The Reply

CHAPTER 16

Kelly Reynolds felt a bead of sweat work its way down her back. She was standing on the hot tarmac of the Nellis Air Force Base runway arguing with a young lieutenant who did not want to let her board a helicopter that the display board in operations had indicated was flying to Area 51. She’d flown here on a departing military hop as soon as the 707 with the others had taken off. She knew the only way to stop them was to uncover more information, and the best place to do that was here, where Majestic had operated for half a century.

They both turned as a car pulled up and a blue-suited figure emerged with gold oak leaves on his shoulders.

“Major Quinn,” Kelly Reynolds said by way of greeting. She still distrusted the Air Force, despite the openness of the last two weeks. Her early experience with an Air Force UFO disinformation campaign, when her budding career in film documentaries had been destroyed in the process, had left her wary of men in blue uniforms.

“Miss Reynolds,” Quinn replied.

“Is that your helicopter?” Reynolds asked.

“Yes.”

“Can I get a ride?” The lieutenant started to say something, but his mouth snapped shut as Quinn waved for her to accompany him to the craft. Reynolds knew Quinn was doing everything he could to stay on the good side of the media. All the other members of Majestic were dead, having killed themselves like Gullick, or were being held in prison. Quinn was riding a thin line, and she also knew from Lisa Duncan that he had been ordered by the President to cooperate fully with the press.

“I just left Professor Von Seeckt,” Quinn said as they entered the side door and buckled in.

“How is he?” Von Seeckt was another person Reynolds felt little affinity for. The former Nazi had worked at Peenemunde and despite his claims of ignorance, Reynolds knew he had to have known about the Dora concentration camp, where slave labor for the missile facility had been housed. Reynolds’s father had been one of the first who entered the camp and experienced the death and misery firsthand. He’d told his daughter about it and the desire to never again let such atrocities go unnoticed or unpunished had been the driving force in Kelly’s path into a career in the media.

“Not well,” Quinn said. “The doctors give him less than a week.”

Kelly snorted. “They gave him that last week. He’s a tough old bastard.” She glanced over as the chopper lifted. “Why’d you see him?”

Quinn met her eyes. “There’s something weird going on.” He related the story of the strange person, Oleisa, showing up and commandeering a bouncer, and the messages being sent to Antarctica. He left off Von Seeckt’s last disturbing question, even though it had been the only thought rattling about his brain since leaving the old man.

“You really think Scorpion Base is being used by this STAAR?” Kelly asked.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“Could it really be kept secret?”

Quinn nodded. “Yes. There’s no set satellite coverage of the land down there, and since the base was under the snowcap anyway, it wouldn’t be hard at all to keep it hidden. Also, remember that international treaty bars any weapons from being deployed on the continent, so it’s the least militarized place on the planet.

“Overflights are also virtually unknown because Scorpion Base is totally off any flight route to any of the other international bases. The vicious weather that’s common most of the time down there also discourages visitors.”

“I’ve never heard of a government agency that was able to keep a total veil of secrecy around itself,” Kelly said, realizing the contradiction built into her words as soon as she said them. “I want to know more about this.”

The helicopter was landing now, just outside the main hangar at Area 51. “I’ll show you everything I’ve managed to uncover,” Quinn said as they disembarked.

As they rode the elevator down to the Cube, Kelly reflected on the fact that just a few weeks ago Johnny Simmons had been captured trying to gain access to the very facility she was now being escorted into. If there was another secret government agency still at work, she promised herself that she would uncover it no matter what the cost.

The doors to the Cube slid open and Quinn led her to the raised desk at the back of the room. There was a subdued hum of activity from the rest of the room.

“I’ve had all our intelligence data links cued to pick up anything relating to STAAR,” Quinn said as he sat down. “I’ve also done an exhaustive search of the classified archives. There’s not much.”

“What do you have?” Kelly asked, the reporter part of her intrigued.

Quinn looked at his computer. “After the bouncers were removed, Scorpion Base remained empty for several years. Then in 1959, unknown even to Majestic at the time, someone moved in, taking over the deep chamber. I’ve got a report here from an engineering unit that put prefab structures deep under the ice, using the wide tunnel they’d dug to bring up the bouncers. I’ve checked and there’s no sign of the base on the surface. Aircraft going there are guided by a transmitter on a constantly changing frequency.”

“Who set it up?” Kelly asked.

