Excalibur

CHAPTER 8: THE PRESENT

Turcotte ignored Yakov, Che Lu, and Mualama. He walked into the room where Duncan was seated in a chair, a blanket wrapped around her slight frame. His fatigues were dusted with sand from his sojourn into the desert and where sweat had soaked through the camouflage material, the sand was crusted in place. “You’re back,” Duncan said, a hesitant half smile on her face. She started to get up. “Mike, I’m telling you the—”

“Shh—” Turcotte said as he lightly put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her back into the chair.

But that didn’t stop Duncan. “I’m telling you the truth as far as I know it.” “I know. I think I’ve got an idea what was done to you. When we infiltrated Majestic-12’s base at Dulce,” Turcotte said, “we found that they were conducting experiments on abductees, including Kelly Reynolds’s friend Johnny Simmons. Mind experiments using Airlia technology.”

“Dulce was destroyed,” Duncan said.

“Yes, but they got the basic technology from the Airlia. They were working on EDOM — electronic dissolution of memory. Majestic was using it on abductees to wipe out their real memories of being captured by Nightscape, and then implanting false memories of disinformation.”

Duncan frowned. “Are you saying my memories are false? That everything I know is a lie? Electronic signals implanted in my brain?”

Turcotte tapped the CIA folder. “We know your memories are a lie, Lisa.” A nerve twitched on the side of her face. “I don’t have a son?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Duncan was shaking her head. “It can’t be. It just can’t be. I remember him. I remember all of it. Damn it, Mike, I remember giving birth to him. The pain. I watched him grow up. Maybe some of my memories are false, but others true? All of it can’t be a lie.”

Turcotte remembered how Johnny Simmons, Kelly Reynolds’s friend who had gotten her involved in the whole Area 51 mess, had killed himself after they’d rescued him from an EDOM pod at Dulce. To have one’s past taken away and replaced with a set of lies was undoubtedly devastating. It took away a person’s sense of self. Duncan had just learned that her family was not only dead, they had never existed.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she finally said. “Why would Majestic have done this to me? I ended up putting in motion the forces that destroyed them.”

Turcotte shook his head. “I’m saying the technology and techniques used on you are similar to the EDOM Majestic used. I’m not saying Majestic was behind it.” “Who, then?”

“That’s a very good question,” Turcotte said. “If we can figure that out, maybe we can figure out who you really are.”

Turcotte went to the door and motioned for Quinn to come in. “How far has Dulce been excavated?” he asked the major.

Quinn checked his PDA, accessing the CUBE mainframe. “They’re down to the bottom level.”

“So they’ve uncovered the EDOM pods and research area?”

Quinn nodded. “And the guardian that corrupted Majestic. It’s being held under heavy guard but it doesn’t seem to be active. Just like the one in the Mission under Mount Sinai seems to be off-line.”

“Where are those guardians now?” Turcotte asked. “I don’t know. UNAOC has taken over all Airlia artifacts. Most likely they are still where they were found.” “Do you think it would be possible to reverse EDOM?” Turcotte asked him. He saw Duncan lift her head, listening intently now.

Quinn shrugged. “I have no idea. That’s not my field of expertise.”

“Find someone whose it is,” Turcotte ordered. He nodded toward the door. “Tell the others to come in.”

Che Lu, Mualama, and Yakov entered the conference room and sat around the table. Turcotte quickly updated them on what he thought had been done to Duncan.

“But we don’t know who did this to her,” Yakov said when Turcotte was done. “It could have been Artad’s side; it could have been Aspasia’s Shadow’s.”

“Well, we can assume it wasn’t Majestic,” Turcotte said. “Which means someone else has or had access to the same technology.”

“Most likely garnered from Airlia artifacts,” Yakov said. Che Lu was rubbing her chin in thought. She looked at Duncan. “This means you cannot trust any memory prior to ordering Turcotte to infiltrate Area 51.”

“I can’t trust my memory and I don’t know what has happened to me.” Duncan held her hands up in defeat. “What now?”

“We need the Master Guardian,” Yakov said. “And Excalibur. And we do not have much time.”

“How long until Aspasia’s Shadow’s fleet is in range of Pearl?” Turcotte asked Quinn.

“A couple of days.”

“Should she be listening to this?” Yakov asked, nodding toward Duncan. “You want to shoot her again?” Turcotte snapped.

“We don’t know who she is,” Yakov pointed out. “She doesn’t know who she is. And more importantly, we don’t know who did this to her or why.”

