The Mission a5-3

by Robert Doherty

  The entryway was cramped, and with great difficulty Yakov and Norward had disinfected the outside of their suits and the other plastic cases they stacked in the entryway. Then they unsuited, placing the garments into sealed plastic bags and shoving the empty cases back outside.

  Norward was setting up the equipment when Turcotte and Kenyon arrived at the entry. The two disinfected and unsuited, passing through the air lock. Kenyon carefully carried the samples, sealed inside his waist pack.

  To handle a Level 4 bio-agent required either a full suit or a glove box. On top of the table, Norward set up the latter. It was a device four feet wide, by three tall, by three wide. It had its own one-way mini air lock so they could put samples in — once in, the sample had to stay there until they took the box back to the Level 4 lab and could sterilize the inside.

  There were numerous compartments so they could keep samples separate and not contaminate each other. There was also a microscope built into the box, so they could examine the samples.

  “What are you doing?” Turcotte asked. He was wiping sweat off his forehead with a towel. Yakov was sitting on the floor of the habitat, taking a drink of water from a canteen.

  Kenyon was placing the waist pack inside the air lock for the glove box. “What we have to find is a brick — a block of virus particles. A brick contains billions of virus particles, gathered together, waiting to move on to the next host.” Turcotte glanced at Yakov. The Russian shrugged.

  Finished with the mechanical task of getting the box ready, Kenyon went to work. Stepping up to the side of the box, Kenyon stuck his hands through two openings, flexing his fingers into the heavy-duty gloves inside. Deftly, he opened the pack, removing the tubes holding the various samples. He sorted those out, placing the tubes in racks.

  “I’m going to test it for Ebola, Marburg, and Ebola3,” Kenyon said. He took samples and mixed them with solutions in preset tubes that had an agent that would react to the specific virus. The tubes were blue.

  “They’ll turn red if the virus was recognized,” Norward explained as Kenyon worked.

  While they waited for a possible reaction, Kenyon put another sample from the brick onto a slide and put the slide into the other end of the scope and pressed his eye up against it.

  Kenyon’s voice startled Turcotte. “I don’t think it’s Ebola3.” Kenyon pointed at the microscope and gestured to Norward. “Take a look.”

  Norward bent over and peered. All he could see was a mass of particles — there was no chance of seeing an individual virus to get a visual ID.

  “How can you tell that’s not Ebola3?”

  “I know Ebola3 and I’ve seen bricks from Ebola3,” Kenyon said. “That doesn’t look like an Ebola3 brick.”

  “One of the other two Ebolas?” Norward asked.

  Kenyon looked down into the box at the four test tubes with the various Ebola reactants. They were still blue. “No.”

  “Marburg?” Norward asked, hoping that at least they would know what they were up against. Even though there was no cure or vaccine for each of the viruses he had just mentioned, knowing the enemy would help clarify the situation.

  Kenyon was looking in the box. “No.” All test tubes were still blue and the requisite time had passed. “It’s not a known. Could be a mutation of a known.”

  Despite the air-conditioning pumping outside, Norward felt a trickle of sweat run down his back.

  “Any idea what it is?” Yakov asked.

  “It’s definitely a virus,” Kenyon said. “But it’s moving way too fast. It’s got to be passed on quicker than blood contact to hit this many people so quickly. And it looks like it’s one hundred percent fatal.”

  “We didn’t check the town,” Turcotte said. “Maybe someone’s alive.” “Maybe.” Kenyon didn’t sound very optimistic.

  “Could it be airborne?” Norward whispered, the very thought enough to make him wish he were very far away from here.

  Kenyon stared at the isolation box. “I never thought we’d see an airborne virus that killed this quickly and could stay alive in the open. It doesn’t compute in the natural scale of things,” Kenyon said. “But…” He shook his head. “But it’s got to be vectoring some way quicker than body fluid.”

  “The Black Death was transmitted by fleas,” Yakov said. “Could this virus be carried by some sort of animal or fly or something like that?”

