The Sphinx

CHAPTER 2

In the cold vacuum of space, the only visible remains of the space shuttle Columbia were a few twisted pieces of metal drifting alongside the source of their destruction. Dwarfing the human wreckage, the alien talon spacecraft took its name from its long, slightly curved shape that tapered to a point on one end like an oversized claw. Over two hundred miles long, by thirty meters at its widest, the craft’s black metal skin absorbed the sun’s rays that struck it. Three hundred miles below, a dark crescent bisecting the East Coast of the United States indicated dawn sweeping westward across Earth. Man’s most marvelous piece of technology had been destroyed in the blink of an eye by a blast from the tip of the talon, stopping the attempt to recover what had been considered a dead ship. The alien ship was indeed lifeless, the crew killed in the explosions initiated by Turcotte that had wiped out its eight sister ships as they converged on the mothership, which was also floating dead in orbit. But as the shuttle wreckage indicated, that didn’t mean the ship was completely nonfunctional. Eighty miles from the drifting talon, the Warfighter IV satellite flew on a polar orbit, its imagers shifting from their task of watching the surface of the planet below to taking a look at the talon as the orbits of the two closed on perpendicular courses.

Thermal infrared imagers pointed at the talon along with low-light-level cameras, recording what they saw and passing it to stations on Earth. Over sixty feet long and fifteen wide, the Warfighter was larger than the Hubble space telescope. It weighed twenty-three tons, a third of that weight fuel for the maneuvering thrusters designed to place it over any spot on the globe within two hours of notification from the ground.

It boasted the full complement of imaging hardware that the latest U.S. spy satellite, the KH-14, contained, but the primary mission of the Warfighter wasn’t to spy but to destroy. The imagers were for pinpointing targets; due to both its size and proximity, the talon was easily acquired as Warfighter closed to within sixty miles. The last one-third of Warfighter’s weight was a small nuclear reactor hooked to a powerful high-frequency overtone laser.

Launched covertly from Vandenberg Air Force Base two years previously, Warfighter IV was the culmination of decades of classified work funded under the Star Wars program. Designed to destroy enemy satellites in space and missiles in flight in the atmosphere with the laser, its presence in orbit’ broke every treaty the United States had ever signed regarding the militarization of space. The nuclear reactor also violated every space launch doctrine ever established. The imagers had a solid target lock on the talon, and the reactor began powering up the laser as Warfighter closed to within forty miles. As the power level passed through fifty percent, a golden glow suffused the tip of the talon. A thin line of power leapt at the speed of light from the talon to Warfighter, enveloping it in a stasis field. All contact the satellite had with its human controllers on the planet below was severed in the blink of an eye. The power buildup held at fifty percent. Slowly the talon used the field to draw Warfighter to it until the two were in orbit less than fifty meters apart.

They moved in tandem that way for fifteen minutes. As the Earth rotated below and the two drifted, their relative position to the planet changed. Soon they were over the western United States. The golden beam slowly rotated Warfighter until it was once more oriented toward the planet below. The imagers locked on a target on the Earth’s surface.

The nuclear power buildup was released, and power surged to the laser. With a bright flash, a bolt of high energy arced toward Earth.

Area 51, located approximately ninety miles northwest of Las Vegas, on the edge of a dry lake bed nestled between mountains, consisted of three major parts. The most visible was the seven-mile-long concrete runway that extended across the dry Groom Lake flats. It was the longest runway in the world, used to launch and land the most sophisticated aircraft American designers could make.

The next most noticeable feature from above was the physical plant on the surface, consisting of hangars, support buildings, and tower for the runway. The third… and invisible from above… part was the two hangars built into the side of Groom Mountain and the underground facilities that had housed the agency that had controlled Area 51 and the alien craft headquartered there… Majestic-12… for over five decades.

The normal operations at Area 51 came to an abrupt halt as a flash of light seared down from above, hitting one of the hangars. It was through the roof in a flash.

The initial blast was followed by a string of secondary explosions, and in less than ten seconds there was no longer a hangar and it would take days to recover the pieces of bodies from those who had been inside.