The Mission

CHAPTER 11

Area 51 had become the hub of UNAOC’s scientific center to investigate the Airlia. The choice had been made early for UNAOC because of the presence of the mothership and bouncers, but since the unveiling of that to the public, the site had expanded even further and Major Quinn, despite his relatively low rank in the military, was in charge.

Area 51 was the unclassified designation on military maps for a training area on the Nellis Air Force Base. Every military post had its land broken down into training areas, usually designated by numbers or letter. But Area 51 had developed into much more than a training area. For decades it had housed a top-secret installation burrowed into Groom Mountain. Next to the mountain lay the longest runway in the world. From that runway not only had the bouncers flown, but the skunkworks had tested all the latest top-secret aircraft, from the Stealth fighter to the still-classified Aurora spy plane.

Only a few of the facilities were aboveground. Most of the core of Area 51 was built into and below the side of the mountain next to the runway. Besides the mothership hangar that had been found, another large hangar had been hollowed out over the years to house the bouncers.

Majestic-12 was the committee that had been designated to run Area 51 and oversee the secrets it contained. Over the years it had turned into a world of its own, ignoring current administrations and believing itself to be above the law. That had all come to a crashing halt several weeks earlier.

Quinn now knew that the members of Majestic-12 had been mentally taken over by the guardian computer uncovered at a dig in Temiltepec and brought back to MJ-12’s other secret site at Dulce, New Mexico.

When MJ-12’s secrets were finally exposed, Area 51’s shroud had been torn asunder. The media had descended on the site, shooting images of the massive black mothership resting in its newly dug-out cavern and the bouncers being put through their paces by Air Force pilots. What had once been the most secret place in America was now the most photographed and visited.

But the discovery of the true nature of the STAAR bodies had brought a shadow into the new light. The information about the Airlia and STAAR had been deemed by UNAOC to be too inflammatory, and Quinn found himself once again guarding secrets.

That was a task much more difficult than it had been to keep the secret when Area 51 was spoken of only as a myth. He had reporters all over the complex now, and the best he could do was keep them out of the Cube and the autopsy area.

The underground room housing the Cube measured eighty by a hundred feet and could be reached only from the massive bouncer hangar cut into the side of Groom Mountain via a large freight elevator that allowed Quinn to control access.

Quinn sat in the seat in the back of the room that gave him a full view of every operation now in process. In front of him, sloping down toward the front, were three rows of consoles manned by military personnel.

On the forward wall was a twenty-foot-wide-by-ten-high screen capable of displaying any information that could be channeled through the facility’s computers.

Directly behind Quinn a door led to a corridor, which led to a conference room, his office and sleeping quarters, rest rooms, and a small gallery. The freight elevator opened on the right side of the main gallery. There was the quiet hum of machinery in the room, along with the slight hiss of filtered air being pushed by large fans in the hangar above.

A man walked into the control center and took the seat next to Quinn. He looked out of place among all the short-haired military personnel in the room, sporting long black hair, tied in a ponytail that went a quarter of the way down his back. Rimless glasses were perched on a large nose, below which a Fu Manchu mustache drooped.

“What do you have, Mike?”

Mike reached up and twirled the left part of his mustache. “All of the drives recovered from Scorpion Base were wiped clean.”

“Damn.” Quinn sat back in his chair.

Mike shook his head. “Oh, no! That doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.” “I don’t understand,” Quinn said.

“When you wipe a computer drive clean, that doesn’t mean it’s totally clean. There’s always residual information. Like a shadow remaining after the object that caused it is gone.”

Quinn had reversed his position, now leaning forward. “What have you got?”

“Nothing coherent yet,” Mike said. “I’m cleaning it up, but it takes time. It’s like putting a puzzle together piece by piece, except you only have a few pieces of each piece rather than the whole piece.”

Quinn blinked, then gave up trying to figure it out. “What do you think you have?”

