“If you are thinking of killing me,” Aspasia’s Shadow began, a second before Turcotte pulled the trigger, “you need to know I am the only one who can revive her. Without me, she dies.”
“What did you do to her?” Turcotte demanded.
“I didn’t do anything,” Aspasia’s Shadow said. “She accessed the Grail and now the process must take its course. And I am the only one who can make sure it develops properly or else she dies a most terrible death.”
“What process?”
The two men had reached the ledge, less than twenty feet from Turcotte. They paused as Aspasia’s Shadow came up behind.
“We will go now,” Aspasia’s Shadow said, the other survivors from his group on the stairs, carrying the Ark.
“What process?” Turcotte repeated.
Aspasia’s Shadow pointed and the men moved forward. Turcotte held his ground for a second, then stepped aside. “You’ll never get out of here.”
“I believe we will,” Aspasia’s Shadow said. He smiled, revealing long, sharp teeth. “Do you know who she is?”
Turcotte was at a loss for an answer, not understanding the intent of the question.
“She is not who you believe her to be,” the creature continued. “She has lied to you — or more likely even she does not yet know her true identity.” The two men and Duncan disappeared into the blackness. “Do not follow us or she will die.” He stepped into the blackness before Turcotte could say another word.
“Damn!” Turcotte cursed. He wondered if Graves and his men would ambush them. He waited a few seconds, so he wouldn’t be caught in the kill zone, then dashed into the darkness, the heavy metal thud of his legs hitting the tunnel floor echoing into his helmet.
The blackness grabbed him, and he propelled himself forward, the MK-98 extended, finger ready. He stumbled over something as he entered the tunnel on the other side, hit his knees, forced the muzzle of the weapon up, scanning the screen for targets — nothing moving.
As he got to his feet, he almost fell once more. “Down view.”
Turcotte blinked, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. A black tube, about two feet long. Turcotte took a step back as he realized what it was. The severed leg of one of the team members, still encased in the suit armor. “Forward view.”
The tunnel was littered with body parts, some still in armor, others ripped out of the suits. A head, half out of the helmet, lay to one side. It was Graves, dead eyes staring at nothing, neck cleanly severed. The body was ten feet away, farther down the tunnel, blood pooled where the head should be. The walls of the tunnel held large divots where darts had hit, so the team had put up a fight against whatever had attacked them.
“It’s the whole team,” Turcotte whispered to himself, as if hearing the words would make the impact less severe. He counted, trying to add up body parts and suits. As near as he could make out, every member of the team was dead.
How could Aspasia’s Shadow have done this? He wondered, but even as the thought crossed his mind, he realized this had happened while he was in the chamber still talking to the alien creature.
The MK-98 was still pointing ahead, but Turcotte wasn’t aware of where the reticules were, the vision on the screen too overwhelming. Turcotte remembered something from the briefing given by the space command representative. He went over to Graves’s body, turned it over, the backpack now accessible. With his right hand, he pushed a button. A cover popped open, revealing the master computer. Turcotte removed a DVD disk. He knew he could put it in his own computer and have whatever it had recorded from Graves’s cameras and mikes played on his screen, but there wasn’t time for that now. He shoved it into one of the empty ammo pouches on the front of his suit.
He began to run. He left the bodies behind, hoping that carrying Duncan would slow Aspasia’s Shadow down enough so that he could catch them.
The pressure on the suit leg was so slight that Turcotte almost didn’t register it. He skidded to a halt, his instincts warning him a second before his mind was aware. Too late as the trip wire ignited the mine.
Steel ball bearing ripped into the TASC-suit, the concussion of the blast knocking Turcotte off his feet and sending him flying backward down the tunnel ten feet.
* * *
Two SA 365 Panther helicopters blew up sand as they landed next to the Great Pyramid. Egyptian troops surrounded the area, but none came close as Aspasia’s Shadow and his entourage came out of the Caliph’s entrance, carrying Duncan and the covered Ark toward the choppers.
