotte noted.

"Maybe the goal then wasn't to wipe mankind out," Yakov said, "but simply to clean out the ranks. Historians acknowledge that while devastating in death toll, the Black Death was very instrumental in getting Europe out of the Dark Ages. It is very simple economics. There were fewer workers, the wages had to go up, and conditions got better for workers. Poor farm areas were abandoned as the surviving farmers took the better land. Oh yes, it was a great boost for civilization. Maybe that was the goal."

"A rather brutal means to an end," Larry Kincaid said.

"Do you think these things, these aliens, care anything for us other than as a means for their own end?"

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Yakov asked. "I believe they use the Black Death—biological warfare, if you like—whenever they see a need to control the human populace. I think destroying Aspasia and his fleet has told them that they not only need to control us, but need to wipe us out completely this time."

"This isn't the Dark Ages," Duncan said. "Using just—"

"The Black Death in history books isn't the only time a Black Death was used against mankind. I just came from South America," Yakov said. "An ancient city called Tiahuanaco. The heart of a great empire—the Aymara—that stretched across the continent for thousands of miles and had a population in the hundreds of thousands. The Aymara empire disappeared around A.D. 1200. It was simply gone.

What happened? No one knows. But I went there, deep into the Pyramid of the Sun, and found high runes, written by the last priests." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a photograph. He tossed it on the conference table.

"The Black Death. That's what those runes in the center stand for. I know because I've seen it in other places. The Black Death killed everyone in the Aymara Empire, wiped it off the face of the earth.

"Before South America I was in Southeast Asia. In Cambodia. Historians have always wondered what happened to the ancient Khmer Empire. From the ninth to fifteenth centuries it was the greatest kingdom in Southeast Asia. Then it, too, suddenly disappeared.

"Did you know that Angkor Wat, the temple in the center of the ancient Khmer city of Angkor Thom, is the largest temple in the world? There's more stone in that temple than was used in the building of the Great Pyramid. It was a great empire, a great civilization. I traveled there, braving the mines, the Khmer Rouge, the warring

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parties. And deep inside a hidden chamber in Angkor Wat, I found a panel with high rune carvings. The last record of another dying culture. And at the center was the same symbol—the Black Death.

"I think that whenever the guardians are tired of the humans around them, or need to stop our development in a certain direction, or direct it, or simply need a tactical victory in their civil war, they use the Guides to develop a biological weapon that cleans the slate, as you say in English. I think they are now ready for such another time, except on this occasion, I think they are ready—and have the technology—to clean off the entire planet."

"I don't understand," Duncan said. "You say on one hand the Guides want to move society forward even if they use rather brutal means, and on the other they want to destroy it. Which is it?"

Yakov raised his hands in a helpless gesture. "I do not know what their ultimate goal is, so I cannot explain their actions. I agree that they do not make sense at times."

"You say The Mission—the Guides—are behind this," Turcotte said. "How do you know?"

Yakov shrugged. "It is, how do you say, a theory of mine."

Turcotte sensed the other man was holding back. "What makes you think the Black Death is back?"

"This village being destroyed." Yakov tapped the last imagery. "This tells you something is killing people. Majestic-12 was infiltrated by Guides. Your facility at Dulce was part of Majestic-12; in fact, it was the place the guardian computer that took over your Majestic people was brought to. And what went on there?" He didn't wait for an answer. "You had some of your Operation Paperclip people. Nazi scientists. But those at Dulce

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were the biological and chemical warfare people. The ones who made the gasses in the camps. Who tested diseases on prisoners."

None of the Americans in the room said anything, knowing that what Yakov was.

saying was one of the ugly legacies of the Cold War.

"General Hemstadt," Yakov said. "Is that name familiar?"

"He was the German who was at Dulce," Duncan said.

"But he did not die when Dulce was destroyed," Yakov said.

"How do you know that?" Turcotte demanded.

"The digging at Dulce has been stopped, hasn't it?" Once more Yakov didn't wait for an answer. "Maybe someone doesn't want what was going on there to be discovered," Yakov said. "But not because of what was there, but because what was there is now at The Mission with General Hemstadt."

"I know of no Majestic facility in South America," Major Quinn said.

Yakov shook his head. "Don't you understand? This is not about America. Or Russia. These Guides care nothing for countries. In fact, they like the fact that humans fight among themselves and have split the world into portions and stare across imaginary borders at other humans with distrust. Very convenient, don't you think?

"This is a world problem. The Mission—I don't even know exactly where in South America it is. All I know is that your Dulce facility was not the only one working on diseases. We had our secret labs in Russia. And who knows if someone from there isn't now at The Mission along with Hemstadt and others."