Area 51: The Mission-3 (28 page)

"Where's Norward?" Kenyon asked.

"At the hospital in town." Turcotte told them of the tear in the suit. The USAMRIID man did not seem surprised or particularly upset. Of course, Turcotte knew both Kenyon and Norward had had more time to

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think about such a fate, just as a soldier was more prepared to go into battle.

"We're all going to get this thing if we can't figure out its vector and come up with an antidote or vaccine," Kenyon said.

"Anything from your headquarters?" Turcotte asked.

"I can't get through to Fort Detrick," Kenyon said. "It will take time for the vector experiments to work."

"We don't have time," Turcotte said. He looked at Yakov. "What do you have?"

Yakov drew a circle. "The satellite came down somewhere to the west of here. I think—" He paused as the SATPhone rang.

Turcotte picked it up. "Turcotte."

"Mike, it's Lisa. We've got something."

Turcotte listened as she told him about the strange transmission picked up to their west. He got the grid location from her.

"There's something else," Duncan said.

"What's that?"

"Colonel Carmen, my friend who authorized the USAMRIID mission, is dead."

Duncan went on to tell Turcotte of the phone conversation.

"So someone's covering up on the Stateside end" was Turcotte's summation of that information.

"Looks like."

"Can you get me any help?"

"I can try," Duncan said. "What do you need?"

Turcotte rattled off a quick list of support.

"I've already got some of that moving. I talked to Colonel Mickell at Bragg already."

"Good. What about the shuttles?" he asked her. "Have you figured out what is going on?"

"I think someone wants to get the mothership, be-

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cause there's a second ruby sphere hidden somewhere, maybe in the lowest level of Qian-Ling."

Turcotte considered the situation. "That's putting the cart before the horse,"

he said. "Whoever wants the mothership has to survive the Black Death first."

"The Airlia on Mars don't have to worry about that," Duncan said.

"True," Turcotte acknowledged. "But what about whoever is helping them? These Guides?"

"The guardian didn't care much about the people it used on Majestic-12. Humans are just tools for it."

Turcotte thought about that. "Yeah, but if the second ruby sphere hasn't been found yet, the guardian still needs those tools. Maybe they're securing the mother-ship for a different reason."

"I don't . . ." There was a pause from Duncan's end. "Oh my God. Major Quinn told me something and I didn't think it was important, but maybe that's why there's a rush to get to the mothership."

"What?" Turcotte asked.

"Quinn got some information off the hard drives about The Mission, but it's old stuff, although it does back up Yakov's claim about The Mission being around a long time. I'll forward you a copy. I've told him to try to find something more recent.

"The only other solid thing they've gotten out of STAAR's hard drives you recovered from Scorpion Base was that they were doing a keyword search with the word ark. Maybe the rush to get to the mothership is to use it as an ark. The gravity drives still work, so it could land on Earth and get back up into orbit without having the ruby sphere."

"Like Noah's Ark," Turcotte said.

"So the chosen ones can survive the Black Death and do the Airlia's bidding."

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Turcotte looked across the habitat at Yakov, who was following his end of the conversation. "Like they've done before in the past. Culling out the human race to make it controllable. And if the Black Death spreads and kills everyone at NASA, then there's no one there to launch the space shuttles to secure the mothership. I think that has to come first."

"We can't let that happen, Mike."

"Get me that support," Turcotte said.

Lexina looked at the crater, trying to imagine a mountain here. She had seen images of this place before the destruction. It had dwarfed Mount Kilimanjaro in size and bulk.

She was near the center of Ngorongoro Crater, a most intriguing spot in north Tanzania. Ngorongoro was the second-largest crater on the surface of the planet.

Over twelve miles wide, it encompassed over three hundred square miles, including Soda Lake in the center. The crater was over twenty-two hundred meters above sea level, the top of a huge, ancient volcano that had been worn down, obviously much further than its cousin to the east, Mount Kilimanjaro.

