Ancients (event group thriller)

by David L. Golemon

  Jack didn't wait, he just brushed by the captain and went through the front doors. What he saw inside was like a scene from a battlefield. He noticed the covered bodies strewn about like so much dropped laundry. He counted thirteen on the first floor alone. He was joined a moment later by Everett and Mendenhall.

  "Jesus, who in the hell hit this place?" Everett said as he turned to face the police captain.

  "As far as we can tell, it was at least a fifty-man raid. So far, only your people are accounted for. Due to the fact that around each of the bodies are several expended rounds, we must assume that your security put up a fight, and bloodstains show that the suspects must have carried off their wounded and dead."

  "You said there was a survivor?" Mendenhall asked, looking ashen, as he knew personally all the men in the security team they had left there. Jimmy Sanchez was a close personal friend.

  "Second floor."

  The three men left the captain and trotted hurriedly up the stairs. Everywhere they looked, the walls and doors were riddled with bullet holes. Technicians were lying about where they fallen after being hit. A few of the academics had been dispatched execution-style in one of the offices. Four of the scientists and assistants looked as if they had been tortured. The artifacts, as far as they could tell, were all missing.

  "Over here, Jack," Everett called out.

  Jack looked up and saw three paramedics close to the second-floor elevator. They had a single soul on a stretcher and were fiercely working on him. As they approached, Mendenhall froze as he discovered who it was who was fighting for his life: Lance Corporal Sanchez.

  "Oh ..." was all the stunned Mendenhall could say as he looked on sadly.

  Everett placed a hand on Mendenhall's shoulder and watched helplessly as the medics worked furiously.

  Jack's eyes never blinked as he watched another one of his men slowly slide away from the living. As Sanchez took his last breath, Collins closed his eyes. When he opened them, he saw the stairwell that still sported the blood where Sanchez had made a stand against the overwhelming odds he had faced.

  One of the bodies closest to the corporal was a full-time archaeologist assigned to the main complex in Nevada. The boy was taped into a chair, and Collins could tell by the missing fingernails that he had been tortured in the most brutal manner possible. He closed his eyes, knowing that the poor kid would have given information on the Group. He didn't have to look far to find his proof. His eyes locked on a portion of the wall above just as Everett joined him. They examined the four words written in the blood of Corporal Sanchez, declaring the Event Group fair and open game. They dripped and ran red down the white wall above the stairwell.

  NOT SO SECRET ANYMORE!

  A man who had been taking pictures most of the morning from across the street changed his position and climbed the stairwell inside the building. He went to the second floor, where he was surprised to find a great location to shoot directly into the Freemont Building. He adjusted the telephoto lens and framed three men standing on the second-floor landing. A large blond man, a black man, and a man who stood ramrod-straight were glaring at the message left on the wall. As he clicked away, the hard-featured man turned to the landing's large window and seemed to look right at the camera's lens. The shooter abruptly stopped snapping pictures, as he could have sworn that the man was looking right at him. He lowered the camera and swallowed. He decided that what he had was enough.

  Dahlia would have to make do with what he had learned, because, for some reason, the man on the landing scared the living hell out of him.

  RUSSIAN PACIFIC FLEET HQ VLADIVOSTOK, RUSSIA

  With the situation in Korea growing steadily worse, the Russian navy was on deployment alert. Every man in the Pacific Fleet, both surface and subsurface, had been recalled and awaited sailing orders.

  Of the serviceable surface combatants, the fleet was in a sorry state, to say the least. Only three of her large battle cruisers were operational, and only one of them could ship a full-crew complement of trained seamen. The rest were out-of-date and undermanned light cruisers and destroyers. Still, the Russian navy was a proud entity and could still draw blood when needed.

  The crew of the Russian heavy battle cruiser Admiral Nakhimov had been at their stations, ready to put out to sea for the past two hours to shadow the two U.S. carrier task forces. The captain of the Admiral Nakhimov was delayed, waiting for the bulk of their task force to form up before putting out to sea.

