by S. A. Beck
Then she noticed the most remarkable thing of all. A man in an American general’s uniform was walking towards them with his hands in the air. An older Mauritanian man in a business suit walked right behind him, holing a pistol to the general’s head.
She spotted Vivian and Grunt not far off and ran to them.
“Is that General Meade?” she asked.
“No it’s not,” Grunt replied. “I don’t know who that is.”
He sounded as confused as Jaxon felt.
The loudspeaker blared again and the man with the gun to the general’s head stopped and looked around nervously.
“What’s that guy been saying?” Jaxon asked.
“He’s the commander of the garrison, and he told his men to stop firing.”
“Why? He was winning.”
“I don’t know.”
The American general and the Mauritanian man approached.
“Salek!” one of the Tuaregs cried.
“What does that mean?” Jaxon asked.
“It’s the name of their vice president,” Vivian said.
“Yes, I am Vice President Salek,” the man said in English. “And if you don’t back off and let me go, I will kill your general.”
Grunt shrugged. “Not my general. I’m done with generals. No more generals in my life. Shoot them all, if you ask me.”
Vice President Salek looked confused, but his gun never wavered.
“You mean you didn’t attack on the orders of General Corbin?”
Jaxon stepped forward. “No, we came to free the People of the Sea, my people.”
“Quiet, girl,” Salek said. “I’m talking to the man.”
Grunt jabbed a thumb in Jaxon’s direction. “She’s in charge of this outfit so you better get used to talking to her, buddy. Considering your situation, you don’t get to be too choosy right now.”
“So what’s going on?” Jaxon demanded.
“This backstabber,” Salek emphasized his point by pressing the pistol hard against the general’s temple, “is General Corbin. He came here to buy our genetic information. Instead his Atlantean bodyguard blew up the lab. Why? You could have bought it all! And now the Tuaregs are helping the People of the Sea. Why? And my own prison commandant turns against me and stops the battle when we are about to win. Why?”
Despite having a gun against his head, General Corbin smiled. “Careful, Mr. Vice President, all this worrying is going to give you a heart attack.”
A hard-eyed officer strode through the haze, flanked by several guards. Judging from the snarl the vice president made when he noticed him, Jaxon figured this was the prison commandant. They exchanged some harsh words in Arabic.
“What’s going on?” Jaxon asked.
“The prison commandant is telling Salek to give up,” Vivian said. “Salek is saying no and threatening to kill the general if they don’t let him go. If that happens, the U.S. would probably invade and that would be bad for everyone.”
“Would Salek do that?”
“He sounds desperate enough. Now the prison commandant is saying that he doesn’t want to imprison his own people and that they are free to go. The vice president says he’ll be executed for treason.”
“So who’s this General Corbin guy?” Jaxon asked.
“I have no idea,” Vivian admitted. Grunt gave a shrug to show he didn’t know either.
The argument went back and forth. Salek was surrounded by both soldiers and rebels, all pointing their guns at him, but he was not a man to be cowed. He knew they wouldn’t dare shoot. If an American general lost his life here the entire country would be in danger. Its vice president was perfectly happy to threaten his own country with the wrath of a foreign superpower in order to save his skin. It was quite obvious he wasn’t bluffing.
Salek got his wish. He edged over to the Jeep that the Tuareg had captured, made General Corbin get in the driver’s seat, and ordered him at gunpoint to drive out of the prison.
The Jeep roared out of the gate and soon became a dwindling pair of tail lights far away in the night. Then the lights winked out. No doubt Salek had turned them off so they couldn’t be followed.
“Well that’s one problem solved,” Jaxon said.
Vivian shook her head. “No, honey. We haven’t seen the last of them.”
Chapter 11
AUGUST 27, THE SAHARA DESERT A FEW MILES EAST OF TIDJIKJA, MAURITANIA
MIDNIGHT
* * *
Jaxon walked through the ragged tents of the prison camp. Agerzam and some more Tuareg had driven up in a long column of trucks and were having peace talks with the prison commandant. The commandant’s main preoccupation was to make sure he and his men didn’t get punished for letting the People of the Sea go. Having a conscience had put them all in grave danger from the government.
Let those guys deal with it, Jaxon thought. A heavy sadness and an unbearable weariness weighed her down. So much death. So much suffering. And for what? So the two strongest countries in the world could get a little stronger?
The prison camp looked like something out of a nightmare. Dirty and hungry Atlanteans lay listless in tents infested with fleas. There were only two toilets for several hundred people and those stank like nothing she had ever smelled. Thick black clouds of flies swarmed over them. Several of the former prisoners tried to speak with her but she could only shrug her shoulders and reply in English that she didn’t understand.
She didn’t understand a lot of things. Like why the world had to be this way.
The prison guards had all fled this part of the compound. The towers stood empty and the gaping hole in the fence left unguarded. The Atlanteans milled around, unsure what to do next. It was too far to walk anywhere and they all looked at the conference going on between the guards and the rebels, wondering what their fate would be.
A Tuareg with a video camera moved through the crowd, speaking to some of the prisoners. Jaxon went over to him.
“What are you doing?”