“I think we have some information about STAAR’s personnel. Also, there’s some intriguing stuff in one of the drives that the report indicates was hooked to a satellite radio. I think it might help us decrypt the Airlia messages going between the guardians.”

“Anything else?”

Mike frowned. “Well, it’s hard to say, but it looks to me like these people…” He paused and looked at Quinn questioningly.

“STAAR,” Quinn filled in.

“Yeah, STAAR, well, they were trying to decode something themselves. Actually, it looks more like they were trying to recover some information from a database, much like I’m trying to do with their hard drives.”

“What was their source for this database?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s among the stuff recovered from the base in Antarctica.”

“How close are you to getting any coherent information off the hard drives?” Quinn asked.

Mike shrugged. “Days. Weeks. Maybe never. It’s hard to say.”

“Have you recovered anything?” Quinn asked.

“A couple of things. First, they were doing a keyword search.”

“The keyword?”

“Ark.”

“Ark?” Quinn repeated. “What kind of ark?”

“I don’t know.”

“And the other thing you found?”

“There was a file pulled from a bunch of sources, and I’m getting ghost images off some of it. Some sort of historical research.”

“On what?”

“Something called The Mission. With a capital T on the The.”

“Anything solid?”

“I should have something shortly on that part of the hard drives.”

Quinn pointed a finger. “Get back to work.”

“How the hell are we getting out?” The man who asked the question had one hand wrapped around a steel cable that ran the length of the plane’s cargo bay. His legs swayed as the low-flying cargo plane followed the contour of the earth outside. He wore camouflage fatigues with no marking or rank insignia — like the rest of the thirty men inside the plane. He was a former French Legionnaire who called himself Croteau.

Elek looked up from the satellite images he had been studying, his eyes hidden behind the black glasses. “Do not worry about that. I will take care of it.”

“Do I look stupid?” Croteau asked. “I don’t trust anyone when it comes to getting my ass out of the frying pan. And the middle of China is the damn fire.”

Croteau looked at the other mercenary leaders inside the aircraft. They were nodding their heads, agreeing with him. The money was good, no doubt about that, now fifty thousand a man, but as every mercenary knew, dead men couldn’t spend good money.

The plane was low to the ground, flying north of Afghanistan, heading toward the Chinese border. Croteau was a little surprised that they had made it this far without being challenged by some country’s air force, but Elek seemed to have no concerns about that. They’d landed at an airfield in Turkmenistan, one of the new former Soviet Bloc countries, and the plane had been refueled by the ground crews there. Croteau had always known that money could buy a lot of cooperation, but the extent of this Elek fellow’s influence seemed to transcend national boundaries.

“Plus how are we going to get past the Chinese army?” one of the other merk leaders, a man named Johanson, a former South African officer, asked. “They got the place surrounded.”

“We jump right on top of the tomb,” Elek said.

“And get our asses shot off coming down,” Croteau said. “You know what kind of target a man hanging in the harness makes?”

“There will be no one shooting at you.” Elek held up a small glass ball. There was a murky green liquid inside that seemed to glow. “This will take care of everyone on the ground.”

“What is that?” Croteau demanded.

“Nerve gas. Developed by the Russians, tested and perfected in Afghanistan,” Elek said. “It works within twenty seconds and dissipates within sixty. Before we jump, we drop the gas. Everyone on the ground will be dead by the time we land, and the gas will be gone also.”

“Jesus,” Croteau exclaimed. “You use that stuff, we’ll have every agency in the world after our ass.”

“You are stupid,” Elek said. “No one will care what happens in western China. And no one will know what happened.”

“No way,” Croteau said. “I’m not—” He froze as Elek held the glass ball under his nose.

“Yes, you will,” Elek said, “or I will drop this right here. The cabin is on a separate pressure system, so the plane will continue, but all of you will be dead.”

“You’re bluffing,” Croteau said. “You’ll die with us.”