  The surrounding harbor was full of antiquated warships, but the Nakhimov was part of the Russian president's massive strive to reclaim some of the old Soviet pride and power. Next to the Nakhimov was the heavy cruiser Petr Velikiy, commissioned the Uri Andropov in 1998. She would sail with the Nakhimov to the Sea of Japan.

  Seven hundred miles out at sea in the freezing waters of the Pacific, a large aircraft strayed off course just as she had in the Middle East. This time her course would not take her over any appreciable landmass.

  The navigator of the large Boeing 747 tracked their marker, an undersea beacon laid down a full year before by a Japanese-flagged fishing trawler.

  Tomlinson, with his assistant in the seat next to him, had been silent since the registered charter flight lifted off from a private airstrip in the Philippines. The navigator and the pilot knew who the man was and it showed in their nervousness.

  The head of the Thor program stepped out of the protected area and walked to Tomlinson. He cleared his throat.

  "The Wave is operational and online. We have return echoes from the amplification modules on the seabed. Radar reports no contact of any air-superiority fighters in our immediate area."

  "Then all is well for the strike?" Tomlinson asked, his blue eyes boring into those of Professor Ernest Engvall, former head of the Franz Westverall Institute of Geology and Seismic Study in Norway.

  "All is as planned; nothing has changed for the past three years of calculations," he said, but Tomlinson knew that he had stopped short of finishing his report.

  "Except?" he asked, holding his penetrating gaze on the world's foremost seismologist.

  The thin, bookish man held his tongue for a brief moment but knew that he had to bring up what his entire technical crew was discussing.

  "Do I have to ask twice, Professor?"

  "We have two wave aircraft at our disposal, both of which could be tracked and attacked at any time. If I may ask, why have you risked your life to be on this particular strike?"

  Tomlinson smiled and looked away without answering. His assistant cleared his throat and concluded the conversation.

  "You may resume your countdown without further delay. Release Thor's Hammer, Professor."

  Engvall's look went from Tomlinson to his impeccably dressed assistant. Then he abruptly turned and entered the protective area of the 747.

  Tomlinson was staring at nothing as he thought about his father. He had been integral part of the Coalition in the latter days of the world war. He'd never risen as high in the council as his son would in future years, but he had done his part. The thought of his father being held up against a crumbling wall and shot by Russian shock troops just outside Berlin, after delivering the Coalition's ultimatum to Hitler, didn't anger him like it used to. After all, his father had allowed himself to be used by those higher in the order and thus had reaped that particular harvest. It was the Russian leadership he had always despised and their weak-minded followers. It was not personal, as most on the Coalition Council would believe, but the smart thing to do, with their government weak and their populace uneasy.

  He looked up when he heard the soft humming of the Wave equipment. He wanted the strike to be flawless, and that was the real reason why he was here. The old guard of the Coalition would be shown that a limited strike did not need the Atlantean Key for control of the weapon. Now, he was here to prove it. Their race had split once before and it had almost cost them their existence in the time of Julius Caesar. He would see to it that if this demonstration did
not have a positive effect on the Coalition members who refused to follow, he would scratch them from the equation in totem.

  "Bring the Wave up to full power. Directional beacon is locked and confirmed."

  Engvall ran to another panel and watched as the Wave buildup became a steady stream of blue and red on the computer's monitor.

  "We have solid tone," one of the techs called out.

  Once the stream turned pure red, the audio wave was pulsed to the amplifiers on the seafloor. Once the trigger had penetrated the depths of the sea, the audio signal would be activated and then the three-pronged decibel enhancers set inside the large steel enclosures would chime like a tuning fork, creating the desired tone that the Ancients had calculated thousands of years before for the science of breaking solid stone.

  The amplifiers were laid along the Koryak-Kamchatka orogenic belt, which sat above one of the most active continental plates in the world. The wave from the amplifiers would sink to crust depth and hammer at its edges in an assault of sound that would crumble any natural strata in all of known geology.