They loaded, the doors slid shut, and the choppers lifted, heading to the east.
* * *
Turcotte had felt pain like this once before when he’d been shot in the chest while wearing a protective vest, except this was all over his body, not localized in one place. He was in complete darkness, and it took him a second to figure out why that was.
“Screen on,” he ordered. “Forward view.” Nothing.
He tried moving, but the suit didn’t respond. The inner, airtight pressure layer pushed in on every part of his body except his head, clinging, not allowing him to move. Into his trapped darkness, Turcotte screamed, the sound reverberating inside the helmet. Then he passed out.
* * *
“We’ve got two bogies moving due west. Takeoff point just about on top of the Great Pyramid.”
“Identification?” Colonel Zycki asked as he came down the aisle in the AWACS to stand behind the screen watcher who had made the report. “Negative ID.”
“Signature?”
“Definitely helicopter. Flying low level but fast. They aren’t Egyptian, because whoever’s flying them has got to have LLTV and extensive night-flying capabilities that the Egyptians don’t have.”
Zycki considered that. “Notify our Israeli friends and forward them updates on the helicopters.”
“Yes, sir.”
Zycki turned to another of his people. “Anything yet from the team?”
“No, sir.”
Zycki checked his watch. They only had an hour of darkness. He didn’t think they could manage an exfiltration from the Nile in broad daylight.
* * *
Turcotte regained consciousness and immediately began hyperventilating. He tried to get it under control, knowing that was how he had passed out.
“Status display?” he whispered, hoping the computer was back on line.
Only darkness. He tried to move his arms. Nothing. Legs immobile. He focused his mind back to the orientation he had received. There was an emergency release if all power was lost. Where? He remembered, turning his head as far as he could to the left and sticking his tongue out. It touched a toggle, which he flipped up.
Turcotte bolted upright as the front part of the suit swung away from his body. He rolled out of the suit, savoring the feel of the stone under his hands and knees. He just lay there for a minute. He knew that Aspasia’s Shadow and Duncan were long gone. He’d been in too much of a rush. He stood, pulling a flashlight out of the small butt-pack strapped to the rear of the suit.
Turcotte shone the light down on his suit. The mine had ripped the armor in many places. The protection had held — or else he wouldn’t be standing right now — but the pellets had ripped into the computer, damaging it beyond repair. Without that working, the suit was just a large pile of high-tech garbage.
Turcotte checked the SATCOM link that was bolted on just above the computer. It was also trashed. He grabbed the DVD disk he’d taken from Graves’s suit. He also took the Watcher ring off the right arm. Then he unlatched the MK-98 from the suit. Without the suit’s strength augmentation, the full weight of the weapon reminded Turcotte of carrying a fully loaded M-60 machine gun. He fastened a sling from his belt and slung the gun over his head. He took one of the lithium batteries from the suit to power the gun, increasing the weight he was carrying by ten pounds.
Turcotte hefted the MK-98, finger on the trigger. He had no clue which cardinal direction he was going in and when he checked the small compass strapped
to his watchband, the needle spun wildly. Turcotte looked at his watch. Dawn was only an hour off.
He reached the end of the hallway. Turcotte used the ring and the door slid open. He stepped through. He then turned in the direction he had come from, where the corridor descended.
* * *
“We have an Egyptian jet coming at us at Mach-2.” Colonel Zycki frowned at the report. They were over the Mediterranean, well clear of Egyptian airspace. “Make commo with it and request the pilot to stay clear,” he ordered. He turned his attention to the screen tracking the two choppers. They were over the Gulf of Suez, still heading west toward the Sinai Peninsula.
* * *
Inside the cockpit of the American-made F-16 Fighting Falcon, the Egyptian pilot, Ahid, ignored both the warnings from the American plane and the confused orders from his own higher command demanding he turn back to base.
