The Truth

by Robert Doherty

  BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK

  Aspasia's Shadow had prepared this operation years earlier and had given the initial implementation order when he first arrived at Easter Island. It was one of many orders he had dispatched, unsure how many of them he would actually have to follow up on.

  So he wasn't surprised as a dozen headlights appeared in the distance, heading toward his location. He'd planted thirty Guides, all ex-military, in sleeper cells here in this remote part of Texas to wait for his call, which he had hoped he would never have to make.

  The twelve off-road vehicles drove up to the base of the Talon and the men exited. They pulled weapons and backpacks out of the trucks. Quietly they walked up the narrow stairs Aspasia's Shadow had extended from the Talon. Once all were inside, he shut the hatch and took off. For step two in his emergency plan.

  CAMP ROWE, NORTH CAROLINA

  Things were different. That was Turcotte's impression as Yakov brought the mothership down toward the side of the landing strip, where there was a large open field. There were many lights blazing and activity all over the place.

  Helicopters flitted about, getting out of the way of the descending alien ship. A half dozen C-130 cargo planes were lined up off to one side.

  As soon as Yakov brought the ship to a halt, just above the ground, the two walked back to the nearest hatch and exited. Turcotte carried Excalibur, wrapped in a cloth. Major Quinn was waiting, flanked by Colonel Mickall and another man wearing a very nice suit.

  "Major Turcotte, Mr. Yakov" — Quinn had quickly stepped forward to make the introductions — "this is Deputy Secretary General Kaong, the new director of UNAOC."

  Turcotte almost laughed. UNAOC — United Nations Alien Oversight Committee — had been practically a nonentity ever since it was formed after he and Duncan publicized what had been hidden at Area 51. Kaong had a very serious demeanor as he stiffly held out his hand. Turcotte shook it briefly.

  "What can we do for you, Secretary Kaong?"

  "We are trying to determine what threat remains," Kaong said. "We know that Aspasia's Shadow is still on the loose, as is Artad."

  Turcotte tried to figure out if there was a tone of accusation in Kaong's voice. "Major Quinn could tell you more about that than me."

  "What happened at Stonehenge?" Kaong asked. "We received only the barest sketch of details from the British. They aren't quite sure themselves."

  "The Swarm recovered some sort of spaceship there," Turcotte said. He was looking about, over Kaong's shoulder, searching for the Space Command troops who should be here.

  "And this Swarm's goal?" Kaong asked. "I assume the same as Artad's. Get to Mars and take over the transmitter. Call home and ask for reinforcements."

  "Most grave," Kaong said.

  Turcotte brought his attention back to the United Nations representative, again not sure of his tone — was he being factitious? "Yeah. Grave. That's a good word to use."

  "How can we help?"

  Turcotte wondered where all this help had been while he was on Everest. "There's not much you can do right now." He turned to Quinn. "Are the Space Command people here?"

  Quinn nodded. "A full team with equipment and TASC suits. Ready to go."

  "And status of Artad's ship? The Swarm's?" Quinn directed them toward the hangar. "Artad stopped at the derelict mothership for a while. His Talon only just left it about twenty minutes ago. Based on how long it took Aspasia to come here, we estimate around two days for him to reach Mars. The Swarm ship just broke orbit. We don't have a speed for it yet, so we don't know who will get to Mars first."

  "And Aspasia's Shadow and his Talon?" Turcotte asked as they entered the hangar. He saw a man standing nearby wearing a black jumpsuit with the Space Command patch on the shoulder.

  "We lost track of him somewhere over Texas."

  "That gave Turcotte pause. "Texas? He's not in space?"

  "We haven't spotted anything else escaping the planet's gravity."

  "Damn," Turcotte muttered. He slumped down in a chair. "All right. Talk to me about Tunguska and Tesla. I want to have something with a bit more punch than this" — he held up the sword — "when we go after them."