“Scorpion was reestablished in 1959 by President Eisenhower. I’ve found a copy of the order and it’s very unusual. The presidential directive authorizing the base also stipulates that none of his successors were to be briefed on the existence of the station or the organization that ran it, known only by the acronym STAAR.”

“Jesus,” Kelly exclaimed. “How could they keep this secret all these years?”

“The appropriation for STAAR is hidden inside the sixty-seven-billion-dollar-a-year black budget,” Quinn explained. This was an area he was very familiar with from his work with Majestic. “By the same presidential directive that established it, STAAR took a specified percentage every year, no questions asked, and wired to a Swiss bank account. I bet you there’s a good chance no one in present-day Washington knows that STAAR exists.”

“Can that be?” Kelly wanted to know.

Quinn nodded. “As far as I can tell, STAAR appears to do nothing, which means it doesn’t attract any attention. The operating budget is hidden inside the highly classified budget of the National Reconnaissance Organization.”

He tapped his computer screen. “Actually, the most interesting thing about STAAR that I could find isn’t the budget but something that’s missing: there’s no personnel records for the people who make up STAAR.” He leaned back in his seat. “As far as the personnel paperwork trail that any organization affiliated with the U.S. Government has to have, no matter how secret, STAAR is an organization with no people. Hell, even the CIA has some paperwork on assassins it hires.”

Kelly stared at him. “What—” she began, but paused as Quinn suddenly leaned forward and began rapidly typing into his keyboard.

“Well, this is interesting. There’s a live link being picked up by the NSA involving STAAR,” he said.

“From where?” Kelly asked.

He pointed up at the screen at the front of the room. “From Aurora.” An electronic map of China appeared. A small flashing light on the wall screen sped across the overlay of the western edge of China, heading toward the safety of the ocean with surprising speed.

Kelly knew that Aurora was the top-of-the-line spy plane that the Air Force had, the successor to the SR-71.

“Data is being downlinked from Aurora to Scorpion Station,” Quinn added. “I’m intercepting a copy. Maybe we’ll learn something.”

Inside the STAAR command center deep under the ice, the woman who had run the organization for the past twenty-two years sat in a deep leather chair, looking at the various display screens that ran across the length of the front of the center. When she had to make contact with those in Washington or elsewhere, she had the ST-8 clearance that could get her whatever she wanted, no questions asked, and she was known only by her code name: Lexina.

She’d been picked by her predecessor for her intelligence, her loyalty, and above all her willingness to exile herself to Scorpion Station and never leave. She considered herself a soldier. A soldier who, like all soldiers, wished always for peace in her time but constantly prepared for the alternative and was willing to give her all if that alternative did occur.

“What is the status of Dr. Duncan?” Lexina asked.

“Airborne,” Elek, her chief of staff, answered. In STAAR the code name was the only way one identified oneself or addressed another. “Should be landing in Korea in less than an hour.”

“Who is on the ground waiting for them?” she asked. STAAR kept an active network of only twenty agents around the world. Add in the five members who ran Scorpion Base and they were an extremely small organization, which further added to their ability to maintain a veil of secrecy.

“Zandra is ready to meet the plane and brief them. Her cover is CIA,” Elek said. “Turcotte knows her as CIA from the Rift Valley mission, so that works best.”

The last was standard. STAAR used whichever government agency it saw fit as cover. Maintaining such covers had never caused trouble, due to their lack of intrusive activity over the years. Now Lexina saw trouble coming, but complaints from the CIA or NSA or any of the other alphabet-soup agencies were the least of her worries. She also knew it was just a matter of time before their initial veil of secrecy was pierced, but that didn’t concern her either. They had a plan in place for that.

“What about intelligence?” she asked.

“We haven’t heard anything out of China for—” Elek began, but Lexina cut him off.

“I know what we haven’t heard. That’s why we’ve authorized Duncan and her people to go in. How does it look for their mission?”

“We’ve got Aurora taking a look and gathering imagery,” Elek said. He typed into his keyboard.

Shaped like a black manta ray, Aurora was cruising at forty thousand feet over China, at a speed of Mach 5. As it approached the target area, it slowed down to less than 2.5, still over two thousand miles an hours, but slow enough so that the reconnaissance probe could be deployed.

In the backseat the RSO, reconnaissance systems officer, made sure all the systems were ready, then he activated them as they passed the target area.

“Anything on the HF or SATCOM frequencies we were told to monitor?” the pilot asked.

“Negative.”

“I wonder who the hell is down there,” the pilot said. “You couldn’t pay me to be on the ground in China these days.”

