“Johnny’s in there?” Kelly stared at the casing. She walked over and picked up a clipboard hanging on a hook.
She checked the papers on it.
“Someone’s in there,” Turcotte said. “Those are IV tubes. I don’t know what they’re carrying, but someone’s in there on the receiving end.”
“It’s Johnny,” Kelly said, holding up the clipboard.
“Get him out of there,” Turcotte repeated.
“I don’t know who you are,” the woman began, “but—”
Turcotte slid his Browning High Power out of its holster.
He pulled the hammer back with his thumb. “You got five seconds or I put a round through your left thigh.”
The woman glared at him. “You wouldn’t dare!”
“He would,” Kelly said. “And if he didn’t, I would. Open it!”
“One. Two. Three.” Turcotte dropped the barrel and aimed at the woman’s leg. “All right. All right!” The woman held up her hands. “But I can’t just open it. The shock will kill the obj—” She caught herself. “The patient. I have to do this in proper procedure.”
“How long?” Turcotte asked.
“Fifteen minutes to—”
“Make it five.”
* * *
At the other end of this level of the facility Von Seeckt and Professor Nabinger were staring at an intellectual treasure trove. The archives had been dark when they opened the doors. When Nabinger hit the lights, a room full of large filing cabinets had come into view. Opening drawers, they found photos. The drawers were labeled with numbers that meant nothing to the two men. At the far end of the room there was a vault door with a small glass window. Von Seeckt peered through. “The original stone tablets from the mothership cavern are in there,” he said. “But they must have photographs of them in these cabinets.”
Nabinger was already opening drawers. “Here’s the same high runes from the site in Mexico that Slater showed me,” Nabinger said, holding up large ten-by-fifteen-inch glossies.
“Yes, yes,” Von Seeckt said absently, throwing open drawer after drawer. “We need to find ones she didn’t show you — the ones from the mothership cavern. I do not believe our Captain Turcotte will have much patience once his five-minute limit is up.”
Nabinger started going through drawers more quickly.
* * *
The woman’s hands shook as she worked on the panel.
Most of the cables had been disconnected and she was checking some readings. “What did you people do to him?” Kelly asked.
“It’s complicated,” the woman said.
“E-D-O-M?” Kelly spelled out the letters.
The woman stiffened. “How do you know of that?” “Finish the job,” Turcotte said.
The woman hit a key and the box began beeping. “It will be safe to open in thirty seconds.”
* * *
Von Seeckt had paused at one drawer, looking at the photos more carefully. At the end of the aisle Nabinger was moving on to the next cabinet when he noticed something in a glass cabinet on the wall. He moved over and stared at the object inside.
Von Seeckt held up a handful of pictures. “These are the photos from the mothership cavern! Let us rejoin the good captain.”
* * *
The beeping stopped and the woman pointed at a lever on the side of the box. “Lift that.”
Turcotte grabbed the red handle and pulled it up. With a hiss the lid came up, revealing a naked Johnny Simmons submerged inside a pool of dark-colored liquid. Needles were stuck in both arms and tubes led to his lower body. A tube was inserted in his mouth, a clear plastic-type material wrapped around the tube and molded to his face, ensuring a seal to keep the fluid out.
“I have to remove the oxygen tube and the catheters and IVs,” the woman said.
“Do it.” Turcotte said. He turned as Von Seeckt and Nabinger appeared in the doorway. Nabinger’s hands were bleeding and he held something wrapped in his jacket.
“You were not at—” Von Seeckt halted in midsentence when he saw the body inside the black box. “Ah, these people! They never stopped. They never stopped.”
“Enough,” Turcotte ordered. The woman was done. He leaned over and scooped Johnny up. “Let’s go.”
“What do I do with her?” Kelly asked.
“Kill her,” Turcotte snapped as he headed out the door.
Kelly looked at the woman. “Please don’t,” the woman begged.
“The change starts here,” Kelly said. She shot the woman with the stun gun, then hurried after the others.