Turcotte rubbed his forehead, trying to relieve a pounding headache. “Let’s keep it simple — we’ve got to do two things. Recover Excalibur and find the Master Guardian, which, according to Kelly, is in the second mothership. Does anyone disagree with that?”

There were no objections.

“I think we all understand the gravity of the situation,” he continued. “It’s not just the fleet that is approaching Hawaii or Artad’s ultimatum to the Chinese government. I want you to think about what will happen if Aspasia’s Shadow combines the Grail with the nanovirus he is using to control all those people. He will have an army of unkillable slaves that he can increase exponentially with every battle he wins. On top of that, imagine the horror of being controlled by the nanovirus while being immortal — it would be an eternal hell.”

Turcotte placed his hands flat on the table and looked each of the people in the room in the eye, uncertain whether he could trust a single one of them and forced to accept, for the moment, that he had no choice. “So. First. Where is the second mothership that holds the Master Guardian?”

Quinn pulled another folder from his briefcase. “The Germans were also searching for a mothership. They zeroed in on the legend of Noah’s Ark.”

“And?” Turcotte prompted.

In response, Quinn threw a black-and-white photograph of a mountain on the table. “They finally focused their search on Mount Ararat. It’s the legendary location for where the biblical ark ended up. And we’ve learned there’s a lot of truth to legends, haven’t we?”

Turcotte picked up the photo. “How come no one’s found it? Ararat’s not exactly the most remote place in the world.”

“It is somewhat remote,” Quinn said, “but more importantly, Ararat has always been in the center of political and ethnic turmoil. It’s located awkwardly in a part of Turkey that juts between Iran, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. And the locals in the area are mostly Kurds, who have been fighting the Turks for centuries.” “Still—” Turcotte began, but Quinn interrupted him.

“The mothership we found here was hidden in a cavern,” Quinn reminded them. “While there have been a few expeditions that have searched for Noah’s Ark on Ararat, they all assumed it would have grounded on the surface after the Great Flood. At worst, they figured it might be covered by several feet of soil or caught in a glacier, not hidden in a cavern deep inside the mountain itself, like the mothership here was hidden.”

“All right.” Turcotte put the photo down. “Let’s say the mothership and the Master Guardian are hidden under Ararat somewhere. What about the key — Excalibur? What was this stuff about Saga-something or another?”

“Sagamartha,” Quinn said. He pulled out another photo. Again of a mountain and tossed it on the table. “That’s what the Nepalese call Mount Everest.”

Turcotte picked up the picture, recognizing the world’s highest mountain. “Great,” he muttered.

“A bouncer ought to be able to go anywhere on the mountain safely,” Quinn noted. “Why do I have a feeling it won’t be that easy?” Turcotte said. “Yakov. The ark is yours.”

“By myself?”

“Afraid of a challenge?” Turcotte didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll see if I can get you some help. One thing to keep in mind — I don’t think Artad has forgotten where he parked the damn thing.”

“Understood,” Yakov said.

“And Excalibur?” Mualama asked.

“I’m going after it,” Turcotte said. “I will help you,” Mualama said.

Turcotte’s instinct was to decline the offer, but he didn’t want to leave Mualama alone. “All right. And check Burton’s manuscript to see if that sheds some light on any of this. It would be nice to have an idea where exactly on Everest it is.” He turned back to Quinn. “How soon can you have a bouncer ready for me?”

“Thirty minutes.”

“OK.” Turcotte looked around at the small group. “The plan is Yakov gets to the ark and the Master Guardian. I get to Excalibur and free it so that Yakov can use the Master Guardian to shut down Artad’s and Aspasia’s Shadow’s guardians.” He focused on the Russian. “You should be able to drop the shields and stop the nano-virus.”

Yakov laughed. “That is all you want me to do?”

Turcotte slapped the Russian on the shoulder. “Hey, I only have to climb Everest. Want to swap?”

Yakov pretended to consider the proposal seriously for a few seconds, then shook his head. “I am much heavier than you. It is best you do the climbing.”

“Always the practical one,” Turcotte said.

Down the hall, Larry Kincaid was doing something he had spent a career at NASA and JPL doing: looking at imagery of an object in space. In this case, the object was Mars as viewed through the Hubble Space Telescope.

The deeply rutted track in the red surface of Mars going from Cydonia to Mons Olympus was obvious. He had taken the time to count the number of mech-robots and come up with over three thousand, but the amount seemed to be growing hourly — more were leaving Cydonia than returning.

