“Come,” Yakov said as he stepped into the corridor. The American and Kurd followed. The corridor curved slightly to the left so he could only see about fifty feet ahead. The sound of his boots hitting the floor bounced off the walls. Yakov came to an abrupt halt as the corridor straightened out.
“Oh, man,” Major Briggs muttered as he came up next to Yakov.
The corridor extended straight ahead, for what appeared to the length of the mothership. Close by they could see cross corridors.
“Where to now?” Briggs asked.
Yakov studied the sheet of paper. He couldn’t read the rune markings, but he did find the corridor. “That way.” He pointed down the corridor. “Thirty-eighth hall to the right.”
“According to the reports we have,” Admiral Kenzie said, “they are going to have to turn off the shield when they launch their aircraft.”
His senior air officer, the CAG, or Commander Air Group, considered that. “We’d have to be close by and act quickly.”
Kenzie nodded. “It’s our only shot to get at those ships.”
They had the Alien Fleet positioned eight hundred air miles to the southeast according to the intelligence report radioed back by Seawolf. The news of the destruction of two alien submarines by the attack sub had raised morale a little, but everyone was also aware that the subs hadn’t been shielded.
“I want half your planes in this initial assault. Launch in five minutes. We hold half back just in case—” He didn’t finish the sentence. No word had been heard from the Area 51 survivors and the messages coming out of Washington were garbled at best. “Get to it.”
The Kanshung Face extended to the SEALs’ left and down over a mile. It had never been climbed for the simple reason it made absolutely no sense to climb it, as pretty much any other approach to Everest was less difficult. McGraw and Olivetti had taken the easiest route they could to get to the same height as their goal, and now they had about fifty meters of lateral traverse across a ledge near the top of the face to their objective.
McGraw put in the first piece of protection, hooked a rope through it, attached a sling from his harness to the rope, and set out onto the Face. When he put the second piece of protection in, Olivetti clipped into the rope and began following.
Lexina looked dispassionately at a body clad in ancient clothing lying in the snow. That humans, rogue Watchers, had climbed this high so long ago in their attempt to hide Excalibur, she found quite remarkable, but foolish. That no one had removed Excalibur in the millennia since it was hidden wasn’t due to the efforts of these humans but rather the fact that the sword was so critical that any attempt by either side to recover it would have resulted in what was happening now: all-out war. And that had been avoided for one major reason — they had no idea what the status of the other war was.
Lexina could hear the Chinese climbers talking excitedly among themselves about the body, but she simply stepped over it. Aksu snapped out orders and the men fell silent, continuing along the ridge until they came to the edge of the Kanshung Face. Lexina pointed out along the Face. “It is out there.” Aksu nodded and edged out onto the Face, putting in protection.
Left. Right. Left. Right. Stop. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Left. Right. Left. Right. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
The rhythm was like a drumbeat in Turcotte’s head, propelling him up the ridgeline. A distant part of his mind knew he should be alert for ambush or another trip wire across the path cut in the snow that he was following, but a larger part almost wished a mine would explode in front of him and put him out of this miserable state of affairs.
He could barely see five feet in front of him because his head was bowed, his eyes focused on a spot just ahead of where his next step would be. Beyond that he dared not look or else he feared he would lose what little energy he had left.
Left. Right. Left — Turcotte paused, right foot lifted barely six inches, all he could manage. The trail disappeared, because the mountain disappeared. Ridgeline gave way to vertical face. Turcotte slowly lifted his head. A rope was clipped into the mountainside. Looking farther, he could see two figures edging their way along the rock face, attached to the other end of the rope. They were about fifty meters away and, even as he watched, the first one disappeared around a cornice of rock and ice.
Turcotte fumbled for his MP-5, bringing it up to his shoulder. The oxygen mask was in the way as he tried to sight the weapon. As he tried to unhook the mask, the second figure also went out of sight. He became aware that Mualama was just in front of him. Turcotte shifted the aim of the weapon toward the archaeologist’s back and his gloved finger touched the trigger.
Turcotte let the gun drop on its sling. Then he hooked into the rope and moved out onto the Kanshung Face following Mualama.
The first Chinese commandos into the cavern were cut down by well-disciplined bursts of fire from the Delta Force men. It was a massacre and over a dozen Chinese lay dead in the entrance.
Then the first Kortad entered, spear leveled under its arm. Bullets hit the black armor, ricocheting off. As each Delta man shot at it, the Kortad would shift the point of the spear and fire a golden pulse. The flash of gold would hit the American soldier, briefly envelop him, and then he would drop, unconscious.
It was over in less than twenty seconds.
The rest of the Kortad entered and the rock floor flowed with blood as they decapitated the unconscious men. The surviving Chinese forces took up defensive positions.
“Thirty-seven,” Yakov said.
“Thirty-seven,” Major Briggs confirmed.
They had come about a half mile down the middle of the mothership. Yakov slowed as he came to the next opening. “Thirty-eight.” He turned the corner.
A twenty-foot-high dull red pyramid was in the center of a huge spherical room, a forty-foot walkway leading out to it.
Captain Lockhart received the report of inbound aircraft with no concern. The entire Alien Fleet was under the guard of the shield. She was more involved with preparing the strike wings on the two carriers. Planes were being readied, bombs full of nanovirus were being loaded, and infected pilots were receiving their orders via the nanovirus inside them.
The Alien Fleet wasn’t hard to spot. CAG (Commander Air Group) had his planes at forty thousand feet and the ships, huge as the two carriers and tanker were, appeared to be tiny toys on the surface of the ocean far below.
He’d assigned each plane a number and broken them into three groups, one for each of the capital ships. As they approached the strike point, they began to circle, waiting.
“CAG, this is Alpha-One. Over.” “This is CAG. Over.”
“Do you see what I see in the lead of that fleet? Over.”
CAG reached for a set of binoculars and trained them on the fleet far below and ahead of them. The silhouette of the lead ship was strangely familiar but at the same time not anything he had ever studied in his ship recognition classes. The superstructure was, well, the only word he could come up with was archaic. But the Tomahawk missile launchers where large turrets should have been were as modern as his plane.
Then he realized what he was seeing. “That’s the Arizona!’ Strangely, the sight of the long-sunken warship didn’t surprise CAG. It made him angry that the aliens would scavenge even that to use against them. “Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie flights. Stick with your primary targets. Our concern right now are the two carriers and the tanker. We go when they launch. Over.”