They piled into the elevator. Turcotte leaned Johnny up against the wall and Kelly kneeled to support him.
Turcotte punched in the button labeled G and the elevator rose. He poked Nabinger in the chest. “You and Kelly carry him out to the van.”
“What are you doing?” Kelly asked.
“My job,” Turcotte said. “I’ll link up with you in Utah. Capitol Reef National Park. It’s small. I’ll find you.”
“Why aren’t you going with us?” Kelly demanded.
“I’m going to see what’s on sublevel one,” Turcotte said. “Plus, I’ll create a diversion so you can get away.” He hustled them out into the garage, then stepped back into the elevator.
“But—” The shutting doors cut off the rest of her words.
Turcotte punched in sublevel 2 and the elevator went back down to where he had just left. The doors opened on the unconscious guard. Turcotte ran out and grabbed the guard’s body. He dragged the body back, wedging it in the doorway to keep the doors from shutting. Then he shrugged off the backpack of gear he had appropriated from the van. He knew it was only a matter of time before some alarm was raised. They had to have some sort of internal checks with the guards, and when the sublevel 2 guard didn’t respond… well, then things would get exciting.
He laid out two one-pound charges of C-4 explosive he’d found in the van on the carpeted floor of the elevator. He molded the puttylike material into two foot-long half circles, placing them about two and a half feet apart in the center of the floor. He pushed a nonelectric blasting cap into each charge. He’d crimped detonating cord into each fuse in the van, so all he had to do was tie the loose ends of the det cord together with a square knot, leaving enough to put on the M60 fuse igniter. The igniter was about six inches long by an inch in diameter with a metal ring at the opposite end from the det cord.
The det cord was just long enough for him to step outside the elevator doors. He pulled the unconscious guard out of the way and held one of the doors open with his left hand. Then he checked his watch. It had been almost five minutes since he’d let the others out in the garage. They ought to be getting near the metal gate. He’d give them another two minutes, then showtime. The seconds dragged by slowly.
Time. Turcotte put the M60 in his mouth, clamping down on it with his teeth. He pulled the metal ring with his right hand.
The detonating cord burned at twenty thousand feet per second. The result was that Turcotte was still pulling when the charges exploded. He threw down the igniter and stepped into the elevator. A three-foot hole was in the floor.
Turcotte jumped in, falling ten feet, landing on the concrete bottom of the elevator shaft. He heard alarms screaming in the distance.
The sublevel elevator doors were at waist level. Turcotte reached up and jammed his fingers between them and pulled. He felt some of the stitches Cruise had put in his side pop. The doors grudgingly gave six inches, then the emergency program kicked in and they began opening of their own accord.
Turcotte had his Browning out in his right hand as he peeked up over the lip. There were two guards standing in the corridor and they were ready, the explosion having alerted them. Bullets ripped in above Turcotte’s head. He ducked and heard the rounds thump into the wall above his head. He removed a flash-bang grenade from his pocket, pulled the pin, and tossed it toward the sound of the guns.
He squeezed his eyes shut and put his hands
over his ears.
As soon as he felt the concussion, he sprang up. In his last assignment Turcotte had fired thousands of rounds from the pistol every day. It was an extension of his body and he could put a round into a quarter-sized circle at twenty-five feet.
One guard was kneeling, submachine gun dangling on the end of its sling, his hands rubbing his eyes. The other still had his weapon ready but was disoriented, facing toward the wall, blinking and shaking his head. Turcotte fired twice, hitting the first man in the center of his forehead, throwing the body back. The next round hit the second man in the temple. As he keeled over, his dead finger jerked back on the trigger, sending a stream of bullets into the wall.
Turcotte slowly slid on his belly up into the corridor. He got to his feet, staying low in a crouch. The hall extended about sixty feet, to a dead end. There were several doors to the left and another corridor turning to the right. There were red lights flashing and a teeth-jarring low-frequency siren wailing. One of the doors to the left opened and Turcotte snapped a shot in that direction, causing whoever it was to slam the door shut. There were name plaques next to each door on the left and Turcotte surmised that those rooms were quarters for sublevel 1 staff.
