But in an old church in Somaliland, I saw etched in the wall the image of two massive peaks, both snowcapped. I recognized one of them to be Kilimanjaro, the queen of all African mountains. The other was a mystery to me, because although there are other peaks near Kilimanjaro, none come close in height, yet in this drawing, the other was just as tall. So I traveled south to that land taking scrolls with me.
From one scroll, I learned there was a Watcher who traveled to the same place, around three thousand two hundred years before the birth of Christ, acting on the report of a traveler who had come down the Nile River with a strange tale of a black metal forest growing out the side of a tall mountain. The tale was strange enough, but the reference to black metal much like the b’ja made it worth investigating.
I can only imagine how difficult that trip was for him, as over five thousand years later, I encountered so much trouble getting there. He traveled across Europe to the Middle East, and then into Egypt. The Horus-Guides still ruled there, but he made safe transit with the assistance of other Watchers already in place in that kingdom. He then traveled along the east coast of Africa and suffered much until he arrived at the place where he was to strike inland. It did not take him long to see the first of the White Sisters, Kilimanjaro, covered in snow far on the horizon. Soon he saw the second, farther west, the one the base was located in where the strange forest grew.
I do not know if word of his journey and destination was picked up by The Mission. From what I have learned, it is apparent that both sides had spies, who for varying reasons passed information to the other side. Or perhaps what was going on at the The Ones Who Wait’s base simply reached such a level that it was discovered by The Mission on its own.
Certainly the watcher’s report about what was being done to the mountain backed up the rumor. From a long distance away, the Watcher reported seeing along the northern slope a vast network of black, like a spiderweb, covering most of the surface. Beasts of metal stalked among the web, working, continuing to build. Such beasts were written of in other places and were known to do the bidding of the Airlia and their followers.
The Watcher circled to the north and hid to watch what was happening and try to understand its purpose.
The second week he was there, a strange thing happened. A small glowing sphere of gold flew by. Watchers in other scrolls reported seeing such things. They also are tools of the Airlia. It circled the mountain and then disappeared.
Two days later sky ships came. Nine black forms long and lean, like knives against the sky. They too were made of b’ja, the sacred metal. A golden light crackled on the tips of the sky ships, then jumped down to the ground and into the mountain.
The top of the mountain exploded. A blast of air hit the Watcher even though he was miles away, knocking him off his feet and tumbling him about as the sky darkened from the dirt blown into the air. The sky ships departed, but the end of the mountain continued. Red, boiling earth flowed out of what remained.
I have seen the results of this. I have been to what was once the other White Sister. It is now called Ngorongoro Crater. It was once a peak as high as Kilamanjaro. Only half the mountain and the crater remain today.
Whatever The Ones Who Wait had been up to, it had failed.
“My family was recruited by this Watcher to keep an eye on the remains of the base,” Mualama said. “But we weren’t told what it was. Just to watch and report.”
“Some of this base must still exist, though,” Che Lu said. “The dragon machine went there after getting the key from Turcotte.”
“It is possible, but neither I nor anyone else in my family saw anything for as long as could be remembered.”
“You did the right thing by leaving the Watchers,” Che Lu said.
“I didn’t leave them,” Mualama said. “I betrayed them. What if they are right? What if the course of action they have tried to follow for so long is the right one? To be neutral. To support neither Artad’s or Aspasia’s side. If they are right, then I may be the greatest traitor ever by giving the Watcher headquarters to Turcotte.”
“I think you overestimate your role and underestimate the active role the Watchers have played,” Che Lu said.
“Perhaps,” Mualama said.
“Are you all right?” Che Lu pointed at his ear.
Mualama reached up and his hand came away with several drops of blood on it. “An infection I picked up in Africa. Quite irritating.”
Easter Island
Popeye McGraw felt the sand on his belly. He lay in the surf and slowly looked from side to side. Nothing moving on the beach. The towering Moai statues on the slope of the volcano were all turned inland. He wondered why these looked to land, while ones on the beach at Anakena looked out to sea.
“Damn,” Popeye muttered to himself. He could feel the age of those statues. He’d grown up in Maine where old burial mounds existed, dating from the earliest inhabitants of that land. He knew these statues predated those. He’d always felt a shiver as a kid when he’d walked those mounds.
They’d left the zodiac offshore about five hundred meters, just inside the shield wall, held in place with the sea anchors. They had debated whether or not to beach the craft, but decided it was more secure leaving it offshore. The cruise around the west shore of the island to the southwest tip had been uneventful. Nothing moved along the rocky cliffs that made up the shore.
Olivetti was behind him. Popeye felt the tug as his partner pulled his fins off. Then Olivetti crawled next to him and slightly forward. Popeye returned the favor, removing his partner’s fins and looping the straps over his non-firing forearm. Olivetti glanced over his shoulder at Popeye, who nodded.
The two SEALs stood and dashed inland. They made it to the base that supported the Moai and stuffed their fins in their packs.
Popeye looked up the steep slope of the volcano. “Ready?”
“Born ready.”
Giza Plateau
Duncan realized her hands were shaking as she hooked up the wires from the Ark to the crown. She still had a headache from her first experience, but the draw was too great. She connected all three leads, then placed the crown on her head.