He looked confused, replying in his own language.
She pointed to the video camera.
“Internet,” the rebel said. “Tuareg YouTube.”
“Come film this,” Jaxon said, leading him to the filthy toilets. The rebel wrinkled his nose and took a close-up panning shot. She wondered how many hits this video would get, and if anyone would care or just move on to the next online distraction.
She left the Tuareg to do his job and went back to her friends.
What she found startled her.
General Corbin wasn’t the only general here. In fact, there were four. Two were Mauritanian and were now prisoners of the prison commandant, who planned to use them as bargaining chips to protect himself and his men. The other general was American. He sat on the sand by the ruined laboratory with his hands tied behind his back while being interrogated by Vivian and Grunt. Vivian looked surreal. Her clothes were perforated with bullet holes and soaked with blood, and yet there she stood, completely fine.
“We got him!” Grunt said as Jaxon came up to them. “This is General Meade.”
Vivian frowned. “Yeah, but there’s something wrong with him.”
Grunt let out a derisive laugh. “He’s just shamming.”
“Where’s General Corbin?” Meade said. His uniform was torn and he had several bruises on his face, but otherwise he looked unhurt. “General Corbin left me and didn’t tell me what to do.”
“He’s been saying that since we caught him,” Vivian told her. “He didn’t even put up any resistance.”
“Where’s General Corbin?” Meade asked again.
Jaxon knelt down beside him. “Why do you need him so much?”
“To know what to do.”
Jaxon cocked her head. That didn’t sound like a general talking.
Then she saw his eyes—lifeless, with no personality or spark.
She had seen eyes like that before.
On Brett, just before he tried to kill her in Timbuktu.
&nbs
p; She glanced at his bonds. His hands were tied with thick rope.
“Get out of those ropes and I’ll take you to General Corbin.”
With a single flex of his muscles, the middle-aged man snapped the thick ropes as if they had been made of rubber bands.
“Whoa!” Grunt shouted, jumping back and leveling his assault rifle.
“Hold on!” Jaxon said. “He’s been changed, like Brett was. He’s like a zombie. And since he hasn’t been given any instructions, I don’t think he’s any danger to us.”
“Yeah, right,” Grunt said, keeping his gun at the ready.
“Are we going to see General Corbin?” Meade asked. “I need to know what to do. He didn’t tell me what to do after helping Orion destroy the laboratory.”
“Wait a minute,” Jaxon told him. She had backed off even though he didn’t seem dangerous at the moment. “Grunt, go get Winston. He’ll get to the bottom of this.”
Grunt refused to budge, so Vivian went and got him. A minute later the Englishman faced General Meade.
“You just relax,” Winston told him. “Relax and tell me everything that happened to you.”
General Meade’s eyes grew even more lifeless, and he began to speak.
What they heard blew their minds. General Meade told them everything—about the Poseidon Project, about giving Dr. Yamazaki a stroke, about using the Grants to spy on Jaxon, about hunting for her once she escaped, about Orion, and then falling prey to General Corbin. The last thing he recalled clearly was being drugged and then waking up as one of the Poseidon Project’s subjects.
His account grew vague after that. It was like his mind remained detached from his actions. Since he had no willpower, what he did and what was done to him did not stick in his memory. In a few jumbled phrases he mentioned physical training, and hypnotism sessions, and returning to his old job under Corbin’s instructions. Then he came here with General Corbin and Orion.
Grunt let out a low whistle. “Damn, if it wasn’t for all the stuff he made us do back in the day, I’d almost feel sorry for the guy.”
“Where’s Orion, that Atlantean you spoke of?” Jaxon asked. She didn’t like the idea of one of Corbin’s followers with Atlantean powers still running free.
General Meade shrugged.
“What does Orion look like?” Jaxon asked.
“Typical Atlantean skin and eye color. About five foot, ten inches. Stocky build. Muscular. Dreadlocks,” the general said.
“That could be any of a hundred guys over there!” Grunt said, gesturing towards the compound. “What were Orion’s instructions?”
“The same as mine. To blow up the lab,” General Meade said. “We wired grenades we took off some guards we killed, plus some canisters of natural gas we found in the mess hall kitchen, and detonated the lab.”
“What were Orion’s instructions after blowing up the lab?”
“The same as mine. To report back to General Corbin. Where is he? Can I go to him now?”
“In a minute,” Jaxon said. “And did you report back to him?”
“The attack happened before we could make it to the general. We got in a fight with more guards and got split up. I don’t know what happened to Orion after that.”
Jaxon looked around the camp nervously. Where could he be?
“Does Orion speak Arabic?” she asked the general.
“No.”
“Well then he shouldn’t be too hard to find,” Jaxon said. “All we need to do is check on every young man with dreadlocks.”
Jaxon and Grunt took one of the Tuaregs who could speak both Arabic and English and went around the camp, checking on all likely candidates. After an hour of searching they didn’t come up with anyone.
