Porter braced himself, his mind flashing to every submariner’s horror of implosion. He, along with everyone else on board, flinched as there was a loud thud from the direction of the bow. Porter blinked. But no explosion.
“A dud!” His executive officer was the first to say it.
“Helm, keep us moving out of here,” Porter ordered. “Damage control?”
The XO hit the intercom, contacting the forward compartments. “Any damage?” Porter recognized the voice of one of his chief petty officers. “Nothing we can see. It hit”—there was a burst of static—“bulkhead. There’s some”—another burst of static—“wrong with—” The intercom went dead.
“You have the conn,” Porter yelled at his XO as he dashed toward the forward hatch. He raced down the passageway, his movement slowed by having to open every hatch. As he reached the hatch just before the compartment they had been talking to, he stopped in shock as he noted a ripple effect in the metal. As he grabbed the round handle, he felt a sharp pain in his hands as if the metal were hot.
He pulled his hands away and stared at them. No burn marks. But the pain was still there. Moving up his arms. His eyes widened as he saw the veins bulging in his arms — and they were black.
Captain Porter screamed as the nanovirus reached his brain. A scream that was echoed along the length of the ship as the microscopic metallic virus invaded every crew member.
General Kashir commanded an army division headquartered in Tabriz in northwest Iran. It was a precarious post given the locale. To the north were Armenia and Azerbaijan. To the west Turkey, and below it Iraq. While the rest of the world had forgotten, no Iranian who had lived and fought through it could forget the brutal eleven-year war Iran and Iraq had waged against each other from 1979 through 1990. Almost two million had died during the fighting and neither side had gained more than a few kilometers of worthless desert despite countless offensives.
The illegal use of chemical weapons, children being forced to charge across minefields to “clear” them, and execution of prisoners were all practices engaged in by both sides. A cease-fire was agreed to in 1990 but no peace treaty had been signed. Add in the unrest in the former Soviet provinces to the north and east, and the ever-present revolt of the Kurdish people throughout the area, and the region was as unstable as it had always been. With the recent assassination of Hussein in Iraq, all the militaries in the region were on high alert. There were those preaching — as ever — for a jihad against Israel, but Kashir knew that blood spite between Arabs would always rate higher than enmity for the Jews.
There had been numerous “cleansings” of the officer ranks by the religious government and Kashir had not only survived them all over the years, he’d been promoted up the ranks to his present position. He owed everything to a secret alliance he had made early in his career.
His office was located on the top floor of the tallest building in the city, with a commanding view not only of the town, but the surrounding countryside. As he had done daily for the past several years, he turned on his computer and accessed a secure e-mail server.
Unlike every one of those days, today there was a message waiting from his secret benefactor.
At first Kashir simply stared at the screen in shock for several moments. The subject line was the proper code word: scimitar.
And there was only one person who had this address. Known for years as Al-Iblis to intelligence agencies around the world, he was now known as Aspasia’s Shadow. Kashir owed his rank and this position to Al-Iblis’s machinations over the years and now he knew that the marker was being called in.
Kashir clicked the mouse and the message appeared. When he was done reading it, his eyes were drawn to the wide windows on the northern side of his office. It was a clear day and far in the distance he could make out a white-covered peak on the horizon. The mountain was over 120 miles away, but high enough to be visible. It was also over the border in Turkey.
“Agri Dagi,” Kashir muttered as he stood and walked over to the window. It was the name the locals called the peak. To the rest of the world, it was better known as Mount Ararat. And his orders from Aspasia’s Shadow were to secure the mountain, even if it meant invading Turkey and causing a war.
General Kashir picked up his phone and ordered his aide-de-camp to assemble his staff.
From the base, the summit of Mons Olympus, despite being three times taller than Mount Everest, wasn’t visible, as it was far enough away to be over the horizon of Mars. It was the largest volcano in the Tharsis Bulge, a ring of high mountains around Mars that were so massive they had caused the axis of Mars to shift over the eons.
The dimensions of Mons Olympus were staggering. Over fifteen miles high. Over 340 miles in width at the base. The volcano was surrounded by an escarpment over four miles high. It was the highest and largest mountain in the solar system.
And on the southeast edge of the escarpment, the greatest engineering feat in the solar system was under way by an army of robots. Eight-legged mech-diggers were tearing into the escarpment, cutting a path through it, using the rubble to build up a ramp that extended over one hundred miles into the surrounding plain. Mech-scouts were ahead of the diggers, near the peak, scuttling about on six legs, setting beacons into the rocky soil in a grid pattern. The machines were being controlled by a guardian computer located underground at Cydonia, a location that had long stirred controversy on Earth because of images taken of the area by probes showing a “face” and other nonnatural shapes on the surface. They indeed turned out to be not natural — an Airlia base where Aspasia had been exiled after Atlantis was destroyed. He, his fleet, and most of his followers were killed when Turcotte booby-trapped the Area 51 mothership in space and exploded it as Aspasia and his followers tried to board.
The remaining handful of Airlia living at Cydonia were cut off not only from their home world but from Earth as Aspasia’s Shadow ignored them, retribution for millennia of being cut off from them and battling on Earth without their support as they slept.
In a long path from Cydonia to Mons Olympus, a line of mech-carriers was moving, their claws, gripping debris uncovered from the ruins of the “face.” The movement had been noticed on Earth and was being tracked by Larry Kincaid, a NASA specialist who was part of the Area 51 team. The purpose of the movement and what was planned on Mons Olympus, however, remained a mystery.
Simon Sherev nodded at the four guards behind the bullet- and blast-proof glass as he passed their station. The four men watched him with cold eyes, muzzles of their Uzis stuck through portals following him even though they knew who he was and around his neck was the proper access card. The men took their jobs very seriously for behind the large steel vault doors to their rear lay the true might of Israeclass="underline" two dozen atomic warheads.
That vault, while it was the most important charge in Sherev’s command at Dimona, was not his destination. Instead he continued down the underground corridor until he came to a second vault. It held objects that had power of a different kind. Sherev showed his pass to the soldiers guarding this bunker, then pressed his face against a retinal scanner. The bulletproof clear door opened with a loud click.
Sherev stepped through, passed the guards, then repeated the process with the vault door. It slowly swung open, lights automatically going on inside. Sherev went inside and hit the control shutting the door behind him. The vault was about forty feet deep by twenty wide, with a high ceiling. Three rows of tables went from front to rear. On them were various artifacts, some human, some they had found to be Airlia.