Turcotte took the other man’s hand and shook it. Billam was a stocky man with thinning black hair. He looked old for a captain, somewhere in his late thirties. Turcotte assumed that meant he had been enlisted and gone through either ROTC or OCS to get his commission.
Billam quickly introduced his A-team.
“This is my executive officer, Chief Tabor; operations sergeant, Master Sergeant Boltz; weapons men, Sergeants Truskey and Dedie; commo, Sergeants Prevatil and Garza; medics, Sergeants Rooney and Askins; demolitions and other nefarious acts, Sergeants Metayer and Jones. Team 055 at your beck and call, sir.”
Turcotte picked up no trace of sarcasm in Billam’s voice, but he was sure they probably weren’t thrilled to death about getting such a vague assignment. He knew Mickall had probably picked a good team, but also a team selected somewhat randomly and secretly to prevent infiltration.
Turcotte relayed Duncan’s instructions and gave them directions to link up with Major Quinn and get their SATPhone and billeting information. He could see Yakov over by one of the bouncers, talking to the pilot, and he knew the Russian was anxious to go.
“Any special instructions,” Billam asked, “or just be ready for anything?”
Turcotte shrugged. “I wish I could be more specific, but you guys are basically our ‘if things go to crap’ option.” He could see the acknowledgment of that on the faces of the men. “If you get called by any of us, things are real bad, so be prepared to come in hot. Major Quinn will brief you on everything that’s happened so far. I’ll try to keep you updated so you can at least war-game some options for action, but we’re pretty much flying by the seat of our pants here.” Turcotte turned to head off toward Yakov when something occurred to him. “Captain, are any of your men trained on SADM?”
That brought Billam’s eyebrows arching up. “Sir, that mission has been phased out of Special Forces.”
“I know that,” Turcotte said, “but do you have anyone that was on a SADM team?” SADM stood for strategic atomic demolition mission… backpack nukes, which had been a Special Forces mission prior to the advent of cruise missiles, which could do as good a job placing a nuke deep behind enemy lines and with less cost in manpower. But Turcotte didn’t think they could count on getting a cruise missile strike when they needed it and where.
Billam nodded. “Sergeant Boltz served on a SADM team in 7th Group, and I served on one when I was enlisted in 10th Group. The rest of these guys are too young to have done that.”
Turcotte pointed toward the elevator. “When you meet Major Quinn, see if he can rustle you up a nuke or two.”
Billam blinked. “Are you authorized those weapons, sir?”
“We won’t know until you ask. Quinn got me some nukes when I needed them before,” Turcotte noted. “Like the Boy Scouts, I want to be prepared. Just in case.”
CHAPTER 8
Qian-Ling was the largest tomb in the world, larger than even the stone pyramids of Egypt and the dirt mound pyramids in Central and South America. According to historians, the Emperor Gao-zong, Third Emperor of the Tang Dynasty, and his empress, the only empress ever to rule in China, were buried inside the massive man-made hill.
Qian-Ling was located west of Xian, the city that had been the first imperial capital in China and the eastern terminus of the Silk Road that had stretched in ancient times from western China across Central Asia to the Middle East and on to Rome. It was now on the border between the rebelling Muslim majority in the west of China and ruling powers to the east in Beijing.
Since the disclosure that Earth had been visited by aliens, the ethnic and religious unrest that had always simmered below the surface in China had reached a boiling point, and there were many parts of the country, particularly in the western half, that were in open rebellion. It was part of a growing pattern around the world where the upset of accepted history was leading to an upset of traditions and norms.
As an outgrowth of that unrest what had been one of China’s most revered monuments of antiquity had been seared by the thousand-degree heat from a low-altitude nuclear blast several days earlier. A CSS-5 cruise missile carrying a nuclear warhead had been fired from eighty miles away, traversed the distance in less than two minutes, and exploded two kilometers from its intended target.
The outside of the tomb was now desolate, many artifacts of antiquity destroyed. The stone statues of the sixty-one foreign ambassadors and rulers who had attended the funeral of Emperor Gao-zong that had lined the way to the tomb had been vaporized. The vegetation that had grown along the slopes of the three-thousand-foot-high man-made hill that was his grave had been burned away in a flash. The hill itself, though, was relatively undamaged, hidden behind a shimmering shield-wall of alien origin.
It was a sign of the desperation of the Chinese government that they’d not only detonated a nuclear weapon inside their own borders, but they’d aimed it at the grave of an emperor and empress. The Chinese revered their ancestors and thus their dead. Grave robbing was unknown and archaeological digging was considered practically the same thing: defiling the burial place of someone’s ancestors. A nuclear bomb definitely outranked both grave robbing and archaeological digs.
Qian-Ling, though, was now almost a shelter from the storm that waged around it. All around the mountain, the air shimmered from the strange alien shield that had been activated just prior to the nuclear weapon’s detonation. There was nothing alive on the surface of the earth within a ten-kilometer circle of the tomb, but underneath, inside the protective mountain of earth and alien barrier, the bomb had had little effect.
Inside a large cavern filled with alien equipment, Professor Che Lu sat cross-legged on the floor, just outside the control room that led to the guardian computer. She was an old woman, her skin creased with age, but her mind was as sharp as it had ever been.
Che Lu had seen all of the history of modern China, often participating rather than just watching it go by. She had been one of the twenty-six women who had started the Long March with Mao sixty-four years before. Only six of those women had made it to the end alive. Only ten percent of the one hundred thousand men who had started the march had been alive when they arrived at Yanan in Shaanxi Province in December 1935 after walking over six thousand miles to escape Chiang Kai-shek’s forces.
She knew how significant it was that her government had tried to destroy Qian-Ling. It was more than just a blind fear of the aliens… it was also a desperate attempt by the leaders to keep the country in ignorance and remain in power.
Metal beams came up from the nearest wall and disappeared overhead, curving to follow the dome ceiling around to touch down on the far side. There were numerous large objects scattered about on the floor, the exact purpose of which was still unknown, except for one large cylinder that gave off a hum… that one had propagated the shield that had saved their lives. The black metal covering it had slid back at Elek’s command through the guardian. A drum had been revealed, about fifty meters long by ten in diameter. It was mounted on both ends in a cradle of black metal that attached at the center. The drum continued to rotate with streaks of color… red, orange, violet, purple… intermingled on its surface. The other, unopened containers, were in the form of black rectangles ranging from a few feet in size to one over a hundred meters long and sixty high.
Fifty feet away from where Che Lu sat there was a bright green light glowing out of the wall, brighter even than the one overhead. Inside was a control room, and beyond that, the chamber housing the golden pyramid that was the Qian-Ling guardian computer.