Ahid’s eyes flickered down, checking his radar, ensuring he was on course. His hands were perfectly steady on the controls, his face relaxed despite the chatter coming through his helmet.
* * *
“Uh, sir, no response from the incoming bogey. We’re picking up transmissions from an Egyptian air base and they appear to be calling it back, too.”
Colonel Zycki frowned. “What’s the vector?”
“Straight on to us, ETA one minute. We’re already within Sidewinder range, but no fire indicator.”
If the F-16 was seeking to take them down, it would already have fired. So what was it doing?
“Where’s our nearest support?” Zycki asked.
“The Israelis could scramble and be here in seven minutes,” the man replied. “Goddamn,” Zycki exclaimed. Another game of chicken, he thought. It was a dangerous game, one that had been played for many decades in the Cold War and on into the years since the fall of the Wall. A jet would charge down on the AWACS, trying to scare the occupants. The fact that it worked, the crew of the defenseless surveillance craft feeling like deer caught in headlights of an approaching craft, was a big reason it had lasted so long.
Zycki keyed the crafts intercom so he could address the entire crew. “All right, people, we’ve got an inbound bogey trying to rattle us. Let’s keep doing our job and let this bozo go by.”
“Fifteen seconds out,” the screenwatcher reported.
“We still have tracking on the choppers?” Zycki asked.
“Yes, sir. They’re dry over the Sinai, turning to the north.”
“I want—” Zycki began, but the man tracking the Egyptian jet slammed his fist on the console.
“It’s still coming!”
“But—” Zycki never finished the statement.
* * *
Ahid could see the left side pilot of the AWACS staring out the small cockpit window at him as he rapidly closed the distance between the planes. His time sense had slowed everything down so that seconds seemed like minutes.
He could see the rotodome rotating inch by inch, the AWACS tail number, the star painted on the side of the craft, the lack of windows, the gray paint. Ahid adjusted course very slightly and, for added effect, kicked on his afterburners.
Then the F-16 hit the AWACS dead-on at over fifteen hundred miles an hour.
* * *
Over two hundred and forty miles away, Aspasia’s Shadow looked down at the desolate desert landscape below as the lead Panther fitted above the ground at less than fifty feet altitude.
“We’re clear of radar,” the, pilot reported. “The AWACS is gone.”
“Head for The Mission,” Aspasia’s Shadow ordered.
CHAPTER 17
The Giza Plateau, Egypt
Turcotte paused and got to his knees. He leaned over, ear to the floor. A faint roar, muted by the stone between him and the river. He had already passed through another doorway and he knew he was getting close to the chamber that held the shaft.
And there was something else, a sound that caused him to halt. A rapid clicking noise, almost in a rhythm, but there was something disconcerting about it. Turcotte closed his eyes and concentrated, trying to identify the sound. Metal on stone, like the rapid tap of a chisel on the tunnel floor. And it was coming closer.
Turcotte stood and began to run, more of a shuffle given the weight and size of the MK-98. He knew this was throwing his pace count off, but he could make out the glow of the chem light on the floor ahead. He reached it and slid the ring key along the wall, searching for the correct spot. Turcotte forced himself to slow down and make sure he was covering every square inch.
Turcotte paused and looked down the corridor. There was a golden glow, but he couldn’t make anything more out. It was getting closer. He continued to work the ring, searching. The clicking sound was louder, more ominous, causing him to look once more. He blinked, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. His first thought was that it was the largest spider he had ever seen, legs over three feet long, a round golden body, but there was more to it. Just as many arms on top of the globe as on the bottom, filling the corridor completely, top to bottom, side to side. But the arms were metal, the source of the noise. And the golden orb — Turcotte had seen that before. A foo-fighter, encased in some sort of robotic extension. In the golden glow of the foo-fighter he could see the blood on the metal arms and he knew what had happened to the rest of the team. That meant the MK-98 was useless against it.
Turcotte slid the ring along the wall as the machine approached, now less than twenty meters away. The ring touched the right place, the stone door sliding up.