“I’ve already been injected with the antidote.” Elek tossed the ball in the air, every eye following it, then caught it. “It does not scare me. But it should scare you. It is a most horrible death. Your brain cannot send any impulses to any part of the body. Your lungs stop working, your heart stops beating. But the impulses coming into the brain, those you feel.”

Croteau swallowed. “All right. We jump.”

Turcotte walked forward along the flight deck, avoiding the bustle that was the normal activity of the aircraft carrier. He turned and watched as an F-14 Tomcat came in for a landing, going from a forward speed of almost two hundred miles an hour to a complete halt in less than a couple of seconds. The intricate choreography of action that followed the landing was just as amazing, as flight personnel unhooked the plane, towed it away, reset the landing cables, and prepared for the next incoming plane in short order.

He turned his back on the ship and looked forward. The weather was clear and he could see to the blue horizon where the water met the sky. Looking over the edge of the flight deck, he could see that dolphins still splashed along the bow. Whether they were the same he had seen earlier or new ones to pick up the sport, he had no idea.

“A penny for your thoughts?”

Lisa Duncan had her leather jacket zipped up tight against the salt breeze. A briefcase was in her left hand. Turcotte knew they both had to leave shortly, going in different directions once again.

“I’m not sure they’re worth that much,” he said as she joined him.

“I think they are.”

Turcotte looked out to sea. “I don’t know. Seems like everything’s been moving so fast that it’s hard to think. Always something else to do that seems to take precedence.”

“Precedence over thinking?”

“You know what I mean,” Turcotte said. “Real thinking. Going a level below.” Duncan slipped her right hand into his left and squeezed. “And what’s a level below?”

“I’m not sure I want to know,” Turcotte said, hoping she would change the subject, but she said nothing.

Finally, he spoke. “I guess I wonder why.”

“Why?” Duncan repeated.

“You know, what’s the meaning of it all. You know we’ve been so focused on who and what and where and when, and we hardly know any of those, but it’s the why that’s the key to everything.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

Turcotte struggled to find the words that would make concrete the thoughts that had been swirling about in his head.

“You know what happened in Germany,” he started.

“Something you were involved in?”

Turcotte nodded.

“The incident in the cafe?”

That was a delicate way of putting it, Turcotte thought. He’d been assigned to a classified counterterrorist unit in Berlin. A unit that, once the Wall fell, spent most of its time trying to keep a lid on the piles of weapons from the former Soviet Bloc. It was a joint U.S.-German team. Handpicked men from the U.S. Special Forces and the Germans’ GSG-9 counterterrorist force. Their orders were to fire first and ask questions later, especially when they were dealing with weapons that could kill hundreds, if not thousands.

On his last mission before being assigned to Nightscape at Area 51—indeed, Turcotte knew it might well have been because of what happened on that mission that he received the Area 51 assignment — intelligence had received word that some IRA extremists were trying to buy surplus East German armament — SAM-7 shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.

The supposition was that they would shoot down a Concorde taking off from Heathrow. The weapons were being transported when Turcotte’s team went to interdict.

They set up an ambush, but the terrorists stopped in a Gasthaus just before the ambush point. Getting antsy, the team leader took Turcotte with him to check it out.

With silenced MP-5 subs slung inside their coats, they walked in the combination bar and restaurant. The place was full of people. They saw two of their targets sitting in a booth, but the third was nowhere in site.

And Turcotte’s partner froze, his unnatural demeanor catching the attention of the Irishmen. All hell broke loose. Turcotte and his partner exchanged fire with the two in the booth, killing both.

But the third man tried to run out of the bar, and Turcotte’s team leader fired at him in the middle of a crowd of civilians also trying to escape.

Turcotte could feel Duncan’s hand in his, her skin against the knotted tissue on his right palm — a scar that had formed from the burn he’d gotten when he’d grabbed the gun out of his team leader’s hands by the barrel, the red hot steel burning the flesh.

