“Two minutes,” Linton announced.
She had two more nuts out. As she worked, she mentally ran through the procedure for disabling the timer. In training she had done it in twenty-two seconds. The fifth nut was out.
“One minute, thirty seconds.”
She put the Allen wrench into the sixth hex nut. She twisted, but it didn’t budge. Greene cursed, putting more pressure on the wrench, feeling the pain as the metal dug into her fingers. Nothing. She paused and took a deep breath. “One minute.”
“Come on, come on,” Greene whispered as she torqued the wrench. With a slight pop, the wrench broke in two, a piece of it still stuck in the hex nut. Greene stared at the piece in her hand in disbelief. A simple, dollar-ninety-nine piece of metal.
“Thirty seconds!” Linton’s voice had an edge of hysteria.
Greene clawed at the broken piece, trying to get it out of the nut. “Twenty seconds!”
A fingernail ripped off and she didn’t even notice. A part of her mind knew it was too late.
“Ten seconds! Are you in?” Linton’s voice was loud in her ear. She took off the headset, wanting one last moment of silence.
Greene slumped back, sitting on the metal gantry. She looked down at her bloody hands and the broken piece of metal. She closed her eyes and unconsciously hunched forward, as if preparing for a strong wind.
The missile, silo, and Greene were vaporized. The LCC, two hundred meters away, was destroyed by the shock wave radiating out. The thick twenty-ton surface doors to the silo were blown into the air and were found half a mile away, but they did help contain some of the blast. A hundred-meter-wide crater, over sixty meters deep, was all that remained where the silo had been.
CHAPTER 12
Six hundred pounds of Semtex, a Czech-made plastic explosive, welded to the body of a water tanker truck, had formed the bomb that destroyed the United States Embassy in Dar es Salaam in 1998. Colonel Nakibsu Balele, an officer in the Tanzanian army, had overseen the import of the explosive from a source in the Middle East and personally wired the fuses into the plastique once it was in place on the truck.
That the blast killed only eleven he saw as something of a failure, but whether the goal of the person who had hired him was achieved was not important. The key thing was that he had been paid quite well.
While still a junior major he had been given a cellular phone by a strange man along with a bundle of money. How the man had selected him, Balele never knew. The money was to carry the phone with him at all times, the man had explained. There would be more money, much more, if he followed the instructions relayed by whoever was on the other end when it rang. Balele had not asked what would happen if he didn’t answer the phone or follow the orders… he was not that naive.
The man had scared him more than anyone else he had ever met. Balele had heard whispers of the man, a figure revered in the terrorist world of the Middle East who went by the name Al-Iblis.
The phone had rung only once in the four years since he was given it, with instructions to pick up the Semtex, wire it, and arrange for the driver to take the bomb to the embassy.
The Americans had blamed Bin Laden, an Afghani, for the embassy attack in Dar es Salaam and Kenya, which was fine with Balele as it kept him in the clear.
Now, as he sat in his office, reviewing training records, the cell phone rang for the second time.
Professor Mualama and Lago stared in fascination as the disk silently flew into the crater. It was thirty feet wide at the base, sloping up to a small rounded top. The skin of the bouncer was silver and perfectly smooth, without a single seam to be seen. The only thing that marred the perfection of the alien craft were the bright red cargo straps that were wrapped over the rim of the disk.
The craft came to a halt near their position, then came straight down, lightly touching the ground. A hatch opened in the top side and a woman climbed out. “Good day!” Mualama greeted her.
“Good day, Professor Mualama. I’m Dr. Lisa Duncan from UNAOC.” She looked toward the pit and the objects on the ground next to the hole. “Is that what you called us about?”
“Yes.”
Mualama and Lago led her over to the coffin and tomb marker. The top was closed, and the long black tube appeared unmarked by time.
“What is it?” Duncan asked.
Mualama answered that by opening the top, revealing the skeleton inside. “An Airlia!” Duncan knelt down next to the coffin and examined the corpse before turning to the red stone. “What about the marker? Can you read it?”
“Some of it,” Mualama said. “I was hoping that with your access to Professor Nabinger’s notes, we could decipher the entire message.”
“We have accumulated a limited high rune symbolic vocabulary at UNAOC,” Duncan said. “But critical parts of Professor Nabinger’s notes were lost when he was killed in China. Nabinger was onto something, some way of understanding it beyond the symbols, but whatever that was died with him and he never had the time to tell anyone. He also had the largest high rune database on the face of the planet, and that went down in that helicopter in China with him.”
“He made no copies?” Mualama was surprised.
“None that we’ve found.” Duncan stood up. “We’re backtracking, looking where he looked, and we’ve gathered a large amount of information.” She pointed down. “This will help.”
“With what you do have,” Mualama said, “can you make anything of this?”
“That will take some time,” Duncan said. “We’ll have to take all this back with us.”
“This is an archaeological site, protected by the laws of Tanzania,” Mualama said.
Duncan arched an eyebrow. “Have you heard what happened in South America with the Black Death?”
“Yes, but I don’t see what that has to do with this,” Mualama said.
“It’s war,” Duncan said. “And any piece of information is important. We don’t know much about these Airlia, and this”… she pointed at the skeleton in the coffin… “is the first true Airlia body we’ve gotten our hands on. Examining it could help us greatly in our struggle.”
Mualama nodded. “I am willing to give you what I have found if you give me access to whatever notes of Nabinger’s you have.”
“What we really need,” Duncan said, “is a key.”
“A key?” Mualama repeated.
“The key to the lowest level of the tomb of Qian-Ling.”
“Qian-Ling is in China,” Mualama noted. “Why would there be a key for that here?”
“Because it’s Airlia!” Duncan was frustrated, her hope crushed. “Who knows where all their artifacts are now.”
“I think that…” Mualama paused and cocked his head.
“What is it?” Duncan asked.
Mualama held up a hand, hushing her as he slowly turned in a circle. He stopped, facing southeast. “Someone is coming.”
Colonel Balele saw the bouncer on the floor of Ngorongoro Crater first. He had seen pictures of the alien craft on TV, but to see one here, now, gave him a moment’s pause as the Hind-D helicopter he was on swooped over the rim of the crater toward the craft. The voice on the other end of the phone had told him to interdict removal of an artifact from the crater and to kill all involved.
The voice had also promised one million dollars U.S. if he achieved this goal… more than enough for him to leave Tanzania and retire in style. Also in the message he had read the implicit threat: fail and be killed.
“Sir?” The pilot of the Hind was looking over his shoulder at the colonel. Balele was standing in the small opening that led to the rear of the chopper, where six armed infantrymen from Balele’s command sat.