There were several clicks—bolts slamming home in their breaches—but no rounds were fired. Several of the soldiers were working their bolts, trying to clear what they obviously thought was a misfire. Turcotte didn’t take the time to wonder about this as he grabbed the muzzle of the nearest man’s AK-47 and ripped it out of his hands, turned it about, and slammed the stock into the man’s head, dropping him like a stone. He stepped back, weapon in his cuffed hands as the other five soldiers surrounded him.
The colonel calmly turned toward the civilian and fired one round, hitting the man square in the center of his forehead, blood and brain splattering the sand behind.
The colonel yelled something in Arabic and the five soldiers half turned toward him.
“Get down,” the colonel said to Turcotte in a very calm voice as he swung up a mini-Uzi submachine gun with his free hand from out of the satchel looped over his shoulder.
Turcotte dove into the sand as a spray of bullets cut down the soldiers. Slowly he got to his feet. Turcotte watched the colonel, waiting for whatever would come next.
“We must go,” the colonel said, gesturing with the smoking muzzle of the mini-Uzi toward the truck. “I hope you can drive this thing.”
“Who are you?” Turcotte asked.
“Colonel Ahid Fassid of the Egyptian army,” he said. “Military intelligence. I had to pull quite a few strings to be the one to pick you up at the Nile. Fortunately the regular army becomes very afraid when they see credentials from an intelligence officer of the general staff.”
“I don’t understand,” Turcotte said.
Fassid sighed. “It is the way things are done here. How do you think we have kept the peace for so long? My father and all my uncles died in the wars. We cannot do that anymore. I also work for the Mossad when its aims and mine coincide and no harm will be brought to my country. And the Mossad has done things for me when our aims also have been the same. I received a call from a friend in the Mossad this morning, asking me to keep an eye out for you. This—” he indicated the bodies “—is far beyond anything I have done before. Now I must give up my life here.”
“Why didn’t their weapons work?” Turcotte asked.
“I inspected them,” Fassid said. “And removed the firing pins. Now, let us leave here. A helicopter is inbound to a rendezvous point.”
CHAPTER 17
Qian-Ling, China
“My name is Ts’ang Chieh, court official to the most noble Emperor Shi Huangdi, Commander of all the World, the Hidden Ruler whose reign goes from rising to setting sun and beyond.” A smile creased the unlined face. “At least that is what we showed to the world in our time.”
“I am Lexina, leader of The Ones Who Wait, and these are Elek and Coridan of my order. The machine taught you our language?”
Ts’ang was in front of the guardian, just released from its glow. “To one who knows, the ways of the guardian are many. I have been updated on the current situation. It is most grave. The forces of Aspasia’s Shadow are mobilizing. There is much I do not understand yet, but there is danger.”
“Does the Emperor sleep below?” Lexina asked.
Ts’ang nodded. “He sleeps.”
“Is the Emperor Shi Huangdi actually Artad?”
“In a manner of speaking, he was. The Emperor Shi Huangdi wore the ka of Artad, thus he was Artad.”
“But the real Artad is here?” Lexina asked.
“Yes. He has slept for almost thirteen thousand years.”
Lexina’s body was so tense, it was practically vibrating. “Will you waken him now?”
Ts’ang nodded. “It is time.”
Vicinity, Cairo, Egypt
Turcotte lay on his back in the sand looking up at the clear blue desert sky while Fassid nervously paced back and forth just below the crest of the dune. They were six miles from the site of Turcotte’s aborted assassination. Fassid checked his watch for the tenth time in the last five minutes.
“Two minutes before, two minutes after,” Turcotte said.
“What?”
Turcotte was tired, emotionally and physically exhausted. He felt rather detached and calm, an unusual state for him on an exfiltration pickup zone in hostile territory. “Exfiltration window in special ops is two minutes before the appointed, until two minutes after. Four minutes altogether. If the exfil aircraft doesn’t show in that window, you go to the emergency plan. Do you have an emergency plan?”
“Yes,” Fassid said. “I start praying to Allah.”
“Not much of a plan,” Turcotte noted.
