Lin knelt next to them. He realized he had taken the streets and woven his way through the southern capital to this destination subconsciously. He’d learned the address when he’d been doing intelligence preparation for his mission.
Lin noted how tightly the old man held the woman. He reached down and pulled a wallet out of the man’s pants. He flipped it open and recognized the name: his father’s brother. Separated over half a century ago.
Lin keyed the radio. “Headquarters. Colonel Lin. It is over. This was wrong. It is wrong.” He let go of the key.
The small earpiece squawked, as his superiors demanded an explanation of his strange message. Lin pulled the earpiece out and left it dangling. He threw his pack with the radio in it on the ground. He reached in, ignoring the radio and pulling out a thin blanket. He carefully placed it over the bodies.
Then he sat down on the floor. He put an arm up over the blanket, feeling the cold bodies underneath, and closed his eyes.
Chang Tek-Chong leaned against the front of the hastily dug foxhole, watching the advancing Chinese forces. They were less than a half mile away. The tactics he had come up with had worked to an extent, but there was no stopping the wave of humanity the Chinese kept pouring ashore behind the shield. His position was located in the foothills of the mountains that ran along the east coast of the island. The entire west coast had been overran. The most fertile and productive part of the country was in enemy hands.
Tek-Chong reached up and pulled a heavy piece of plywood over the top of the foxhole, covering it. He heard the rumble of heavy equipment and then the thud as a backhoe dumped a load of dirt on the top of the plywood, burying him and the other occupant of the hole.
Tek-Chong leaned back against the freshly cut earth. He noticed that he was breathing more shallowly, which brought a wry smile to his face. It wasn’t as if his partner in the hole was taking any of it. He reached out and felt the cold steel. No comfort.
He looked at his wrist and the small glowing face told him he’d been buried for ten minutes. He thought of his father, who had died fighting the refugees from the mainland who had taken over Formosa. And now he was fighting for that same regime, against another invasion from the same mainland. He laughed out loud at the insanity, and then cut it short, realizing that mainland forces were probably walking right over his site.
He checked his watch again. Given the rate at which the mainland forces had been advancing, he was now inside the shield wall. He reached out like a lover in the dark toward his companion. His fingers lightly reached over the metal to the small keyboard. He blindly tapped in the command.
Tek-Chong died instantly as the nuclear weapon went off. The explosion roared out of the foxhole, incinerating the mainland forces nearby, then rebounding off the interior of the shield wall like a captured tsunami of fire. The effect of the single bomb was multiplied by being captured inside the shield wall and within less than thirty seconds the entire contingent of mainland forces and all surviving Taiwanese inside were dead.
Garlin placed the priest’s crown on top of Duncan’s head. She was strapped to an upright table, her arms and legs bound tightly. He left the room briefly, then returned, wheeling in a cart with a large plastic case on top of it. Duncan’s eyes watched his movements, but she didn’t say anything. Her previous meal had been drugged, she knew that now, because her last memory was of eating the food Garlin had brought Then she had awoken, strapped down to the table. She blinked as she noted the massive amount of blood that blanketed the top of the plastic case. Fresh blood, glistening under the bright overhead lights.
“What happened?” she demanded.
Garlin ignored her. He flipped latches and took the top off the case. Duncan recognized the Ark of the Covenant. He reached inside and opened the Ark’s lid and pulled out the leads. He carefully attached them to the crown. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing, which Duncan found strange. It was as if he had handled the Ark and crown before.
Whose blood? she wondered. What the hell was going on?
Her thoughts were cut short by a spike of pain and then a vision of a beautiful white city with a magnificent palace in the center.
Garlin reached up and gripped her chin in his hand, squeezing tight, drawing her attention from the vision inside her head to him. “We want to know where you came from.”
It was a struggle to talk, to hold back the vision flooding in through the crown. “What do you mean?”
“We know you’re not from Earth,” Garlin said. “We want the location of your home world.”
CHAPTER 18: THE PRESENT
Mike Turcotte sat down in the snow. All he wanted to do was sleep. The snow felt very comforting, like a nice blanket. He leaned back, enveloped in it. So nice. He remembered Sunday mornings in Maine, his only day off from cutting, when he could sleep in, his body completely worn-out from a week on the saw. This was so much better.
A bolt of pain spiked through his brain. Duncan.
He sat up, snow falling off his parka. Turcotte opened his eyes, but all he could see was formless white. The pain, though, was still there.
His goggles were frozen over, he realized. He wasn’t in Maine. Goggles, why was he wearing goggles? He reached up and fumbled, pulling them down. He was in a depression in the snow. The sky above was clear blue, the clearest he had ever seen. Beautiful. It reminded him of someplace in his past, someplace very safe, very home.
Duncan.
What was happening?
A form intruded on the bluest sky. A figure swaddled in Gore-Tex. It stepped over him and disappeared up the mountain.
Turcotte rolled his head back. Ice. Snow. Rock.
Duncan. The pain was worse than the cold. It brought him out of his desire to sleep, to fade away, to become part of the nothingness that the mountain was part of.
The mountain.
Everest. He knew where he was. Sitting up again was the hardest thing he ever did.
He got to his feet. Mualama was about ten meters away, moving upslope. The last twenty-four hours with the archaeologist flooded over Turcotte. Mualama reminded him of a sphinx. Silent. Brooding. Waiting. Waiting for what, he wondered.
Lisa Duncan.
Turcotte turned toward the peak. He took a step. He saw that about two hundred feet above them the ridgeline steepened. Turcotte felt a shiver run up his back, not from the cold, but from the man ahead of him.
The “elevator” in the strut had started slowly up the massive leg and then begun moving in a horizontal direction as near as Yakov could tell. The pace was incredibly slow, something he found strange for a piece of machinery associated with such a spectacle as the mothership. He had expected to be swiftly transported into the front of the mothership, but instead they seemed to be traversing the entire length of the ship at a snail’s pace.
“Do you think there’s a control panel that we don’t see?” Major Briggs asked. The walls of the room were smooth black with no visible markings, but Yakov remembered that the door to the room had been invisible on the strut.
“There might be,” he acknowledged, “but I do not know how to access it, if there is one.”
“We seem to be taking the—” Briggs began, but he shut up as the room came to a halt.
The three faced the door and were startled when the wall behind them opened. They spun about, weapons at the ready. An empty corridor beckoned, the walls made of the same black metal.