Area 51: The Reply-2 (28 page)

Dmitri noted Kostanov putting the beret on. "For Mother Russia," he said.

"For Mother Earth," Kostanov corrected as he put his weapon to his shoulder and pulled the trigger.

Turcotte could hear the firing. It spurred him to move even quicker, to not waste the valiant sacrifice made by the Russians. After five minutes the furious sound of the firefight behind them faded to a few scattered shots, then silence.

Turcotte checked his compass. They had made it around the tomb. Due north beckoned down-slope. Turcotte started sliding down the slope, knowing the PZ was only four kilometers away.

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Kelly Reynolds looked at the computer printouts in frustration. She could make as much sense of them as the UNAOC decryption experts, which was to say she could make no sense of the garbled letters and numbers transmitted in one continuous stream.

The Guardian I computer under Easter Island was bursting information to the incoming Talon fleet almost nonstop, and in turn getting messages from the ships transmitted back to it. Kelly had to assume, as UNAOC did, that Aspasia was updating his information base. After all, Kelly reasoned, a lot had happened on Earth since Aspasia had gone into his self-imposed exile on Mars. Five thousand years of human history would require such extensive communications to get caught up on.

There had been no further messages from Aspasia to UNAOC, other than to acknowledge the landing site in Central Park. The clock was now under thirty-six hours to live contact, as the media

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had dubbed the moment Aspasia's ship was scheduled to land.

Kelly hoped her friends would be back from China in time to see the landing and the beginning of a bold new chapter in the history of the human race.

Three more kilometers, Turcotte knew, and they'd be at the pickup zone. The going downhill was much easier. The terrain had also become less steep. Looking to the east Turcotte could see the first hint of dawn on the horizon, a light smudge in the amplified imaging of the night-vision goggles. Looking back to the north, he could see movement. The PLA had gotten smarter and wasn't running around with flashlights on anymore, but he could hear the distant rumble of vehicles and voices. The chopper was still hanging back, several kilometers to the east.

As the elevation dropped, the vegetation grew thicker, which provided them with more cover.

"How you doing, Professor?" Turcotte asked.

"I'll make it," Nabinger said. "How much farther?"

"Under three klicks."

"Keep going."

Harker whispered out of the dark, "Hold up." The warrant officer grabbed Turcotte's arm. "We got trouble."

Turcotte could see that Harker was holding a bulky scope in his hands, looking through it in their direction of travel. "What do you see?" Turcotte knew the thermal site could penetrate

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the vegetation and highlight the heat of living creatures and working machinery.

"We've got a picket line about six hundred meters ahead at the base of hill,"

Harker said. "They're holding still, just waiting. Looks like there's a large stream down there, and the Chinese are along the northern bank. The line coming up the hill behind us must have been the hammer to drive us; they're the anvil up ahead."

Turcotte checked his watch. They had less than two hours before the choppers showed up. There was no time to go in any other direction, plus there would most likely be Chinese forces waiting whichever way they went.

"Suggestion?" Turcotte asked.

"We're going to have to split," Harker said. "I'll take DeCamp with me. We'll have the sniper's rifles with the thermals." He pointed over his left shoulder to a ridgeline coming off the mountain tomb. "We'll go up there and start firing. That should cause some confusion as they react. There should be a hole for you to get across the stream, through their lines, and get to the PZ."

"And what about you?" Nabinger asked.

"Once you get on the choppers, send one to pick us up," Harker answered.

Turcotte knew the odds of Harker and DeCamp still being alive by that time were slim, but he didn't have time to stand and discuss it. He also knew Harker was aware of the dire reality of the situation.

"All right," Turcotte said. "How long do you need?"

"Give me fifteen minutes to get in position. You'll hear us when we start shooting."

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"Let's go," Turcotte said. He grasped Harker's hand briefly, feeling the dried blood that had come off Kostanov's hand grit between their flesh.

"Is everything good to go?" Lisa Duncan asked.

Zandra was listening to radio reports. "Yes. The helicopters are on time and in the clear so far."

