Area 51: The Reply-2 (19 page)

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pointing. There was the faintest of glows ahead, just the tiniest smudge of something in the inky darkness.

"Come on," she said. Ki turned the light back on and Che Lu held the bamboo pole in front of her, the cloth hanging down to the ground. Slowly they made their way toward the light.

As they got closer, Che Lu could see that it was a small beam of light crossing the tunnel from upper left to lower right. She wondered if it was another one of the killing beams until she got even closer and could tell it was daylight. She felt a lightening of her heart as she stepped up close to the shaft. It came in from a hole in the upper left of the corridor about six inches square. The beam crossed and disappeared into another hole the same size in the lower right.

"What is the purpose of that?" Ki asked as they all gathered around, comforted by the warm ray of sunlight.

Che Lu put her face up to the hole, which she could reach if she stood on her toes. All she could see was a very faint blue square, far up the shaft. She estimated it was about a hundred meters to the outside and no one was going to be crawling up this tunnel. Still, it gave her hope that there might be a larger one farther on.

"It is like the Great Pyramid," she said, a subject she had brushed up on once she had discovered the oracle bones with high rune writing on them. "There are small shafts in it just like this that go from the king's chamber to the surface. They point to specific constellations in the sky." She turned to the lower hole. "The emperor's tomb must lie in that direction," she added.

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"Was there a back door in the Great Pyramid, where you could get out?" asked Ki, ever the practical one.

"No," Che Lu said. "Only one entrance and that had been sealed up to discourage grave robbers." She sat down on the floor. "We will rest here, then continue on."

"Why don't we simply ask this Oleisa person?" Kelly Reynolds suggested.

"I don't think she's going to talk to us," Quinn said. He stood up. "But it's worth a shot."

Quinn and Reynolds left the Cube and took the elevator up to Hangar 1. As the doors opened, they entered a large room carved out of the rock of Groom Mountain. The hangar was over three quarters of a mile long and a quarter mile wide. Three of the walls, the floor, and roof—one hundred feet above their heads—were rock. The last side was a series of camouflaged sliding doors that opened up onto the runway.

They passed by one of the bouncers as they walked. Kelly knew that one could easily imagine how the rumors of flying saucers had started in the fifties if someone had seen a bouncer. The official designation by the scientists for them was MDAC or magnetic drive atmospheric craft. Each was about thirty feet in diameter, wide at the base, then sloping up to small cupola on top.

They were called bouncers because of their unique manner of flight, able to alter course instantly, which had the effect of throwing the occupants around.

Quinn and Reynolds approached the door to

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the part of the hangar where the bouncer had been isolated. They pounded on it in vain for a couple of minutes, but it didn't open.

"Goddamn!" Quinn exclaimed.

"Let's take a look at the mothership," Reynolds suggested. They walked back into the main part of the hangar, past the bouncers to a door in the rear.

Inside was an eight-passenger train on an electric monorail. Quinn stepped into the car, Reynolds at his side, and pressed the controls. It immediately started up and they were whisked along a brightly lit tunnel.

Kelly now knew the history of Area 51, but for over fifty years it had been one of the most closely held secrets in America. For years the primary focus of Majestic-12 had been the bouncers in Hangar One, but it was what was in Hangar Two that had helped decide the location of Area 51 when it was uncovered in the dark years of World War II. The tunnel the train was going through had been bored out years ago to connect Hangar One and Hangar Two.

The train came out of the tunnel and entered the large hole holding the mothership. Kelly knew it had been a cavern, but she'd been outside when Captain Turcotte had fired charges out of sequence trying to stop General Gullick from flying the mothership, tearing the roof down on top of the craft. Getting off the train, she could see that after extensive digging by the Army Corps of Engineers for the past several days, the rubble had been removed, enough to clear the mothership, which had not suffered any obvious damage.

