Victory is fleeting. The thought came unbidden to Turcotte’s mind and he knew he had heard it from someone. Someone important.
There was a voice in the background, yelling something. “Kincaid’s here,” Quinn said. “He says he has to tell you something.”
The hatch on top of the bouncer was open and Turcotte could feel the level of oxygen inside rise as he descended over India. The sun streaming in through the skin of the aircraft brought welcome warmth. It was probably just around freezing inside the craft now, but to Turcotte it was beginning to feel like being in an oven. Snow that had drifted in was beginning to melt, forming puddles of water on the floor.
“Mike, this is Larry Kincaid.” “Go ahead.”
“Mars. What the Airlia from Cydonia are building on Mons Olympus. I figured it out. It’s a transmitter/receiver of some sort. A very, very big one. I assume it has some way of sending and receiving a message across interstellar distances. Possibly faster than the speed of light. I can’t be sure of that, but who knows what technology they have in that area. We assume the mothership was capable of faster-than-light speed, so we have to assume they have some way of communicating like that. I think they had an array at Cydonia, but it was destroyed long ago. Now they’re rebuilding it on Mons Olympus.”
The words seemed to resound in Turcotte’s mind, a jumbled, confusing mess for several seconds before the pieces fell into place. “So.” He drew the word out as the implications sank in. “We’ve won the battle of Earth. But if Artad gets to Mars and gets a message out to his people, we can end up losing everything.”
There was no response to that.
Turcotte glanced down at the green fields flashing by below. He was feeling a bit dizzy. And much too warm. His body felt as if it were burning up. He was nauseous and he twisted his head to the side as he retched, but nothing came up. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He’d survived for too long on too little. Now he was overwhelmed by too much oxygen, too much warmth, too quickly he realized. He let go of the radio and tried to unzip his parka.
“We need to finish this once and for all,” Turcotte muttered, and then passed out, his hand dropping off the controls.
CHAPTER 4: THE NEAR PAST
Balancing in the open back of the jeep, both hands holding on tight to the M-2 fifty-caliber machine gun, the OSS agent imagined himself in North Africa driving across the desert in pursuit of Rommel’s Afrika Corps. The fact that the gun had no rounds loaded was something he chose to ignore.
The driver, Special Agent Cavanaugh, usually tried to do his best to ignore his younger partner. But when, above the never-ending sounds of the wind, he could swear he heard him making rat-a-tat-tat noises, Cavanaugh tapped the brakes, causing his partner’s chest to bang against the back of the gun painfully. Cavanaugh then slowed the jeep to a halt. He got out of the driver’s seat and walked ten feet away, before pulling out his compass to make a map check. He wanted to be sure they could find their way back.
They were northwest of the newly established Nellis Air Force Base tracking a plume of dust several miles ahead of them. They’d been following the German agent from New York, via train to Salt Lake City and then by car to this area and now by jeep into the desert. Cavanaugh couldn’t imagine what the hell the German was up to in this godforsaken place, but they had their orders from Wild Bill Donovan himself.
The OSS — Office of Strategic Services — was a new entity, developed in response to the war and mimicking the British SOE, Special Operation Executive, an organization designed to do the dirtier work of warfare. Donovan, the head of the OSS, had told Cavanaugh that the arrival date and time of the German agent in New York had been forwarded from the British, but there was no clue as to the agent’s mission.
“Kramer,” Cavanaugh called out.
His partner was rubbing his chest. “What?” “You need to look at this.”
Reluctantly, Kramer gave up the gun position and climbed out of the jeep. “What is it?” Cavanaugh simply held out the compass. “Yes?”
Cavanaugh held in his sigh of contempt. “The sun is there. North is that way.” He pointed in the direction indicated by the compass, one hundred and eighty degrees out from north.
“There must be a large ore deposit nearby,” was Kramer’s best guess.
Cavanaugh looked about, then checked the map. They were on a dry lake bed, marked Groom Lake on the surveying map they’d been given. The compass was pointing at a mountain to their south.
Cavanaugh rubbed away some sand stuck to the sweat on his face. Both men were sunburned, tired, and worn. And subconsciously feeling guilty that they weren’t at the front, whether it be in the Pacific or Atlantic. When he’d joined the OSS, Cavanaugh had envisioned parachuting into Europe to work behind the lines, not driving across the desert in Nevada. He checked his watch, then walked back over to the jeep and picked up the handset for the radio to make their check-in with Nellis.
When he keyed the handset a sharp burst of static came out of the speaker. Cavanaugh cursed and fiddled with the frequency knob, checking to make sure it was set correctly. When he tried again, he still found only static. He switched to the alternate frequency but the result remained the same.
Cavanaugh looked at the mountain to the south. He pulled a set of binoculars out and focused them. He couldn’t see the German’s car, but he could see the dust trail it was kicking up. Straight for the mountain. “Let’s go.”
They hopped back in the jeep and Cavanaugh held the speed down to keep their own dust cloud from being too large. He felt exposed, but there was no other way to do this. He slowed as the plume ahead disappeared. At the base of the mountain. He stopped the jeep. “What now?” Kramer asked.
“We wait a little bit,” Cavanaugh said for lack of a better plan. “What the hell is this guy doing out here?” Kramer asked.
Cavanaugh shrugged. Nellis was nearby and it was a large air base, but there was nothing out here as far as he knew. He pulled up the binoculars, but he was too far away to make out anything.
Kramer was swinging the fifty-caliber around, shooting at imaginary enemies. Cavanaugh wondered how the man had made it through the screening process to be allowed into the OSS. He started as the crack of an explosion rolled across the desert. Cavanaugh looked through the binoculars and could see the dust cloud coming off the lower side of the mountain.
He started the jeep’s engine and threw it into gear, nearly knocking Kramer out of the rear as he hit the gas. He was trying to figure out what the German was up to, but he couldn’t even come up with possibilities.
He drove between two large boulders and skidded to a halt, seeing the German’s dust-covered car and thirty feet above it, on the side of the mountain, blasted rock, indicating where the explosion had gone off. A rope dangled from a ledge, but he couldn’t see what was just above the ledge.
Cavanaugh reached between the canvas seats and grabbed a Thompson submachine gun. He pulled the charging knob back, putting a round in the chamber. He noted that Kramer’s normally ruddy cheeks had gone white. “Let’s go,” he ordered.
Kramer grabbed his own Thompson and clumsily did the same. Cavanaugh looped the sling over his shoulder and grabbed hold of the rope. When he saw Kramer sling his own weapon, Cavanaugh paused. “How about covering me until I get to the ledge, then I’ll cover you?”
Kramer nodded nervously, unslung his weapon, and backed up a few feet, putting the stock in his shoulder and squinting up. Cavanaugh had a moment of doubt, wondering if it might be better to not have Kramer below him with a gun in his hands, then decided to trust that the OSS training had had some effect. He grabbed the rope and began climbing.