Two other Apaches made gun runs at the bouncer as it exited the hangar, firing just in front of the alien craft. Quinn ignored them, pressing forward on the control stick.
Everyone flinched as the Apaches circled back and fired once more, rounds slamming into the side of the alien craft, the impacts visible via the strange ability of the skin to act like one-way glass.
Quinn accelerated the craft and they were moving over six hundred miles an hour within ten seconds, leaving Area 51 and Che Lu’s slowly cooling body far behind.
Squads of soldiers entered the CUBE, arresting all those who had been left behind. They planted small explosive charges on every computer and communications device. As the red digits slowly counted down to detonation the men expeditiously exited the complex.
On the surface, the C-130 rolled down the runway and came to a halt, where the squad of soldiers waited with Duncan. The back ramp came down and touched the concrete. Four white-coated figures rolled a gurney off the ramp and up to those waiting. They put Duncan on the gurney and strapped her down. Standing inside the cargo bay was a fifth white-coated figure, a tall man with shockingly white hair and piercing blue eyes.
When they rolled the gurney onto the plane, he leaned over Duncan, checking her vital signs, even as the ramp began to close and the aircraft began turning.
As it roared down the runway, the charges inside of Area 51 detonated.
Inside Hangar One lay the body of Che Lu. From the Long March in 1934, through the agony of World War II and the subsequent Communist regimes, to watching her students die in Tiananmen Square, to the thrill of entering Qian-Ling, her journey was finally over in the most unlikely of places.
CHAPTER 9: THE PRESENT
Roberta Lockhart wore with pride the four stripes on the cuff of her blue jacket that indicated she was a United States Navy captain. From the streets of south-central Los Angeles, through the rigors of the Naval Academy, to the subtle racism and sexism of the active Navy, she had followed two rules her mother had taught her with unswerving obedience: Do your job better than anyone else and treat everyone with respect.
At the moment she was standing behind another black woman, twenty years her junior, a new rating assigned to SOSUS-PAC, Lockhart’s command. To Lockhart the new sailor’s sex or race made no difference — she was doing her job making sure the newcomer was trained as well as possible.
SOSUS stood for sound surveillance system. The first SOSUS systems were put together in the fifties and the sixties and laid along the Atlantic Coast — SOSUS- ATL. Then the Navy emplaced Colossus, which is along the Pacific Coast. Both were linked lines of passive systems submerged in the ocean, designed to listen for the movement of submarines through the water.
Those first two systems guarded both coasts of the United States, but as the Soviets deployed ballistic missile submarines that could stand far off the coast and lob their nuclear warheads into the heartland of America, it was realized they weren’t enough.
In response the Navy emplaced systems just off the Russian coast, near the two major Soviet sub ports at Polyarnyy and Petropavlovsk. Since then, the Navy continued to add to the worldwide SOSUS web. A line of devices was emplaced off the Hawaiian Islands. Each receiver consisted of a cluster of hydrophones inside submerged tanks as large as the oil storage tanks just outside of Lockhart’s command. The tanks were sunk to the bottom, anchored, then linked by cable. The cables were buried as the Soviets — and the Russians afterward — had a tendency to send trawlers dragging cable cutters near the systems.
All the systems were coordinated so that not only could SOSUS detect movement, but by comparing pickup timing from various sensors, Lockhart’s people could draw at least two lines and pinpoint the emitter’s location.
There was only one problem with the system: differentiating between friendly and enemy submarines. As part of their security, American ballistic submarines patrolled within large assigned areas at the discretion of their commanders, where it was more than likely that a potential enemy submarine would be in the same area.
The solution was simple but effective. Every friendly submarine had an ID code painted on its upper deck with special laser reflective paint. SOSUS could pinpoint a sub, then a FLTSATCOM satellite could fire a laser downlink toward the indicated spot using a high-intensity blue-green laser, which could penetrate to submarine depth and read the code.
Lockhart had been in Admiral Kenzie’s office earlier in the day along with all the other senior military commanders on Oahu. The information that the fleet would sail the next day and essentially leave the islands undefended by sea had been met with shocked silence.
Even the Army’s main unit on the island, the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division at Schofield barracks was on the move. All day she’d watched truck after truck of soldiers come into the port and troops walk up gangplanks onto the Navy ships.
Absolute secrecy had been Kenzie’s number one directive. Only those in the room knew what was to happen but the media had picked up the activity and over the entire island there was a sense of near panic. Despite a blackout on news, rumors were rife of naval disasters and pending doom.
Lockhart knew she and her people would not be with the fleet when it sailed. She also knew what had happened to Task Forces seventy-eight and seventy-nine. Along with an Air Force AWACS flying patrol to the southeast, her people were the warning line for the island chain.
In Hawaii, particularly at Pearl Harbor, early warning was something on the order of a religion. Despite being over sixty years in the past, no one forgot what had happened on December 7, 1941. The Arizona Memorial was a daily reminder in sight of every person at Pearl.
“Anything?” Lockhart asked. It was a sign of the stress of the times that she asked. She knew her sailors would report anything out of the norm. She also knew the report from the satellites was that the enemy fleet was slightly more than two days out. Still.
“No, ma’am,” the rating replied.
Lockhart walked across the dimly lit room to the other occupant, her senior enlisted man, Markin, and best “listener.” She leaned close so the rating wouldn’t hear. “Anything?”
“Pod of whales here.” Markin tapped his screen, indicating a spot southwest of Maui.
“Maybe you should get some rest,” Lockhart said. “There should be nothing—” Her mouth snapped shut as Markin held up a finger, indicating the need for quiet. She waited.
After five long minutes, Markin slowly pulled off his headphones. “There’s a strange sound southeast.”
Southeast. Where the enemy was coming from, Lockhart thought. “Range?”
He checked his computer. “One hundred seventy-five miles, ma’am.” Too close, she thought. Too close. “What is it? Submarine?”
“I’ve never heard this before,” Markin said. “Give me a minute, ma’am.” He put the headphones back on and closed his eyes.
Lockhart walked over to her new rating. “Anything strange?” she asked.
The young woman hadn’t heard the exchange with Markin, but she had seen that something was up. Her face tightened as she listened.
“There’s something, ma’am,” she finally said.
Lockhart noted that Markin had taken off his headphones and was looking toward her. She was torn. “What do you think it is?”
“Water, high pressure,” the rating said.
Lockhart frowned, then went over to Markin. “What do you hear?” “I’ve never heard anything like this before,” he said.