“Small villages scattered about the jungle,” Colonel Carmen said. “They make their living harvesting coca leaves and making paste for shipment to drug dealers.”
Norward checked the two photos against each other. “This thing is moving fast. How is it getting transmitted?”
“We won’t know that until we get there,” Kenyon said.
“Who’s calling us in on this?” Norward asked.
Colonel Carmen sat behind her desk and steepled her fingers. “That’s the hard part. We haven’t officially been called in. This is coming from, let us say, unofficial channels. There’s a bouncer en route to our location to pick you guys up, link you up with some other people, and take you to ground zero.”
“A bouncer?” Norward frowned. “I don’t—”
“The less questions you ask right now, the less I have to tell you I don’t know,” Carmen said. She pointed at the imagery in his hands. “Let’s deal with that first. God knows what it is, but it’s spreading fast. Be ready to move in thirty minutes.”
• • •
“That’s the spot,” Faulkener said.
Toland looked at the border crossing. The rest of the mercenaries were farther back, hidden in some low ground. There was only the faint impression of a rough road cutting across the ground. No border post. No sign that there was even an international border between Bolivia and Brazil.
“We’ll keep surveillance on it,” Toland said. “I wouldn’t put it past The Mission to have a trap set for us now.”
Faulkener turned to him. “Who exactly is The Mission?” The two had always worked for The Mission using a cutout, never meeting their occasional employers face-to-face.
“I’ve heard they’re Germans.” Toland spit. “Nazis. Hiding in the damn jungle all these years.”
“I don’t like working for no Nazis,” Faulkener said.
“You want the money or not?” Toland said. “After this job we can retire. Quit and live in style.”
Faulkener’s silence was answer enough. Faulkener glanced toward where the other men were. “Some of the men are sick. Justin is in real bad shape. He’s throwing up blood.”
Toland had been thinking. “All right. I’ve changed my mind. I think it’s better for us to go small. Let those go who want to and get rid of all that are sick. We’ll keep about four good men who you trust. Whatever this guy we’re to link up with is coming after, it’s worth five million to The Mission. And after we get him where he wants to go,” Toland added, “we’ll have both the guy and whatever it is.”
CHAPTER 11
Area 51 had become the hub of UNAOC’s scientific center to investigate the Airlia. The choice had been made early for UNAOC because of the presence of the mothership and bouncers, but since the unveiling of that to the public, the site had expanded even further and Major Quinn, despite his relatively low rank in the military, was in charge.
Area 51 was the unclassified designation on military maps for a training area on the Nellis Air Force Base. Every military post had its land broken down into training areas, usually designated by numbers or letter. But Area 51 had developed into much more than a training area. For decades it had housed a top-secret installation burrowed into Groom Mountain. Next to the mountain lay the longest runway in the world. From that runway not only had the bouncers flown, but the skunkworks had tested all the latest top-secret aircraft, from the Stealth fighter to the still-classified Aurora spy plane.
Only a few of the facilities were aboveground. Most of the core of Area 51 was built into and below the side of the mountain next to the runway. Besides the mothership hangar that had been found, another large hangar had been hollowed out over the years to house the bouncers.
Majestic-12 was the committee that had been designated to run Area 51 and oversee the secrets it contained. Over the years it had turned into a world of its own, ignoring current administrations and believing itself to be above the law. That had all come to a crashing halt several weeks earlier.
Quinn now knew that the members of Majestic-12 had been mentally taken over by the guardian computer uncovered at a dig in Temiltepec and brought back to MJ-12’s other secret site at Dulce, New Mexico.
When MJ-12’s secrets were finally exposed, Area 51’s shroud had been torn asunder. The media had descended on the site, shooting images of the massive black mothership resting in its newly dug-out cavern and the bouncers being put through their paces by Air Force pilots. What had once been the most secret place in America was now the most photographed and visited.
But the discovery of the true nature of the STAAR bodies had brought a shadow into the new light. The information about the Airlia and STAAR had been deemed by UNAOC to be too inflammatory, and Quinn found himself once again guarding secrets.
That was a task much more difficult than it had been to keep the secret when Area 51 was spoken of only as a myth. He had reporters all over the complex now, and the best he could do was keep them out of the Cube and the autopsy area.
The underground room housing the Cube measured eighty by a hundred feet and could be reached only from the massive bouncer hangar cut into the side of Groom Mountain via a large freight elevator that allowed Quinn to control access.
Quinn sat in the seat in the back of the room that gave him a full view of every operation now in process. In front of him, sloping down toward the front, were three rows of consoles manned by military personnel.
On the forward wall was a twenty-foot-wide-by-ten-high screen capable of displaying any information that could be channeled through the facility’s computers.
Directly behind Quinn a door led to a corridor, which led to a conference room, his office and sleeping quarters, rest rooms, and a small gallery. The freight elevator opened on the right side of the main gallery. There was the quiet hum of machinery in the room, along with the slight hiss of filtered air being pushed by large fans in the hangar above.
