Area 51: The Mission-3 (25 page)

Otherwise the parasite would destroy its own source of survival. If we can find the reservoir, we might find out how that organism held off the effects of the virus, and that might point in the direction of a vaccine or cure. It has to be the village that Harrison talked about."

Turcotte stared at Kenyon in disbelief. "Are you nuts? We don't have any time to be coming up with vaccinations!"

Kenyon returned the look in kind. "We've got to find where it came from or else this thing will burn and it will only stop burning until it kills everything and there are no more hosts for it to consume."

"The satellite," Yakov said.

"What satellite?" Kenyon demanded.

Turcotte explained about the satellite that came down west of their location.

"You think this came from a satellite?" Kenyon asked. "What is this Kourou place?"

"It's the launch site for Ariane, the European Space

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Consortium," Yakov said. "It's located on the coast of French Guiana."

"Why is the European Space Port located in South America?" Kenyon asked.

"Several reasons," Yakov said. "First, it's got a low population density.

Second, it's located near the equator, which is advantageous for a space launch.

Third, it's right on the ocean, so rockets can go up over water instead of land.

And fourth, there's little likelihood of hurricane or earthquake in that specific area.

"Even though it's run by the European Space Consortium," Yakov continued,

"anyone with enough money can buy a rocket and a launch window from them. Many U.S. firms launch their commercial satellites from Kourou."

"Do you have proof that this virus came off a satellite?" Kenyon demanded.

"We need to find exactly where Harrison and his crew picked up this thing from. That will help prove or disprove what Yakov says," Turcotte said. "He said in the video that he went upriver, but there's a lot of rivers here."

"What do you suggest?" Norward asked.

Turcotte tapped the scientist on the chest. "You and I go to the boat, try to see if there's a map or anything on board that shows where they found the dead village."

Guide Parker stood on top of a dune, looking down at the encampment of the chosen. Only one hundred and forty had made the commitment to leave behind all they knew and follow him to the desert.

This was the place. They had left the last hard surface road at Alice Springs, the center of Australia, and followed an old mining track into the Gibson Desert. Even that had disappeared hours before, but the Guide 216

Parker had kept his people moving through the desert, the sun beating down on the roofs of the four-wheel-drive vehicles that made up the makeshift convoy.

When he arrived at the right spot, he had just known. He'd ordered them to stop and set up camp. Then he had walked out of the camp and up this dune.

Parker looked around. He saw no sign of life other than the tents his people had pitched. He dropped to his knees, feeling the sand shift beneath them. He looked up to the sky.

"We are here," he whispered to the clear night sky. "We are here. Come take us away."

He didn't notice the drops of blood coming out of his nose, falling to the sand and being absorbed immediately.

Duncan read the report from Major Quinn once more. The Mission was real and STAAR had been investigating it. That was important, but did little to help the situation right now. It did back up Yakov's story about the existence of The Mission and that The Mission had obviously interfered with mankind in the past.

She called Quinn and told him to get his computer experts working on finding the current location of The Mission and whether there was any connection between The Mission and the Black Death.

Duncan punched in another number on her SATPhone. The other end was picked up on the third ring.

"USAMRIID," the voice pulled the letters into one word.

"Colonel Carmen, please," Duncan said.

"Who is calling?"

Duncan paused—this was Carmen's direct number. "I'd like to talk to Colonel Carmen."

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"I'm afraid that isn't possible."

"Why not?"

"Colonel Carmen had an accident."

Duncan's hand gripped the SATPhone tighter. "Is she all right?"

"I'm afraid the accident occurred on the Level Four containment facility. The entire base has been quarantined. Colonel Carmen is dead. There's a Colonel Zenas here from the Pentagon, and he's taken over. Would you like to speak to him?"

Duncan pushed the off button. She stood in the shadow of the space shuttle Endeavour for several minutes, waiting until she could stop her hand from shaking.

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-15-

Che Lu thought it quite ridiculous, two old people crawling around in the dark.

