Area 51: The Reply-2 (23 page)

Turcotte acknowledged. He leaned over and informed Nabinger.

"Jesus," Nabinger exclaimed. "Two days? That's not much time."

"We'll be out of here before then," Turcotte reassured him.

"I hope so."

Turcotte looked around the cargo bay. Everyone was awake now and fidgeting.

The ride was getting extremely bumpy as the pilots used their 227

sophisticated electronics to keep the aircraft down in the radar cluster of the terrain.

Turcotte was sweating under his dry suit. He hated waiting and having his destiny in someone else's hands. He'd feel a lot better once they were on the ground. He turned back to Nabinger and gave the professor a smile. The older man was white under his dark beard, beads of sweat trickling down the side of his face.

"It'll be all right," Turcotte reassured him.

"Just get me in the tomb," Nabinger said through clenched teeth.

Duncan threw her cigarette to the concrete floor of the hangar and ground it out with the toe of her shoe. She went over to the commo terminal and restlessly looked through the message logs. She stiffened as she noted one of the messages.

"Find something interesting?" a voice behind her asked.

Duncan turned to find Zandra towering over her. "What's STAAR?"

"STAAR?"

Duncan held up the message log. "You received a message two hours ago from someone or something with that code name."

"And you never heard of it and you have the highest security clearance possible in the United States," Zandra said, her eyes hidden behind her sunglasses. "Correct?"

"Correct," Duncan said, her jaw clenched tight.

"Well, Doctor, you don't have a need to know."

"Goddammit—" Duncan began, but Zandra raised a hand, cutting her off with clipped words.

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"Don't! Not only don't you have a need to know, this is bigger than you, bigger than the United States."

"We'll see about that," Duncan said, turning for the door.

"Wait!" Zandra called out. There was a beeping sound coming out of the radio.

"What is it?" Duncan asked as the other woman sat down in front of the device and typed into the keyboard.

"We've intercepted a message from China," Zandra said.

Duncan looked at her watch. "They can't have jumped yet."

"They haven't," Zandra said. "This is from someone else."

"Where?"

Zandra was looking at the information being relayed to her. "It appears that whoever is transmitting is inside Qian-Ling."

"What the hell—" Duncan began, but again she was cut off by Zandra.

"Shut up for a minute and let me decipher this."

TO: SECTION FOUR

FROM: GRUEV

TRAPPED INSIDE

PLA HAS SEALED EXITS

SUPPLIES LOU

LINKED UP WITH PROFESSOR CHE LU

BEIJING UNIVERSITY

MANY AIRLIA ARTIFACTS

NEED HIGH RUNE TRANSLATIONS

PLEASE ADVISE

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"Who is Gruev and what is Section Four?" Duncan asked, having patiently waited while the words came up on the screen line by line.

"Section Four is the Russian equivalent of Majestic-12. Gruev is the code name of one of their operatives."

"You seem to know a lot about this."

"I do. Our intelligence sources tell me he led a small team into the tomb several days ago. The Russians didn't hear a word from them after they entered and assumed they were lost."

"Why didn't you tell us that someone from the Russians had already gone inside?"

"You didn't have a need to know."

Duncan gritted her teeth.

"Listen," Zandra said, "you'll find out all you need to in due time. In the meanwhile we need to get word to Turcotte and his team to link up with Gruev.

They can work together."

"Well, at least now we know why the PLA is sitting on top of the tomb," Duncan said, her own tone heavy with sarcasm.

Turcotte held six fingers aloft. "Six minutes!"

He extended both hands, palms out. "Get ready!"

The team members unbuckled their safety straps.

With both arms Turcotte pointed at the team seated along the outside of the aircraft. He pointed up. "Outboard personnel stand up."

The members of Team 3 staggered to their feet in the wildly swaying aircraft, using the static-line

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cable and side of the aircraft for support. Turcotte reached out and gave Nabinger a hand.

Curling his index fingers over his head, representing hooks, Turcotte pumped his arms up and down. "Hook up!"