Kelly looked up. The ship was now open to the sky, and the early-morning light filtered over the

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lip of the hole in the roof onto the glistening black skin. Despite having seen it before, Kelly Reynolds was staggered by the sheer physical size of the mothership: cigar shaped, over a mile long and a quarter mile in width at the center, it was nestled in a large black cradle made of the same black metal that composed the skin of the craft.

There was scaffolding near the front of the ship where an entrance had been opened, allowing access to the inside. With the aid of the rebel guardian computer, Gullick and the others on Majestic-12 had been able to get into the ship and fathom some of the controls, enough that they had even gotten the ship to lift off its cradle a short distance and figure out some of the drive mechanisms.

But that was it, Reynolds knew, as she walked with Quinn along the side of the ship. Majestic had been stopped from flying the ship, and up to the message coming from Mars, what should be done with the ship had been a hot topic of conversation not only at UNAOC, but around the world. Now, as evidenced by the small number of people in the cavern, there were more important things happening.

Kelly stopped walking and looked up at the black wall curving up and over her head. She had a feeling that not long after the Airlia came, someone would be coming here for a visit, because she had an inkling that the mothership might be the real reason Aspasia was coming back to Earth.

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The East Pacific Ridge runs from the underwater Amundsen Plain off the coast of Antarctica, north, to finally rise out of the ocean at Baja, California.

Between those two points the only place the ridge crests the surface of the ocean is Easter Island. North of Easter Island, along the ridge, was the area that the foo fighters controlled by the Guardian I computer had been tracked going into the ocean.

For the past four days the United States Navy had been intensively searching the entire area under a veil of secrecy. The secrecy had been approved by the Pentagon because of the very uncomfortable fact that the foo fighters, despite being only three feet in diameter, obviously were capable of great devastation, as shown by the destruction of the lab at Dulce, New Mexico. UNAOC, and the United States Government, had downplayed the incident and the loss of fourteen security and lab personnel due both to the illegal work that had been going on there and the fact

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that the destruction didn't show the Airlia computer in the best light.

The flight the previous day of the three foo fighters had heightened anxiety and the pressure to find the strange crafts' home base. The three had exited and entered the ocean over three hundred miles to the west, but the Navy still believed they were in the right place. The feeling was that the fighters must have traversed the intervening distance underwater.

Up until the previous day the work had consisted of searching and scanning.

The searching was conducted by several submersibles, manned and unmanned. The scanning was done by sonar and the LLS, laser-line scanner. The LLS was the most efficient piece of machinery the Navy had for the job of finding where the foo fighters were hiding. It worked by projecting a blue-green laser, capable of penetrating the ocean, in seventy-degree arcs, "painting" a picture of the bottom. The LLS was so accurate, it could show rivets on a sunken ship's hull.

The previous evening, just after sunset, the LLS had discovered an anomaly in the side of a outcropping along the East Pacific Ridge, at a depth of five thousand meters or over three miles down. The picture the laser painted showed a cylindrical tube sticking out of the side of the outcropping, extending about twenty feet, with a boxlike structure sitting on top. It most definitely was not naturally occurring.

The Navy spent the entire night moving their classified deep-sea submersible, the USS Grey-wolf, into position. The Greywolf was tethered to a surface support ship, the Yellowstone, that towed it

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to a spot directly over the anomaly. As dawn was breaking on the horizon, the Greywolf slipped its mooring underneath the Yellowstone and began its descent into the inky darkness. The head pilot was a twenty-five-year naval veteran, Lieutenant Commander Downing. His copilot and navigator was Lieutenant Tennyson.

The third member of the crew was a contract civilian named Emory.

The Greywolf was the result of decades of trial and error with deep-sea submersibles. Prior to its construction the record for manned depth was just under seven thousand meters. The Greywolf shattered that record on its first dive, going down to eight thousand meters. Its design was radical, being neither the traditional sphere nor cigar shape most people associated with such vessels.

It was shaped like the F-117 Stealth fighter, with composite, flat-planed sides, made of a special titanium alloy.