A man walked into the control center and took the seat next to Quinn. He looked out of place among all the short-haired military personnel in the room, sporting long black hair, tied in a ponytail that went a quarter of the way down his back. Rimless glasses were perched on a large nose, below which a Fu Manchu mustache drooped.
“What do you have, Mike?”
Mike reached up and twirled the left part of his mustache. “All of the drives recovered from Scorpion Base were wiped clean.”
“Damn.” Quinn sat back in his chair.
Mike shook his head. “Oh, no! That doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.” “I don’t understand,” Quinn said.
“When you wipe a computer drive clean, that doesn’t mean it’s totally clean. There’s always residual information. Like a shadow remaining after the object that caused it is gone.”
Quinn had reversed his position, now leaning forward. “What have you got?”
“Nothing coherent yet,” Mike said. “I’m cleaning it up, but it takes time. It’s like putting a puzzle together piece by piece, except you only have a few pieces of each piece rather than the whole piece.”
Quinn blinked, then gave up trying to figure it out. “What do you think you have?”
“I think we have some information about STAAR’s personnel. Also, there’s some intriguing stuff in one of the drives that the report indicates was hooked to a satellite radio. I think it might help us decrypt the Airlia messages going between the guardians.”
“Anything else?”
Mike frowned. “Well, it’s hard to say, but it looks to me like these people…” He paused and looked at Quinn questioningly.
“STAAR,” Quinn filled in.
“Yeah, STAAR, well, they were trying to decode something themselves. Actually, it looks more like they were trying to recover some information from a database, much like I’m trying to do with their hard drives.”
“What was their source for this database?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s among the stuff recovered from the base in Antarctica
.”
“How close are you to getting any coherent information off the hard drives?” Quinn asked.
Mike shrugged. “Days. Weeks. Maybe never. It’s hard to say.”
“Have you recovered anything?” Quinn asked.
“A couple of things. First, they were doing a keyword search.”
“The keyword?”
“Ark.”
“Ark?” Quinn repeated. “What kind of ark?”
“I don’t know.”
“And the other thing you found?”
“There was a file pulled from a bunch of sources, and I’m getting ghost images off some of it. Some sort of historical research.”
“On what?”
“Something called The Mission. With a capital T on the The.”
“Anything solid?”
“I should have something shortly on that part of the hard drives.”
Quinn pointed a finger. “Get back to work.”
• • •
“How the hell are we getting out?” The man who asked the question had one hand wrapped around a steel cable that ran the length of the plane’s cargo bay. His legs swayed as the low-flying cargo plane followed the contour of the earth outside. He wore camouflage fatigues with no marking or rank insignia—like the rest of the thirty men inside the plane. He was a former French Legionnaire who called himself Croteau.
Elek looked up from the satellite images he had been studying, his eyes hidden behind the black glasses. “Do not worry about that. I will take care of it.”
“Do I look stupid?” Croteau asked. “I don’t trust anyone when it comes to getting my ass out of the frying pan. And the middle of China is the damn fire.”
Croteau looked at the other mercenary leaders inside the aircraft. They were nodding their heads, agreeing with him. The money was good, no doubt about that, now fifty thousand a man, but as every mercenary knew, dead men couldn’t spend good money.
The plane was low to the ground, flying north of Afghanistan, heading toward the Chinese border. Croteau was a little surprised that they had made it this far without being challenged by some country’s air force, but Elek seemed to have no concerns about that. They’d landed at an airfield in Turkmenistan, one of the new former Soviet Bloc countries, and the plane had been refueled by the ground crews there. Croteau had always known that money could buy a lot of cooperation, but the extent of this Elek fellow’s influence seemed to transcend national boundaries.
“Plus how are we going to get past the Chinese army?” one of the other merk leaders, a man named Johanson, a former South African officer, asked. “They got the place surrounded.”
“We jump right on top of the tomb,” Elek said.
“And get our asses shot off coming down,” Croteau said. “You know what kind of target a man hanging in the harness makes?”
“There will be no one shooting at you.” Elek held up a small glass ball. There was a murky green liquid inside that seemed to glow. “This will take care of everyone on the ground.”
“What is that?” Croteau demanded.
“Nerve gas. Developed by the Russians, tested and perfected in Afghanistan,” Elek said. “It works within twenty seconds and dissipates within sixty. Before we jump, we drop the gas. Everyone on the ground will be dead by the time we land, and the gas will be gone also.”
“Jesus,” Croteau exclaimed. “You use that stuff, we’ll have every agency in the world after our ass.”
“You are stupid,” Elek said. “No one will care what happens in western China. And no one will know what happened.”
“No way,” Croteau said. “I’m not—” He froze as Elek held the glass ball under his nose.
“Yes, you will,” Elek said, “or I will drop this right here. The cabin is on a separate pressure system, so the plane will continue, but all of you will be dead.”
“You’re bluffing,” Croteau said. “You’ll die with us.”
“I’ve already been injected with the antidote.” Elek tossed the ball in the air, every eye following it, then caught it. “It does not scare me. But it should scare you. It is a most horrible death. Your brain cannot send any impulses to any part of the body. Your lungs stop working, your heart stops beating. But the impulses coming into the brain, those you feel.”
