Thermal infrared imagers pointed at the talon along with low-light-level cameras, recording what they saw and passing it to stations on Earth. Over sixty feet long and fifteen wide, the Warfighter was larger than the Hubble space telescope. It weighed twenty-three tons, a third of that weight fuel for the maneuvering thrusters designed to place it over any spot on the globe within two hours of notification from the ground.
It boasted the full complement of imaging hardware that the latest U.S. spy satellite, the KH-14, contained, but the primary mission of the Warfighter wasn’t to spy but to destroy. The imagers were for pinpointing targets; due to both its size and proximity, the talon was easily acquired as Warfighter closed to within sixty miles. The last one-third of Warfighter’s weight was a small nuclear reactor hooked to a powerful high-frequency overtone laser.
Launched covertly from Vandenberg Air Force Base two years previously, Warfighter IV was the culmination of decades of classified work funded under the Star Wars program. Designed to destroy enemy satellites in space and missiles in flight in the atmosphere with the laser, its presence in orbit’ broke every treaty the United States had ever signed regarding the militarization of space. The nuclear reactor also violated every space launch doctrine ever established. The imagers had a solid target lock on the talon, and the reactor began powering up the laser as Warfighter closed to within forty miles. As the power level passed through fifty percent, a golden glow suffused the tip of the talon. A thin line of power leapt at the speed of light from the talon to Warfighter, enveloping it in a stasis field. All contact the satellite had with its human controllers on the planet below was severed in the blink of an eye. The power buildup held at fifty percent. Slowly the talon used the field to draw Warfighter to it until the two were in orbit less than fifty meters apart.
They moved in tandem that way for fifteen minutes. As the Earth rotated below and the two drifted, their relative position to the planet changed. Soon they were over the western United States. The golden beam slowly rotated Warfighter until it was once more oriented toward the planet below. The imagers locked on a target on the Earth’s surface.
The nuclear power buildup was released, and power surged to the laser. With a bright flash, a bolt of high energy arced toward Earth.
Area 51, located approximately ninety miles northwest of Las Vegas, on the edge of a dry lake bed nestled between mountains, consisted of three major parts. The most visible was the seven-mile-long concrete runway that extended across the dry Groom Lake flats. It was the longest runway in the world, used to launch and land the most sophisticated aircraft American designers could make.
The next most noticeable feature from above was the physical plant on the surface, consisting of hangars, support buildings, and tower for the runway. The third… and invisible from above… part was the two hangars built into the side of Groom Mountain and the underground facilities that had housed the agency that had controlled Area 51 and the alien craft headquartered there… Majestic-12… for over five decades.
The normal operations at Area 51 came to an abrupt halt as a flash of light seared down from above, hitting one of the hangars. It was through the roof in a flash.
The initial blast was followed by a string of secondary explosions, and in less than ten seconds there was no longer a hangar and it would take days to recover the pieces of bodies from those who had been inside.
CHAPTER 3
It was after three days of difficult journeying that the falls finally came into view. They had been audible for hours during the approach. There was no mistaking the sound of over two million gallons of water tumbling over the edge of the Parana Plateau of South America, cascading down 270 feet onto the rocks below… a natural thunder that abated only once every forty years during a dry season in the middle of a drought upriver.
The vision matched the awesome sound. It was as if an ocean met an abyss, as the Iquaca River in southern Brazil tumbled over a wall of 275 individual falls, stretching two and a half miles wide, most separated only by a few craggy rocks with some trees struggling to grow in the watery mist.
Downstream, on the west bank of the river, the small party stood in silent awe for minutes, simply watching the power of nature. Finally, one of the figures, the tallest of the group, shifted his gaze from the falls to the narrow gorge beneath them, where the water was carried away.
“Garganta del Diablo!” the native guide, Bauru, yelled in the tall man’s ear, struggling to be heard as he pointed at the gorge. “That is what you seek, Professor.”
“The Devil’s Throat,” the tall black man translated. Professor Niama Mualama was over six feet six inches in height. He was slender but not skinny, with broad shoulders and muscles packed on his frame like whipcord. His face was broad and friendly when he smiled, which was just about all the time. The only indication of his age were the thin tines around his eyes and a touch of lightness in his closely cropped black hair. He was old enough to have a one-year-old granddaughter back home in Nairobi, from his only daughter. His wife had died three years before from cancer, and since the funeral and the mourning period afterward, he had spent all his time pursuing his life’s obsession.
Mualama was an anthropologist affiliated with the University of Dar es Salaam on the east coast of Tanzania. The fact that the university had barely a thousand students and Mualama had been one of only two professors in the anthropology department had done nothing to dint his enthusiasm. He had gone to graduate school in the United States and England and had returned home to help run the department. Recent changes in the government had caused severe cutbacks to what the ruling powers considered unessential programs at the university, and Mualama’s department had been one of the first to fall under the ax two years ago.
No longer able to teach, he had devoted all his time to his studies and research, traveling extensively around the world, searching for answers to a mystery he had stumbled over as a young man. Mualama had spent two decades following clues scattered about the world. The last clue had led him to this location, and recent events regarding the alien presence on Earth had given a particular urgency to his mission.
He turned back to the thundering water. “The first European to see the falls… a Spaniard, Alvar Nunex de Vaca in 1541… called them Salto de Santa Maria, the Falls of Saint Mary.”
Bauru shrugged. He had never heard that. They had always been the Iquaca Falls, from the local tongue, in which Iquaca meant “great water.” Bauru was of Indian-Spanish descent. He was a short, stocky man with dark skin. His most distinguishing feature was his bald head.
His hair had begun falling out several years before, and he’d decided to complete the process on his own. He shaved it every day, even when he was in the wilderness.
“Let’s go.” Mualama shouldered his pack and headed toward the gorge, where the surging water passed between rock cliffs on its journey to the Orinoco River, the third-largest river in South America, and a long journey to the distant Atlantic Ocean.
Bauru led and the two porters he had hired followed, scrambling across rocks, then into the thick jungle as they swung around the most immediate cliffs.
It was an arduous three-hour journey that covered less than a mile before they came back out on the edge of the gorge, the water fifty feet below them. The sound of the falls was only slightly diminished.