  The duration of the three-second pulse would be short, due to the instability of the Wave of the Ancients. That and the fact that the fault line above the plate ran all the way to Sumatra.

  "Initiate trigger, now!"

  Located at the bottom of the huge aircraft, a set of doors swung open and the small laser cannon deployed. It was not a cannon in the normal sense of the word; it was a laser-guided sound pulse. A three-second burst at full power shot downward into the sea, where it would actually pick up speed as it was not diminished by one single decibel due to the salinity of the water. Twenty-one miles below the surface of the sea, the wave penetrated the waters of the cold Pacific at the speed of sound. It struck the first amplifier, then relayed down the line of six. More than six hundred miles of fault line and its supporting plate were under attack. The strike would generate enough explosive energy as fifty twenty-megaton nuclear detonations going off in the earth's crust.

  As it struck, the audio wave radiated in the only direction it could: straight down through sand and rock.

  The Boulder Institute of Seismology in Colorado recorded the eruption underneath the crust as it traveled as far south as Australia and as far east as the United States. The epicenter of the quake originated two hundred miles north of the undersea Siberian Seamount. As the seafloor split, ten trillion gallons of seawater flooded into the void. The smaller seamounts nearest the eruption cascaded into the gap that had instantly gone from a mere fracture to the size of the island of Hawaii. The quake hit the Siberian coast and shook houses to their foundations. The first shocks hit Japan and China only twenty-three seconds later.

  As he monitored the reports coming in from prepositioned seismic stations in the Pacific, Engvall knew that they had unleashed a strike accurate to the mile. As he listened to the euphoria in the voices of his technicians, the realization had struck him that he just might have destroyed a great deal of Russia's eastern coast.

  RUSSIAN AND NORTH KOREAN JOINT SEISMIC LISTENING STATION (JSRCLS) 12

  As a listening post at the northern end of the Sea of Japan, the Joint Communications and Seismic Station did not garner much respect from the U.S. Navy. The antiquated equipment failed to measure seismic activity accurately. Japan and the United States had succeeded in doing that in the late 1950s. The communications network was in an even worse state.

  As the bored men fought to stay awake, the needle on the antiquated Richter monitor moved once and held steady. The operator failed to see the quick jump of the needle. Instead, the ancient radio monitor told them something was amiss.

  The two young Korean and Russian officers listening in on the Japanese and American chatter were using a radio and direction finder that was surplus back in 1959. The constant replacement of its tubes and the limited-frequency channels made finding anyone, anywhere, talking openly as rare as good food on the anchored station. However, the one thing it was good at was picking up low-range high-decibel-burst releases, only because the equipment lacked the necessary filters of modern sets to block it out.

  Both radiomen suddenly shouted out and threw the headphones from their ears. The Russian doubled over in pain and the Korean actually felt the trickle of blood flow from his right ear.

  "What are you two fools doing?" asked the Korean duty officer.

  "It must have been some sort of burst transmission," the soldier said as he grabbed his Russian counterpart for support. "An aircraft directly overhead, that's the only thing it could have been, maybe--"

  That was as far as he got as the anchored platform was rocked on its stiltlike legs.

  "My God, look at this!"

  The officer gained his balance and turned to the Richter scale. The long needle was swishing back and forth on the graph paper, almost creating a solid wall of red as it moved.

  The technician shouted out, "6.5 ... 7.1 ... 7.9 ... 8.0," as he counted the numbers the needle struck. As he did so, the platform--an old oil derrick of Russian design--lifted and then swayed. He continued: "8.7 ...9.6..."

  "My God, the sea is erupting around us!"

  "Track that aircraft!" the officer screamed as he lost his footing.

  TARGET AREA 1: VLADIVOSTOK

  The men of the battle cruiser Admiral Nakhimov were making ready to get under way when the harbor waters started to recede. At the same time, warning sirens sounded throughout the naval base. The above-deck crew ran to the railing and watched in amazement as the sea rolled out from under them and her sister vessel, Petr Velikiy, as both giant vessels strained at their many mooring ropes. As the two great warships groaned and creaked, their heavy bulk settled into the dark mud of the harbor. Smaller warships of the fleet were torn from their moorings, kidnaped by the retreating waters of the Pacific.