He abandoned his cautious approach and ran forward, turning the corner to the right. The hall he faced was ten feet long, ending in a double set of doors with more dire warnings in red posted on them. Turcotte pushed the doors open and stepped in. The rough concrete floor angled down to a large cavern carved out of the mountain. The ceiling was twenty feet high and the far wall a hundred meters away. What caught Turcotte’s attention first were several dozen large vertical vats that were full of some amber-colored liquid and each one holding something in it.
Turcotte stepped up to the nearest one and peered in. He recoiled as he recognized what was a human being. There were tubes coming in and out of the body and the entire head was encased in a black bulb with numerous wires going into it. It reminded Turcotte of what had been done to Johnny Simmons, except on a more sophisticated level.
A golden glow to the right caught Turcotte’s attention.
He ran in that direction and stopped in surprise as he cleared the last vat. The glow came from the surface of a small pyramid, about eight feet high and four feet across each base side.
Several cables hanging from the ceiling were hooked into it, but it was the texture of the surface that caught and held Turcotte’s attention. It was perfectly smooth and solid appearing. The surface seemed to be some sort of metal and when Turcotte touched it, it was cool and as unyielding as the hardest steel. Yet the glow seemed to come right out of the material.
There were markings all over it. Turcotte recognized the high rune writing from the photos Nabinger had shown him.
There was a noise. Turcotte spun and fired. A guard racing through the double doors returned fire with a submachine gun, his rounds hitting several of the vats, shattering glass, the liquid pouring out. The man was disoriented by the layout of the room and had fired instinctively at the sound of Turcotte’s gun.
Turcotte fired again, more carefully, and hit the man twice, killing him. He felt nothing. He was in action mode, taking care of what needed to be done. He needed information and he had plenty from what he had seen in this room. He didn’t expect any more guards soon. One of the Catch-22’s of a place like this was that the more guards you had, the more people you had who were security risks. This time of night he didn’t think there was a platoon of men hanging around “just in case.”
A humming noise drew his attention back to the pyramid A golden glow was flowing out of the apex, forming a three-foot-diameter circle in the air above. Turcotte staggered back. His head felt as if an ax had split his brain from ear to ear. He turned and ran, heading away from the corridor he’d come down. When he’d first come into the room he’d realized they hadn’t gotten all this equipment in here through the elevator he’d destroyed. There had to be another way. He fought to keep his concentration against the tidal wave of pain that surged through his skull.
The floor began sloping up again. A large vertical door beckoned. Turcotte grabbed the strap on the bottom of it and pulled up. It lifted to reveal a large freight elevator.
Stepping in, he pulled the door back down and checked the control panel. It had the same two-key system, but the keys were only needed to go down. He punched in HP and the floor jerked.
The pain in his head slowly subsided as he got farther away from sublevel 1. He went up past 2, 3, then 4. The parking garage passed by, then almost ten seconds of movement passed until the light came on for HP. The elevator came to a halt. Turcotte pulled up on the inside strap and the door opened onto a large bay carved into the side of the mountain. Camouflage netting overhung the open end and the place was dimly lit with red night-lights. Crates and boxes were stacked about. If there had been a guard up here he must have responded to the alarm on the lower level, because the place was deserted. Turcotte ran across to the netting and peered out. A steel platform large enough to take the biggest helicopter in the inventory had been erected out there. He walked out onto it. The side of the mountain was very steep here. Turcotte looked down.
The valley below was in darkness, giving no idea how far down it went. Eight hundred feet above, the top of the mountain was silhouetted against the light of the moon.
Turcotte slid over the edge of the platform onto the rock-and-dirt mountainside and began climbing.
