But she wondered how many more people would die. She listened to the pilot of the C-2 report that all jumpers were away, and her thoughts went to Mike Turcotte.
• • •
Turcotte understood the tandem rigs now. The man in the rear was flying the chute. The man in front, not having to bother with controlling the toggles for maneuvering, held a silenced MP-5 submachine gun in his hands with a laser scope.
Turcotte checked his altimeter and the glowing numbers told him they were just passing through ten thousand feet. He looked around, now able to make out some details on the ground. There were mountains to both sides, some as high as his present altitude. Turcotte remembered the warning that the compound was in a depression, the deepest in Africa, Zandra had said, and they had to descend twelve hundred feet below sea level.
Turcotte pulled his oxygen mask aside and breathed in the fresh night air. He had a moment now to collect his thoughts, and one thing still bothered him from the briefing: Why had Zandra given so much information about the Rift Valley? It was Turcotte’s belief that people never did things for no reason at all. Zandra had to have had a conscious, or perhaps subconscious, reason for going into detail about the geographical formation. There was no doubt, looking about through his night vision goggles, that the terrain of the valley was spectacular. Jagged mountains rose on either side, framing a twisted and torn valley floor.
The formation changed directions, curving to the left, and Turcotte brought his mind back to the task at hand, pulling his left toggle and following the stream of glowing chem lights below.
The jump formation broke apart two hundred feet above the roof of the research building. Turcotte knew the guards on the roof had to be awake, but would they be looking up?
There was a brief sparkle to one side and below. One of the SAS troopers was firing. Through his earplug Turcotte could hear the men call in.
“Guardpost one clear.”
“Guardpost two clear.”
“Team one down.”
The first troopers were on the roof and it was clear of opposition without any alarm being sounded. Turcotte let up on his toggles and aimed just off the center of the roof. He could see the SAS men clearing themselves of their parachute rigs.
Turcotte pulled in on his toggles and braked less than three feet up. His feet touched and he immediately unsnapped his harness, stepping out of it even before the chute finished collapsing. He turned, looking about, MP-5 at the ready. He could see several bodies; guards dispatched by the SAS.
“This is Ridley. We’re landed and secure,” the squad leader’s voice announced over the radio.
“Air wing, in now,” Colonel Spearson ordered.
• • •
The F-4G Wild Weasel was the only remaining version of the venerable F-4 Phantom still in the U.S. inventory. It had one very specific job—kill enemy radar and antiair systems.
Two Weasels came in on Spearson’s orders fast and high out of the east. The radar systems of the Terra-Lei compound picked them up and locked on, which was exactly what was desired. Missiles leapt off the wings of the Weasels—Shrike, AGM-78, and Tacit Rainbows—fancy names for smart bombs that caught the radar beams and rode them down to the emitters.
The pilots of the Weasels banked hard and were already one hundred and eighty degrees turned when the missiles struck. All of the compound’s air defense went down in that one strike.
Right behind came the first air assault wave.
• • •
The SAS demolition’s men had been carefully placing shaped charges on the roof; four different charges, evenly spaced. They had run out their detonating cord and were waiting on the order to fire.
As the sound of helicopters came from the east Colonel Spearson gave the order to Ridley.
“Fire in the hold!”
The charges blew, searing the night with their explosive crack and brief flash. Four holes appeared in the roof, and soldiers jumped down into each one.
Turcotte paused, head cocked to the side. A roar of automatic fire reverberated out of the southwest hole. Turcotte sprinted over. A jagged opening, four feet in diameter, beckoned in the concrete. He looked down. The four SAS men who had gone into the hole lay motionless on the floor.
Turcotte pulled a flash-bang grenade off his vest and tossed it in, counted to three, then jumped in, just as the grenade went off, stunning anyone inside. Turcotte was firing even before he hit the ground. He landed on the body of one of the SAS men and fell to his right side. A string of tracers ripped by, wildly fired just above his prone body.
Turcotte stuck the MP-5 up and blindly returned the fire, spraying in the direction the tracers had come from. He heard the sound of a magazine being changed and was just about to move when he froze. That was too obvious. He rolled onto his stomach and peered about. All the SAS men were dead. There was a desk to his left in the direction the bullets had come from. That was where the man was. Whoever he was, he was using the mirror on the wall behind the desk to aim. Turcotte fired, shattering the glass. Turcotte put a couple of rounds into the desk, confirming what he’d suspected. He wouldn’t be able to shoot through it.
Turcotte heard just the slightest sound of someone moving over broken glass. The other man could come from around either side of the desk and if Turcotte picked the wrong one, the other man might get the first shot.
Turcotte fired at the lights, shattering them and throwing the room into darkness.
A small object came flying over the top of the bar. Grenade, Turcotte thought, and reacted just as quickly, rolling away. The man was right behind the object, vaulting the desktop—which didn’t make any sense if it was a grenade. Turcotte knew he’d made a mistake as he fired offhand with the MP-5, still rolling.
The other man was also firing in midair, his bullets trailing Turcotte’s rolls by a few inches, Turcotte’s winging by him.
