Area 51: The Reply-2 (9 page)

"Besides, the one on Mars has made communication with us now. There's no reason to think it won't continue to do so. Also," Sterling continued, "you are not to release any news of this message to the media quite yet."

"I thought—" Nabinger began.

"I have to go now. That is all." The screen went blank.

In the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, eight hundred feet underground, a system that had originally been developed to detect ICBM launches during the Cold War suddenly sprang to life.

"Sir, we've got activity in the Pacific. Sector four-six-three."

The Warning Center watch officer, Major Craig, looked over his shoulder. "Can you identify the signal?"

The screen watcher stared at the information in front of him: infrared maps of the Earth's surface and surrounding airspace downloaded every three seconds from satellites in geosynchronous orbit twenty thousand miles up.

"Multiple contacts. Very small." He took a deep breath. "Signature matches foo fighters."

The term foo fighter came from World War II, when American airmen reported small, glowing spheres that they occasionally spotted on mis-

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sions. What had not been generally reported was that the first several times foo fighters had been spotted and aircrews attempted to engage the flying spheres, the planes had been knocked out of the sky. That had led to an Air Corps-wide policy ordering crews to ignore the foo fighters, which in turn had led to no more fatal incidents. What had been particularly intriguing was that during the Enola Gay's run in to Hiroshima it had been shadowed the entire way by two foo fighters, almost leading to a cancellation of the mission. The consensus now was that the foo fighters were the guardian's way of gathering information and, when needed, directing force.

"What about the Navy ships there over the site?" Craig asked. "They pick anything up?"

"The fighters are coming up fifty miles west of where the ships are, over the horizon from their radar."

"Send the Navy the data," Craig ordered. He knew it was too late for the Navy to do anything, but at least they couldn't complain that they hadn't been informed as quickly as possible.

"Put it on the screen," Craig ordered. The large screen in front of the room displayed a Mercator conformal map of the entire world's surface. With a few commands the data that was being downloaded from DSP could be selectively displayed on the screen. Several glowing dots appeared.

"I count three foo fighters," the operator said.

Craig could clearly see them. One glowing dot heading due east toward the coast of South America. One heading west across the Pacific, and 80

a third heading northeast toward Central America.

"Damn, those suckers are booking," one of the men in the center muttered.

Craig looked down at his own computer and cleared it, then put the tracking data the other man had on his screen. He chewed absently on the nail of his right forefinger as he considered the data, then did what he knew he had to do.

He entered a code and transmitted the data to the UNAOC operations center in New York and on Easter Island along with the Pentagon, NSA, and CIA in his own government. Then, glancing around and making sure no one was watching, he entered another code consisting of the five letters STAAR, and transmitted the data to that destination. He breathed a sigh of relief as soon as the message was sent and his screen was clear again.

He looked up and watched. One of the foo fighters hit the shore of South America over Chile, then cut hard left and followed the coast north. It followed the entire coastline up to Central America and then looped back.

Meanwhile, the second one had crossed Central America and was over the mid-Atlantic while the third was passing New Guinea. The first dot returned to the spot it had originated from and disappeared.

The second foo fighter passed straight through the Strait of Gibraltar and flashed across the Mediterranean. The third had passed Taiwan and was doing a loop over mainland China.

The second reached the far end of the Mediterranean and curved right over Egypt before heading back. The third had done a large figure eight 81

over the entire length of China and was now also heading back. At speeds in excess of thirty thousand miles an hour, the blips on the screen ate up large chunks of distance quickly and shortly all were back down underwater at the point where they had come up.

"What the hell was that all about?" someone asked.

Craig was tapping his forefinger against his lips in thought.

"Reconnaissance," he said.

"Looking for what?"

"Damned if I know," Sinclair answered.

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The pebble hit the bricks, then slid down to the turf at the base of the Wall.

Che Lu bent to pick up another one, then paused, her back aching with pain. She straightened, as much as a wizened seventy-eight-year-old woman could, to her full height of four inches over five feet.

"Never works for me," she muttered as she turned from the crumbling remains of the Great Wall.

"What doesn't work, Mother-Professor?" her assistant, Ki, asked. He was young, just out of the university, and it was her opinion that he had taken the job more out of desire not to be arrested in Beijing than interest in her work. He used the term her students had used for her for many years. It was a sign of respect for both her age and her status as chief archaeologist at Beijing University.

"The tradition." She peered at him, her eyes a bright blue and, despite her years, not needing glasses of any sort. "You need to know traditions.

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They are very important in archaeology. They can guide you to what you look for."

She waved her hand at the serpentine mound of rubble that extended left and right as far as the eye could see. This portion of the Great Wall was not what was shown on documentaries to the outside world. The fools in Beijing would want the world to believe that the entire fifteen-hundred-mile length was in pristine condition, but this pile of rubble and decaying brick was more the norm, left to the ravages of nature and the needs of generations of peasants who had used the bricks to build their hovels.

"The tradition is that a traveler going through the Great Wall should throw a pebble against the brick. If it bounces back, then the journey will be a good one. If it simply falls to the ground, then it will be not so good."

"So we will have a not-so-good expedition?" Ki said with a worried smile.

"It has been not so good from the very beginning," she said. "I don't see why things should get any better." She turned from the wall and headed toward the battered American Jeep that she had been using for so many years. A Russian truck, also Korean War vintage, was puffing large clouds of diesel into the air directly behind the Jeep. It held the other five students in her group and their equipment.

Her great expedition, Che Lu thought to herself as she allowed Ki to help her into the passenger seat. He scurried around and got behind the wheel, throwing the ancient transmission into gear. They continued on their way, now paralleling the Wall, heading toward their work site many

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miles distant in the vastness of the western provinces of China.

