Matthew Reilly
КОМПЛЕКС ТРИНАДЦАТЬ
Complex 13
PROLOGUE: THE PRISON OF NO RETURN
There are several Great Military Myths out there.
One of the most well-known is the Area 51 myth: that the US Air Force holds a crashed alien spacecraft—and the aliens that arrived in it—inside a hangar complex in the Nevada desert.
Another is that Adolf Hitler did not commit suicide in his fortified bunker in Berlin before the Soviet armies stormed it. Rather, the Soviets caught him and took him back to Moscow where he ended his days in an isolation cell, going mad.
A third is that the Israeli Mossad, the most ruthless secret service organisation in the world, knew of the September 11 attacks in advance and did not tell its ally America, thinking that such a shocking Islamist attack would only enhance US support for Israel.
Interesting conspiracy theories, yes.
But one myth has long prevailed over them all.
A legend which many in the United States intelligence community swear is true—especially those CIA operatives who eavesdropped on the former Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War.
It was they who heard the radio intercepts of whispered, frightened Russian voices speaking of a place named “КОМПЛЕКС ТРИНАДЦАТЬ.”
Complex 13.
It was the USSR’s Area 51, a high-security facility nineteen miles outside Tunguska—the site of a famous meteor impact in 1908—where the Soviets supposedly held their own array of extra-terrestrial creatures.
The myths about Complex 13 are terrifying: that no prisoner who entered the complex ever left; that the Soviets fed human prisoners to the aliens there; and that the Soviets did foul experiments on the aliens themselves.
Members of the Soviet prison system—political prisoners, anti-socials and military deserters—knew Complex 13 by another name.
The prison of no return.
But then an odd thing happened.
According to the CIA, Complex 13 was decommissioned in December 1959, its furnaces extinguished, its iron doors shut, its place on maps obliterated. It is not mentioned in any Soviet transmission—radio or otherwise—after that date.
It has not been found since.
In 1959, Complex 13 vanished from history.
THE LONELY MOUNTAIN
The American troops shouldn’t have been there—out in the barren northern mountains of Siberia, a thousand miles from anywhere, breaching the sovereign territory of Russia.
Indeed, technically, since they were carrying weapons and wearing combat uniforms, not only were they breaching the sovereignty of Russia, they were committing an act of war.
But these twelve battle-hardened Force Recon Marines didn’t care.
Their mission was to be a quick one.
Get in, verify that it was the right complex, get whatever documents they could find on the subject, and get out.
Why? Because this was urgent.
Their own government had one big problem back home and this might be the only way to solve it.
‘It’s under this one!’ Rockmeyer indicated the ominous black mountain rising up before them. It soared into the sky like a slab of seamless black stone, its front face covered in the rocky detritus of a major landslide.
Master Sergeant Rockmeyer held in his hands a high-density sonic-resonance imager, aimed at the mountain. The imager now revealed that there was a cave-system inside the mountain, but one that featured voids with squared-off corners.
A man-made structure.
THE FINISHER
The commander of the team stepped forward.
His name was Lieutenant John T. Armstrong, a quiet but effective man who excelled at unusual missions.
Among other things, he’d tracked down Saddam Hussein to a tiny hole outside Tikrit; he was also the one who’d captured bin Laden after a gigantic firefight in a cave in Tajikistan. America had not yet released that information to the world.
He was the man the Marines called in for the hard missions, the tough ones.
His call-sign: the Finisher.
Armstrong called in his team’s only piece of heavy equipment: an M-19B tunnel-boring machine. It looked like a tank fitted with a big cone-shaped drill-head on its main cannon.
The tunnel-borer roared to life, started cutting into the mountainside.
Within an hour, it had penetrated two hundred metres into the landslide…
…where it struck iron.
The doors of Complex 13.
THE INSIDE OF HELL
Flashlights in darkness—twelve of them—lancing through the hazy gloom.
Led by Armstrong, the Marine team came to the giant iron doors of Complex 13, hidden for nearly fifty years under the landslide, and now ripped open by Armstrong’s tunnel-borer.
Scrawled in spraypaint over the broken iron doorframe were Milton’s famous words, translated into Russian: ‘ Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. ’
The team entered anyway.
‘Man, when Hell freezes over…’ someone said.
He was right.
It looked like Hell…frozen-over.
Immediately inside the iron doors, they found a giant grey all-concrete receiving dock. It was flanked by some glass-walled administration offices.
Blood was splattered everywhere—painting the dock’s concrete walls and the offices’ glass windows with long foul strokes. Human body parts lay strewn about the floor, preserved for years by the extreme cold, body parts that seemed…
…half-eaten.
A layer of frost covered everything.
Beyond the receiving dock, past a heavy steel door, they found a wide spiralling stairwell, going down into hazy darkness.
Armstrong peered down into the stairwell—
—just as something large and leathery swooped low and fast behind his head and with an ear-piercing shriek ripped the head of the man behind him clean off!
Armstrong whirled around—just as Rockmeyer opened fire on the creature— brrrraaaappp! —and it smashed against the nearest wall, hit.
It lay on the floor, whimpering, dying.
The eleven remaining Marines gathered around it, stared at it.
It was man-sized, but with oily scaled skin and bat-like wings. It looked a little like a teradactyl, the flying dinosaur, only its head was more developed, more complex, like that of a miniature dragon.
‘Mother of God, it just tore Kasdan’s head off…’
‘Jesus, it’s just like the two we saw at Groom Lake…’
‘Which means,’ Armstrong said, ‘the Russians might also have some of the bigger ones. And that’s why we’re here. Stay sharp. Twohy and de Souza, stand guard here. The rest of you, come on. It’s time to get nasty.’
They descended the stairs.
THE STAIRCASE AND THE HANGAR
The staircase was open-sided, open to the air.
It was actually a tall-and-spindly spiralling structure that hung from the ceiling of an immense underground room. But this
spiralling staircase never reached the floor of the hangar—it ended abruptly thirty feet above the floor of the room, at a long straight catwalk that was itself suspended off the floor.
For in the centre of this hangar, on its base, directly underneath the long catwalk, stood the centrepiece of Complex 13.