Turcotte watched as each man hooked into the static-line cable. As jumpmaster, Turcotte was already hooked up and facing the team as he screamed the jumpmaster commands. The load-master was holding on to Turcotte's static line and trying to keep him from falling over as Turcotte used both hands to pantomime the jump commands.

"Check static lines!"

Turcotte checked his snap link and traced the static line from the snap link to where it disappeared over his shoulder. He then checked Nabinger's.

"Check equipment!"

Turcotte made sure one last time that all his and Nabinger's equipment was secured and the connections made fast on their parachute harnesses.

Turcotte cupped his hands over his ears. "Sound off for equipment check!"

The last man in line, Chief Harker, slapped the man in front on the rear and yelled, "Okay." The yell and slap was passed from man to man until Nabinger.

Turcotte gave him a big thumbs-up and yelled, "All, okay!"

"Yeah, right," Nabinger muttered, leaning against the side of the plane.

With all the jump commands, except the final "GO," done, Turcotte gained control of his static line from the loadmaster and turned toward the 231

rear of the aircraft. He waited for the ramp to open. He swayed to the front as the aircraft slowed down from 250 knots to 125 knots.

The loadmaster leaned over Turcotte's shoulder and stuck an index finger in his face. Turcotte looked at the team and screamed: "One minute!"

"Hang tough," Turcotte yelled in Nabinger's ear. "We're almost there."

Ten seconds later Turcotte felt his knees buckle as the plane rapidly climbed the two hundred and fifty feet up to the minimum safe drop altitude. The noise level increased abruptly as a crack appeared in the ramp and grew larger as the gaping mouth drew wide open. As the ramp leveled off open, Turcotte stared out into the dark night. The wind was swirling through the back of the plane, the sound layered on top of the roar of the engines.

Turcotte got to his knees. Grabbing the hydraulic arm on the left side of the ramp, he peered around the edge of the aircraft looking forward, blinking in the fierce wind. It took a few seconds to get oriented, but there it was in the moonlight. Only about twenty seconds away a lake loomed. It had the right shape.

He could see a large mountain, it had to be the Qian-Ling, to the left of the lake. Despite himself Turcotte was impressed. Over four hours of low-level flying and they were right on target.

Turcotte stood up and yelled over his shoulder as he shuffled out to within three feet of the edge of the ramp. "Stand by!" He made sure Nabinger was right behind him. He could see that the professor's eyes were wide open.

Turcotte stared at the red light burning above

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the top of the ramp. Now that he knew that they were on track for the right drop zone, as soon as the light turned green they'd go.

Turcotte edged a few inches closer to the edge. Looking down he could see the leading shore of the lake below.

The green light flashed.

Turcotte yelled "GO!" over his shoulder and was gone.

The team moved forward. Nabinger hesitated but the pressure of the six men behind him turn- * bled him off the edge into the swirling air.

Jumping at five hundred feet left little time for anything other than landing.

Turcotte was only two hundred and fifty feet above the water of the lake when his main parachute finished deploying. He checked for Nabinger but the impact of the water quickly regained his attention as he went under. The natural buoyancy of the air trapped under his dry suit popped him back to the surface after a brief dunking.

The parachute settled into the water away from him where the wind had blown it. As the pull of his two weight belts tried to draw him back under, Turcotte quickly pulled his fins out from under his waistband and put them on to tread water. Rapidly he worked on getting out of the parachute harness. Unhooking his leg straps, he then pulled the quick release on his waistband. He pulled out the parachute kit bag that had been folded flat under those straps and held on to it while he shrugged out of the shoulder straps.

With the harness off Turcotte pulled in on the lines to his parachute. Holding one handle of the kit bag with his teeth, he used his hands to stuff 233

large bellows of wet parachute into the bag. After a minute of struggling Turcotte succeeded in getting the chute inside and the kit bag snapped shut.

Turcotte took off the second weight belt he wore and, attaching it to the handles of the kit bag, let it go. The water-logged chute and kit bag disappeared into the dark depths.

