The Russian was known by only one name — Yakov. Whether it was his first or last name didn’t matter. Nor did it matter whether it was his given name. He had been operating in the gray covert world for all of his adult life, and that was all he knew.
Yakov cared little for the outside of the pyramid. His research had led him here and he knew what he wanted to see. The guide was clambering over a pile of broken rocks at the base of the pyramid, searching.
“Here!” The man pointed down.
Yakov joined him and looked. There was a black hole between two large rocks. It would be a tight fit. The guide held his hand out and Yakov tossed him a wad of local currency held together with a rubber band. The guide was gone.
Yakov paused before pushing himself into the dark hole. He took several deep breaths, his lungs laboring in the thin 13,000-foot atmosphere. He looked around, taking in the sight of Tiahuanaco as it caught the first light of morning. One of the two great ancient cities of the New World, Tiahuanaco was much less well known than the other, Teotihuacan, outside Mexico City. That could easily be explained by Tiahuanaco’s remote location high in the Andes Mountains. Just getting there required an arduous journey from La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. But there was also a very negative policy enforced by the Bolivian government toward visitors desiring to see the ruins. Getting a travel permit to come to Tiahuanaco was almost impossible. Yakov had bypassed that requirement by ignoring it. He was well-versed in the techniques of entering countries illegally and moving about in the black world.
Both New World cities, because of their greatness, their pyramids, their sudden appearance at the time of the waning of the Egyptian Empire, had raised speculation that they were founded by remnants of that civilization. Now, with the awareness that there really had been an Atlantis, destroyed by the Airlia, the speculation had shifted that perhaps these Central and South American cities — along with the Egyptian, the Chinese, all the Old World civilizations — had been founded by those fleeing that disaster; this, the diffusionest theory of the rise of civilization, claimed that the various civilizations around the world had arisen at the same time because they were founded by people from an earlier, single civilization.
Yakov thought the diffusionest theory was likely, and he also felt there was much more to history than the books recorded. He was a member of Section IV, a branch of the Minister of Interior, sister to the KGB. More a bastard stepchild. Section IV had been formed by the Soviet Union to investigate UFOs and the paranormal. As the years had gone by, after various discoveries, the Soviets had little doubt that Earth had been visited by aliens at some time in the past, although the exact extent of alien involvement in human affairs had been unknown up until the cover being blown off of America’s Area 51 just several weeks before and the information received from the guardian computer.
Yakov, while taking the new revelations in stride, was still on the path of something he had been tracking down for years. Today he hoped to find another piece in the puzzle. He turned toward the dark hole and lowered himself into the bowels of the Pyramid of the Sun. Turning a powerful flashlight on, he made his way through the stone hallways, hunching over to keep his head from hitting the roof.
At Area 51, Major Quinn was inside one of the surface buildings that had been turned into a makeshift morgue. In the middle of the Nevada desert, this location was also well off the beaten track. Part of Nellis Air Force Base, the location had gotten its designation from that post’s map, being designated with that number training area. Quinn knew the entire history of the place, having been assigned as operations officer to the Cube, the command-and-control center for Area 51, five years before.
The location had been chosen because it was where the mothership had been found during World War II. The facility had grown over the years, especially when most of the bouncers — seven of the nine atmospheric craft of the Airlia — had been brought there after being recovered from their hiding place in Antarctica. Test flights of those craft had led to the rumors of UFOs for decades.
Two doctors from UNAOC — the United Nations Alien Oversight Committee — wearing their white lab coats, masks, and goggles, were preparing to do an autopsy on one of the two bodies of the STAAR representatives who had been killed trying to stop the mothership from taking off.
Zandra had been her code name, Quinn remembered as one of the doctors pulled back the sheet covering the first’s body.
“Could have used some sun,” the first doctor remarked. His name tag read “Captain Billings.”
The body was milky white, the skin smooth. The other doctor set up a microphone on a boom in front of Billings. He clicked on a recorder. “All set.”
Billings picked up a scalpel but simply stood over the body for a few seconds as he spoke. “Subject is female; age approximately forty, but it is difficult to determine. Height…” He waited as the other doctor stretched out a tape measure. “Seventy inches. Weight”—Billings looked at the scale reading on the side of the portable cart—“one hundred and fifty pounds.”
Quinn stepped out of the way as Billings walked around the body. “Hair is blondish, almost white. Skin color is very pale white. Body is well muscled and developed. No obvious scars or tattoos. There are six bullet entry wounds on the chest. Four exit wounds on the back.”
Billings leaned over and pulled up the left eyelid. “Eye color is brown…” He paused. “Looks like there’s a contact.” He put down the scalpel and picked up a small set of tweezers. He plucked out the contact lens and looked at it against the overhead light. “Hmm, the contact might have been cosmetic, as it is brown-colored.” Billings looked down.
“Jesus!” Billings exclaimed. “What the hell is that?” Quinn stepped forward as the doctor gasped and moved back. Quinn looked into the right eye. The pupil and iris were red, the pupil a scarlet shade darker than the rest of the eye and elongated vertically like a cat’s. Quinn pulled his cell phone off his belt and punched in to the Cube. “I am isolating this building as per National Security Directive regarding contact with alien life-forms. Request immediate bubble protection be put over us ASAP to prevent further contamination!”
In the Cube, the operations center for Area 51 buried deep underground, Larry Kincaid heard Major Quinn’s call over the speaker. He’d worked at NASA for over thirty years, and STAAR personnel, with their sunglasses, pale skin, and strange-colored hair, had been around for every space launch. They had been there under the authority of a top-secret presidential directive and as such had had complete access to every NASA facility. It was the way of bureaucracy that the correct piece of paper could override every suspicion and every bit of common sense for decades. The warning that they weren’t human was startling but not earth-shattering, given all that had happened in the past several weeks.
So as everyone else scrambled to comply with Quinn’s request to quarantine the STAAR personnel autopsy area, Kincaid’s attention was focused in an entirely different direction. He was tapped into the U.S. Space Command’s Missile Warning Center.
The Center was located deep inside Cheyenne Mountain on the outskirts of Colorado Springs, alongside the headquarters for NORAD. The Space Command, part of the Air Force, was responsible for the Defense Support Program (DSP) satellite system, which Kincaid knew quite a bit about from his work for JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which had been responsible for coordinating the construction of the boosters that had put those satellites into space.
He knew that DSP satellites in geosynchronous orbits blanketed the entire surface of the Earth from an altitude of 20,000 miles. The system had originally been developed to detect ICBM launches during the Cold War. During the Gulf War, it had picked up every Scud missile launch and proved so effective that the military had further streamlined the system to give real-time warnings to local commanders at the tactical level.