Croteau swallowed. “All right. We jump.”
• • •
Turcotte walked forward along the flight deck, avoiding the bustle that was the normal activity of the aircraft carrier. He turned and watched as an F-14 Tomcat came in for a landing, going from a forward speed of almost two hundred miles an hour to a complete halt in less than a couple of seconds. The intricate choreography of action that followed the landing was just as amazing, as flight personnel unhooked the plane, towed it away, reset the landing cables, and prepared for the next incoming plane in short order.
He turned his back on the ship and looked forward. The weather was clear and he could see to the blue horizon where the water met the sky. Looking over the edge of the flight deck, he could see that dolphins still splashed along the bow. Whether they were the same he had seen earlier or new ones to pick up the sport, he had no idea.
“A penny for your thoughts?”
Lisa Duncan had her leather jacket zipped up tight against the salt breeze. A briefcase was in her left hand. Turcotte knew they both had to leave shortly, going in different directions once again.
“I’m not sure they’re worth that much,” he said as she joined him.
“I think they are.”
Turcotte looked out to sea. “I don’t know. Seems like everything’s been moving so fast that it’s hard to think. Always something else to do that seems to take precedence.”
“Precedence over thinking?”
“You know what I mean,” Turcotte said. “Real thinking. Going a level below.” Duncan slipped her right hand into his left and squeezed. “And what’s a level below?”
“I’m not sure I want to know,” Turcotte said, hoping she would change the subject, but she said nothing.
Finally, he spoke. “I guess I wonder why.”
“Why?” Duncan repeated.
“You know, what’s the meaning of it all. You know we’ve been so focused on who and what and where and when, and we hardly know any of those, but it’s the why that’s the key to everything.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
Turcotte struggled to find the words that would make concrete the thoughts that had been swirling about in his head.
“You know what happened in Germany,” he started.
“Something you were involved in?”
Turcotte nodded.
“The incident in the cafe?”
That was a delicate way of putting it, Turcotte thought. He’d been assigned to a classified counterterrorist unit in Berlin. A unit that, once the Wall fell, spent most of its time trying to keep a lid on the piles of weapons from the former Soviet Bloc. It was a joint U.S.-German team. Handpicked men from the U.S. Special Forces and the Germans’ GSG-9 counterterrorist force. Their orders were to fire first and ask questions later, especially when they were dealing with weapons that could kill hundreds, if not thousands.
On his last mission before being assigned to Nightscape at Area 51—indeed, Turcotte knew it might well have been because of what happened on that mission that he received the Area 51 assignment—intelligence had received word that some IRA extremists were trying to buy surplus East German armament—SAM-7 shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.
The supposition was that they would shoot down a Concorde taking off from Heathrow. The weapons were being transported when Turcotte’s team went to interdict.
They set up an ambush, but the terrorists stopped in a Gasthaus just before the ambush point. Getting antsy, the team leader took Turcotte with him to check it out.
With silenced MP-5 subs slung inside their coats, they walked in the combination bar and restaurant. The place was full of people. They saw two of their targets sitting in a b
ooth, but the third was nowhere in site.
And Turcotte’s partner froze, his unnatural demeanor catching the attention of the Irishmen. All hell broke loose. Turcotte and his partner exchanged fire with the two in the booth, killing both.
But the third man tried to run out of the bar, and Turcotte’s team leader fired at him in the middle of a crowd of civilians also trying to escape.
Turcotte could feel Duncan’s hand in his, her skin against the knotted tissue on his right palm—a scar that had formed from the burn he’d gotten when he’d grabbed the gun out of his team leader’s hands by the barrel, the red hot steel burning the flesh.
It was only later that Turcotte found out the body count. Four dead civilians. Including a pregnant, eighteen-year-old girl. To add insult to injury, the powers that be had tried to give Turcotte a medal for the action. Something had snapped in Turcotte after that, and he wasn’t sure he had ever put whatever it was back together.
“Mike?” Duncan’s voice indicated her worry over his long silence and his mood. “What about Germany?”
“Nothing,” Turcotte said. He felt very tired.
“Don’t give me nothing,” Duncan said.
Turcotte sighed. “Those guys I killed in Germany. The IRA gunmen. Their why. Their motivation. I’ve thought about it a lot. They thought they were right. They thought their cause was just and were willing to pay any price to further that cause. Do anything, even if it meant killing innocent civilians.”
“Oh, come on,” Duncan said. “You can’t be comparing—”
“You said you wanted to know what I was thinking,” Turcotte said, harder than he intended. “Then you need to listen.”
Duncan lapsed into silence and waited.
“Okay,” Turcotte said, still trying to rind the words. “The thing is these guys here on this ship. They wear American uniforms. This ship took part in the Gulf War. Bombed the crap out of Iraq. Killed a bunch of Iraqis. But those Iraqis believed in what they were doing, just as much as these sailors and pilots believed in what they were doing. And that’s the way it’s always been. You know—God was on both sides. How come one side ends up winning, then?
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