The crater was a spectacular place, considered by those who had made the arduous journey there to be almost an unspoiled Garden of Eden. Even if one reached the rim, which was not easy by itself, the steep, almost vertical rim of the crater made travel into the crater very difficult. There was only one overgrown road that switchbacked its way down to the interior floor. The land was mostly open grassland, although near the rim there was thick forest. Soda Lake was a broad expanse of water, but it was not deep, less than four feet in most places. Because of its isolation and the relative lack of human intrusion, the crater teemed with wildlife.

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She reached into her pack and pulled out a small gray device about six inches long by three wide and one deep. The top surface was covered with hexagons. She knew she was close enough now, but the big question was whether there was anything left here.

Lexina pressed a pattern on the device and the hexagons were lit from behind with a green light. She then tapped out a code and the front edge of the device glowed orange.

Slowly she turned in a circle, holding the device at arm's length. She completed one complete revolution. Then she tapped in a new code. The front shifted from orange to red. She again began turning, holding the device out. It had been so long and the obvious destruction so great, she expected nothing.

Thus when there was a beep from the device and a bright scarlet line appeared in the center of the red, she didn't stop, but completed another circle. When the device repeated its report as she faced in the same direction—toward the center of the crater—she stopped. She began walking forward in a perfectly straight line, ignoring the bushes that grabbed at her cloak.

Soda Lake came into view, and the device still pointed her forward. As she approached, she pulled her backpack off, holding it with one hand. With the other, she removed her black robe. Underneath she wore a tight, gray bodysuit.

She stuffed the robe in her backpack as she walked.

She didn't pause, striding right into the lake, feeling the cool water splash around her ankles. She had studied this area before going on her trek and knew the lake covered a large amount of area, but it was very shallow, never more than four feet deep.

The device kept her on an unerring straight line. The shore was soon far behind and the water just above her

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waist, slowing her slightly, but she kept moving. A flock of birds resting on the water took off in startled flight at her approach. Off to her left front, beady eyeballs in large gray heads watched her warily. She knew the water buffalo were to be feared, as they were unpredictable in their behavior, but her course wavered not in the least. She passed within twenty feet of the water buffalo.

The beeping on the device was growing quicker, the pauses less. Despite that, she was startled when her right foot touched nothing and she fell, the water going over her head. She kicked, coming back up to the surface and backed up, regaining her foothold on the bottom.

Carefully she felt in the murky brown water with her foot. There was a smooth cut in the bottom. She traced its circular pattern to the left until she had outlined a round hole in the bottom of the lake twenty feet wide. The entire way, the device in her hand pointed to the center. She turned the device off and put it in her soaked backpack, making sure the top was sealed.

Lexina took a deep breath and then dove headfirst into the hole. Her legs kicked as went straight down. She could feel the pressure building on her ears as the seconds went by and still she descended. She let air out of her lungs in a trickle of bubbles, going ever deeper.

Then her outstretched arms hit something smooth and flat. Her fingers scrambled in the murky water, searching. They closed on a semicircular metal object sticking up from the flat surface. She gripped it with her left hand and continued to feel around with her right.

Her lungs were low on air; she'd been under now for over a minute. Her fingers hit a thin, raised ridge of metal, less than half a millimeter high. She traced it, running into a junction where three ridges went off at

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exact angles. Exploring further, she realized she had a series of hexagonals.

Her lungs struggling, her mind beginning to blacken with lack of oxygen, she felt out the entire series. There was one in the center with six surrounding.

Quickly she hit the code she had memorized long ago.

The rod in her left hand swung up, the surface underneath it rising, pushing her upward. She scrambled to avoid being caught between the hatch and the side of the tube. A bubble of air blew past her, too quick for her to even consider trying to get any.

She pulled herself around the hatch that had opened. She scrambled around, feeling the walls, searching for the controls to close it. She realized she had to find it in the next couple of seconds or shoot for the surface, and even as she thought that, her fingers touched a similar pattern of hexagons on the wall.