  MARS

  The Airlia convoy was well up on the hundred-mile-long ramp that led to and through the four-mile-high escarpment surrounding the Mons Olympus Aureole. A long plume of red dust trailed behind the convoy. The actual cut in the escarpment, even with the ramp, was two miles deep, a testament to the efficiency and immense capabilities of the mech-machines. A dozen of those machines were scattered about in the midst of whatever task they had been about, their system crashing when the Cydonia guardian went off-line.

  The lead vehicle cleared the escarpment and rolled onto the slope of Mons Olympus. The volcano was so large, that the angle of ascent was actually relatively gentle, only about five degrees. Far ahead, and near the summit, the arcs of two completed pylons and a third incomplete one were visible. And fifty miles behind the convoy, reaching the beginning of the ramp, was the trail vehicle carrying the core element of the transmitter.

  CHAPTER 12: THE PRESENT

  * * *

  CAMP ROWE, NORTH CAROLINA

  "Nikola Tesla." Quinn held up a black-and-white photograph of a young man with pale skin, dark hair parted in the middle, and sporting a thick mustache. "He was an electrical engineer and scientist who was born in 1856 and died in 1943. He's known for some very innovative work on electricity and magnetism." Quinn put the photo down and picked up another old black-and-white image, someone Turcotte recognized. A savage-looking man with scars on both cheeks and intense black eyes. "Tesla met Burton."

  "How do you know that?" Turcotte demanded. Quinn held up a leather-bound manuscript — the lost manuscript of Burton that Professor Mualama had tracked down. "It's in here."

  Yakov spit. "Another thing Mualama didn't tell us."

  "And?" Turcotte gripped the arms of his chair, trying to keep his anger toward the archaeologist under control. The man, after all, had been infected by a Swarm tentacle. His actions had not been of his own volition. And he had paid the ultimate price. Turcotte could still see the archaeologist tumbling from the face of Everest in his final act of resistance against the Swarm's attempt to use him to stop Turcotte from reaching Excalibur.

  "I found a scholar who could translate Akkadian," Quinn continued, "and had her work on the manuscript via fax. Do you want Burton's words verbatim, or do you want my summary?"

  "Summarize," Turcotte said, checking his watch.

  "Burton was being chased by the Watchers, who were afraid his investigations might cause problems and upset the truce. Also, he was being tracked down by the Ones Who Wait and Aspasia's Shadow."

  "Sounds like he wasn't making any friends," Yakov said.

  "Because he thought for himself," Turcotte said. "That's been a rare commodity throughout history, it appears."

  Quinn continued. "Shortly before his death, Burton ran into Tesla in Paris, acting on a tip he received. It turns out that Tesla was a member of a group that traced its beginning back to Myrddin — Merlin as he is more commonly known."

  "But I thought Merlin had been a rogue Watcher?" Yakov pointed out. "A onetime thing?"

  "True, Merlin was a rogue Watcher," Quinn said. "But it doesn't look like it was a onetime thing. It appears that Burton was occasionally aided by a clandestine group of rogue Watchers who actually claimed the mantle of being the real Watchers."

  "What?" Turcotte asked irritably. Another thing that wasn't as it had originally appeared.

  "Like the Roman Catholics and the Protestants," Quinn said, "it appears there was a schism among the ranks of the Watchers precipitated by Merlin's actions or perhaps even earlier. Burton himself wasn't really sure about the timing, but he does write that there was a split between those who believed in the original edict as decided at Avalon after the destruction of Atlantis, to remain a neutral group dedicated simply to watching, and a more progressive group, initiated perhaps by Merlin,
that dedicated itself to more active measures against the aliens."

  "They haven't been very helpful," Yakov muttered.

  Quinn shrugged. "How do you know that?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Both sides of the Airlia have committed terrible atrocities against the human race over the millennia but we're still here. Maybe some of that is due to the active Watchers."

  "Tesla. Burton." Turcotte shot the words out like bullets. If there had been active Watchers, it didn't appear they were still around — he checked that thinking. There had been the man in South America — whom Turcotte had thought a Watcher — who had warned of the plague the Mission had let loose. And the destruction of the shuttle Columbia. Perhaps Quinn was right — more had been going on behind the scenes than he realized.

