“I’m not concerned about that or the spin control,” Turcotte said. “I’m worried why the Easter Island guardian sees a need to have Kelly send this.”
“Why are you so sure the Easter Island guardian is the evil one?” Yakov asked in a rather mild tone.
“Because of what Nabinger uncovered under Qian-Ling,” Turcotte answered. “Which could have been as much of a lie as what he uncovered under Easter Island,” Yakov noted once more.
Turcotte held up the article. “So we should believe this? We knew that The Mission was behind the Black Death. You talked to General Hemstadt on Devil’s Island.”
“I think… ” Duncan was interrupted by the buzz of her SATPhone. She pulled it out and turned it on. “Duncan here.” She listened for a second, her face tightening, then pulled it away from her ear. “Can we put this on the speaker in here?” she asked Quinn.
He nodded, pulling a wire out of a drawer and running it to her phone, plugging it into the bottom. While he was doing that, Turcotte mouthed the words Who is it?
“The Ones Who Wait.” Duncan held her hand over the phone. “Lexina, their leader.”
“You’re set,” Quinn told her as the speaker in the middle of the table came alive with a crackle of static.
“We’re listening,” Duncan said.
The voice that echoed out in response was low-pitched, somewhere between male and female. “We have been patient, but time is running out. We want the key.”
“The key to the lower level of Qian-Ling?” Duncan asked.
“Don’t play games with me,” Lexina said. “I have shown you just a small sample of what I can do by destroying the place you held my comrades’ bodies and your last manned space vehicle. I now control the talon, and I will do much worse if you do not turn the key over to us.”
“You killed a lot of people,” Duncan said.
“And I will kill many, many more if you do not get me the key.”
“Did you destroy the Columbia as it approached the talon?” Duncan asked.
“No. That was the talon’s automatic defense system reacting to anything that came close. But I control it now. I control your satellite through the talon. I warned you,” Lexina said. “You ignored the warning. Do not ignore this one. Give us the key.”
“Why should… ” Duncan began, but she was interrupted.
“Give us the key or we will destroy your country completely.”
Kincaid stirred. “Warfighter couldn’t even come close to doing that.”
“Give us the key or we will destroy your country completely,” Lexina repeated. “You have forty-nine hours. If you do not give me the key by then, North America will be destroyed.”
“You’re bluffing.” Duncan glanced at Turcotte as she said it.
“Is the Russian there?” Lexina asked. “The man from Section Four?”
“I’m here,” Yakov growled.
“Tell them about Strategicheskii Zvyezda,” Lexina said. “Deliver the key to me in forty-nine hours, or two hundred and sixty million die and your country will be an uninhabitable wasteland for centuries.”
CHAPTER 6
Mountains Of The Moon, Ruwenzori, Uganda
D — 48 Hours, 55 Minutes
Mualama and his nephew Lago were both startled when a long cacophony of thunderclaps rolled down the mountain, following on the heels of two dozen lightning strikes that had split the gloom in less than five seconds. If there was to be an end to the world, Lago figured it would sound very much like what he was listening to. They were in a netherworld lost among the clouds. Snow, ice, and rock were the only things visible around them.
Sweating was no longer a problem as Lago pulled his jacket tight around the neck to keep out the chill. His uncle was seated on his pack, which rested on the foot-deep snow, reading the journal once more and looking about.
They had cleared the tree line at eleven thousand feet an hour before, and it was now well past noon. Lago knew that if they did not begin their descent soon, they would be trapped on the mountain overnight. The cold did not scare him as much as the incessant lightning. He’d never seen the like. Now he knew why these mountains were avoided and why the locals believed the gods forbade travel there.
It was the worst of two worlds… Amazonian-type jungle the first two-thirds of the journey, followed by Alpine terrain with the most awful weather in an incessant mist that threatened to make them lose their bearings. Technically the climb was not difficult, but the weather made it hazardous.