“I didn’t have much time,” Fassid said. He looked at his watch. “Our window has just opened.” He cocked his head. “I hear nothing.”
Turcotte couldn’t even add up the number of times on training and real missions when he’d listened for the sound of helicopter blades. He estimated that over half of those occasions he’d been disappointed and left standing on the pickup zone (PZ) as the window closed, left to move to an alternate PZ or into an escape and evasion plan. It was why he wasn’t even getting up, searching the horizon. If the Israeli helicopter showed, fine. If it didn’t, he was certainly better off than he’d been an hour ago when he’d anticipated imminent death. Frankly, he didn’t much care.
“Ah!” Fassid was jumping up and down like a schoolchild as a small helicopter popped up over the sand dune and swung around to come in for a landing forty feet away. It was amazingly quiet, and Turcotte knew why as he recognized the model—the McDonnell-Douglas MDX.
Built around the venerable MD-530 bubble frame, the MDX was on the cutting edge, incorporating NOTAR—no tail rotor—technology, thus eliminating the largest producer of noise on helicopters: the small tail rotor had to rotate at much higher speeds than the main blades. Instead of a tail rotor, compressed air was ejected from the side of the tail boom to keep the helicopter’s torque in balance.
“Come on, come on,” Fassid grabbed Turcotte’s arm.
Turcotte got to his feet and put his hand over his eyes for some protection against the blowing sand. He followed Fassid on board, getting into the backseat. The pilot and co-pilot immediately took off, even before he had the door shut behind him.
The helicopter banked hard, then sped east, less than ten feet above the sand. The pilots kept the craft low and in a couple of minutes they reached the Nile, skimming across the surface of the water, barely missing a scow’s mast, then over the desert on the other side, heading toward the Gulf of Suez.
Turcotte reached up and pulled down a headset hanging from the ceiling and put it on. He listened as the pilots called out checkpoints to each other, confirming their escape route. Then a tone chimed, and one of the pilots cursed.
“What’s that?” Turcotte asked.
“Radar lock from above,” the co-pilot responded. Turcotte leaned against the glass and looked up. Etched against the blue sky were two white contrails from Egyptian jets.
“We know we got picked up on radar coming in,” the co-pilot informed him, “and they’ve scrambled everything they can get in the air to track us down.”
“You’ve got company at eleven o’clock,” Turcotte told them. He was amazed the Israelis had continued and made the pickup if they’d been detected. Every helicopter pilot he’d ever met had described the possibility of a battle between a helicopter and a jet as the equivalent of that between a poodle and a pit bull.
“How far until our feet are wet?” Turcotte asked.
“Forty-six miles to the Gulf,” the co-pilot answered. “But remember, we gave the Sinai back to the Egyptians in the peace accord.”
“And we stationed peacekeepers on the Sinai,” Turcotte said. “Can you get me a radio link to South Camp?”
South Camp was located near Sharm El Sheikh, on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula and home to part of the multinational peacekeeping force put in place by the United Nations after the Camp David Peace Accords in 1979. Turcotte knew there was a strong U.S. presence there.
“You’ve got a
channel on the MNF frequency,” the co-pilot said. “Better buckle up.”
Turcotte was slammed against the side door as the helicopter turned perpendicular to the ground and dove into a wadi, now ever closer to the ground, something Turcotte had not thought possible.
“Can you get us over the water?” Turcotte asked the co-pilot, before he keyed the radio. He could see that the two jets were in a steep dive, heading toward them.
“We’re sure going to try. We’ve got a few tricks we can use.”
Turcotte keyed the radio and demanded to speak to the senior American officer at South Camp. As Turcotte talked to South Camp, the MDX began bobbing and weaving as the two jets rapidly approached.
Out of the comer of his eye, Turcotte saw a missile flash by, then explode into a sand dune. He felt his stomach tighten as the MDX spun one hundred and eighty degrees, abruptly halting forward movement. The two jets roared past, then the helicopter reversed once more and continued on course. It took the jets almost a dozen miles to loop around for another pass.
“What are they doing?” the co-pilot yelled.