  Onshore the quake hit with devastating power. Buildings constructed to withstand direct bomb hits were knocked flat with no warning. Streets buckled and fell into voids created by ancient riverbeds collapsing underground. Thousands of people were crushed to death as cranes and material in the dry dock area broke and fell. Giant cruisers rolled over and crushed the lives of seamen as they tried in vain to make it over ships railings.

  Men aboard the Admiral Nakhimov were knocked from their feet as thick, viscous mud erupted like lava from the harbor floor. The giant ship rippled as the mud below waved up like a maddened sea. At that moment, the men heard the most horrible of sounds. It rumbled even above the noise of the quake. It was the return of the sea.

  "Abandon ship, all hands abandon ship!" the loud speakers on both vessels bellowed.

  The horrible roar grew from the east and the sea beyond. The sun was blotted out as the giant wave built as the ocean rushed back in to fill the land vacated in its backlash. As the sea started to crest, just one mile south of the port of Vladivostok another quake, of greater magnitude, struck. The air itself became a living thing as scared people became disoriented and fell to the undulating ground. Then the water was returning just as if hell itself had opened its gates.

  The crew of the Nakhimov knew they were about to die as the wall of water was seen taking out the city before them. Entire buildings were knocked free of their foundations, their debris joining the onrush of destruction. The wall of water hit the two great ships. They were smashed and then lifted and flipped over like toys in a tub as they cascaded into the eastern end of the port city.

  The Petr Velikiy disintegrated like it had been made of wood. The thick steel plates made to withstand a standard torpedo strike caved in and fell apart as easily as if made of the finest crystal. The Nakhimov was flipped end over end three times before it struck the roiling waters below, breaking the ship into three pieces. Still the waters rushed inland.

  The Wave had created an earthquake with its accompanying tsunami the likes of which the modern world had never seen. The quake struck in Sydney, killing seventeen people when one of her older bridges collapsed. The tsunami, though diminished by that
time, struck northern Japan and destroyed two small villages.

  The American carrier force sent to help the Second Infantry Division lost one supply ship and two destroyers, as the sudden surge of ocean had caught the smaller ships in a wide turn. The carriers themselves suffered only minor damage.

  By far the second-largest devastation and loss of life occurred in China, where it struck as far inland as Beijing. One hundred thousand Chinese lost their lives to Thor's Hammer.

  The target city of Vladivostok was destroyed. Not a single human life survived the quake and tsunami that followed Thor's Hammer. The water reached as far inland as Mongolia and wiped out mining operations in Siberia. All told, the death toll in Russia would exceed one million people. The Russian Pacific Fleet, which was preparing to monitor the American response to North Korea's actions, was gone forever.

  Now, the one thing not expected by Tomlinson and the younger Coalition members was the fact that a Russian and Korean monitoring station had picked up the initial trigger broadcast that activated Thor's Hammer. The president of Russia, after finding this out, grew suspicious and suddenly the ravings of Kim Jong Il didn't seem so far-fetched. The Russians and Chinese for precautionary reasons brought their military forces to red alert.

  The Doomsday Clock had started.

  PART TWO

  ON THE TRAIL OF THE ANCIENTS

  4

  HEMPSTEAD BUILDING CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

  William Tomlinson accepted the drink from his assistant as the other members of his inner circle waited. On the large liquid-crystal screen was a broad view of the conference room in Norway. A test of wills was so palpable that the air was as thick as molasses.

  "You have missed the point entirely, sir. The weapon has caused damage to the two American carrier groups en route to the Sea of Japan. This is jeopardizing the American and Korean lines of resistance if the North attacks. They will be overrun, and that, regardless of your bravado, is not now nor ever was the goal of the test strike. And your blatant disregard for the loss of life in Japan and China was never in the Russian plan."