He could see the massive cut in the Mons Olympus escarpment. And now he saw the destination as the first of the carriers began dumping their black cargo high up the slope before turning to head back. The site was less than a mile from the volcano’s crest.

Other mech-robots were digging into the side of the volcano, excavating.

“What the hell are they building?” he wondered out loud as the printer spit out the latest picture.

As the two attack submarines headed northwest toward Hawaii, they increased speed. The nanotechnology was monitoring performance, transmitting the information back to the guardian on Easter Island. The alien computer then sent back the new design orders increasing the submarines’ maximum speed.

The changes increased the subs’ speed to over seventy-eight knots.

Turcotte looked up from the computer screen as Quinn appeared next to him. He had just finished typing in a brief query to Kelly Reynolds and was ready to hit the enter key, sending it through satellites into the stream of traffic going between the Alien Fleet and Easter Island. The US military was in a quandary about the message flow because if they cut off the Alien Fleet’s access to the MILSTAR communications system, they would also have to cut off all their other forces, thus making the system useless. So far, they had elected to keep the system running and send messages to forces using ground encryption.

Turcotte hesitated because he was afraid the message might get noted by the guardian or Aspasia’s Shadow, who might retaliate against Kelly. He’d phrased his query in a way that he thought only the reporter would understand and would seem innocuous to any sniffer program, but he understood he was risking her life with the message.

“What’s up?” Turcotte asked.

The major pointed toward the status board at the front of the room. “We’ve got a dozen inbound choppers along with a large fixed-wing plane.”

“Reinforcements?” Turcotte asked. Area 51 was operating at below bare minimums as far as personnel went, as orders from Washington had stripped most of their personnel. They had a half dozen people left from a regular staff of over three hundred.

“I’ve been trying to get us people,” Quinn said, “but I haven’t received any acknowledgments from the aircraft. They aren’t responding to hails.”

“Range?” Turcotte’s attention was torn away from the message he’d been composing.

“Ten klicks and closing fast.”

Turcotte was surprised to feel a kick of adrenaline, similar to what he had always felt before going into action. He knew that Washington — every government — was infiltrated by both alien groups in various ways. And even worse, there were the various human factions inside of each government now lining up in one of four ways: to side with Artad; to ally with Aspasia’s Shadow; to try to be neutral; or to fight both alien groups and their minions.

Three out of four options did not bode well for what they were trying to do there at Area 51, Turcotte thought. Not good odds.

“Have you copied everything onto CD-ROM?” he asked Quinn. “The archive material, Burton’s manuscript, all the Majestic records? Everything?”

“Yes.”

Turcotte could see the small dots on the large screen closing. The choppers were over the lake bed.

“Take the disks, get the others, and go to a bouncer,” Turcotte ordered. “What do—” Quinn began, but Turcotte cut him off.

“Do it now!”

Quinn still paused. “The doctor took Duncan to the medical hangar on the surface to run some tests,” Quinn said. “I can get Che Lu, Kincaid, and Mualama.”

“Then do it!” Turcotte yelled as he hit the send key for the message, then ran for the surface elevator.

Five Apache helicopter gunships led the way, followed by five UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters carrying troops. They were low over the desert floor, less than twenty feet up and moving fast.

Ten miles behind them was a specially modified C-130 transport plane with large red crosses painted on the wings and high tail. Turcotte could hear the choppers as he ran across the sand toward the medical building. It was about a quarter mile from the hangar doors and next to the runway tower.

An Apache helicopter swooped in front of him, 30mm cannon aimed directly at him.

Turcotte ignored it, trusting that American soldiers, regardless of their orders, would not fire at an unarmed man. He reached the door of the medical building as a Blackhawk landed fifty meters away in a swirl of blowing dust. A dozen men dressed in camouflage jumped out.

Turcotte threw the door open. “Lisa!”

There was no response. He ran down the hallway and twisted the knob on the lab room. It was locked. Turcotte slammed his boot into the door, right above the knob. The wood splintered. He shoved it open and stepped inside. Duncan was on the examining table, her eyes closed. Turcotte rushed to her side.

“Lisa?”

He started as he felt a sharp jab in his right arm. He spun, open left hand slamming into the doctor’s chest. The white-coated figure flew backward, syringe falling from his fingers. The doctor tried to get up and Turcotte hit him hard on the side of the head, knocking him unconscious.

Turcotte turned back to the table, trying to scoop Duncan up, but his arms were weak. He couldn’t lift her. Turcotte strained, putting every ounce of effort he could muster into it. He slumped to his knees, leaning against the table.

