“Hey, Captain,” one of the men in cockpit called out from his communications console. “Just got a message for you.”
“Go ahead,” Turcotte said.
“From a Lisa Duncan on board the George Washington. Says there is radio traffic between the guardian on Easter Island and Mars.”
“Both ways?” Turcotte asked.
“Both ways,” the man confirmed. “And also the guardian on Easter Island was into the Interlink and Internet for a while. They’ve cut off that link.” “Great,” Turcotte muttered.
Turcotte went back into the rear and sat down on the red web seating along the inside skin of the plane. He was tired. Upon getting back to Earth after destroying the Airlia fleet, he had been whisked to Washington for an in-depth debrief. He’d had only the one day off, shared with Lisa Duncan in her mountain home, before starting on this mission.
Despite his weariness, he was grateful simply to be alive. He knew others who had not been so fortunate.
He could clearly see Colonel Kostanov from Russia’s Section IV of the Interior Ministry — their version of Area 51. He had died on the slopes of Qian-Ling fighting off the advancing Chinese forces. Peter Nabinger was dead, his body unrecovered in the wreckage of the helicopter crash in mainland China. Kelly Reynolds was in the grasp of the guardian computer under Easter Island and had not been heard from since she radioed him to not destroy Aspasia. Von Seeckt was still alive, but barely, in the base hospital at Nellis Air Force Base outside Area 51. Of the original group that had uncovered the secret of that mysterious base, it looked as if only he and Duncan were still in the fight.
And from Duncan’s message it appeared the fight would go on.
Kincaid threw the imagery down in disgust. Wherever TL-SAT-9-3 was, he wasn’t going to be able to find it this way. The area he had had the spy satellite check showed only thick jungle. Using thermals or infrared wouldn’t help on an inert piece of metal.
TL-SAT-9-3 had been swallowed up by the jungle.
Kincaid’s computer beeped. He eagerly checked his e-mail, hoping he had another message from Yakov. When he had first received the e-mail message, Kincaid had checked in with Lisa Duncan and she had told him that Yakov was a Section IV operative. Given what had happened in China with Colonel Kostanov, another Section IV operative who had given his life so that Mike Turcotte and Peter Nabinger could escape from Qian-Ling, Duncan had told Kincaid to take Yakov seriously and check out the information.
But the message wasn’t from Yakov. Instead, it was from the CIA. He had asked for a check into the background of that satellite.
He read the short message: TL-SAT-9-3 had been launched by Ariane, the European Space Consortium, under contract to a civilian firm. No details about the satellite itself were available. The company that owned the satellite was called Earth Unlimited, and the report speculated that since that company dealt in mining, the satellite had been a ground-imaging sensor.
That didn’t make sense to Kincaid. Why would they have brought it down after only two days if its job was to take pictures from orbit? He scanned the rest of the message, which gave some information about Earth Unlimited. He paused as something caught his eyes. Nestled among a listing of two dozen subsidiaries of Earth Unlimited, a name jumped out at him: Terra-Lei. The same company that had discovered the ruby sphere in the cavern in the Great Rift Valley.
Yakov listened to the hiss of static coming from the earpiece of the SATPhone for ten seconds before pushing the off button. He knew he had dialed the right number — it was the same number he had used for two decades — but he carefully punched it in once more. And again, his ear was filled with static.
In those two decades the other end had always been answered by the second ring. Yakov knew there could only be one reason it wasn’t being picked up now — there was no one alive on the other end. Yakov had worked in the covert world long enough to know that, like an animal in the wild, a good operative had to adjust quickly and efficiently to any change in the environment they operated in. He didn’t want to accept what his ear was telling him, but he did. He shut the phone off, tucked it into his backpack, and continued on his way, already making new plans.
CHAPTER 5
The Springfield had listened as its sister ship, the Pasadena, had been destroyed by the foo fighters. Like their brethren on the fleet above them, the crew of the submarine felt no affinity for the Airlia or the alien race’s machines. They would have much preferred loading a live torpedo in the tube and firing it toward Easter Island rather than the device that was currently being manhandled into the number one tube.
Sea Eye was developed to be a remote probe that the submarine could launch and use as a stand-off surveillance device. The housing for the device was a conventional MK-48 torpedo. Nineteen feet long by twenty-one inches in diameter, it fit perfectly into the firing tube.
Inside of the casing, the torpedo’s propulsion system and wire-guidance spool remained intact. The warhead, however, had been removed and an array of surveillance equipment took its place.
The Springfield was currently at two hundred feet depth and cruising just on the edge of where the shield guarding Easter Island was plotted.
“We have a direct link to the Springfield and through her to the Sea Eye,” the young lieutenant seated in front of the computer informed Duncan. “They’re closing on their launch point.” “How close will they get?” Duncan asked.
“The wire link is over eight kilometers long,” the lieutenant said. “They will get within two kilometers of the shield to launch. That gives them plenty to work with. The Springfield is taking a course that will follow the shield around for the length of the mission. She’s running on minimum thrust and power. Stealth mode.”
“Won’t the shield react to the torpedo as a threat?” Duncan asked.
“We’re going to try to float the torpedo through, with the power off,” Admiral Poldan said. “Once it clears the shield, we can activate it through the trail wire and take a look.”
“Two minutes to shield,” the lieutenant announced. He hit a button on his console. “Entry program is loaded and ready to run.”
Duncan looked once more at the imagery of the shield. The guardian had made the shield opaque after the last failed attack by Admiral Poldan’s fleet. Up to that point, it had been invisible. The best guess UNAOC scientists had been able to come up with was that the field that comprised the shield was similar to the electromagnetic used by the bouncers — the small Airlia atmospheric craft that Area 51 had had control of for forty years. The fact that in all the years Majestic had worked on the electromagnetic gravity drives of those craft not a single clue as to how they actually worked had been discovered told Duncan that the key to the shield would not suddenly reveal itself.
“Torpedo launch!” the lieutenant announced.
The torpedo was spit out of the launch tube with a gush of compressed air. It ran straight for two hundred meters and then began curving to the left, approaching the shield.
When it was less than a hundred meters from the shield, the electric motor went dead. The torpedo’s momentum kept it going forward.
The lieutenant checked the time. “Sea Eye is at the shield.”
On board the Springfield, Captain Forster had also just been informed of the torpedo’s status.
“Sonar?” he called out. “Anything?”