She and Lo Fa were a kilometer from the base of Qian-Ling, edging ever closer.

They were moving so slowly it had taken them an hour to go the past hundred meters, but Lo Fa was in no rush. He had told Che Lu before leaving the guerrilla camp that they would proceed very cautiously. He reminded her for the hundredth time of another reason he had lived to be an old man—his ability to move carefully when it was called for.

The rest of the camp had packed up their meager belongings and begun their trek west to the Kunlun Mountains. It was reported that large numbers of refugees were flooding into those hills, occasionally coming out to strike at the army. It had tugged at Che Lu's heart to see the women and children pick up their satchels and fade away into the night. It seemed as if that was the story of China—the people always walking to escape one government while hoping for another.

"Hush!" Lo Fa hissed, even though Che Lu knew she had not made a noise. There was a quarter moon that threw down a feeble light. Even on the darkest night, it would be impossible to miss the looming bulk of the mountain tomb of Qian-Ling.

Che Lu heard what it was that had halted her part-

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ner. A plane's engine, very faint but getting louder. She peered into the night sky, searching.

Lo Fa grabbed her arm and pointed. "There."

Che Lu looked, but she couldn't see what he was pointing at. The plane had to have been blacked out, as there were no lights. The sound grew louder, then she spotted it, a black cross in the dark night.

It came in low over the mountain, then circled. As it did so, screams rang out in the night, emanating from the Chinese soldiers bivouacked all over the mountain.

"What is happening?" Che Lu asked.

"I don't know, but we wait," Lo Fa said.

On the second time over, white parachutes blossomed in the plane's trail. Lo Fa stood. "Now!"

He scrambled across the creek, Che Lu following. He pushed aside a heavy overgrowth of vegetation and then they were in a narrow cut in the side of the mountain, less than three feet wide and six feet deep, almost completely overgrown across the top. Che Lu felt smooth stone under her feet and she remembered scrambling down these same stairs after splitting from Turcotte and Nabinger as they escaped from the tomb the previous week.

The stairs went up the side of the tomb, invisible unless one stumbled right into the narrow cut. Che Lu wondered why it had been made. She assumed it was for the warriors who guarded the emperor's tomb so many centuries ago to be able to move across the mountain from one side to the other without being seen.

Whatever the reason, the steps took them up the mountain to within twenty meters of the hole that Turcotte had blown at the end of the exit to the Airlia storeroom.

By the time they got there, Che Lu could hear men

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moving in the darkness, commands shouted in foreign tongues, some of which she recognized.

"What is going on?" she asked Lo Fa, who was peeking over the edge of the trench toward the opening.

"I think someone else wants to get into the tomb." Lo Fa slithered over the edge of the trench, then reached back. "Let us hurry!"

Che Lu took his hand, and he lifted her out. Together they hustled through the dark. Che Lu could see bodies lying about—the soldiers who had been guarding the entrance.

Lo Fa reached the small opening that had been blasted. "Come on, old woman!"

Che Lu put her foot into the hole, and Lo Fa hissed. "Don't move."

"What?"

Lo Fa was turning, his hands raised. "Look at your chest," he said.

Che Lu looked down and saw three bright red dots of light on her khaki shirt.

"What is it?"

"Laser sights."

Che Lu put her hands up also as men loomed out of the night and surrounded them.

Turcotte looked down at the body. The walk had taken twenty minutes. He had made sure to control his breathing the entire time, trying to keep the suit's mask from fogging up. His clothes under the suit were soaked with sweat. The dirt lanes between the buildings had been empty. Turcotte tried to imagine the streets of New York looking like this once the Black Death spread.

Norward was next to him, walking very slowly. They'd left Kenyon trying to get hold of his headquarters at Fort Meade—to no apparent avail. Turcotte knew Ken-

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yon's scientific methods weren't going to work. One look at the empty streets told Turcotte this was out of control. The one thing that Kenyon had said that Turcotte did think was valid was that they had to find out how the Black Death had originated.