He sensed people behind him. He collapsed, body turning as he did so. He was seated on the floor, his back against the table, unable to move at all. He couldn’t even move his eyeballs. He could see a half dozen soldiers fill the room. Two of them picked up Duncan and carried her out. An officer knelt in front of Turcotte. The officer checked his pulse, then looked over his uniform, noting the various patches. The man bit his lip with indecision. Then he stood.

“Let’s go,” the officer ordered.

“But, sir, we’re supposed to arrest all—” one of the men began. “That’s an order,” the officer said.

The men and doctor exited the room, leaving a helpless Turcotte.

“Come on.” Quinn ripped the laptop computer out of Che Lu’s hands to lighten her load as they ran across the hangar floor toward the waiting bouncer. Yakov, Mualama, and Kincaid were already climbing up the side of the bouncer. The massive doors were partly open and they could all hear helicopters close by. The snout of an Apache helicopter poked through the empty hangar doors. The multibarreled 30mm chain gun under the nose of the craft snooped about, linked to the sight flipped down in front of the gunner’s eye. Wherever the gunner turned his head, the barrel of the chain gun followed. And the gunner was obviously now watching the five members of the Area 51 team scurry onto the bouncer.

Balanced precariously on the top of the bouncer, Yakov pulled a pistol out and aimed it at the gunship.

“No!” Quinn yelled as he reached the side of the craft. Yakov’s finger was on the trigger, but he hesitated.

Inside the Apache the gunner had Yakov square in the reticules of his HADSS — Helmet and Display Sighting System — a monocular just inches from his right eye. “Warning rounds,” the pilot ordered over the intercom.

The gunner turned his head slightly and squeezed the trigger. A burst of 30mm rounds — each the size of a milk bottle — ripped through the air and hit the skin of the bouncer five feet to the right of Yakov, ricocheting off.

Major Quinn was knocked off his feet onto his back as Che Lu slammed into his chest. He blinked and tried to get up, but the Chinese scientist was on top of him. He felt something wet soaking into his chest and when he looked down saw that a round had punched through the old woman’s slight frame.

“Oh, God,” Quinn whispered as he slid her to the floor.

Yakov slid down the bouncer and joined him, kneeling next to Che Lu and tenderly placing a large hand around her neck, searching for a pulse.

“She’s gone,” Yakov said.

“It can’t be,” Quinn whispered.

“Get on board,” Yakov stood, the pistol in his hand. He brought it up and aimed at the cockpit of the Apache. He squeezed off six shoots in rapid succession. They impacted harmlessly on the armored cockpit.

Quinn tried to ignore the blood soaking through his uniform as he climbed onto the side of the bouncer, reaching up and taking Mualama’s outstretched hand. The African literally pulled him up and tossed him into the open hatch. He quickly slid into the pilot’s depression, taking the controls into his shaking hands. Mualama was down next, followed by Yakov. Kincaid was strapping down gear as Quinn lifted the bouncer off the floor of the hangar. He accelerated directly toward the Apache blocking the opening. It bobbed left, narrowly missing getting rammed.

Two other Apaches made gun runs at the bouncer as it exited the hangar, firing just in front of the alien craft. Quinn ignored them, pressing forward on the control stick.

Everyone flinched as the Apaches circled back and fired once more, rounds slamming into the side of the alien craft, the impacts visible via the strange ability of the skin to act like one-way glass.

Quinn accelerated the craft and they were moving over six hundred miles an hour within ten seconds, leaving Area 51 and Che Lu’s slowly cooling body far behind.

Squads of soldiers entered the CUBE, arresting all those who had been left behind. They planted small explosive charges on every computer and communications device. As the red digits slowly counted down to detonation the men expeditiously exited the complex.

On the surface, the C-130 rolled down the runway and came to a halt, where the squad of soldiers waited with Duncan. The back ramp came down and touched the concrete. Four white-coated figures rolled a gurney off the ramp and up to those waiting. They put Duncan on the gurney and strapped her down. Standing inside the cargo bay was a fifth white-coated figure, a tall man with shockingly white hair and piercing blue eyes.

When they rolled the gurney onto the plane, he leaned over Duncan, checking her vital signs, even as the ramp began to close and the aircraft began turning.

As it roared down the runway, the charges inside of Area 51 detonated.

Inside Hangar One lay the body of Che Lu. From the Long March in 1934, through the agony of World War II and the subsequent Communist regimes, to watching her students die in Tiananmen Square, to the thrill of entering Qian-Ling, her journey was finally over in the most unlikely of places.