  "Burton wrote that Tesla was one of these rogue Watchers, Tesla questioned Burton about his expeditions to northern India. And he told Burton he had made contact with a guardian computer."

  "Where?" Turcotte asked.

  "Mount Ararat."

  Yakov nodded. "The Kurds did say some people came there now and then. And if they had a Watcher ring or medallion, the Kurds would let them in the mothership cavern."

  Turcotte leaned forward. "So Tesla found the mothership, got into it, and found the Master Guardian?"

  "It appears so," Quinn said.

  "Why?" Turcotte asked.

  "To learn about the Airlia," Quinn said.

  "To copy from them?" Yakov wondered.

  Quinn shook his head. "Burton is pretty adamant that Tesla wanted nothing to do with taking knowledge from the Airlia. He wanted to learn about their technology in order to counter it."

  Turcotte nodded. "Good. And?"

  "That is all that's in the manuscript about Tesla," Quinn said. "Burton died — was killed, basically — by Aspasia's Shadow shortly after that meeting."

  Turcotte rubbed his forehead, feeling the painful pounding of a growing headache. The back of his head still hurt and he wondered if he might have sustained some permanent damage from his time in the death zone on Everest. "OK. Exactly who was Tesla? And how is he connected to Tunguska and the Swarm scout? How did he shoot it down?"

  "Nikola Tesla," Quinn said as he referred to his notes. "He was a Serb, born there in 1856. He was formally trained as an engineer. He came to America in 1884, arriving in New York City with just four cents in his pocket."

  Yakov snorted. "Sounds like the typical American immigrant story."

  "Tesla was anything but typical," Quinn said. "He went to work for Thomas Edison, but the two soon parted ways over differences of opinion. Edison was an advocate of direct current electricity and Tesla of alternating current. Tesla invented the induction motor, fluorescent lights, and many other things for which others took subsequent credit. However, his obsession was the wireless transmission of power."

  Turcotte had never heard of either Tesla or his theories and inventions. Which was strange considering the everyday things Quinn was saying the man had invented. He thought of the alien shield and how it stopped power and — his train of thought came to a halt as Quinn continued.

  "In 1899 Tesla moved to Colorado Springs. There he made a most strange discovery — terrestrial stationary waves."

  "Which are?" Turcotte prompted.

  "Tesla believed the Earth itself could be used as a conductor for electrical vibrations of a certain pitch. During his experiments he lit two hundred lamps without any wires between them and the power source, which was twenty-five miles away from the lamps. He also created man-made lightning. He even claimed to have received signals from another planet, a claim that was one of the many reasons he wasn't taken seriously despite an astounding list of inventions and accomplishments."

  "That claim would be taken seriously now," Yakov noted. "The bouncers," Turcotte realized. "The best Majestic could figure was that they used some sort of field that the planet itself generated, right?"

  "Right," Quinn said. "I think Tesla was tapping into the same thing. In fact, I know that some of the scientists who Majestic brought in were using research that Tesla had done. I've back-checked and they were trying to make a connection between the Earth's magnetic field and the bouncer's propulsion system. Even more basic, they felt there was a tremendous amount of untapped energy in the Earth itself, deep beneath our feet."

  "What else?" Turcotte asked. "I just read Tesla's journal," Quinn continued. "His journal?" Turcotte asked. "How did you get that?"

  "Tesla died in New York City in 1943," Quinn said. "His notes and letters were in a large trunk, which became the property of his nephew" — there was a short pause as Quinn checked his notes — "one Sava Kosanovich, a citizen of Yugoslavia, where the trunk was shipped. It appears that somehow, at the end of the Second World War, the trunk fell into the hands of the intelligence arm of the military there."

  "No surprise there," Yakov said. "Knowledge is power."

  "Once you told me to check on him, I had a friend in the NATO peacekeeping forces in Sarajevo search the archives and find the trunk. Turns out in all the turmoil at the end of the Cold War a lot of material disappeared from the secret police files and ended up in the public domain. He e-mailed me a copy of the scanned journal just ten minutes ago."