The river appeared. Several docks stuck out into the brown, murky water.

Turcotte recognized the boat from the video.

"That one." He pointed with a blue arm at a flat-bottomed boat tied up at one of the docks. They made their way out on the shaky wooden pier and onto the boat.

There were two bodies. One was covered with a poncho. The other was slumped, half sitting with its back against the front of the bridge shield.

Harrison had not waited for the Black Death to take him down. Very carefully, Turcotte knelt down. He nudged the pistol in the man's hand and pushed it away, along the deck. There was something around his neck. Turcotte pulled apart the shirt, ripping it off the open black welts. A thin metal chain. Whatever was on it had slid into Harrison's left armpit. Turcotte pushed the arm out.

The chain passed through a ring. Harrison must have taken it off recently, as his body began to swell with the infection and his finger wouldn't take the ring. Turcotte lifted the ring up and looked at it. The face was almost half an inch diameter, slightly bulging. Turcotte was looking at it for several seconds before he realized what the design was—an eye, pupil inside of iris inside of eye. It was the same design as the one that had left the mark on the tree near Duncan's house in Colorado. Turcotte looked around. There was the smallest of indentations in the forward wood of the bridge. Turcotte checked the ring against it. It fit exactly.

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He ripped the ring off the chain and stuck it in his waist pack. He went onto the bridge. There was a leather-bound binder. Turcotte opened it. A map was inside, covered with acetate. Blue marking traced a route from Gurupa near the mouth of the Amazon, upriver thousands of miles.

It passed by Vilhena and continued to the foothills near the border with Bolivia, where it ended. Farther to the west there was a small circle of yellow highlight off the south tip of a lake in Bolivia. Turcotte read the label: Tiahuanaco.

He tucked the binder under his arm. "Let's go," he ordered Norward. "Back to the habitat."

"What is that?" Duncan was staring at a large black helmet that had no mask or eyepieces. She remembered the photos Turcotte had brought back from Scorpion Base. She was trying to concentrate, to make sense of everything, but events hard outpaced her ability to keep track.

"That's our helmet," Osebold said.

"How do you see?"

"It's something that's come out of the Air Force's Pilot 2010 Program." Kopina had walked up and heard the question.

"So what's this 2010 program thing?"

Osebold answered. "The Air Force knows that their equipment, specifically their jet fighters, are outstripping the men who fly them. Most modern jets are capable of maneuvers that the pilot's body can't take. What good does it do to have a jet capable of making a twenty-g turn if the pilot can only handle half that before passing out?"

Duncan thought of the pilots of the bouncers and how that alien craft was far beyond anything the Air

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Force could develop. How come Area 51 had not had access to this technology was the unspoken question that crossed her mind. Or had it had access to it?

"Also," Osebold continued, "another big problem is the time lapse between the brain receiving information, processing it, and then executing a response through the nervous system."

"You're talking reaction time," Duncan said.

"Correct. Like the time it takes you to see someone jump out in front of your car to the time your foot is on the brake. In a jet going at several thousand miles an hour, even a tenth of second lapse can lead to a pilot missing a target by dozens of miles.

"Pilot 2010," he said, "is a program where the Air Force worked on both problems. The TASC-suit utilizes everything they've managed to develop, including the SARA link."

"SARA link?"

"The SARA link is a direct link into the brain. It—"

"Wait a second!" Duncan said. "How does it do that?"

Kopina leaned over the helmet and pointed. "See here?" She was pointing to the interior. There was a black band. She pointed down. There was one around the back part of the head portion. "You can't see it, but there are very small holes in that black band. Very small," she repeated.

"The SARA probes come through those holes. They are extremely thin wires that go directly into the brain and—"

"Hold it." Duncan held up her hand. "Directly into the brain?"

"It's perfectly safe," Osebold said. "Scientists have been using thermocouples—which are very similar to the SARA links—for years to study the brain. We're just

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taking them to a higher level of use. The wire goes into a specific part of the brain. It's a two-way feed."

"Feed of what?"