  Kenyon was still looking through the microscope. “Possibly. But then, it probably doesn’t kill its host. We need more information. And quickly.”

  * * *

  Peter Shartran carefully dipped the tea bag in a mug of hot water. He placed it on a spoon, then wrapped the string around, squeezing the last drops out, then discarded the bag into the waste can next to his desk. He cradled both hands around the mug and leaned back in his large swivel chair, staring at the oversized computer screen in front of him. He had six programs accessed, and his eyes flickered from one to another.

  The NSA was established in 1952 by President Truman as a replacement for the Armed Forces Security Agency. It was charged with two major responsibilities: safeguarding the communications of the armed forces and monitoring the communications of other countries to gather intelligence. The term “communications” had changed from the original mandate in 1952. Back then the primary concern was radio. Now, with the age of satellites and computers, it involved all electronic media.

  Shartran had been “given” a special tasking by his supervisor — to watch two separate locations, one in South America and one in China. So far it had been uninteresting, but mainly because he had spent the last several hours shifting through the communications and signals generated by Chinese forces and trying to get an order of battle on forces deployed near Qian-Ling, a routine task for an intelligence analyst. There had been nothing from the South America locale.

  Shartran’s ears and eyes were a battery of sophisticated and tremendously expensive equipment. A KH-12 satellite had been moved over to a fixed orbit over Qian-Ling in China. Covering South America was much easier, as he had simply tapped into the Department of Defense antidrug network that blanketed that region of the world.

  Shartran took a sip of his tea, preparing to get back to work on the order of battle, when a flashing symbol on one of the displays caught his attention. Several minutes before, something most unusual had happened: someone had bounced a signal off a GPS satellite and then received a back signal through the satellite.

  The signal was strange because the satellite uplink went to the GPS satellite instead of one of the commercial satellites that handled SATCOM traffic.

  GPS, which stood for ground positioning system, was a series of satellites in fixed orbits that continuously emitted location information that could be downloaded by GPRs — ground positioning receivers. The transmission had been sent up in such a frequency and modulation that it piggybacked on top of the normal GPS transmission on the way back down both times.

  Shartran looked at the data and took another sip of tea as he considered the brief burst. Why would someone do that? The first and most obvious reason was to hide both brief transmissions. Shartran knew that even a one-second burst using modern encoding devices was enough to transmit a whole message, but maybe this wasn’t a message. The key question was why use the GPS satellite?

  “Because they want to know where something is,” Shartran said out loud. But then, why didn’t the people on the other end simply tell the first transmitters their location? The answer came to him as quickly as he thought the question: because there was no one at the second site. It was all clicking now, and the more Shartran thought about it, the more his respect grew for whoever had thought of this. Using the GPS signal allowed the first transmitter to get a fix on the response, which was blindly broadcast up. And there was more. Maybe, just maybe, Shartran thought, the second signal was very weak and needed the GPS signal to add to its power.

  “Most interesting,” he muttered as he summarized the information on his computer a
nd e-mailed it into the Pentagon intelligence summary section. As the report flashed along the electronic highway, it fell in among hundreds of other summaries coming out of the vast octopus of intelligence agencies the United States fielded. And there it spooled, waiting to be correlated and even perhaps read. But Shartran also made a copy and sent it to the address his supervisor had told him to.

  CHAPTER 14

  “This is our main training area,” Osebold told Duncan.

  The dominating feature of the large hangar was a three-story-high water tank, almost a hundred meters in diameter. The exterior of the tank was painted a flat gray. Several ramps went up the side of the tank. There were also tracks suspended from the ceiling over the top of the tank, several having various devices hanging down from them.

  There were several men gathered around the top edge of the tank, looking down at something inside. They wore shorts and black T-shirts with the trident, eagle, flintlock pistol, and anchor symbol of the Navy SEALs on the front. Each of the men looked as if he spent his entire day split between the gym and the beach — bronzed, well-muscled warriors. Captain Osebold led Duncan over to the side of the tank where his crew was.