"The Chinese aren't onto them?"

"I can't tell that from here," Zandra said. "Their air defense units haven't been alerted."

"How do you know that?" Duncan demanded.

"I have an AWACS on station off the coast of China monitoring the situation."

"And if the helicopters do get spotted?"

"Then I will do what is necessary," Zandra said.

"That's rather vague," Duncan said.

"I'm sorry you feel that way, but I don't have to explain myself to you,"

Zandra said in a calm voice.

"Who do you answer to?" Duncan wanted to know.

"We've already gone over that," Zandra said.

"I want to know what you have done to protect those people on their way out,"

Duncan insisted.

Zandra flipped a switch on the radio set in front of her. "Here. You can listen in to what's going on as relayed from the AWACS. You'll hear what I have done."

Colonel Mike Zycki was the commander of the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) plane that Zandra had ordered into the air using 285

her ST-8 clearance. As the modified Boeing 707-320B leveled off at thirty-five thousand feet, Zycki ordered the thirty-foot dome radar dish, riding on top of the fuselage, to be activated. The advantage the AWACS had over ground-based radars was its ability to look down. The radar signals emitted at altitude were not blocked by the curvature of the earth or terrain. Zycki and his crew had an accurate radar picture almost four hundred miles in diameter as the rotodome completed a revolution every ten seconds.

Unfortunately, even that coverage was insufficient to reach the area he had been ordered to take a look at. He could paint an accurate radar picture of the coast of China from Beijing almost to Shanghai, but the aircraft he was supposed to watch were over a thousand miles inland, near Xi'an.

Still, the AWACS could function in a command-and-control role by linking with a KH-14 spy satellite that was in geosynchronous orbit above central China and downloading the current data the various gathering devices on the satellite were picking up.

Quickly, Zycki's crew began the process of identifying and coding out all known images the KH-14 was picking up in the air. Civilian aircraft liners were blanked off the screen. In a short while they had a manageable screen. There were only a few spots of activity left: some helicopter activity in the vicinity of Qian-Ling. And two blips moving quickly toward that spot.

The radar operator pointed. "That's our aircraft right there. They're flying right on top of the

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earth. Airspeed's right for Black Hawks flying low level."

"Punch in transponder code alpha-four-romeo," Zycki ordered.

The operator did so, and four small dots appeared over eastern China, heading directly toward Qian-Ling. "Who is that?" the operator exclaimed. "They don't show up on down-looking radar or"—he paused as he hit a switch to access another asset of the KH-14 spy satellite—"thermal imaging!"

"That's our ace in the hole," Zycki said, "four F-117 Stealth fighters to provide air cover for the exfiltration."

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On board the USS Springfield Captain Forster was the senior commander among the three Los Angeles-class attack submarines hovering above the Greywolfs position. The Springfield and the Asheville were at a standstill, power down to a minimum to keep life-support systems operating on board the boats. The Pasadena, the third ship of the flotilla, had all systems active and was monitoring the situation for the group.

The first indication that the foo fighters were moving again was from the Pasadena, which reported two foo fighters coming up from the depths.

Forster didn't reply, still running silent as they had planned. The captain of the Pasadena had his orders.

On board the Pasadena the crew reacted as they'd thoroughly been trained to, rushing to bat-

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tle stations. The firing crew began tracking the two targets.

On board the Greywolf Commander Downing watched the two foo fighters sweep by, heading up. The three that had been shadowing the submersible still remained on station. Downing turned and met Tennyson's glance.

"Your guess is as good as mine," he said.

As the foo fighters passed the Greywolf's depth, the captain of the Pasadena gave the order to arm the Mark 48, Mod 2 torpedoes.

"Fire!" the captain of the Pasadena ordered as the foo fighters passed through three thousand meters.