The RSO noted a red light flash on the left of his console.

“We’ve got missile launches,” he told the pilot. “I have what we came for. Pod’s coming in. Get us out of here.”

“Roger.” The pilot kicked in the afterburners. Both men were slammed back against their specially designed seats as the plane more than doubled its speed in less than fifteen seconds, leaving the missiles fired by the Chinese military well behind, the guidance systems electronically wondering where the target they had locked on to had gone.

“Downloading data,” the RSO said as the red light went out and the Pacific Ocean rapidly approached.

The data went through a scrambler and the garbled transmission was recorded onto a digital disk. The disk then played forward at two thousand times normal speed, bursting the message to an orbiting satellite. That satellite bounced the message to a sister satellite farther west and down to South Korea, where Zandra waited, the data also forwarded to Scorpion Base and intercepted by the NSA and sent to Major Quinn in the Cube.

“I’ve got a copy of the data,” Quinn announced.

“Is it going anywhere else other than Antarctica?” Kelly Reynolds asked.

“A copy is being forwarded to Osan Air Force Base in South Korea,” Quinn said.

“Looking through it, there seems to be mainly imagery of western China.”

“Osan is where Turcotte and Nabinger are being briefed,” Kelly said.

“I don’t get it,” Quinn said. “Who’s handling their operation? I thought it was CIA.”

“If you don’t know,” Kelly said, “I for one don’t know. But this may mean that whoever is in Osan waiting for them isn’t CIA but connected to STAAR.”

“It’s a possibility,” Quinn agreed. “But whoever’s there, they’re obviously getting the best possible intelligence for the mission.”

“What’s the political situation in China?” Kelly asked. She felt very uneasy in the closed confines of the Cube, so far underground. Everything here represented what she hated, and this intrigue about the mission into China was causing her to teeter on the verge of despair.

“CNN has the best coverage,” Quinn said as he turned one of the front screens to the news network. A reporter was standing in front of a modern building in Hong Kong as people hurried in the streets behind him. Ever since Hong Kong had been turned over to the Chinese government it had existed as a strange netherworld between the rest of the world and the government in Beijing. Any news that managed to get out of China came out of the small former colony like this reporter’s best guesses as to what was happening on the mainland:

“There have been unconfirmed reports that elements of the Twenty-sixth Army have moved into positions around the city of Beijing. Whether these reports are true is not known, nor is it known whether the government will use these troops in an attempt to abort this movement that has been going on for the past week.”

“So far things in the capital have been calm, but there are vague reports of fighting in the countryside, especially in the Western Provinces, where ethnic and religious groups have long chafed under the heavy hand of the Chinese government.”

“There have even been unconfirmed reports that commandos from the Taiwanese army have been operating on the mainland, helping to foment the unrest.”

“We have also been informed that we have twelve hours to leave the country or face arrest. Xenophobia is sweeping the Revolutionary Council and China is closing its borders to the outside world.”

“This will be our last broadcast as—”

“Nothing from the CIA or NSA?” Kelly asked as Quinn turned the volume down.”

“Some troop movements. The Twenty-sixth Army is indeed being moved in near the capitol. The PLA is doing a shell game, moving units away from where they were conscripted and putting them where they’ll be more likely to shoot at the local populace if ordered to do so.”

“And the Taiwanese?” Kelly asked.

“According to the CIA the Recce Commandos, part of the Taiwanese special forces, have infiltrated several teams into mainland China to do exactly as the reporter said. And China is closing off from the rest of the world.” Quinn looked up from his computer screen. “Do you think this site in China is important?”

“I don’t know,” Kelly said. “Turcotte and Nabinger did, and obviously whoever is pulling strings from Antarctica thinks it is. I just wonder who is who here and what their motives are.”

“Well, whoever this STAAR is, they sure have a lot of power,” Quinn noted.

“We need to keep an eye on things in case Turcotte and the others need help.” Kelly knew that Quinn would give her information, but he would not help her try to stop the mission.

“Already on top of that.”

“What about the person from STAAR who took over your bouncer?” Kelly asked. Quinn shrugged. “She seems to be waiting.” “For what?” “Your guess is as good as mine.”

The duty officer for the 1st Special Operations Squadron (1st SOS), home-based out of Okinawa, looked up as the secure SATCOM terminal machine nestled in the corner hummed with an incoming message. He put down his book and went over to the machine. After five seconds the humming stopped and the message was spit out. The man’s eyes widened as he read the message.