  “Aren’t you cutting it tight for launch?” Duncan asked.

  As if on cue, the speaker blared once more. “Perform IMU preflight calibration.”

  “We’ll make it,” Osebold said.

  “How did the SEALs get tagged for this?” Duncan asked.

  “Because we’re used to operating in a nonbreathing environment. Plus we have some degree of familiarity with a sort of zero-g operational area.”

  Duncan knew about the SEALs. The acronym stood for sea, air, land — which pretty much had covered the three environments the naval commandos had been asked to work in up to now. Duncan wondered where they would add the “space” to their name.

  SEALs were the most physically fit of all the special operations forces, taking great pride in their conditioning. They were adept at operating underwater with a variety of equipment, and it did make sense for them to be picked for a combat space force.

  The SEALs had grown out of the Navy frogmen in World War II, called UDTs — underwater demolition teams — at the same time Turcotte’s Special Forces had grown out of the OSS, Office of Strategic Services. The SEALs had always been less of a sneaky-Pete type organization, more oriented toward combat. Along with Special Forces, the SEALs had been the most decorated force in Vietnam. The thing Turcotte had impressed Duncan with was that the SEALs had never in their entire history left behind one of their own — be he dead or wounded. No Navy SEAL had ever been taken prisoner.

  But Duncan had to wonder why the military had been brought in on this operation. The military had run Area 51 and Dulce. Duncan returned her attention to this new unit. A rack was behind the team, holding five roughly human-shaped suits.

  Osebold saw Duncan’s glance. “Those are our TASC-suits. We use them instead of NASA’s space suits.”

  Duncan looked more closely at the suits. They were long, almost seven feet from the top of the helmet to the legs. The exterior seemed to be made of a hard black material with articulated joints. The helmet had no visor, just a camera and several lights and sensors on top and in the front.

  The arms ended in a flat black plate instead of a glove. The same with the legs — no feet, just the plate. Before Duncan had the chance to ask, Captain Osebold was pulling her to the side.

  “What is that?” Duncan demanded.

  A large gray tank, like a coffin, was raised off the floor. The lid was open. It reminded Duncan very much of what they had rescued Johnny Simmons from in Majestic’s secret biolab in Dulce.

  “That’s how we get fitted for the TASC-suit,” Osebold said. “A person gets in, we pump it full, and it basically makes a body cast. Much like a dentist makes a mold of your teeth — except we need the entire body.”

  Duncan stared at it. “Can I ask why the military is involved in this?”

  Osebold smiled, revealing even teeth. “Ma’am, I just do what I’m told to. Space Command put together my team a couple of years ago and we’ve been preparing for a combat mission in space ever since.”

  “Do you anticipate combat?” Duncan was confused.

  “No, ma’am. Just a recovery mission. But—” Osebold shrugged. “You never know.”

  “Welcome to the bitch.” Lieutenant Terrel walked up, interrupting her train of thought. He pointed at the suits. “Getting in one of those isn’t much better than the mold tank.”

  “Why does—” Duncan began, but Ms. Kopina, the mission specialist, slapped her palm on the tank.

  “The TASC-suit is an exoskeleton.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the rack. “See how much thicker each one is than the human that goes inside? Once inside, a person has about four inches all around. That includes protective armor, power system, environmental system, and external suit nervous system. On top of that, a computer system gets carried on your back, but we’ll get to that in a little bit.”

  Kopina walked over to the rack and stood next to one of them. “This suit has taken fifteen years of development. We put as much work into this at Space Command as the Air Force put into the Stealth bomber. This suit represents four billion dollars of research and experimentation.”

  “I’m surprised I haven’t heard of this program.” “It was highly classified,” Osebold said, as if that explained everything quite satisfactorily.

  * * *

  It was dark inside the Cube conference room, only a single light in the corner giving any relief. Larry Kincaid had his feet up on the conference table, leaning far back in a seat, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He was staring at his computer screen.