Lago’s eyes continued to search the misty gloom as his uncle studied his notes. It was as if the mountain were alive, telling them with the thunder to turn back, to return to the normal world.
His uncle abruptly stood and slid the book back into his pack. “Not much farther.”
They tramped up the steep trail, tied together by a twenty-foot section of rope, Lago leading the way. As the altitude increased, occasionally Lago had to put in protection… a piton, a nut in a small rock crevasse… and clip the rope in. His uncle would pull the protection out as he passed.
“Uncle.” Lago paused after one particularly tricky section of climbing. “We must turn back or we will be trapped by darkness.”
“Not much farther” was Mualama’s response. “We do not have to reach the very top.”
That was the best news Lago had heard in a while. “What are we looking for?”
“We will know when we see it.”
* * *
Afternoon was sliding into early evening, and Lago had no idea how far they were from the summit. The rocks were now sheathed in ice. Visibility had increased to about a hundred feet, but darkness would put an end to that.
“There!” Mualama was pointing to the right of their narrow trail. A spectacular wall of icicles over fifty feet long and twenty feet wide dangled from a rock cornice that extended out from the mountain’s side. “Would you call that the Devil’s Thumb?”
Lago squinted up. The spur of rock might indeed be called that when viewed in profile.
“And this is the Devil’s Veil?” Mualama walked to the wall of six-inch-thick icicles that covered the depression under the spur. Lago would have thought them quite beautiful if not for the fact that they were on the side of a sixteen-thousand-foot mountain, the temperature was dropping, and night was less than an hour off.
Mualama pressed his face and a flashlight against the ice. He moved along the wall, peering in.
“There it is!” The excitement in his uncle’s voice was evident. Lago joined him, looking. There was a dark square on the other side, the exact nature of which was unclear. He jumped back as Mualama swung the ice ax in his hands and it splintered one of the icicles, a four-foot-long shard crashing to the ground. “Come on!” Mualama yelled. “Help me!”
Area 51, Nevada
D — 48 Hours, 50 Minutes
All eyes were on Yakov, the question prompted by Lexina hanging over the table. The Russian got up and walked over to a small table on the side of the room. He reluctantly poured a glass of water. “Haven’t you stocked anything stronger yet?” he asked Major Quinn.
There was no answer, nor did Turcotte think Yakov had expected one. He knew the Russian was digesting this new information. Yakov sat back down, then looked at Duncan. “Do you have the key this Lexina creature wants?”
“No.”
Yakov’s bushy eyebrows contracted. “Then why does this creature think you have it?”
“The first time she asked me, while we were combating the Black Death, I told her we had it, trying to get more information out of her,” Duncan said.
“That was a mistake,” Yakov said. “Now, if you tell Lexina you do not have the key, the creature will think you are lying and follow through on her threat”
“What is Strategicheskii Zvyezda?” Turcotte finally asked, tired of the verbal sparring.
“You have to understand… ” Yakov began, but Turcotte cut him off.
“What is it? Can it do what Lexina threatened?”<
br />
Yakov slowly nodded. “Strategicheskii Zvyezda-… the long form for what was called in classified circles Stratzyda… means ‘Strategic Star.’”
Turcotte put a hand to his forehead. “This doesn’t sound good.”
Yakov continued. “Stratzyda was launched in 1988, just before the end of the Cold War. A one-hundred-ton payload over thirty-seven meters long and four meters wide.
“It was put into orbit four hundred miles up. We knew your tracking systems would pick it up, so we fed the world a cover story. We said it was a first-stage experimental platform in preparation for launching our Mir space station. But it was not that, of course. It was… is… a weapons platform designed to…” Yakov stopped and took a deep drink from his glass, his face tightening when he remembered it was water, not vodka.
“What kind of weapons?” Duncan’s voice was cold.