Turcotte slid the side door open and leaned out. He could see the two Egyptian planes coming around, very low this time, at just slightly faster than their stall speed. “Gun run,” Turcotte replied. “Low and as slow as they can go.” He knew that if they were going to fire missiles again, the jets would be much higher to try to keep a heat lock. The helicopter must have some sort of anti-radar device and heat diffusers given that they had survived the first attack.
“Range?” the co-pilot wanted to know.
“Two miles and closing,” Turcotte informed the pilots.
“They’ll wait until they’re right behind us before shooting. Maybe a quarter mile,” the pilot said.
“How do you know that?” Turcotte asked.
“We’ve read their tactical manuals,” the pilot said.
“One mile and closing,” Turcotte said. “How far to the coast?” he asked. “Eight miles.”
He knew they weren’t going to make it. The two planes coming dead on for the tail of the helicopter looked like rapidly approaching darts.
“Half mile,” Turcotte said. “Now!” the co-pilot yelled.
Turcotte felt his stomach slam downward as the nose of the helicopter abruptly lifted. He blinked, realizing he was now looking at the desert floor, then he was completely disoriented as the MDX went vertical and began to loop over.
The two jets went by below and Turcotte was upside down, held in place only by the shoulder straps. His stomach completed the roll as they came around and down, now behind the two jets.
“Fire!” the pilot ordered. A stinger missile leapt from the weapons pod and raced after the jets.
“Fire.” Another missile trailed the first.
The Egyptian jets broke, one right, one left, desperately kicking in their afterburners to escape the missiles bearing down on them. They’d played right into the Israelis’ hands by coming down to low level and losing the ability to trade altitude for speed.
Turcotte turned from watching the second fireball as he heard a loud, retching sound. Fassid was puking all over himself on the other side of the chopper.
“The Gulf,” the co-pilot announced as they cleared a dune and a flat stretch of water as far as they could see appeared ahead.
“We’ve got two more fast-movers on radar,” the pilot said. “ETA six mikes.”
“Where will we be in six minutes?” Turcotte asked.
“Halfway across the Gulf.”
Turcotte keyed the radio. “Vanguard Six, this is Area Five One Six. Over?” He felt a wave of relief as he was instantly answered. “This is Vanguard Six.”
“Six, do you have us on screen? Over,” Turcotte asked. “Roger. Over.”
“Your intercept time to us? Over?”
“Ten mikes. Over.”
“Make it six,” Turcotte said, “or there won’t be anything to meet. Over.”
“We’ll try.”
The pilots had the MDX about twenty feet over the Gulf of Suez, engines maxed out. The interior smelled foul from Fassid’s vomit, but that was the least of anyone’s concern. Turcotte wasn’t scared. He’d always been capable of shutting down his emotions in battle, but on those occasions he’d had some control over his fate. Here he was just a passenger on an aircraft that was either going to make it or go up in a ball of flame, with the latter the more likely event.
“Ship to the right,” Fassid reported.
Turcotte looked past the Egyptian officer. A midsized freighter flying a Liberian flag was steaming up the Gulf, heading for the Canal. He keyed the intercom. “Can we use the ship for cover?”
In reply the pilot banked the MDX and headed straight for the large bow of the ship.
“Jets two minutes out,” the co-pilot reported.
“Guardian Six, ETA? Over.” Turcotte asked over the radio as they closed on the tanker.
“Six minutes. Over.”
The pilot brought the nose of the helicopter up and they cleared the top of the bow by five feet, banked hard right to avoid hitting the bridge, then were over the large main deck.
“There,” the co-pilot was pointing toward an open cargo hatch. The pilot brought the MDX down above the deck of the moving ship, then descended, matching the ship’s speed, down through the open hatch in the hold.
They hovered in the darkness of the hole, the only light coming from the hatch overhead where they could see a few startled crewmen looking down. Turcotte checked his watch. “Time,” he told the pilot finally.
They were up, out of the hatch. Five thousand feet up they could see the Egyptian fighters circling. And closer, four Blackhawk helicopters with UN stenciled on the side.
The MDX darted to the east and the four Blackhawks surrounded it. Two above, two behind, preventing the Egyptians from getting to it without shooting them down first.
