“Yes, sir.”
Turcotte, Yakov, and Quinn headed for the elevator. “Uh, sir—” Quinn paused.
“Yes?”
“There’s some interesting material in the folders you took from the Russian Archives.”
“Such as?”
Quinn opened a folder. “The file which held the photo of Mount Ararat… was the search for Noah’s Ark. Hitler sent teams around the world looking for the place it supposedly came to rest. Naturally, Mount Ararat was one of those places.”
“Did they find it?”
“It doesn’t appear so.”
“Why would they be looking for Noah’s Ark?” Turcotte asked.
“Perhaps it is something else,” Yakov said, “as all other legends have turned out to be.”
“What else do you have?” Turcotte was studying the Nile imagery, committing it to memory. Quinn closed the folder. He had one more that he hadn’t opened yet. Quinn hesitated, fingers running along the edge of the manila folder.
“Well?” Turcotte pressed as they reached the elevator.
“I was checking CIA case files on the Watchers, seeing if I could find another ring. When I pulled what they have now, it was cross-referenced with some other files, um—” He paused.
“What other files?” Turcotte checked his watch.
“It’s just a list,” Quinn said, “of people the CIA thought needed watching; targeting people who they suspect had some sort of connection with The Watchers or The Mission or The Ones That Wait. You have to understand that they did this in a rush after the revelations of what was here.”
“And?” Turcotte was surprised at Quinn’s sudden reticence. The elevator doors opened and they got in.
“Doctor Duncan’s name is on it.”
“For suspicion of what?” Turcotte snapped.
“Just as requiring further investigation,” Quinn said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Turcotte took a step toward the smaller major. Yakov put out an arm across Turcotte’s chest. “Easy.”
“It’s bull,” Turcotte said. “Clowns In Action — I worked with them before and they couldn’t—” He caught himself. “We’ve got more important things to do.”
As he walked out of the elevator toward the conference room, Quinn gave Yakov a questioning glance. The Russian merely shrugged his large shoulders.
Popeye McGraw stared down at the Easter Island International Airport as Olivetti recorded the scene on a digital recorder.
“Damn,” Popeye said.
The fact that Olivetti said nothing in response indicated the depth the effect of the scene below had on the larger SEAL.
A strange collection of people and equipment were all over the airfield and the surrounding area. Six-legged machines stalked about on their tasks, while people moved around as if in a stupor. Various aircraft from the Washington lined the runway in different stages of either assembly or disassembly, it was hard to tell.
“They ain’t normal, those people,” Olivetti muttered.
Popeye raked the area with the binoculars, checking everything. There were several clusters of people staked out next to the runway, heads all pointing inward as mechanical robots walked by, spraying something over them.
He could see the entrance to the tunnel that led to the guardian computer chamber. A squad of marines with M-16s stood there. Popeye twisted the focus. The men had blank expressions, but their hands held the weapons tightly.
Popeye had often boasted in bars that a Navy SEAL could kick butt on a dozen marines. But that was in a bar. Automatic weapons were a great equalizer.
“What the hell is going on?” Popeye muttered. During the mission briefing, they’d read the report about the people who had come to Easter Island on the Progressive trawler who had been taken over by some sort of black cloud. Popeye pulled the glasses away from his eyes and rubbed a hand across his forehead, smearing the camouflage paint.
Olivetti waited patiently. “The crater,” Popeye said.
Olivetti didn’t even nod, but hoisted his pack containing various gear and his tanks onto his back. They turned away from the airfield and headed farther up the slope of Rapa Karu.
Kelly Reynolds twitched. Consciousness seeped into her brain. She had no idea how long she had been out. For just the slightest of moments she was home in Nashville, snug in her bed, buried under a down comforter.
That image was ripped asunder as the flow of data through the guardian cascaded over her. She knew where she was, she just didn’t know what she was anymore. How long had she been here?
She paused her racing mind. What had woken her? The torrent of data was a river pouring past her, and it was like trying to find a slight disturbance in the flow.
She began searching.
Popeye McGraw and Olivetti went over the lip of the crater, their wet suits soaked with sweat, but their breathing almost normal. They’d done things in training that made the climb look like a weekend jaunt. Two hundred feet below, the surface of the lake filling the crater was totally smooth. They didn’t even pause, but began clambering down.
Within a couple of minutes they reached the water. Packs were dropped and cached under some rocks, tanks were put back on, and they slid into the water.
Working off the information they had been given in their mission preparation, they searched for the tunnel entrance at the bottom and found it relatively quickly.
They swam into it, navigating by feel through the darkness. Both men had been in dark water before, and they moved forward without fear.
Kelly Reynolds saw what the guardian had noted. A woman, one of the ones brought by the Southern Star, among the third wave infected by the nano-virus, had caught a glimpse of a light reflecting off glass high on the flanks of Rapa Karu. The woman, a former nurse from Australia, of course, had no idea of the import of what she had seen. She’s simply continued on her task of dragging food supplies for other humans from the UNAOC supply depot.
But the guardian, capable of two billion calculations per second, had reacted differently. Within three seconds, the event had worked its way through various layers to the forefront of the computer’s attention. None of the nanovirus slaves were on the slope. Neither were the mech-robots.
The conclusion — an unknown variable.
The guardian didn’t know what it was, so Kelly didn’t either. But the guardian began reacting.
The two SEALs headed toward a small dot of light. It grew brighter as they approached, and in a minute they surfaced inside a cavern. The light came from a glowing orb on the ceiling. They swam over to a lip of rock on one side and got out of the water. A tunnel was cut into the wall in front of them. They secured their weapons and headed into it. The ground sloped up slightly, then turned to the right. It was lit by thin strips of glowing material set into the ceiling.
They entered a cave, about a hundred meters wide and long. The walls were of rock, except for the far one, made of black metal with control panels built into it. Their eyes were focused on what was in the forefront. The body of a woman was splayed against a twenty-foot-high golden pyramid. Near it, a hole was cut in the floor of the cavern into and out of which a steady stream of small robots flowed.
Slung over Olivetti’s shoulder was a satchel containing explosives. He’d already prewired several different charges, and already mentally calculating what he would need to destroy this chamber and the pyramid.
Both men started, swinging the muzzles of their weapons about as something moved to their right. A young boy dressed in brown walked out of the shadows.