“Thirty-two one-megaton, cobalt-salted, nuclear warheads with their own reentry engines, pretargeted, as Stratzyda passes over the center of your country, to blanket the United States with a grid pattern that will ensure every square inch is covered with a lethal dose of radioactive material.”
“You idiots.” Duncan’s comment filled the stunned silence that followed. “Our own sword against us,” Turcotte muttered.
Arlington, Virginia
D — 48 Hours, 40 Minutes
The Secretary of Defense’s motorcade departed the Pentagon and headed north along the George Washington Expressway, paralleling the Potomac. A lead and trial car contained bodyguards, sandwiching the limousine holding the Honorable William Wickham.
Wickham was going to the White House to plead with the President to give him nuclear weapons release with regard to Easter Island. The Navy had a plan to attempt to probe the shield once more, but Admiral Poldan, the commander of Task Force 78, which surrounded the island, wanted to do more than just probe. Wickham agreed with the admiral. The takeover of the Warfighter satellite and the destruction of Atlantis had been the final shove, landing the Secretary of Defense solidly in the camp of those in the Pentagon who believed that all-out war against the aliens and their supporters had to be waged.
Wickham paused in his musings as he saw the familiar landscape of Arlington National Cemetery out the left window of the limo. He always took this route into the capital, because the numerous rows of white crosses that stretched across the green fields overlooking the capital were a constant reminder to him of the weight of the decisions he had to make and advise the President to make. It was because Wickham felt the responsibility that would be his if his recommendations caused more young men and women to be buried that he had urged caution and restraint to this point, but the attack on the hangar at Area 51, on top of the loss of the shuttles and the submarine Pasadena to foo fighters and the entrapment of the Springfield, had changed that stance.
The three vehicles turned east onto the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Wickham turned his attention from the cemetery, which was now behind them, to the Lincoln Memorial, which was directly ahead on the other side of the river. The going was slow, because one of the lanes of eastbound traffic was closed due to construction.
Wickham knew the severe pressure the President was under from the isolationists and that it would be a hard sell to get authorization to nuke Easter Island. He was considering arguments he could use, when he was jerked forward, almost falling off the rear seat when the driver slammed on the brakes.
“What the hell?” Wickham reached for the intercom to the driver, when he saw directly ahead what had caused the halt. A backhoe had rumbled out of the construction lane between the lead car and the limo. The backhoe turned, the heavy steel shovel now pointing at the front windshield of the limousine and coming closer.
“Get me out of there, George,” Wickham yelled into the intercom.
The driver threw the limo into reverse and abruptly backed into the trail car, fenders crumpling. Wickham fumbled with door as the shovel came down on the front seat, spearing through the bulletproof windshield, pinning the driver against the seat. The steel blade sliced the man in two as it buckled the frame of the car.
Wickham pulled on the latch, trying to get the door open, but the entire car was twisted, the metal bent and unyielding. He could hear shots, his guards firing at the driver of the backhoe. The blade pulled free of the front of the limousine and the backhoe advanced, large tires climbing up onto the twisted metal. Through the tinted sunroof Wickham could see the blade looming overhead.
Outside, the guards from the first car blazed away at the man driving the backhoe, partially protected by the metal roll cage that surrounded him. Bullets ricocheted off metal, the driver ignoring everything but the rear half of the car in front of him. As a round ripped through his chest, he slammed forward the lever controlling the shovel and it dropped, crashing through the top of the car.
Wickham dove to avoid the blade as it smashed down. The edge caught his ankles, severing his feet from his body and momentarily pinning him in place. The pain exploded along his nervous system, almost causing him to black out.
The driver pulled back on the lever, edging it in the direction of the Secretary of Defense. A bodyguard was climbing up the side of the backhoe. As the guard fired a fatal shot through the driver’s head, the man’s hand slammed the lever forward one last time.