The duty officer grabbed the phone and punched in the number for the commander’s quarters.

“That’s Qian-Ling,” Nabinger said, tapping a satellite photo that showed a large mountain. He was looking at the satellite and thermal imagery tacked to hastily erected plywood bulletin boards. The others followed him. They had landed at Osan less than ten minutes ago and an Air Force major had immediately escorted them into this hangar, past the armed guards standing next to the door, and then left them alone.

Turcotte peered at it. “Big target area. How do we find Che Lu and get into it?”

They all turned as the door slid slightly open and a figure stepped in. “Fancy meeting you here,” Turcotte said as he recognized the tall, slender form.

“Captain Turcotte, Dr. Duncan, we’ve met,” the woman said. She turned to the other person. “Professor Nabinger, my name, as far as you are concerned, is Zandra.”

Nabinger raised a bushy eyebrow. “Greek?”

“It’s just a code name,” Zandra said, a bit taken aback. She gestured around the room. “We have all the information we can gather about Qian-Ling here for your use, including imagery from Aurora.”

“What’s the plan?” Turcotte asked.

“This is the launch site, and I will be your FOB commander,” Zandra began, only to be interrupted by Duncan.

“You are going to have to speak English here. Launch site for who and what is an FOB?”

“An FOB is a forward operating base,” Turcotte explained. “In Special Forces it’s the headquarters with operational control of deployed elements.” He indicated his two comrades. “Are we to be the deployed element?”

Zandra shook her head. “You will have a Special Forces split A-team accompanying you, Captain. And only you are going.”

“Split A-team?” Duncan asked.

“An A-team has twelve men on it,” Turcotte said. “A split team is six men, with each specialty: weapons, demolition, medical, and communications; represented by one man, plus a commander and intelligence expert.”

“I’m going too.” Nabinger stepped forward.

Zandra shook her head. “Captain Turcotte can relay back via digital video any information they find in Qian-Ling or get from Professor Che Lu. You’re too valuable to—”

“I’m going or you’re not getting my assistance.”

Zandra stared at him for a few seconds. “It’s the tomb, isn’t it? Can’t pass up the opportunity?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “Fine. You can go.”

“And I’m staying here with you,” Duncan said, earning herself a sidelong look from Zandra.

“Where’s the split team?” Turcotte asked, feeling more comfortable knowing that he would have six men with him who were part of his Green Beret brotherhood.

“Already isolated next door. They’ve been planning since they were alerted,” Zandra said. “They don’t know the actual objective, just where you are going and that they are to get you in and out in one piece.”

“Does that mean alive?” Nabinger asked.

“That would be beneficial to mission accomplishment,” Zandra said without the slightest crack of a smile.

“How are we getting there?” Turcotte asked.

“MC-130. The plane is en route from Okinawa,” Zandra said. “It’s the quickest and safest way in.”

Turcotte turned to Nabinger. “Have you ever parachuted?”

Nabinger’s eyes got wide. “Wait a second! Parachuting?”

For the first time there was some amusement in Zandra’s eyes. “You want to see the tomb, you jump. Don’t worry, at five hundred feet it’s just falling off the back ramp of the plane. The static line will open the chute and then you land.”

Turcotte looked at the woman more closely. “This doesn’t give us much time. We’ll be going in tonight.”

“That should not be a problem. The team has been doing your mission planning for you. They’ll be briefing back shortly. You just go for the ride and to discover whatever Airlia artifacts, if any, are in Qian-Ling. You try to make contact with Che Lu and find out what she knows. Then you come home.” Zandra turned toward the satellite imagery. “By the way, we believe that Che Lu and her party have been sealed inside the tomb by the PLA, so you can kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.”

“Stop,” Che Lu ordered, although the command was unnecessary, for once she stopped her slow and careful steps along the tunnel, the students all froze behind her.

“Turn off the light,” she ordered, and Ki complied.

They were bathed in blackness. Che Lu blinked, and peered down the tunnel. “There,” she said, pointing. There was the faintest of glows ahead, just the tiniest smudge of something in the inky darkness.

“Come on,” she said. Ki turned the light back on and Che Lu held the bamboo pole in front of her, the cloth hanging down to the ground. Slowly they made their way toward the light.

As they got closer, Che Lu could see that it was a small beam of light crossing the tunnel from upper left to lower right. She wondered if it was another one of the killing beams until she got even closer and could tell it was daylight. She felt a lightening of her heart as she stepped up close to the shaft. It came in from a hole in the upper left of the corridor about six inches square. The beam crossed and disappeared into another hole the same size in the lower right.