It was only later that Turcotte found out the body count. Four dead civilians. Including a pregnant, eighteen-year-old girl. To add insult to injury, the powers that be had tried to give Turcotte a medal for the action. Something had snapped in Turcotte after that, and he wasn’t sure he had ever put whatever it was back together.

“Mike?” Duncan’s voice indicated her worry over his long silence and his mood. “What about Germany?”

“Nothing,” Turcotte said. He felt very tired.

“Don’t give me nothing,” Duncan said.

Turcotte sighed. “Those guys I killed in Germany. The IRA gunmen. Their why. Their motivation. I’ve thought about it a lot. They thought they were right. They thought their cause was just and were willing to pay any price to further that cause. Do anything, even if it meant killing innocent civilians.”

“Oh, come on,” Duncan said. “You can’t be comparing—”

“You said you wanted to know what I was thinking,” Turcotte said, harder than he intended. “Then you need to listen.”

Duncan lapsed into silence and waited.

“Okay,” Turcotte said, still trying to rind the words. “The thing is these guys here on this ship. They wear American uniforms. This ship took part in the Gulf War. Bombed the crap out of Iraq. Killed a bunch of Iraqis. But those Iraqis believed in what they were doing, just as much as these sailors and pilots believed in what they were doing. And that’s the way it’s always been. You know — God was on both sides. How come one side ends up winning, then?

“I guess the why I’m wondering is what’s behind it all? I’ve been reacting to this Airlia thing with the basic philosophy that they aren’t us — humans, that is. But is that so much different than being an American and thinking an Iraqi is different? I don’t know. Now Yakov is here telling us that it’s more about a long battle among us — humans — than the aliens.”

“But the aliens are manipulating us,” Duncan said. “STAAR isn’t exactly human, and these Guides — like Majestic-12—their minds have been manipulated by the guardian.”

“So they’re just pawns?” Turcotte asked. “What are we? We can’t even go to UNAOC or our own government for help now. We can’t trust anyone, as Yakov says. I was paranoid when I was working Special Operations, but this is ridiculous. There’s got to be something more. Something different.”

“Why?”

The word caught Turcotte by surprise. “What?”

“I’m asking the same thing you started this with,” Duncan said. “Why does there have to be something more? Something on another level?”

Turcotte blinked. “Don’t you think there has to be a purpose to all this? All our efforts?”

Duncan spread her hands. “There might be. I don’t know what it is right now except we have to do the next right thing.”

A small smile crossed Turcotte’s lips. “The next right thing. I like that.” They stood there in silence, the ocean breeze of the mid-Pacific cool against their faces.

“There’s something else,” Duncan finally said.

“Yes?”

“Yakov.”

“What about him?”

“Do you trust him?” Duncan asked.

“He told us not to,” Turcotte said.

“I agree with him,” Duncan said.

“Why?”

“I spoke with Larry Kincaid and Major Quinn privately before they left, while you and Yakov were talking to Von Seeckt. Kincaid did a check on the Earth Unlimited satellite’s path prior to coming down, backtracking through Space Command’s database.”

Turcotte waited.

“While it didn’t get close to the mothership or the talon, he found the point at which the satellite’s orbit abruptly began to change and deteriorate. It was over a place called Sary Shagan in central Asia. That’s Russia’s primary ABM and ASAT research test site. ASAT stands for antisatellite. There have been reports from both the U.S. and NATO countries of their satellites that pass over that site being interfered with. Some suspect a low-power laser. Others, electronic jamming.”

“So you’re saying this satellite was interfered with by the Russians?”

Duncan nodded. “Kincaid definitely thinks so. Quinn has tried tapping into the intel network reference at the Ariana Launch Site at Kourou — the point of origin of the satellite — and he wasn’t able to find out much, but one thing he did learn was that this specific satellite was supposed to stay in orbit another day, then come down for an ocean recovery in the South Atlantic — just like the previous two Earth Unlimited satellites.