Turcotte fired. The steel dart hit the foo-fighter dead center and ricocheted off. Turcotte threw the MK-98 with all his might at it and dove into the tunnel, the stone slamming shut behind him.
He could hear the clatter of the metal arms on the wall for several seconds, as if it were scratching at the door, then silence. He didn’t wait for anything more to happen and assumed the thing was taking another route. He raced down the tunnel until he came to the stone debris that had been the last door. He entered the chamber. The hole in the floor beckoned.
Turcotte lowered himself into the tunnel. He let go and fell.
Vicinity Easter Island
The crew of the E-2C Hawkeye felt like sacrificial lambs as they circled five miles to the east of the shield wall surrounding Easter Island. The rest of the Task Force was two hundred miles to the north. A pair of F-14 Tomcats were halfway between them and the fleet, but the jets’ mission was to guard the fleet, not support the Hawkeye if there was trouble.
“Look at that,” the pilot didn’t have to point out what he was indicating, as the ship that was heading toward the island was the largest thing floating anyone on the crew had ever seen.
The combat information officer (CIO) keyed his radio. “Operations, this is HK-12. Over.”
The reply from the Stennis’s operations center was immediate. “This is operations. Over.”
“We have visual on the Jahre Viking three miles from the shield wall and she’s still heading straight for it. Over.”
“Roger that.”
The CIO waited for more, then finally asked what they all wanted to know. The answer was apparent from the lack of activity on their radar screens — no strike force winging in from the north — but they wanted the answer in plain English. “What are the orders from Pearl? Over.”
“Do nothing. There’s women and children on that ship from a half-dozen different countries. You want to be responsible for killing them?”
There was no adequate answer to that.
The bow of the Jahre Viking was less than a half mile from the shield wall when a dark cloud came swarming out of the blackness.
* * *
His crew thought him quite mad. Johan Verquist had been forced to relieve both the captain and first officer. The junior officer now running the bridge felt the same as his predecessors, but the presence of half a dozen Progressives armed with pistols had been enough to persuade him to follow the orders the others thought insane — head straight
for the shield wall that protected Easter Island.
Verquist glanced over at Dennison, but the Guide’s eyes were fixed on the black wall. On the broad deck of the tanker, the thousands of passengers were gathered, all facing the same direction. Every square foot of deck space held a person. All were above deck except for those that drowned in the 3-starboard hold.
A cloud came out of the darkness and Verquist started. “What is that?”
“Our salvation,” Dennison said. He leaned forward, pressed a button, and spoke into the ship’s audio system. “Our rebirth is at hand.”
An audible moan swept over the bridge, torn from thousands of lips, a mixture of fear and anticipation. The people began chanting something in a low tone that Verquist couldn’t make out.
Verquist couldn’t take his eyes off the unnatural cloud that was approaching his ship. “I’ve done what I said I would — what you asked of me. I want what you promised.”
Dennison nodded. “What you were promised is also at hand.”
The cloud swarmed over the bow of the ship, over four football fields in distance from the bridge. Screams now mixed with the chanting. Those farther back reacted, some staying in place, others shoving and pushing to try to get away from the rapidly approaching cloud. It was mass panic, but as the cloud slid down the deck, those caught in it quickly became quiet.
“What is that?” Verquist demanded.
“What you were promised. The beginning of it, anyway.” Verquist could now see that the cloud appeared to be a swarm of flying insects. One smashed against the bridge glass but rebounded, buzzing around, searching for a way in. They were machines, Verquist could see that now, smaller than mosquitoes, almost invisible to the naked eye. They poured through the open side doors to the bridge. Verquist dashed toward the rear of the bridge, through the door leading to his cabin.
He slammed it shut and locked it. Screams, quickly cut off, echoed through the expensive wood. Verquist threw himself into the chair behind his large mahogany desk. He pulled open a drawer and wrapped his hand around the pearl handle of a revolver. He pointed it at the door.
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