After a few minutes he could see lights moving in the valley below. Reinforcements. It would take them a while to get air assets in — he hoped. Having been in Special Operations for years, Turcotte knew that there just weren’t packs of men sitting around with high-speed helicopters waiting around every corner.
He moved from rock to rock, clinging to bushes at times. He’d learned mountain climbing during a tour in Germany and this slope wasn’t technically very difficult. The darkness was a bit of a problem, but his eyes were adjusting. He reached the top of the mountain after forty-five minutes. He turned to the west, following the ridgeline that he had seen coming into town during the day. He moved quicker now that he was gradually descending. His head still hurt, feeling as if a massive headache was worming its way around his head, moving from section to section. What had that pyramid been? It definitely wasn’t man-made. He knew it was connected to the bouncers and mothership.
But how was it connected to the bodies in the vats? What the hell was going on down there?
He saw the lights of Dulce to his left and he curved downslope in that direction, heading for the western edge of town. As the ridgeline leveled out to valley floor he passed the first houses. An occasional dog barked, but Turcotte moved swiftly, not worried right now about the locals.
He spotted a pay phone outside a closed bowling area and jogged up to it. He picked up the receiver and dialed the number Dr. Duncan had given him. After the second ring a mechanical device informed that the number was no longer in service. Turcotte pushed down the metal lever, disconnecting. Then he dialed a new number with a 910 area code. Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
A sleepy voice answered. “Colonel Mickell.”
“It’s Mike Turcotte, sir.”
The voice woke up. “Jesus, Turc, what the fuck have you done?”
Turcotte leaned against the phone booth, energy draining out of his body. “I don’t know, sir. I don’t know what’s going on. What have you heard?”
“I haven’t heard shit except somebody wants your ass bad. One of those agencies with a whole bunch of letters has put out a classified ‘grab and hold’ on you. I about shit when I saw it come through in my reading file.”
Mickell was the deputy commander of the Special Forces Training Command at Fort Bragg and an old friend.
“Can you help me, sir?”
“What do you need?”
“I need to find out if someone is for real and, if she is, how to contact her.”
“Give me her name.”
“Duncan. Dr. Lisa
Duncan. She told me she was the President’s adviser to a thing called Majic-12.”
Mickell whistled. “Oh, man, you’re in some deep stuff. How do I reach you?”
“You don’t, sir. I’ll get back in contact with you.”
“Watch your butt, Turc.”
“Yes, sir.”
Turcotte slowly hung up the phone. He wasn’t one hundred percent certain that Mickell would back him up. He didn’t know why Duncan’s number didn’t work. The only means of communication she’d given him as he went undercover and it had been out now for a couple of days. Not good. Not good at all. He’d just killed three men this evening. “Fuck,” Turcotte muttered. What the hell was that pyramid?
Turcotte rubbed his forehead. He’d played his last cards.
When it got down to it, he had to admit that the only people he could trust right now were heading for Utah and the rendezvous he had planned. He didn’t want to go there, but it was the only place he could go.
He looked about. There was a pickup truck parked on the street. Goddamn, his head hurt. Turcotte drew deep inside, relying on years of harsh training. He drew up strength where most would find nothing. And headed for the pickup truck.
CHAPTER 26
Route 64, Northwest New Mexico
T — 70 Hours, 40 Minutes
Johnny Simmons started screaming and Kelly’s best efforts couldn’t stop it. She wrapped her arms around him and held him tight, whispering words of comfort in his ear.
Getting out of the facility had been even easier than getting in. They’d piled into the Suburban, driven out past the unsuspecting guard, and linked back up with the van.
Returning the still-unconscious driver to his own truck, they’d jumped into the van and driven back down through town and turned left on Route 64.
“Can’t you keep him quiet?” Von Seeckt asked from the driver’s seat, checking the rearview mirror.
“I’d be screaming too,” Kelly answered, “if I’d been locked in that thing for four days. You just drive. No one can hear him except us.”
Area 51 a5-1 Page 26
