He turned his back on the ship and looked forward. The weather was clear and he could see to the blue horizon where the water met the sky. Looking over the edge of the flight deck, he could see that dolphins still splashed along the bow. Whether they were the same he had seen earlier or new ones to pick up the sport, he had no idea.
“A penny for your thoughts?”
Lisa Duncan had her leather jacket zipped up tight against the salt breeze. A briefcase was in her left hand. Turcotte knew they both had to leave shortly, going in different directions once again.
“I’m not sure they’re worth that much,” he said as she joined him.
“I think they are.”
Turcotte looked out to sea. “I don’t know. Seems like everything’s been moving so fast that it’s hard to think. Always something else to do that seems to take precedence.”
“Precedence over thinking?”
“You know what I mean,” Turcotte said. “Real thinking. Going a level below.” Duncan slipped her right hand into his left and squeezed. “And what’s a level below?”
“I’m not sure I want to know,” Turcotte said, hoping she would change the subject, but she said nothing.
Finally, he spoke. “I guess I wonder why.”
“Why?” Duncan repeated.
“You know, what’s the meaning of it all. You know we’ve been so focused on who and what and where and when, and we hardly know any of those, but it’s the why that’s the key to everything.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
Turcotte struggled to find the words that would make concrete the thoughts that had been swirling about in his head.
“You know what happened in Germany,” he started.
“Something you were involved in?”
Turcotte nodded.
“The incident in the cafe?”
That was a delicate way of putting it, Turcotte thought. He’d been assigned to a classified counterterrorist unit in Berlin. A unit that, once the Wall fell, spent most of its time trying to keep a lid on the piles of weapons from the former Soviet Bloc. It was a joint U.S.-German team. Handpicked men from the U.S. Special Forces and the Germans’ GSG-9 counterterrorist force. Their orders were to fire first and ask questions later, especially when they were dealing with weapons that could kill hundreds, if not thousands.
On his last mission before being assigned to Nightscape at Area 51—indeed, Turcotte knew it might well have been because of what happened on that mission that he received the Area 51 assignment — intelligence had received word that some IRA extremists were trying to buy surplus East German armament — SAM-7 shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.
The supposition was that they would shoot down a Concorde taking off from Heathrow. The weapons were being transported when Turcotte’s team went to interdict.
They set up an ambush, but the terrorists stopped in a Gasthaus just before the ambush point. Getting antsy, the team leader took Turcotte with him to check it out.
With silenced MP-5 subs slung inside their coats, they walked in the combination bar and restaurant. The place was full of people. They saw two of their targets sitting in a booth, but the third was nowhere in site.
And Turcotte’s partner froze, his unnatural demeanor catching the attention of the Irishmen. All hell broke loose. Turcotte and his partner exchanged fire with the two in the booth, killing both.
But the third man tried to run out of the bar, and Turcotte’s team leader fired at him in the middle of a crowd of civilians also trying to escape.
Turcotte could feel Duncan’s hand in his, her skin against the knotted tissue on his right palm — a scar that had formed from the burn he’d gotten when he’d grabbed the gun out of his team leader’s hands by the barrel, the red hot steel burning the flesh.
It was only later that Turcotte found out the body count. Four dead civilians. Including a pregnant, eighteen-year-old girl. To add insult to injury, the powers that be had tried to give Turcotte a medal for the action. Something had snapped in Turcotte after that, and he wasn’t sure he had ever put whatever it was back together.
“Mike?” Duncan’s voice indicated her worry over his long silence and his mood. “What about Germany?”
“Nothing,” Turcotte said. He felt very tired.
“Don’t give me nothing,” Duncan said.
Turcotte sighed. “Those guys I killed in Germany. The IRA gunmen. Their why. Their motivation. I’ve thought about it a lot. They thought they were right. They thought their cause was just and were willing to pay any price to further that cause. Do anything, even if it meant killing innocent civilians.”
“Oh, come on,” Duncan said. “You can’t be comparing—”
“You said you wanted to know what I was thinking,” Turcotte said, harder than he intended. “Then you need to listen.”
Duncan lapsed into silence and waited.
“Okay,” Turcotte said, still trying to rind the words. “The thing is these guys here on this ship. They wear American uniforms. This ship took part in the Gulf War. Bombed the crap out of Iraq. Killed a bunch of Iraqis. But those Iraqis believed in what they were doing, just as much as these sailors and pilots believed in what they were doing. And that’s the way it’s always been. You know — God was on both sides. How come one side ends up winning, then?
“I guess the why I’m wondering is what’s behind it all? I’ve been reacting to this Airlia thing with the basic philosophy that they aren’t us — humans, that is. But is that so much different than being an American and thinking an Iraqi is different? I don’t know. Now Yakov is here telling us that it’s more about a long battle among us — humans — than the aliens.”
“But the aliens are manipulating us,” Duncan said. “STAAR isn’t exactly human, and these Guides — like Majestic-12—their minds have been manipulated by the guardian.”
“So they’re just pawns?” Turcotte asked. “What are we? We can’t even go to UNAOC or our own government for help now. We can’t trust anyone, as Yakov says. I was paranoid when I was working Special Operations, but this is ridiculous. There’s got to be something more. Something different.”
“Why?”
The word caught Turcotte by surprise. “What?”
“I’m asking the same thing you started this with,” Duncan said. “Why does there have to be something more? Something on another level?”
Turcotte blinked. “Don’t you think there has to be a purpose to all this? All our efforts?”
Duncan spread her hands. “There might be. I don’t know what it is right now except we have to do the next right thing.”
A small smile crossed Turcotte’s lips. “The next right thing. I like that.” They stood there in silence, the ocean breeze of the mid-Pacific cool against their faces.
“There’s something else,” Duncan finally said.
“Yes?”
“Yakov.”
“What about him?”
“Do you trust him?” Duncan asked.
“He told us not to,” Turcotte said.
“I agree with him,” Duncan said.
“Why?”
“I spoke with Larry Kincaid and Major Quinn privately before they left, while you and Yakov were talking to Von Seeckt. Kincaid did a check on the Earth Unlimited satellite’s path prior to coming down, backtracking through Space Command’s database.”
Turcotte waited.
“While it didn’t get close to the mothership or the talon, he found the point at which the satellite’s orbit abruptly began to change and deteriorate. It was over a place called Sary Shagan in central Asia. That’s Russia’s primary ABM and ASAT research test site. ASAT stands for antisatellite. There have been reports from both the U.S. and NATO countries of their satellites that pass over that site being interfered with. Some suspect a low-power laser. Others, electronic jamming.”