CHAPTER 7
Mountains Of The Moon, Ruwenzori, Uganda
D — 48 Hours, 25 Minutes
Mualama slid between the sharp shards of shattered ice, the glow from his flashlight reflected a hundred times by the glistening walls of the cavern. The far wall was ten feet in front of him. A circle of blackened stones, where a fire had once burned, was in the center of the floor.
A large stone set against rear of the cavern caught his eye. He went around the fire pit and shone the light on the rock. Etched into the stone was a word in Arabic: Sedgh. Mualama felt a wave of excitement. The word meant truthfulness and honestly, one of the virtues of a Sufi Master.
“Help me move this,” he ordered Lago.
Together they put their shoulders to the boulder and edged it away from the cavern wall. Underneath, an oilskin-wrapped package was revealed. Mualama sat down and got his breathing under control before picking up the package. It was much heavier than what he had found underneath the stone in the Devil’s Throat in South America. Carefully he unwrapped the covering. Inside he uncovered a sheaf of several hundred pages, bound by a red ribbon, preserved by the freezing air.
In bold letters that Mualama recognized as Burton’s handwriting, several words in Arabic were written on the cover page. Mualama translated them as he read:
THE PATH OF A TRUTH SEEKER
BY SIR RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON
Mualama peeled off his glove and carefully turned the page. “Ahh!” he exclaimed as he saw the handwritten script on the next page that began the body of the text.
“What is wrong, Uncle?” Lago asked.
“It has never been easy to follow Burton, and even now he makes it hard,” Mualama said as he quickly began thumbing through the manuscript.
“I have never seen writing like that,” Lago commented.
“I have seen this at a dig in Iraq. It is an extinct tongue. It is called Akkadian and was written and spoken in ancient Assyria and Babylon.”
“Why the title in Arabic and the body of the text in another?” Lago asked. “The title is an arrow pointing in the text. It is Burton’s way.”
“Is there anyone who can read it now?” Lago asked.
“Perhaps,” Mualama said as he stopped on a page where there was a drawing. He held up the piece of paper. “Ah! This is even better for right now. This is the piece I needed.”
“What is it?”
“Burton must have copied this from another source.” Mualama carefully put the page back in the manuscript. “It fits in with two other drawings I found following his trail and tells me where we go next.”
Lago sat on the floor of the cavern, exhaustion etched
on his face. “And that is?”
“Home to Tanzania. To Ngorongoro Crater.”
“And what is there?”
“We will know when we find it.” Mualama stood and slapped his nephew on the shoulder. “Come on, young man. You can’t be more tired than I am, and this is exciting! We are on the trail of a great mystery!”
Area 51, Nevada
D — 48 Hours, 20 Minutes
“Forty-nine hours.” Kincaid spun his laptop around so they could all see the screen, although no one other than he could make out what the numbers and lines displayed meant. “Lexina didn’t pull that number out of the air. This is the drifting orbit of the talon and Warfighter… ” Kincaid touched the left side of the screen. His finger moved to the right side. “This is the orbit of Stratzyda. The two will come within two kilometers of each other in forty hours here, over the Atlantic. I assume she’ll use the talon to then take control of Stratzyda and change its orbit to coincide with the talon’s. Then it will take the talon and its new satellite another nine hours to drift east on the talon’s orbit, as the earth turns beneath it, to be in position over the center of the United States to deploy the nukes.”
“Can’t your government bring Stratzyda down before the talon gets control of it? Or change its orbit?” Turcotte asked Yakov.
“It is now out of maneuvering fuel. It has been just drifting up there for the past five years. We have no control over it anymore,” Yakov said. “It was never designed to be able to reenter the atmosphere… the bombs, even unexploded, are simply too radioactive.
“You have to understand that things have changed in my country in the past ten years. There is no money, no working system. Only a quarter of our ground-based missile system is functional… the rest is falling into disrepair. For over two-thirds of every twenty-four-hour cycle, we have no satellite coverage of the United States and are essentially blind, as our surveillance satellites have degraded.”
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