“The satellite had its own maneuvering rockets, and the DSP tapes show they fired during the descent, so Kincaid thinks the Russians damaged it, then The Mission brought it down as best they could, given it was going to come down anyway.”

Turcotte looked out to sea and considered that information. “So the Russians interfered with the satellite and The Mission brought it down early and not in its recovery zone. And maybe Section Four getting destroyed was in retaliation for that. If Yakov is telling the truth and it was destroyed. Perhaps Yakov knows more than he’s telling us.”

“That’s the way I see it. Maybe he made a mistake and he’s here to get us to clean it up for him since he doesn’t have the resources anymore.”

“But the good thing is that this plan of Earth Unlimited, whatever it is, got screwed up.”

“Yeah,” Duncan acknowledged. “But the bad part is that maybe this satellite wasn’t supposed to come down on land. Maybe something was in that satellite that wasn’t supposed to get out. And now it’s out and everything’s out of control.”

“Jesus,” Turcotte said. He rubbed his forehead. “So perhaps The Mission isn’t on top of the situation either.”

“Or Yakov is lying and there is no Mission,” Duncan suggested.

“Or Yakov is one of them.”

“Them?”

Turcotte laughed, not from humor, but rather futility. “STAAR. Guides. Section Four. The KGB. Hell, he could be a double, working for the CIA. Who the hell knows? Or he could be what he says he is. It doesn’t matter,” he finally decided. “Those people are dead in South America, and we’ve got to find out what the hell was on that satellite, whether it was the Black Death or something else.”

“While you’re going to South America,” Duncan said, “I need to go back to the States to do some checking.”

“On what?”

“First, I have to stop at Vandenberg Air Force Base. One of the shuttles is being launched from there. I still work for the President, and he wants me there for the launch. I also want to get an idea of what the UNAOC people involved in the talon and mothership missions are up to. Then I want to go on to Area 51. I think that’s the best place to coordinate everything from once you find out what is going on. Plus I want to see if I can’t find out any more about Dulce and Temiltepec.”

Turcotte nodded. “All right. I’ll return with Yakov to Area 51 once we do our recon.”

Since getting his marching orders Norward had been on the move, gathering equipment and packing. To go to the target site and collect what was necessary — without becoming infected themselves in the process — they needed specialized gear. They would have to take bio-safety Level 4 precautions with them.

Norward had let Kenyon take charge. The other man had much more experience in traveling and going places. In fact, Norward was now counting his blessings that Kenyon had gone on the “jaunt” a couple of years before. The jaunt was part of the lore at the Institute, and Norward had heard more than a few stories about it.

There were two things that were of primary importance to be discovered when a new biological threat appeared. The first, of course, was to determine exactly what it was. To isolate it. The second was to find out where it came from. With those two facts, they at least had the basics needed to try to defeat the bug.

Two years earlier a virus had erupted out of southern Zaire. Of course, since southern Zaire wasn’t a media hot spot, the word got out slowly. The disease burned along the Zaire-Zambia border with a kill rate of over 90 percent of those infected. Thousands upon thousands of people died.

After two weeks ripping through the countryside, the virus made a toehold in the Zambian city of Ndola. The Zambian president had the city cordoned off by troops. Roads were blocked, the airport was shut down, and travel was prohibited. The president was prepared to lose the city to save the country.

And just as swiftly as it had appeared, the virus went away. The last of the victims died and their bodies were burned. Life went back to normal along the border, except for the forty thousand people who had died. But forty thousand dead in Africa barely made a blip on the world media. Except for those at the Institute.

From Zairean doctors, they managed to get samples of the virus in the form of frozen tissue samples sent by plane. They quickly isolated the deadly virus. It was a filovirus, a cousin to Marburg and the two Ebolas. But it wasn’t any of them, and for lack of a better name, the new virus was christened Ebola3. A filovirus was derived from the Latin — thread virus. If they had not already seen Marburg and Ebola at the Institute, they might not have so quickly caught on to Ebola3, but as soon as the strange, thin, elongated forms showed up in the electron microscope they zeroed in on it.