The three-man crew of the Greywolf didn't know they owed the makeup of their ship's skin to the work done on the mothership in Area 51, but that was where Majestic researchers had learned much about various alloys, the results being passed on to other military black projects such as Greywolf.

Commander Downing was not concerned about the dive itself as they cleared through two thousand meters. The depth was well within range, the currents in the area were minimal, and the submersible was operating well within all acceptable parameters. He, and the other two crew, were, however, concerned about their objective. No foo fighter had been spotted close up since the destruction of the lab at Dulce, but all three men

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had seen classified videotape of the results of that strike. They also knew about the loss of signal from Viking II as it closed in on Cydonia. It probably was all just automatic functioning of the Guardian computer, but they figured that wouldn't do them much good if they had an accident at five thousand meters caused by Guardian.

Because of the fear that the guardian might react to their presence near the foo fighter base, the Greywolf was being accompanied on the dive by Helmet II, a remotely piloted vehicle, or RPV. It had received its name because that was exactly what it looked like: a helmet with several mechanical arms and sensors bolted to the main body. A large propeller rested in the bottom of the Helmet and provided vertical thrust. Maneuvering was done by four small fanlike thrusters spaced around the rim of the base.

Helmet II was equipped with not only the arms and sensors, but a video camera on top that had an unrestricted 360-degree view and one that ran around on a track just above the lip and thrusters. There was a third bolted to the center bottom, able to look directly down. The views these cameras picked up were transmitted directly back to the Greywolf, where the remote control was, and from there up to the Yellowstone.

As it passed through four thousand meters, the Greywolf came to a halt and sent Helmet II ahead. That was Emory's job. He sat in a cramped section of the crew compartment and looked at video screens and a fourth computer screen that showed him essential data as to attitude, trim, depth, and speed of the RPV. He controlled it with a joystick

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that always reminded him of his kid's game controller for the computer at home.

As they slowly descended, Tennyson picked up several sonar contacts a thousand meters above them. He promptly reported them to Downing.

"Whales?" Downing asked.

"No. Submarines." Tennyson listened carefully, hearing the sound of screws churning through water decrease. "They're slowing."

"Ping with active," Downing ordered. "Let's get a fix, then I'll call Yellowstone and find out what's going on."

The subs were silent now, fixed in position. Tennyson sent out a ping and listened to the return. "We've got three Los Angeles-class attack submarines over our heads."

"Damn," Downing muttered. He clicked on the ULF radio linking him to the Yellowstone. "Mother, this is Wolf. Over."

The reply came back in the flat way ULF transmissions did, muted by the mass of water over their head. "This is Mother. Over."

"What's with the subs? Over." Downing had no time or inclination to be tactful or subtle at four thousand feet. The pressure of the water surrounding their ship would crush them in an eye-blink if the hull were breached in any manner.

Their commanding officer on the Yellowstone was also terse, for different reasons. "We have them on sonar also. We have no contact with them, but we have been informed by CINCPAC that they are here at National Command Authority directive. I don't know what their orders are, and when I asked, I was told to mind my own

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business. They won't interfere with your mission, so ignore them. Out."

Downing twisted in his seat and looked at Tennyson. "Prepare to ignore," he said.

Tennyson smiled. "Preparing to ignore. Aye, aye, sir."

"Implement ignore mode."

"Ignore mode it is." Tennyson laughed, but it echoed hollow off the titanium alloy walls and died quickly.

"If you gentlemen are interested," Emory said from his little corner, "I've got visual contact with the ridge."

The other two peered over his shoulder as the rock-strewn surface of the East Pacific Ridge appeared on the video screens.

"How far to the objective?" Downing asked.

"Another two hundred meters down and Helmet should be right on top of it,"

Emory reported.

A minute went by, then the view from the bottom camera showed something different. Emory's hands manipulated both the controls for the RPV and the camera.

"That's it!" Downing announced as the camera focused on a large smooth black tube sticking out of the side of the ridge. "That's where the foo fighters are based."