Despite the pebble and paucity of people and equipment allotted her, Che Lu was as excited as she had been in many years. She had finally received permission to dig into Qian-Ling, the mountain tomb of the third emperor of the T'ang dynasty. Inside the massive hill that made up the tomb were buried the Emperor Gao-zong and his empress, the only empress ever to rule in China.

She knew it was the confusion of the current turmoil in China, of course, that had gotten her the permission. Some fool in the Antiquities Division of the government had made a mistake and stamped APPROVED on her request after twenty-two years of her resubmitting it every six months. She'd changed the wording on each submission, obscuring in scholastic language the fact that she wanted permission to actually enter the tomb.

She'd known they had to get to Qian-Ling quickly and get to work before someone else at the division discovered the error. There were two things working against her, and both were significant. One was tradition. The Chinese people revered their ancestors and thus their dead. Grave robbing was unknown in the country, and archaeological digging was considered practically the same: defiling the burial place of someone's ancestors. The second reason was that the present Communist government was walking a very tight rope in how the past was treated. There was fear, foolish fear in Che Lu's opinion, that there might be desire among the peasants for a return to the old imperial days.

Che Lu understood respect for ancestors. But

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she thought it was carried a bit too far in China, denying the world, and most particularly the Chinese people, a look into the splendor that had once been the Middle Kingdom. If China was ever going to take its rightful place in the present world order, Che Lu felt it had to acknowledge its power in ancient times and understand how that power had been eroded and destroyed by the ignorant and small-minded people who had ruled.

Che Lu had given much to China, and she wanted to see her country regain some of the stature it had held in ancient times. She had participated in much of the history of modern China, often at the cutting edge. Just twenty-six women had started the Long March with Mao sixty-four years ago. Only six had made it to the end alive, Che Lu being one of them as a young fourteen-year-old girl. Over one hundred thousand men had also been there at the start, less than ten thousand remaining alive when they arrived at Yan'an in Shaanxi Province in December 1935 after walking over six thousand miles.

Such a feat should have assured Che Lu a revered place in Communist China, but such were the shifting vagaries of power and influence that she had long ago fallen out of favor with newer regimes. At least she had been able to get schooling and earn her degree in archaeology before she was put on the blacklist.

The Jeep hit a pothole in the dirt road and she felt pain shoot up her spine, a fiery red explosion in the back of her head. Ki turned to make an apology and she waved him to remain silent. Young fools. They knew nothing of suffering.

The two-vehicle convoy was heading west from

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Xi'an, the city that had been the first imperial capital in China and the eastern terminus of the Silk Road that had stretched from western China across Central Asia to the Middle East and on to Rome. Che Lu and her associates had arrived there three days earlier and checked in with the local authorities.

Things were not much calmer here, a thousand miles away from the turmoil that was brewing in Beijing. The students were growing restless and now the workers were also. The UN disclosure of aliens visiting Earth had seeped its way even into tightly controlled China. Change was in the air all over the globe, and Che Lu feared and hoped that it was coming in China.

She reached into the old straw bag between her legs and pulled out a leather sack. She emptied the contents into the cloth of her skirt that was stretched wide between her legs and looked at the four pieces of bone that lay there. She picked one up and turned it, staring at the marks etched into the white material. The bone was from the hip of some animal, perhaps a deer, triangular in shape, with two long flat sides.

"What are those?" Ki asked.

What did they teach young people at the university? Che Lu wondered. Of course, Ki was a geology major, not archaeology. Most of the students she usually worked with had preferred to remain in Beijing, prepared to participate in whatever happened in the upcoming weeks. That there would be another event like the Tiananmen Square massacre Che Lu had no doubt. She had lived through too many purges and bloodlettings in seventy-eight years to be optimistic that this turmoil would end peacefully. The key issue was

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would everyone behave like sheep and go back to the status quo after the blood had flowed, like they had in 1989? Che Lu, from listening to her students who politely but firmly declined to come with her, felt this time it would be different.

"They are oracle bones," she answered.

Ki raised an eyebrow, inviting more information. At least he was curious, she would give him that. "They were used in ancient times by diviners to communicate with ancestors." She felt the smooth bone under her wrinkled fingers. "In the beginning was not the city, but the word," she murmured.

"Excuse me?" Ki politely asked.

Che Lu looked up. "Every other developing civilization on Earth was based on the growth of the city. In China, our civilization is based on the written word.

In fact, our word for civilization, wenha, means 'the transforming influence of writing.' " She held one of the bones closer so he could see the marks on it.

"The interesting thing about these bones is that no one can read the writing.

Most curious. After all, we had writing long before the rest of the world. But this writing, it predates even our own language."

"Perhaps it is just some form of drawing, Mother-Professor," Ki ventured.

"No, it is writing," Che Lu said.

"Where did you get those?" Ki asked.

"From an old friend."

"And are they important?"

Che Lu nodded but didn't say anything. She didn't trust anyone else yet, although she knew that there was a call she was going to have to 88

make. She wanted to be clear of the monitored phones in Xi'an, though, before doing that.

"Do they relate to Qian-Ling?" Ki asked.

"They were found near the tomb," Che Lu acknowledged. She saw a small town approaching. Tracking the single telephone line to a small store, she indicated for Ki to stop there.

She walked inside and greeted the proprietor. She held out a wad of cash, and asked to use the phone to make a most important call. The cash was more than the proprietor saw in a month, and the old man was most happy to oblige this strange woman.

Che Lu dialed on the old rotary device, getting the local operator. Slowly she worked her way through until she had an international operator in Hong Kong who could make the final connection.