Four torpedoes launched with a hiss of compressed air, each foo fighter double-targeted. The torpedoes raced away from the sub, a spool of wire unreeling behind each one, allowing it to be continuously targeted by the submarine. Each Mark 48 weighed over 2,750 pounds and was ten feet long by twenty-one inches in diameter. The conventional warhead consisted of over a thousand pounds of high explosive.

"Tracking," the weapon officer announced in the crowded control center. "I've got four good ones. All tracking clear, tracking two separate targets. Time to impact forty-two seconds. . . ." He paused, his eyes widening at the information his computer was giving him. "We've got inbound!"

"Inbound what?" the captain demanded.

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"Our own torpedoes!" the weapons officer exclaimed. "They've been turned." His fingers were working the keyboard, trying to regain control of the weapons.

"Time to impact, twenty seconds." Every eye in the control room fixed on the commanding officer.

The captain was staring over the man's shoulder, reading, interpreting.

"Fifteen seconds!"

"Abort, abort, abort!" the captain yelled.

The weapons officer flipped up a red cover and pressed down on the button underneath. All four torpedoes detonated less than two hundred meters away from their launch point.

"Prepare for impact!" the captain ordered, knowing his order had been much too late as the shock wave from the four simultaneous explosions hit the sub.

Captain Forster, on board the Springfield, was listening passively through a hydrophone headset. He tore the headphones off when the thunderous noise of the torpedoes going off hit them. The submarine rocked in the water. Forster yelled for a damage report as he put the headphones back on.

He heard the sounds coming from the Pasadena every submariner feared the most: the screech of metal giving way, water rushing in, air being blown out under pressure. He even imagined he could hear the screams of the crew of the Pasadena as they were crushed, but that might simply have been his imagination.

There was absolute silence throughout the

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Springfield as even sailors not wearing the headphones could hear the faint sound of bulkheads giving way echo through their ship, like the sound of popcorn popping in the distance.

"Sir!" the first officer hissed. "What do we do?"

"We do nothing for now," Forster ordered, turning away from the other men in the control room. He felt his hastily eaten breakfast threatening to come back up as he imagined the fate of the crew of the Pasadena. "We do nothing."

On board the Greywolf they had heard the explosion and now they could also hear the sound of the Pasadena dying. Half a minute later they could pick up the noise of the battered hulk of the once proud submarine dropping by, heading for the ocean depths, more bulkheads shattering as the pressure increased.

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Turcotte was now walking slower, to allow Harker time to get in position. They were going down slightly, as the terrain sloped into the wide streambed that ran along the northern base of Qian-Ling. It made tactical sense for the Chinese picket line to be waiting on the far bank of the stream, using it as a control measure. Turcotte slowed his pace further, moving as stealthily as he could through the darker shadows. The one big advantage Turcotte knew he held over the Chinese was that the PLA did not have ready access to night-vision equipment.

Another five minutes and they reached the edge of the thicker undergrowth along the south bank. Turcotte wanted to get as close to the enemy line as they could prior to Harker initiating contact. He halted in an area of especially thick underbrush.

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Harker and DeCamp wee positioned slightly

under six hundred meters away from the Chinese picket line. They were about a hundred meters higher than the men they would be shooting at. They crouched among jumbled rocks and stunted pines along the first crest of the ridge that marked the northern side of the draw they had been descending.

Harker looked through the thermal scope, which he now had mounted on the sniper rifle. The rifle and scope were rated effective out to twelve hundred meters, and Harker felt confident that he could hit the soldiers he could clearly see as glowing images. He also could see Turcotte's group, a small cluster of glowing dots, just south of the Chinese on the near bank.

Harker counted twenty Chinese soldiers in the immediate area of the team.

Harker zeroed in on one glowing figure nearest the team. There was no wind that he would have to correct for. The hundred-meter drop required some adjustment, but Harker had done enough long-range firing to be able to account for that.

Five meters to Harker's left DeCamp was hidden. He had his sniper rifle propped between two rocks. Harker glanced at his watch again. Another minute.

Behind the two Special Forces soldiers the mass of Qian-Ling loomed, waiting for the first rays of daylight to touch it from the east.