Turcotte slammed into the wall just as the bolt in his MP-5 clicked home on an empty chamber. He dropped the submachine gun and drew his pistol, firing as he brought it to bear. In the darkness it was his night-vision goggles that gave him the advantage over the other man, and his rounds hit the other man in the chest, knocking him down.
Turcotte stood, listening to the radio, hearing the SAS clearing the building from top floor down. There was no sign of any Airlia artifacts yet. He called in his own location and that the room was secure as he moved to the door, and carefully opened it.
At the end of the hallway a searchlight came in the window from an AH-6 helicopter hovering just outside. Turcotte could see SAS sharpshooters hanging out the doors and the small laser dots creeping around the hall, searching for targets. He flipped a switch on the side of his night-vision goggles and they emitted an infrared beam, identifying him as friendly.
• • •
From five thousand feet Colonel Spearson was orchestrating the assault over five different radio nets. The airborne force was in the main building. The Little Birds were flitting about the compound, searching for targets. He turned to Duncan.
“All or nothing, now, miss,” he said.
“Let’s go in,” Duncan said.
Spearson gave the orders for the main assault force to land.
• • •
Turcotte kicked open the door at the juncture of the hallway, his reloaded MP-5 in his left hand. He spotted two men in khaki with their backs to him, firing around the corner. Turcotte killed them with one burst.
“Who dares, wins!” he called out the SAS motto, moving down the hall. Turning the corner he met four SAS gathered by the stairwell, one of them holding his muzzle inside the door, firing an occasional shot to keep more security men from coming up.
Ridley came around the corner with more men. Turcotte stepped back and let the professionals do their job as they began to clear down the building.
• • •
The Little Birds were also going down the building one floor ahead of the SAS inside. The two armed with 7.62 miniguns wer
e firing through windows. The snipers hit anything they saw moving. Windows shattered out and tracers crisscrossed the floor. The men inside lay low, hiding from the carnage as best they could.
The two Little Birds with rockets were firing up the barracks buildings nearby as security personnel poured out of them. As the first armored vehicles began appearing, they switched to those.
The four Apaches arrived just in time and fired a salvo of eight Hellfire missiles at the armor. Each one was a kill, ending that threat.
A pair of SAM-7’s—shoulder-fired heat-seeker missiles and thus not affected by the Weasel attack—streaked up at one of the Apaches. It exploded in a ball of flame.
• • •
“Bloody hell,” Colonel Spearson muttered as he saw the signal for the Apache disappear and heard the pilot screaming before the radio went dead. He ordered in the F-14’s, directing the Apaches to laser-designate targets for the smart bombs the fast-moving jets carried.
Lisa Duncan watched the chopper go down, knowing that meant two men dead. “Let’s land,” she told Spearson, who looked like he was going to argue with her, then changed his mind.
• • •
The SAS soldiers were quickly overcoming their opposition in the building. Surprise, superior firepower, and superb training were winning the day. Turcotte followed them down, floor by floor, until the entire building was clear except for whatever was hidden behind a set of steel doors on the ground level.
One of the Little Birds was hit by ground fire and autorotated down. Once it was on the ground, the four men got off and immediately became embroiled in a gun battle with ground forces.
The Apache pilots were also firing now, trying to suppress any SAM fire from shoulder-fired missiles. They would be out of ammunition in another minute at their current rate of expenditure. The F-14’s came in, their bombs riding the laser beams down with pinpoint accuracy. The effect was devastating.
• • •
“One minute!” the pilot said.
Colonel Spearson keyed his mike. “Put us in with the first wave!” he ordered. The pilot glanced over his shoulder at Duncan and she nodded. The Black Hawk swooped down, heading toward the secondary explosions in the compound on the valley floor.
The Black Hawk touched down and Duncan jumped off, following Colonel Spearson. The chopper was back up and gone just as quickly.
“How are the men inside?” she asked.
Spearson had the handset for the radio his batman was carrying pressed to his ear. “They’re in the basement. Took some losses, but they’ve cleared the building.”
• • •
Turcotte watched as Ridley examined the steel doors. “Okay, men, let’s get through this thing.”
A demolitions expert took a heavy backpack off and pulled out a three-foot-long cone-shaped black object. He placed the shape charge up against the doors and ran out the firing wire.
“Fire in the hole!” he yelled, causing everyone to scatter and take cover.
• • •
On the surface the battle was about over, disheartened mercenaries surrendering now that they saw that there was only one possible ending to this conflict. Spearson’s men rounded them up, while they searched for the scientists who had been working at the site.
Spearson had been listening to the force inside the building, and he knew that they were getting ready to blow the doors. “They must be underground,” he told Duncan when she asked where the scientists were.
“Let’s get inside,” she told him.
“Oh, yeah,” Spearson added as they headed for the main doors to the building. “Your buddy is okay.”
The only acknowledgment Duncan made was to slow her walk slightly.
• • •
Turcotte’s head rang from the explosion, and swirling dust choked his lungs.
SAS men with gas masks on ran through the hole in the twisted metal.
Turcotte forced himself to wait. He turned as Lisa Duncan and Colonel Spearson came down the hallway and joined him.
“This has got to be it,” he said.
“We wait on my people to clear,” Spearson said.