They had Ebola3, but they didn’t know anything else about it other than it killed and killed well. So Kenyon proposed to go track down where the virus had come from. He took a trip to Zaire and investigated. Like a detective, he backtracked the line of death that the few survivors remembered. Kenyon found that Ebola3 had probably originated not in Zaire but somewhere on the southeast side of Lake Bangweulu in Zambia. He hired a small plane pilot to fly him up there. They flew over mile upon mile of swampland bordering the lake. It was a dismal-looking place, full of wildlife and little visited by man. Kenyon tried to get the pilot to land at a small town on the edge of the swamp they overflew, but as they descended, the odor of rotting corpses was so great they could smell it in the cockpit of the plane and the pilot refused to land.

Kenyon came back to the Institute and proposed an expedition to Lake Bangweulu to find out the birthplace of Ebola3. His justification was that if it had come out once, it might come out again, and the next time it might not go away. Forty thousand dead and a 90 percent kill rate made for a very effective argument. The funds were appropriated, and Kenyon went back to Zambia with a team of experts and the proper gear to work with Level 4 bio-agents in the field. Something that had never been done before.

They went into the swamp and, after two weeks of searching, found an island where Kenyon suspected the disease might have originated among the local monkey population. A few local survivors told him that swamp people went to that island occasionally to capture monkeys for export to medical labs for experimentation. That might help explain how the disease got out of the swamp, Kenyon reasoned. They suited up and went onto the island as if it were hot. But they found nothing, and eventually Kenyon had to order them to pack up and head back.

Kenyon never found out where Ebola3 came from; thus the nickname “jaunt” for the entire exercise. But he had learned a lot about taking a Level 4 lab to the field, and for that Norward was now very grateful because most of the equipment on the second helicopter was prepackaged gear that Kenyon had used on the jaunt. Kenyon had used his expertise to put together easily movable equipment that they had stored at the Institute. If ever there was a need to go virus hunting again, Kenyon had wanted to be ready.

And now they were off hunting. Several dead villages in the Amazon highlands didn’t necessarily mean they had another Ebola3 on their hands, Norward knew. But if they did, at least they wouldn’t be starting from scratch preparing this expedition.

In the past several decades Ebola3, Ebola, and Marburg had broken out occasionally in Africa and killed with ruthless efficiency — or propagated with amazing strength, depending on one’s outlook, Norward thought. Then it had disappeared. There was still no vaccine for those known scourges — never mind something new. It was a sore point at both USAMRIID and the CDC in Atlanta that they hadn’t broken any of the filovirus codes. The only thing they had accomplished in the past several years was to come up with a field test to determine if someone had Ebola or Marburg.

But South America was something new. And the bouncer — Norward wondered how that was involved. Was it simply being used because of the time rush? And Colonel Carmen indicating that this trip was occurring outside of official channels added to the mystery.

“Here’s our ride,” Kenyon said.

The bouncer came in low over the grounds in front of the main building for USAMRIID. The gear that they would need was piled next to them. Norward marveled as the alien craft came to hover, then silently touched down on the lawn.

An Air Force officer came out of the top hatch.

“Major Norward?”

Norward nodded. “Yes.”

“We’ve got your ride.” He looked at the lab gear. “Might take us a couple of minutes to get your stuff loaded. This whole thing is kind of unorthodox, but we’ll get you out of here as fast as we can.”

“How long will it take us to get to the target area?” Kenyon asked.

“We have to stop at the Stennis first to pick up a couple of passengers.” Kenyon shook his head. “We don’t have time for any side trips.”

“What’s the big rush?”

“In an hour,” Kenyon said, “certain viruses can replicate themselves almost a million times. That is the rush.”