“What is the purpose of that?” Ki asked as they all gathered around, comforted by the warm ray of sunlight.

Che Lu put her face up to the hole, which she could reach if she stood on her toes. All she could see was a very faint blue square, far up the shaft. She estimated it was about a hundred meters to the outside and no one was going to be crawling up this tunnel. Still, it gave her hope that there might be a larger one farther on.

“It is like the Great Pyramid,” she said, a subject she had brushed up on once she had discovered the oracle bones with high rune writing on them. “There are small shafts in it just like this that go from the king’s chamber to the surface. They point to specific constellations in the sky.” She turned to the lower hole. “The emperor’s tomb must lie in that direction,” she added.

“Was there a back door in the Great Pyramid, where you could get out?” asked Ki, ever the practical one.

“No,” Che Lu said. “Only one entrance and that had been sealed up to discourage grave robbers.” She sat down on the floor. “We will rest here, then continue on.”

“Why don’t we simply ask this Oleisa person?” Kelly Reynolds suggested.

“I don’t think she’s going to talk to us,” Quinn said. He stood up. “But it’s worth a shot.”

Quinn and Reynolds left the Cube and took the elevator up to Hangar 1. As the doors opened, they entered a large room carved out of the rock of Groom Mountain. The hangar was over three quarters of a mile long and a quarter mile wide. Three of the walls, the floor, and roof — one hundred feet above their heads — were rock. The last side was a series of camouflaged sliding doors that opened up onto the runway.

They passed by one of the bouncers as they walked. Kelly knew that one could easily imagine how the rumors of flying saucers had started in the fifties if someone had seen a bouncer. The official designation by the scientists for them was MDAC or magnetic drive atmospheric craft. Each was about thirty feet in diameter, wide at the base, then sloping up to small cupola on top.

They were called bouncers because of their unique manner of flight, able to alter course instantly, which had the effect of throwing the occupants around.

Quinn and Reynolds approached the door to the part of the hangar where the bouncer had been isolated. They pounded on it in vain for a couple of minutes, but it didn’t open.

“Goddamn!” Quinn exclaimed.

“Let’s take a look at the mothership,” Reynolds suggested. They walked back into the main part of the hangar, past the bouncers to a door in the rear. Inside was an eight-passenger train on an electric monorail. Quinn stepped into the car, Reynolds at his side, and pressed the controls. It immediately started up and they were whisked along a brightly lit tunnel.

Kelly now knew the history of Area 51, but for over fifty years it had been one of the most closely held secrets in America. For years the primary focus of Majestic-12 had been the bouncers in Hangar One, but it was what was in Hangar Two that had helped decide the location of Area 51 when it was uncovered in the dark years of World War II. The tunnel the train was going through had been bored out years ago to connect Hangar One and Hangar Two.

The train came out of the tunnel and entered the large hole holding the mothership. Kelly knew it had been a cavern, but she’d been outside when Captain Turcotte had fired charges out of sequence trying to stop General Gullick from flying the mothership, tearing the roof down on top of the craft. Getting off the train, she could see that after extensive digging by the Army Corps of Engineers for the past several days, the rubble had been removed, enough to clear the mothership, which had not suffered any obvious damage.

Kelly looked up. The ship was now open to the sky, and the early-morning light filtered over the lip of the hole in the roof onto the glistening black skin. Despite having seen it before, Kelly Reynolds was staggered by the sheer physical size of the mothership: cigar shaped, over a mile long and a quarter mile in width at the center, it was nestled in a large black cradle made of the same black metal that composed the skin of the craft.

There was scaffolding near the front of the ship where an entrance had been opened, allowing access to the inside. With the aid of the rebel guardian computer, Gullick and the others on Majestic-12 had been able to get into the ship and fathom some of the controls, enough that they had even gotten the ship to lift off its cradle a short distance and figure out some of the drive mechanisms.

But that was it, Reynolds knew, as she walked with Quinn along the side of the ship. Majestic had been stopped from flying the ship, and up to the message coming from Mars, what should be done with the ship had been a hot topic of conversation not only at UNAOC, but around the world. Now, as evidenced by the small number of people in the cavern, there were more important things happening.

Kelly stopped walking and looked up at the black wall curving up and over her head. She had a feeling that not long after the Airlia came, someone would be coming here for a visit, because she had an inkling that the mothership might be the real reason Aspasia was coming back to Earth.