Kelly reachead out a hand and touched the screen. “So beautiful,” she whispered, her fingers running over the image of the ships. “So beautiful.”
CHAPTER 24
“Can you figure it out?” Turcotte asked Nabinger.
They were in the control room, along with Kostanov and his men and Che Lu and her students.
“My God, there’s never been a find like this,” Nabinger said, looking at the various consoles and panels. “Even the room on Easter Island was nothing compared to this.”
“No guardian computer, though,” Turcotte noted.
“Not here,” Nabinger agreed. He pointed to the far wall. “But who knows what’s in there? Plus there’s the central passageway, which no one has gone down yet.” “Yeah, because you’ll get cut in half if you try,” Turcotte noted.
“Can you get us in there, Professor?” Kostanov asked, nodding his head toward the far wall. “We do not have much time.”
“What is the rush?” Che Lu asked.
“The PLA is going to be knocking on the door soon,” Turcotte said, “and they’re not going to be happy.”
“Plus, as you told us,” Kostanov noted, “Aspasia will be on Earth in less than forty-two hours.”
“And?” Turcotte prompted. “What does this have to do with that? Isn’t this Aspasia’s equipment?”
“It’s Airlia equipment,” Kostanov said, “but I don’t think it’s Aspasia’s.” “The rebels?” Nabinger asked.
“We believe so,” Kostanov said.
“Who’s we?” Turcotte demanded.
“Section Four has been tracking all of this for a very long time,” Kostanov said.
“If you’ve been tracking this for so long, why is it so important that you uncover this base now?” Turcotte said.
“Because the Airlia are coming.” He turned to Nabinger. “Professor, what can you tell us about this room?”
“It’s a control center,” Nabinger said. He was looking at the console. “Controlling what?” Che Lu asked.
“This.” Nabinger waved a hand absently around his head. “This entire complex. From what I can gather, this entire mountain was built to house”—he paused, his eyes running over high rune symbols—“to house the equipment in the other room that we passed getting in here — and…”
“And?” Kostanov prompted.
In reply Nabinger pushed his right hand down onto the panel. A red glow suffused the black top, outlining more high rune symbols.
“What are you doing?” Turcotte asked.
Nabinger ignored those around him, concentrating on what was before him. His hands hovered over the top of the console for a long minute. A group of hexagons, fitted tightly together, appeared. Nabinger pressed his hand down on the hexagon field in a certain sequence. Everyone in the control room took a step back as there was a loud humming noise. A crack appeared along the edges of the door in the far wall as it began to slide upward. Turcotte and the other Green Berets instinctively swung up the muzzles of their guns to cover the door, as did Kostanov and his men.
Nabinger walked through their line of fire and disappeared into the room. Turcotte was next through and he was half expecting what he saw as he stepped through. Sitting in the center of a small room hewn out of the rock was a six-foot-high pyramid, the surface glowing with a golden haze that extended out a few inches from the material that it was made of.
Turcotte also wasn’t surprised when Nabinger walked right up to the pyramid and put his hands on the surface, the golden glow extending around the archaeologist as if he had become part of the machine.
CHAPTER 25
Exactly on schedule O’Callaghan smoothly banked his aircraft away from the O’Bannion and headed for the shore. He adjusted the throttle for maximum fuel conservation and they were on their way, skimming along at fifty feet above the waves at 130 knots.
The sun was starting to settle in the sky and he knew that soon, just before they reached the shore, it would be dark, which was just the way they had it planned. Just under six hours of flying to the pickup zone.
The sound of automatic fire echoed dully into the chamber. Turcotte’s head snapped up and he grabbed his MP-5 before hustling out the door, followed by the rest of his men and Kostanov. Turcotte had sent Howes and DeCamp to guard the entrance as soon as Nabinger had made contact with the pyramid.
Halfway up the side corridor they paused as a loud explosion thundered down the rock walls, the sound multiplied by the confined space.
Farther up they met the two Special Forces men, both of them covered in dust. “We had to blow the entrance,” Howes said. “The Chinese were bringing up a tank.”
“What now?” Kostanov asked.
“We’ll figure something out,” Turcotte said. “What about where you came in?” “It was on the other side of the large chamber but now it’s blocked from the outside.”
“We’ll get out,” Turcotte said, wishing he were as confident as he hoped he sounded.
Inside the “Fort” the cables fell away from the ships. Through tunnels hooked in to the base of each ship figures moved, crews manning vessels they had last been on board over five millennia ago. The tunnels pulled back.
Without any visible sign of energy being expended, the ships smoothly lifted off the surface of Mars. As they gained altitude their paths began to interlace in an intricate dance, six lean talons, their tips pointed toward Earth.
CHAPTER 26
Turcotte checked his watch for the third time in the last ten minutes. Looking up, he caught Kostanov staring at him. The Russian raised his eyebrows in inquiry and pointed at his own watch. Turcotte looked past the Russian toward Nabinger, who was now leaning against the golden pyramid, his entire body encased in the golden glow. He’d been like that for two hours.
“The Chinese are out there in force by now,” Kostanov said.
“Yep,” Turcotte replied shortly in his northern Maine accent.
“We can’t go out the way you came in and we can’t go out the way I came in.” Kostanov summed the tactical situation up succinctly.
“Yep,” Turcotte said. Then he added his own tidbit. “And my exfil is going to be time-on-target in four hours. If we aren’t on the PZ then, well, it’s a long walk home.”
“How far is your pickup zone?” Kostanov asked.
“Six klicks north.”
“We can make it in two hours,” Kostanov estimated. “If we can get out.” “If no one shoots us,” Turcotte added.
“That, too, my friend, that too.”
“What about you?” Turcotte asked.
“My men and I have long since missed our exfiltration window. Perhaps if we got out and could make communications with our higher command again, we could arrange something, but I do not believe we will have the time.”
“You can come with us,” Turcotte said.
“I believe that is the only option,” Kostanov acknowledged.
“Why did you pretend to be a freelancer working for the CIA on the carrier?” Turcotte asked.
Kostanov rubbed the stubble of his beard. “Hard as it may be to believe, we Russians support UNAOC. We thought my pretending to be what you thought I was would be the easiest way to give that information up to UNAOC and get the Terra-Lei site checked out. After all, we caught quite a bit of public grief over the revelation that we’d kept secret a crashed Airlia craft in our possession for decades, much as you Americans suffered a publicity problem over Area 51. We wished to minimize the publicity fallout.”