Immediately, she was no longer in the Hall. She was in a large, enclosed space. The floor was black metal. The walls curved to meet a hundred meters overhead. Bouncers rested in metal cradles. Eighteen of them.
She knew that she was in the hold of the mothership.
Airlia moved about, preparing the bouncers, moving equipment. She saw the Ark on a cart. An Airlia was carrying the Grail, placing it inside. Then rolling the Ark over to one of the bouncers. The Airlia was treating it as a piece of equipment, not an object of veneration.
Her attention was drawn to one side of the cargo bay as two large doors opened. She could see out, noting that the mothership was hovering about a mile above the planet’s surface. Bouncers began leaving the hold, going about their missions. Looking down, Duncan saw water extending to the horizon in all directions.
A Talon spacecraft passed by between the mothership and the ocean. Something about what she saw disturbed Duncan; something wasn’t right.
Duncan started, feeling a lance of pain in her temples. She grabbed the crown and pulled it off. She felt as if every ounce of energy had been drained from her body. She set the crownm down and sat with her back to the Ark’s stand. Her eyelids drooped, her mind shutting down. Just before she fell asleep, her mind replayed what she had seen. The Talon was racing toward the horizon, the sun glinting off its black skin—no, that was it, she realized with alarm. There were two suns in the sky, one large, like the one she knew, but there was a second smaller, red one close to it.
CHAPTER 10
Area 51
Major Quinn had to almost run to keep up with Turcotte as he walked across the hangar toward the elevator. “Did you get the ring?”
Turcotte held it up briefly, then asked his own question. “What do you have?” Yakov followed behind, walking more slowly.
“Who?”
“A mixed Special Forces-SEAL team from Space Command.” Quinn pointed toward one of the walls that crossed the large hangar. “They’re in there.”
Turcotte abruptly changed direction. Quinn opened a door in the partition and they entered a corner of Hangar 1. Satellite imagery was tacked to a large piece of plywood, the corresponding map sheets covered with acetate pinned next to the pictures. Several men in black jumpsuits stood in front of the maps, marker in hand, comparing them with latest downloaded photos of the same sites.
One of them, a tall man with a shaved head and large black mustache, turned at the sound of the door shutting behind Yakov. He came striding over.
He snapped a salute. “Lieutenant Graves.”
Turcotte returned the salute, then extended his hand. “Mike Turcotte.” Graves nodded. “I heard we’re going after the sons-a-bitches who took out our men on the shuttle. Every man here is a volunteer and eager to kick some ass.”
Turcotte felt at home, having been in this type of planning situation many times before in his Special Forces career. It was called “isolation,” where the team was given its mission statement and the intelligence data needed to plan the operation.
“The last time you tried this mission,” Yakov said, “it did not go well.” Graves frowned at the Russian and Turcotte quickly introduced Yakov.
“What do you have on the underground river?” Turcotte asked.
Quinn pointed at one of the boards as they walked across the room. There was a series of satellite imagery tacked on it. “There’s a KH-14 always on duty over that area, supporting our peacekeeping force in the Sinai. I had a buddy at NSA do a complete spectrographic workout of Giza and the Nile.”
“We’re looking for an underground river running from the Nile, below Giza, and back to the Nile,” Turcotte said.
Quinn didn’t hesitate for a beat. He tapped a color-filled picture. “Thermal. High discretion.” Quinn tilted his glasses, peering at it. “There. See the change. Something’s going on in the river on the west bank—right there. Then see how the shoreline at the spot is a little cooler, then follow the line looping around to Giza and back to the Nile. That’s your underground river.”
“How come no one’s seen this before?” Turcotte asked.
Quinn gave a short laugh. “This is top-secret, top-of-the-line imagery. Like we’re going to give it to someone? And there was no strategic or tactical interest in the Nile and Giza before this.”
Turcotte ran his fingers over the photo, noting the slight change in temperature on the shoreline, a cooler spot where water ran underneath the bank. “That’s how we’re getting in.”
“What do you think we should do for infiltration?” Graves asked.
Turcotte picked up a marker and circled the location where the underwater river branched out from the Nile, two kilometers below the Giza Plateau. “Water drop right here. Then we go into the tunnel.”
“Drop from a bouncer?” Graves asked. Turcotte had given that matter some thought on the flight back from England. “They aren’t rigged for that. We’ll take a bouncer to Israel to save time, but we’ll go in by conventional means from there.”
Major Quinn spoke up. “I’ve lined up an MC-130 out of Germany to meet you in Israel.”
An MC-130 was a specially modified C-130 transport plane, designed to be able to fly in all types of weather and at low level, below radar. Turcotte tapped the map. “We’ll go in low on the C-130 and parachute at less than two hundred feet with multiple drogue chutes rigged for underwater.”