Area 51, Nevada
Kincaid leaned back in the seat and stared the computer screen in front of him. A sphere was rotating quickly, twenty-four red dots glowing along its surface. Stationary on the screen were three green dots representing Giza, Easter Island, and Qian-Ling. One of the red dots would align with Giza, then the sphere of red dots would spin rapidly, as the computer tried to line up another red dot with Easter Island. If there was a hit, the computer was programmed to try to align a third with Qian-Ling, but so far there had been no second hits.
As he watched the computer work in vain, several possibilities occurred to Kincaid, none of them good. One was that these grid points referred to a planet other than Earth—perhaps Mars. Another was that perhaps Che Lu’s mathematic assumptions were wrong. Or that using Giza as a fixed point was off base and none of those points referred to Giza.
Kincaid shook his head. None of those possibilities was useful. He’d learned early in the NASA program to make the impossible possible. To do that required looking at things with blinders on. If this was indeed an Airlia grid system of important points on Earth, perhaps they had done something very simple to make it hard to plot.
He heard commotion from the Cube, but Kincaid focused his attention on the problem at hand.
• • •
Major Quinn threw the door to the conference room open. “Turcotte has been picked up by an Israeli helicopter and will be landing at Hazerim in twenty minutes.”
Yakov looked up from the chess set between himself and Che Lu. “That is news worthy of a drink.” He pulled the bottle of vodka out from some hidden pocket inside his large, billowy shirt.
“The Grail?” Che Lu asked.
The enthusiasm dimmed on Quinn’s face. “Aspasia’s Shadow escaped with it—and Doctor Duncan. Turcotte thinks they’ve headed back to The Mission, wherever that is now. He said he’d update via SATCOM from the bouncer on the way back here,” Quinn said. “He was using an Israeli radio and frequency to tell me what I just told you.”
“Some good news, some bad news.” Yakov took a drink. “That s
eems to be the way it always is.”
“Anything from Mister Kincaid and his search?” Che Lu asked Quinn. “Nothing yet. The computer is still doing permutations.”
“Let us hope Turcotte has a plan,” Yakov said.
Hazerim Air Base, Israel
Major Turcotte had no plan other than getting off the Israeli helicopter without falling on his face. Beyond that, his mind and body were too exhausted and drained to go. He recognized Sherev and watched as the Mossad agent met Colonel Fassid with open arms. His greeting to Turcotte was less enthusiastic.
“Al-Iblis has the Ark” were his first words as Turcotte felt the heat from the tarmac rising like a hot blanket.
“And the Grail,” Turcotte added, squinting in the bright sun. “Do you know where he went?”
“Last radar image before the AWACS was destroyed indicated the two helicopters were heading east,” Sherev said as he led Turcotte toward the waiting bouncer. “For all we know the choppers had external fuel tanks, which means they could go anywhere in the Middle East. There they could land and cross-load to a plane if they wanted to go farther. One of our listening stations intercepted part of an FM broadcast between the two helicopters which indicated they were heading toward a place called The Mission, which no one seems to know the location of.”
Turcotte knew that intelligence agencies all over the world had been trying to find the new spot where The Mission had set up shop after being chased off of Devil’s Island in South America.
“Things are very unstable,” Sherev continued as they reached the bouncer. “The assassination of Hussein has led to saber rattling in both Iran and Iraq. The fools here thought cutting off the head would kill the beast, but it has just made things more dangerous. The enemy you know is always better than the enemy you don’t.
“Your own country is threatening Egypt over the loss of the AWACS. My country is contemplating mobilization of reserves because of what is happening.
“China is still sealed off from the rest of the world, although intelligence reports indicate their military is mobilizing. There’s fear that the Chinese might invade Taiwan. North Korea is also mobilizing. Both countries are hoping that your Navy in the Pacific is so preoccupied with Easter Island that they can act with impunity in the western Pacific.” Sherev shrugged his shoulders. “The world is getting even crazier than it usually is. And now we have the Ark of the Covenant and the Grail both surfacing after being myths for generations and now lie in the hands of a terrorist.
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