Emory was strapped into his chair. “Ready.”
“Release,” Downing ordered.
Tennyson pulled the lever over. There was a grinding noise, then the sound of thousands of steel ball bearings rattling against metal. Underneath the Greywolf the submersible’s ballast was sliding out of the portal Tennyson had just opened.
Tennyson clambered up into his seat and strapped in. Minus the ballast the Greywolf began to slowly rise, picking up speed as the seconds went by.
The two foo fighters, picking up no power emission from the submersible, remained where they were, now guarding empty ocean.
On the surface, forty miles to the east, Kevin Brodie was a Department of Defense civilian assigned to the crew of the Yellowstone. For the past twenty minutes he had been putting his laptop computer through its paces, furiously calculating, looking up current and depth data, rechecking, putting in figures as they were relayed to him from the Navy weapons specialist who was sitting at his side. Finally he looked up.
“I’ve got it.”
The weapons man picked up a radio mike. “Anzio, here’s the coordinates.”
Forty miles from the Yellowstone, the USS Anzio, a Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser, was waiting. As the weapons man gave the coordinates, the captain of the Anzio maneuvered his ship to the designated spot on the ocean’s surface and came to a halt. The ocean for forty miles in all directions was clear of surface vessels.
On the rear deck, weapons experts worked over a BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missile. They were bypassing the sophisticated homing and arming mechanisms built into the missile and replacing them with a simple depth-activated ignitor. In other words they were reducing a missile worth four million dollars to a depth charge.
The petty officer in charge called up to the bridge and informed the captain they were ready. Shaking his head, the captain ordered the nuclear warhead in the missile armed. The petty officer did so, then stood back as a crane lifted the Tomahawk up and over the side of the ship.
Slowly the missile was lowered to the water’s surface. The cable holding the missile was released and it sank out of sight. The ship’s four General Electric gas-turbine engines had been running at high speed while this was going on. At the captain’s order the drive shafts were engaged, and the twin screws tore into the water.
The Anzio raced away to the east at maximum speed, while on the rear deck a SH-60 Sikorsky helicopter lifted off.
The Greywolf was rocketing to the surface now and it passed the missile on its way down at fifteen hundred meters depth. It had been Brodie’s job to calculate the exact location of the foo fighter base from the LLS reading, add in the local currents, temperature inversions, depth, weight and size of the missile and its warhead, and mix all those effects together to find the point on the surface where it should be dropped so that, falling free, it would explode, hopefully, right on top of the foo fighter base.
The Greywolf broke surface and the entire submersible popped into the air before settling down.
“Let’s move!” Downing yelled as he reached up and began unscrewing the hatch. Tennyson crowded in and helped him. They pushed the hatch out of the way. It tumbled free into the ocean, but Downing wasn’t worried about that. He climbed up onto the top deck and squinted into the fierce sunlight. He heard the chopper before he saw it.
The SH-60 swung over the top of the submersible, lowering a cage. Downing grabbed on to the cage and held it steady as Tennyson and Emory climbed in, then he squeezed in beside them.
“I’ll miss her,” he said to Tennyson as they were lifted into the air, the chopper heading east after the Anzio even before the cage began to be reeled in.
“She was a good ship,” Tennyson acknowledged as the Greywolf faded into the distance, a dark spot on a blue carpet.
They all flinched as the entire ocean surface erupted in a massive waterspout where the Greywolf had been.
Brodie’s calculations were excellent. The Tomahawk passed through the depth the igniter was set for less than fifty meters from the foo fighter complex.
The nuclear explosion took out not only the two foo fighters that had shadowed the Greywolf and the base, but a half-mile section of the East Pacific Ridge.
On the other side of the world Captain Mike Turcotte gripped Colonel Spearson’s weathered hand in his.
“Bloody good to see you, even if you do come flying in on one of those weird saucer things,” Spearson said.
“We need to get to the cavern,” Turcotte said as Duncan and Zandra followed him.
“Right this way.”
At the same time, back in the Pacific, Kelly Reynolds’s bouncer was settling down on the runway on Easter Island.
CHAPTER 38
“You’ve neutralized the foo fighter fleet,” Duncan said as they rode the cog railway down into the cavern. “But what about the Airlia ships that are coming?”
Turcotte felt tired, the sort of tired he had experienced before in combat and in Ranger School when he’d gone for months with a couple of hours’ sleep a night and barely one meal a day to provide energy. He knew the danger of such tiredness: thoughts became muddled, decision-making impaired. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and cleared his head, then he went back to the question Duncan had asked. He turned and addressed the man in the seat behind them.
“Colonel Spearson, do you have SATCOM with Area 51?”
“I can route through to that location,” Spearson said.
“There’s some people there I need you to send a message to.”
Spearson pulled out a small notepad from the breast pocket of his camouflage smock. “Go ahead.”
“All right,” Turcotte began. “The message is to Kelly Reynolds and Major Quinn.” He nodded toward Zandra. “I’m going to need you to pull your ST-8 authorization.”
“You’ve got it,” Zandra said.
“All right,” Turcotte said. “Here’s what I need.”
A tunnel had been blasted and drilled through the side of Rano Kau to the chamber containing the guardian. Kelly Reynolds went down the tunnel in a mental fog, her brain and heart swirling with thoughts and emotions she was having a very hard time sorting out and controlling.
She’d heard of the success in wiping out the foo fighter base and seen the military personnel at the airfield on Easter Island celebrating even while they were evacuating the island. Fools, she thought. All they had done was spit in the face of those who could save the human race. And there were still the talon ships closing on Earth.
Think what they had done to Atlantis, she wanted to shout at the idiots. Didn’t they realize the Airlia could do the same to New York or Moscow or any major city?
She reached the bottom and entered the chamber. There was no one around. The U.S. military was getting everyone off Easter Island, clearing it of all human life. Her clearance from Major Quinn had allowed her to pass the military police guards and the captain in charge had warned her that if she wasn’t back up in thirty minutes they weren’t coming down to get her and she’d be on her own. Bouncer 6 had its orders, too, and the pilot took off and headed back to Area 51, leaving her stranded on the island.
She knew why they were evacuating the island and she knew why the captain was nervous. They wanted to destroy the guardian. They wanted to destroy the machine that held the key to mankind’s history and its future. Just as they wanted to destroy the Airlia.