By the time they made it back, frustrated and wondering where Orion could have disappeared to, the prison commandant and Agerzam had come to an agreement. The Tuareg would withdraw, taking the Atlanteans with them. The prison commandant would not surrender or give up any weapons, so the government would have a harder time accusing them of treason. The Tuaregs could take the water trucks and food for the Atlanteans. The commandant would keep the two Mauritanian generals, however, as extra insurance. In the meantime, the Tuaregs would publicize what had happened here on the chance that they’d get some international sympathy.
No one held out much hope for that, though.
“We are a poor corner of the world with no oil and no mineral riches,” Agerzam said. “We have been trying to get attention for our plight for years, with no success.”
It was now approaching dawn and everyone felt dead tired. Wearily they helped the Atlanteans board the trucks, buried their dead, and headed off into the desert. Everyone had a long drive ahead of them. The trucks would all split up and get as much distance between them and the camp as possible. They knew the army would be coming after them soon enough.
Jaxon nodded off the in the front of a truck driven by Vivian, the back crammed with Atlanteans. She knew she should be planning their next move but she felt sick to her stomach from all the violence. Every time she glanced at Vivian, who still wore her bloodstained clothes, she felt like throwing up.
At last she fell asleep, to have frightening, rapid-fire dreams of fire and blood, and of fingers clenching tight around her neck.
When she woke with a start a couple of hours later, the sun was already a few degrees above the horizon. Craning her neck out the window, she looked behind her and saw the two Land Rovers behind their truck, plus a few of the Tuareg vehicles. It was only a tenth of the vehicles that had been part of the attack and rescue mission. She presumed the others had spread out to other areas of the desert. She lay back in the seat and tried to doze. She knew she’d need to conserve her strength for what was to come. This fight wasn’t over by a long way.
After another hour, they parked behind some dunes and draped all the vehicles with light brown tarps the same color as the desert. Their vehicles still cast a tell-tale shadow, but hopefully any air reconnaissance would think they were sand dunes.
Jaxon got out and stretched her legs in the blazing heat. She desperately needed a bath and a good, long sleep. She knew neither of those things would happen today. The Tuaregs and refugees set up a camp away from the vehicles. Jaxon remembered the precautions Grunt and Vivian had always taken when they first crossed the Sahara to camp away from the Land Rovers in case of an air strike.
Jaxon shook her head. It would be nice to be in a life where she didn’t have to worry about airstrikes or Russian agents or her own government, but she hadn’t had a life like that in a long time. She had almost forgotten what it was like.
She noticed that while the Tuareg tents and their own tents were camouflaged, the refugee’s tents were not. They were made of any old bits of canvas or plastic sheeting and came in all colors. They stood out against the dull shades of the desert. The Tuaregs and her own people camped away from the refugees.
Great, she thought. Leaving them on their own in case of an airstrike.
While it was a callous thing to do, she couldn’t fault the logic. There was no point in all getting blown up together.
Once camp was set up and everyone had eaten a cold meal, the Atlantis Allegiance and Atlantis Guard got together and spent much of the day trying to interrogate General Meade. They didn’t learn much of value. The man was half zombie.
He did come out with one weird detail, though.
“We need to make an army of Atlanteans to protect us against a new threat,” General Meade said. “Aliens are planning to invade the Earth. There have been more and more UFOs flying in the upper atmosphere, generally over military installations and nuclear power plants. The UFO that crashed at Roswell even had an inscription of Atlantean DNA.”
That got her team into a huddle.
“This is amazing!” Otto said. “A leading general actually admitting that UFOs exist. But what could they want with the Atlanteans?”
“Don’t believe it for a minute, pyro,” Grunt said. “Edward
talked to me about this once a while back. It’s all fake.”
Jaxon’s stomach turned when she heard Edward’s name. The hacker had been killed for his association with the Atlantis Allegiance. Killed for helping her.
Make this mean something. Those had been his last words to her.
“How did he know it was fake?” Otto asked.
“Not sure. He spouted a bunch of technobabble. You know how he was. But if he didn’t believe in it, I don’t believe in it.”
Jaxon considered this. “Edward believed in a lot of conspiracy theories. If he didn’t believe in that one, maybe it wasn’t true.”
“What do you mean?” Otto said. “We’re living in a conspiracy theory. Secret government projects, a lost continent, supernatural powers … you even talked to Edward after he died.”
“Just because one conspiracy is true doesn’t mean they’re all true,” Dr. Yamazaki said. “And the Atlantean powers do have a scientific explanation. We just haven’t had time to study them yet.”
She paused, looking like she wanted to say more, then glanced at Jaxon and stopped talking.
That’s right, Jaxon said. I remember you doubted me when I said I saw Edward. I don’t want to have that argument again.
“So now what?” Elaine asked. “Do we just ignore this?”
Grunt shook his head. “I’m not sure what to do about this. Someone high up was faking this UFO stuff and managed to fool General Meade. I remember Meade always did believe in UFOs. A lot of the officers and men joked about it behind his back, although some believed in them too. Made for some interesting arguments in the mess hall.”
“Maybe that other general did it? The one the politician took away?” Jaxon asked.
Grunt shrugged. “Maybe. It’s hard to tell being stuck out here. We’re working blind now that Edward’s gone.”
“But why fake a bunch of UFO sightings?” Otto asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