  "What did it say?" Turcotte asked.

  "If you read between the lines concerning the supposed messages from the planets, I think Tesla definitely tapped into either a guardian or transmissions between guardians."

  "Go on," Turcotte said.

  "He gained some understanding of how Airlia technology functioned and also saw that his own research was along similar lines. Because of his status as a rogue Watcher, he understood we — humans — needed weapons to counter the aliens. I think, perhaps, that is why many people have never heard of him — whereas Edison used his genius for practical inventions for day-to-day living, Tesla's focus was on something that has never been publicly acknowledged until recently. Because of that, he had to use misdirection when pursuing much of his work.

  "Tesla worked on using his nonwire electrical beam transmission as a weapon. He went to New York in 1900 where, with the financial backing of J.P. Morgan, he began construction of what he said was a wireless broadcasting tower that could make contact around the world. It appears from reading his papers that Tesla was not entirely forthcoming to his financial backer. While the huge tower he was building at a place called Wardencliff could transmit radio waves, that was not its primary purpose.

  "In his papers Tesla writes that he developed a wireless transmitter that could produce destructive effects at long distances using a certain frequency of radio wave propagated through the Earth itself. Indeed, he claimed he could touch any spot on the globe by sending a transmission through the planet, and even have the inherent energy inside the Earth magnify the power. He claimed that the high-end effect would be the equivalent of the detonation of ten megatons of TNT."

  "Could this new form of power get through a shield wall?" Turcotte asked. "How powerful was it really?"

  "Well—" Quinn paused. "That brings me to Tunguska."

  Yakov cut in. "Do you remember General Hemstadt's last words to me on Devil's Island?"

  "I remember you telling me he said something about Tunguska," Turcotte agreed.

  "Yes," Yakov said. "We never really followed that up."

  "We've been a bit busy saving the world," Turcotte said. "There was a file in the archives we recovered about a German expedition to Tunguska, wasn't there?"

  "I have it here," Quinn said. "Part of what we were able to rescue from Area 51." He held up a thin leather portfolio with a swastika on the cover. "The report is dated 1934. In summary, it appears the Germans uncovered remains of an alien craft from Tunguska. That's where those creatures that Section IV had in the tank, the Okpashnyi came from, which we now know are Swarm. At the end of World War II, the Russians recovered what had been taken."

  Turcotte suppressed a shudder as he remembered the strange object floating in the tank at the unde
rground base on the island of Novaya Zemlya, where Russia's Area 51 had been. A central orb several feet in diameter and six arms separate from the main body. Each arm had been approximately six feet long, twelve inches thick at one end, tapering to three "fingers," each about six inches long. While the center orb had been yellowish, the arms had been grayish blue. There were lidded, protruding eyes spaced around the center orb.

  Quinn's voice cut into Turcotte's remembering. "The Russians formally called it Otdel Rukopashnyi which means 'section of hands.' Okpashnyi was the shortened version. There were two recovered — one of which the Germans had done an autopsy on. They found that the center orb housed a four-hemisphere brain surrounded by a very hard skull. The arms, or legs, or tentacles, or whatever you want to call the six appendages, had a nervous system with a complex stem on the end that attached to the orb. The German scientists guessed that the arms were detachable and could function in some manner on their own, away from the orb or perhaps even mate with another orb, either in a sexual manner or to exchange information.

  "The Germans took casualties on that mission," Quinn continued. "Five men dead. Cause — an alien infection after thawing out one of the Okpashnyi bodies. The Germans shot the men to stop the infection from spreading."

  "Could one of the Swarm have survived the crash?" Turcotte asked.

  "I don't know," Quinn said. "It appears so now, though."

  "OK," Turcotte said. "Tunguska."

  "Many people have wondered what really happened at Tunguska in 1908. I've got photos here from the German expedition. You can see that the trees have all been blasted outward from a central point. The most commonly accepted explanation has been that a meteor struck at the epicenter, but the problem with that was that no one could find any remains of the meteor. Given what we know now, and the results of this German expedition, there's no doubt that an alien craft crashed at Tunguska.