Allowing his rucksack to drag behind him on a short five-foot line, Turcotte turned to swim in the direction he believed the aircraft had been heading, where Nabinger should be. As he lay on his back and started finning, he checked his wrist compass to confirm the direction, straight along the azimuth the aircraft had flown over the DZ. Soon he heard muffled splashing ahead, which verified that he was heading in the right direction.

When Nabinger popped to the surface after landing, he found his parachute descending on top of him and covering him in the water. The two weight belts he wore gave him an almost neutral buoyancy, and without his fins on, he found it difficult to keep his head above water as the nylon of his parachute descended around him. When Nabinger reached up with his arms to push the nylon away so he could breathe, the movement caused his head to slip underwater. With the chute bearing down on him, Nabinger quickly panicked.

Two feet below the surface of the water he was momentarily trapped. In his fear Nabinger started struggling that much harder and got himself more entangled. He stroked vigorously and broke surface underneath the canopy. Taking a gulp of air,

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Nabinger sank back underwater and wrestled with his parachute, which was becoming waterlogged. Nabinger remembered Turcotte had told him that a parachute would stay afloat for only about ten minutes before becoming completely soaked and sinking. He estimated he had been in the water over five minutes now, using only his one free leg to get him to the surface to grab quick breaths.

Nabinger was tiring and the chute was starting to press down on him like a cold, wet blanket.

Turcotte saw the blue chem light come on ahead. It was then that he came across Nabinger desperately treading water in the middle of a half-submerged parachute. Turcotte grabbed the apex of the chute and pulled it off the professor.

Nabinger spit a mouthful of water out. "I'm never doing that again!"

"Can you make it to shore?" Turcotte asked.

"Hell, yes," Nabinger said.

"Drop your weight belts and hang on to me. Don't worry, I'm not gonna leave you. We got plenty of time."

Turcotte hooked himself to Nabinger with his buddy line. Together they swam toward the blue chem light.

When Turcotte arrived at Harker's position he found the entire team accounted for. They quickly swam for the nearby shore, the bulk of Qian-Ling rising up in the sky ahead of them, a darker form against the night sky. After only a minute of swimming the team got to where the bottom came up to meet them. They quickly discovered that the shore was not solid, as the lake melted into a 235

bamboo swamp. They stood up and trudged through the swamp for two hundred meters until they hit a patch of firm ground. The men then formed a circular perimeter.

One man started taking his dry suit off while the other readied his weapon and provided security. Turcotte helped Nabinger with his gear, peeling off the dry suit, knowing that time was of the essence.

"Let's go." Harker gave hand and arm signals and the team fanned out, moving forward, sliding night vision goggles over their eyes. Turcotte slid his own pair down and turned them on. The night gave way to a bright green field of vision. He helped Nabinger adjust his set and then they quickly followed the team.

"Stay right with me," he whispered to the professor.

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Che Lu could see nothing. It was pitch black, even right next to the shaft to the outside world. She could hear a few snores and the nervous fidgeting of others who were too wound up to sleep. She could feel the hard stone floor under her as she lay on her side, her eyes open to the darkness. She'd slept under worse conditions but she'd been younger then. Now it was just uncomfortable and irritating.

The Russians had pointed their small satellite dish directly up the shaft and sent out a message earlier. Kostanov had explained to her that they could send, but they would not get a reply for a while according to some sort of schedule he had, and he wasn't even sure if they could pick up a reply through the narrow opening.

She didn't know how much good that would do. She doubted that the Russians would be so flagrant as to send in a force to rescue Kostanov and his men now that the PLA knew they were in here and were waiting outside. She also wasn't thrilled

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with the idea of having Russians inside the tomb or even outside of it.

She wondered what was going on in the outside world. Were the Airlia coming?

If so, then this tomb certainly had to play some part in their plans. From the news stories she had seen, the guardian cavern underneath Easter Island was a small complex compared to the machinery that was in the main chamber.

She also wondered what was deeper in the tomb, through the wall on the far side of what they had dubbed the control room. And what was down the corridor protected by the powerful beam? Perhaps the same thing, approached from a different direction? Or were there other, deeper chambers in the tomb? Where did the light shaft go?