  “No smoking,” Major Quinn said with no emphasis on the words. He sat down across from Kincaid, several file folders under his arm.

  Kincaid took another puff. “What ya got?”

  “The bodies from the vats at Scorpion Base have been flown in. They’re not the same as what we got here with the two STAAR bodies.”

  “What’s different?”

  “These don’t have any of the Airlia genes. Just plain human clones.”

  “So they were growing their own people down there?” Kincaid wasn’t surprised by much anymore.

  “Looks like it.”

  “And what exactly are these STAAR people?”

  “Autopsy’s done on the ones we had here. Or as done as the UNAOC people can do.”

  “And?”

  “And those two STAAR people aren’t people, but they aren’t aliens either. Some kind of DNA combination. Mostly human”—Quinn thumbed through the papers—“eightysix percent human. Other than eyes, there’s some discrepancy in the skin pigment, the hair. That’s the obvious stuff. The not-so-obvious stuff is that the brain is a little different.”

  “Different how?” Kincaid asked.

  “The frontal lobe is a little bigger, and they have more connections between the two hemispheres.”

  “Does that make them smarter?” Kincaid wanted to know.

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Quinn smiled. “Hell, we’re doing the autopsy on them, remember, not the other way around.”

  “Yeah, well, Turcotte and those USAMRIID guys are doing autopsies on some human bodies down in South America.”

  “Another strange thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Their genitalia are underformed. The UNAOC people think they must reproduce mechanically. Perhaps using the cloning vats.”

  “They can’t have sex?” Kincaid asked.

  “Doesn’t look like it was important to them.” Quinn pointed at the cigarette. “Got a spare?”

  Kincaid pulled a pack out of his shirt pocket and extended it. There was only one cigarette in it.

  “Damn.” Kincaid shook his head. “The stuff keeps getting deeper and deeper.” “What about South America?” Quinn asked as he fired up.

  “They’ve forwarded what they’ve found to USAMRIID. Hope to get some sort of r
eadout shortly on what the bug is. Imagery shows it’s spreading. Two more villages wiped out. Closing in on two thousand dead. Anything on Temiltepec?”

  “The classified records say that the guardian was recovered at Temiltepec,” Quinn said. He ignored the look that statement garnered him from Kincaid. “But no matter how well someone tries to cover up, there’s always a loose end.”

  “And what thread did you find to pull on?” Kincaid asked.

  “I pulled the classified flight record for Groom Lake,” Quinn said.

  “And?”

  “And on those dates that the classified record shows that someone from Majestic went to Temiltepec, the flight log from the Groom Lake tower indicates an Air Force executive transport plane with a flight plan for La Paz.”

  “Bolivia.”

  “Long way from Mexico,” Quinn said.

  “Indeed.”

  “In fact, it’s pretty close to the ruins at Tiahuanaco.”

  “So the guardian might have been there?”

  “It’s possible.”

  Kincaid thought about it. “What about The Mission?”

  Quinn pulled out a file folder with a red TOP SECRET stamp at the top and bottom. “I found this in the files. The CIA rep to Majestic-12 asked the same question a couple of years ago. There’s not much here, but what is written is pretty remarkable.

  “The CIA had reports of a place called The Mission in South America.” Quinn smiled. “When they chased Che Guevara, they thought that was where he was heading.”

  “You’re pulling my leg,” Kincaid said. “Che Guevara?”

  “I’m not kidding. This Mission place sounds like it’s been around awhile. The CIA tried backtracking it. The most current report says it might have been in Bolivia — where Che was killed — but that it moved sometime in the seventies. Current location unknown, but they think it’s still in South America somewhere.” “Come on—” Kincaid began, but Quinn cut him off.

  “No, wait a second. This is interesting. This report says that before he went to Cuba. Che first spent a couple of years traveling all over South America on foot and by bicycle. He then made his living by writing articles about ruins in South America.”