“Fine,” Duncan acknowledged. She turned to Turcotte. “You all right?” “I’m getting too old for this,” he said, earning a laugh from Spearson.
The minutes stretched out. Finally, after almost a half hour of waiting, a dust-covered Major Ridley crawled back out of the hole. He pulled his gas mask off and wiped his eyes. “Did you find any of the scientists?” Duncan asked.
Ridley looked slightly disoriented. “Scientists? They’re all dead in there. All dead.”
“How?” Colonel Spearson demanded.
Ridley shrugged, his thoughts elsewhere. “Gas, most likely. Must have been set off by the guards when we attacked. It’s clear in there now. The merks were just delaying us until the gas worked. The scientists were trapped in there like rats. Looks like they hadn’t been allowed out in a long time. Probably lived down there for years. There’s plenty of tunnels full of supplies. Living quarters. Mess hall. All that.”
“What about Airlia artifacts?” Turcotte asked.
“Artifacts?” Ridley’s laugh had a manic edge that he was trying hard to control. “Oh, yeah, there’s artifacts down there, sir.” He slumped down into a chair. “But you best go see for yourself.”
Spearson leading the way, they went through the destroyed doors. They were in a large open tunnel with concrete walls and a floor that sloped down and to the right, disappearing around a curve a hundred meters away. Ridley had been correct about the supplies, Turcotte noted as they walked down. There were numerous side tunnels cut into the rock, full of equipment and supplies. Several of the side tunnels housed living areas, and as Ridley had noted, one was a mess hall. SAS soldiers stood guard at each door and told the colonel that there was no one alive inside.
Bodies were strewn about here and there, wherever the poison gas had caught them. Whatever Terra-Lei had used on its own people must have been fast acting and had dissipated quickly, Turcotte noted, but also appeared to have been painful. The features of each corpse were twisted in a grimace and the body contorted from violent seizures.
As they went around the bend, the three stopped momentarily in surprise. The wide walkway expanded to a sloping cavern, over five hundred meters wide, the ceiling a hundred meters over their heads hewn out of the volcanic stone. As far as they could see it descended at a thirty-degree slope. Rubber matting had been placed over the center of the smooth stone floor to form a walkway and there was a cog railway built next to the rubber matting.
“Bloody hell,” Spearson whispered.
“Look,” Duncan said, pointing to the right. A black stone stood there, like a dark finger pointed upward into the darkness. It was ten feet high and two in width, the surface a polished sheen except where high runes were etched into the stone.
“Hope it doesn’t say, NO TRESPASSING,” Turcotte said.
An SAS sergeant stood next to the small train and passenger cars. He saluted Spearson. “Already been down there, sir, with the captain,” he reported, pointing into the unseen deep distance where a row of fluorescent lights next to the rail line faded into the dark haze. “Left a squad on guard.” The sergeant swallowed. “Never seen nothing like it, sir.”
“Let’s take a look for ourselves,” Spearson said, climbing into the first open car.
Duncan and Turcotte joined him while the sergeant got in the cab and pushed the throttle into the forward position. With a slight jolt they began rattling down the cogs, descending farther into the cavern. As they went down, the cavern widened until they couldn’t see an end to either side, just the meager human light fading into the darkness ahead and behind. Turcotte pulled the collar of his battle-dress uniform tighter around his neck, and he could feel Duncan pressing closer to him. There was the feeling of being a tiny speck in a massive emptiness. Turcotte glanced over his shoulder back the way they had come. Already the brighter light of the cog r
ailway terminal where they had boarded was over a mile behind them. The train was moving at almost forty miles an hour now, clattering over the cogs, but there was no sense of movement other than the fluorescent lights strung on poles next to the rail line flashing by.
After five more minutes they could all make out a red glow ahead. At first it was just the faintest of lines across the low horizon. But as they got closer, they could see the line grow clearer and larger over a mile ahead, perpendicular to their direction of travel. Turcotte had no idea how deep they were, but the temperature was starting to rise and he could feel beads of sweat on his forehead.
Turcotte looked down and could see that the floor of the cavern was still perfectly smooth. He’d seen Hangar Two at Area 51 where the mothership had been hidden, but this cavern dwarfed even that massive structure. He couldn’t imagine the technology that would be needed to carve this out. And for what purpose? he wondered. Directly ahead there was a red glow coming out of a wide crevice that split the cavern floor. Turcotte spotted several smaller glowing lights, the flashlights of the SAS squad at the end of the railway. As they slowed down, Turcotte could see the far side of the crevice, over half a mile away, but he couldn’t see down into it because they were still over a hundred meters from the edge when the train stopped at the end of the line.
“Sir!” An SAS trooper nodded at Colonel Spearson as they got out.
They walked together toward the edge and stopped where the smooth stone, which had been sloping down at thirty degrees, suddenly went ninety degrees straight down. Duncan gasped and Turcotte felt his heart pound as he carefully peered over the edge. There was no bottom that they could see, just a red glow emanating up from the bowels of the Earth. Turcotte could feel heat washing over his face, accompanied by a strong odor of burning chemicals.
“How deep do you think that goes?” Spearson asked.
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