Graves frowned. “Scuba? Why not use what we’re trained on?” He pointed to the wall where black suits were lined up, like an army of drones. “TASC-suits?” Turcotte asked. “What’s that?” Yakov asked. “Stands for Tactical Articulated Space Combat suit,” Graves explained. “Each suit is self-contained.” He looked at Turcotte. “If you’re going with us, you’ll have to run through the mentor program to learn how to operate the suit, which takes about two hours. And then you’re going to have to learn to actually use them in action, which isn’t exactly—”
Turcotte cut him off. “But they give us an advantage, correct?”
“Yes, sir. A lot of advantages. You’ll be completely armored, stronger, and the weapons are extremely accurate when using the suits aiming system. You have a built in rebreather so we can infiltrate directly into the water.”
“And I can learn to use it in a basic mode quickly, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Great.”
Graves turned back to the map. “Once we go into this underground river, do we have any idea where we’re going?”
Turcotte pointed at a surface photo of the Great Sphinx. “As near as we can tell, our objective is directly below that.”
“Does the river run to it?” Graves asked.
“Not directly,” Turcotte admitted, remembering Burton’s account. “We’re hoping we get some more information before we go wheels up. We do have directions once we go up the shaft that Burton came down. That shaft intersects with the river.” Turcotte ran through the account Burton mapped from the Hall of Records chamber to the one he was trapped in. “If his pace count is one hundred and sixteen steps per hundred meters, we can use that to approximate the location of these doors.”
“And the ring which helps find these doors and open them?” Graves asked. Turcotte reached into his pocket and pulled out the Watcher key.
“And exfiltration?” Graves asked.
Turcotte had been expecting that. It was something every special-ops man asked when given an assignment, and something that was rarely given in the mission briefing as higher commands always were much more concerned about getting the men in than getting them out.
“Helicopters from the peacekeeping force,” Turcotte said. “They can come in from South Camp and retrieve us. But we have to be in the river, ready to be picked up an hour before dawn. If we’re later than that, forget about getting out by chopper, and it’s a long walk.”
“Roger that,” Graves said.
“And Easter Island?” Yakov asked. “Qian-Ling? What is going on there?”
“Let’s go down to the conference room for that,” Turcotte suggested. He slapped Graves on the shoulder. “Keep planning and get my suit ready to be rigged.” He pulled one of the large-scale images of the Giza Plateau off the board.
“Yes, sir.”
Turcotte, Yakov, and Quinn headed for the elevator. “Uh, sir—” Quinn paused.
“Yes?”
“There’s some interesting material in the folders you took from the Russian Archives.”
“Such as?”
Quinn opened a folder. “The file which held the photo of Mount Ararat… was the search for Noah’s Ark. Hitler sent teams around the world looking for the place it supposedly came to rest. Naturally, Mount Ararat was one of those places.”
“Did they find it?”
“It doesn’t appear so.”
“Why would they be looking for Noah’s Ark?” Turcotte asked.
“Perhaps it is something else,” Yakov said, “as all other legends have turned out to be.”
“What else do you have?” Turcotte was studying the Nile imagery, committing it to memory. Quinn closed the folder. He had one more that he hadn’t opened yet. Quinn hesitated, fingers running along the edge of the manila folder.
“Well?” Turcotte pressed as they reached the elevator.
“I was checking CIA case files on the Watchers, seeing if I could find another ring. When I pulled what they have now, it was cross-referenced with some other files, um—” He paused.
“What other files?” Turcotte checked his watch.
“It’s just a list,” Quinn said, “of people the CIA thought needed watching; targeting people who they suspect had some sort of connection with The Watchers or The Mission or The Ones That Wait. You have to understand that they did this in a
rush after the revelations of what was here.”
“And?” Turcotte was surprised at Quinn’s sudden reticence. The elevator doors opened and they got in.
“Doctor Duncan’s name is on it.”
“For suspicion of what?” Turcotte snapped.
“Just as requiring further investigation,” Quinn said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Turcotte took a step toward the smaller major. Yakov put out an arm across Turcotte’s chest. “Easy.”
“It’s bull,” Turcotte said. “Clowns In Action—I worked with them before and they couldn’t—” He caught himself. “We’ve got more important things to do.”
As he walked out of the elevator toward the conference room, Quinn gave Yakov a questioning glance. The Russian merely shrugged his large shoulders.
Easter Island
Popeye McGraw stared down at the Easter Island International Airport as Olivetti recorded the scene on a digital recorder.
“Damn,” Popeye said.
The fact that Olivetti said nothing in response indicated the depth the effect of the scene below had on the larger SEAL.
A strange collection of people and equipment were all over the airfield and the surrounding area. Six-legged machines stalked about on their tasks, while people moved around as if in a stupor. Various aircraft from the Washington lined the runway in different stages of either assembly or disassembly, it was hard to tell.
“They ain’t normal, those people,” Olivetti muttered.
Popeye raked the area with the binoculars, checking everything. There were several clusters of people staked out next to the runway, heads all pointing inward as mechanical robots walked by, spraying something over them.
He could see the entrance to the tunnel that led to the guardian computer chamber. A squad of marines with M-16s stood there. Popeye twisted the focus. The men had blank expressions, but their hands held the weapons tightly.
Popeye had often boasted in bars that a Navy SEAL could kick butt on a dozen marines. But that was in a bar. Automatic weapons were a great equalizer.
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