She hit the code. She could feel water sweep by her, forced by the hatch closing.

Now she was trapped. The last of the air in her lungs dribbled out of her mouth. Her mind flickered, going blank, when she was slammed against the metal wall by a rush of water. Then all went dark.

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-17-

Turcotte looked at the map as Yakov and Kenyon peered over his shoulder. "NSA picked up some SATCOM transmissions out of this. Earlier today someone piggybacked a GPS—ground positioning satellite— signal."

"And?" Kenyon asked.

"And someone has to have very good gear to do that, and," Turcotte continued looking at the map, "the NSA analyst thinks that the whole thing was designed for whoever broadcast the first signal to find something on the return piggyback."

"Find what?" Kenyon asked.

"The satellite," Yakov said.

Turcotte nodded toward Kenyon. "That would be your zero point."

"No," Yakov disagreed. "That would be the start of your vector. The zero point is The Mission."

Duncan looked out the blast windows. The shuttle Endeavor and its launch pad dominated the view between his location and the Pacific Ocean beyond.

"NASA's never done a dual launch." Kopina had quietly appeared at her side.

"Can they handle it?" Duncan asked.

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Kopina nodded. "We prepared contingency plans for this exact occurrence."

" 'We'?"

"Space Command." Kopina pointed at the shuttle. "Right now that's the only way we can put people into space. At least in the States. And each shuttle can carry only eight personnel, ten if we disregard some safety requirements. Not exactly a large number. Of course, that's considering only the crew compartment," Kopina amended. "Rockwell has been working on a personnel payload pod to fit in the cargo bay, but it's never been tested.

"Right now, the crew of each has ten people. Most from SEAL Team Six and two from NASA—pilot and copilot."

"With those two shuttles launched, will we have any space capability?" Duncan asked, thinking about Turcotte's theory that the shuttles had to be launched first, before the Black Death spread too far.

"There will be one remaining shuttle—Atlantis. It's currently being refitted."

Kopina had a model of the shuttle in her hand. "Just so you know a few basic terms that will help." She tapped the shuttle on top of the large rockets. "This is the orbiter." She touched the two rockets on the outside of the large center tank. "These are the two solid rocket boosters, which are called SRB. This big tank in the center is not a rocket, but rather carries fuel. Most people don't know this, but each SRB is bolted to the launch platform by four bolts.

"At launch, the three space shuttle engines, these three nozzles here at the bottom, are ignited first. They're fed fuel from the external tank so the orbiter can get into space with a full load. It's a special liquid hydrogen fuel with liquid oxygen oxidizer. When feed-

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back indicates all three are working properly—we're talking the last six seconds in the countdown here—the SRBs are ignited." She touched the bottom of the two rockets.

"But we still want to make sure everything's working right. When it's determined that there is sufficient thrust-to-weight ratio, initiators—small explosives—cut the eight hold-down bolts on the SRBs and the whole system is now free to go. That's liftoff.

"Maximum dynamic pressure comes approximately sixty seconds after launch, but it never exceeds three g's. Two minutes up, the SRBs are just about empty and they're jettisoned from the external tank. They still have a little fuel left that keeps them going while a small side rocket pushes them away from the shuttle."

Kopina pointed out to sea. "The SRBs are reusable and deploy a parachute. They come down over a hundred miles out to sea. By that time, the shuttle is moving pretty quickly. For the next six minutes, until eight minutes after launch, the orbiter engines fire. Then, just before reaching orbital velocity, the external tank is jettisoned. It is not reusable."

"Where does it come down?" Duncan asked.

"Point of impact is the extreme South Pacific, but most of it breaks up coming back down. Two of the orbiter engines are then used to finalize thrust into orbit. Which can be anywhere from 115 to 250 miles up. The mothership and talon are at about 175 miles. Endeavor should be able to link up with the mothership without any problem. It's not like they could fly by and not see it."

"What's in Endeavor's cargo bay?" Duncan asked.

"Equipment to seal up the mothership and for beginning repairs on the talon."