Free Area 51: The Truth by Robert Doherty

consciousness. His eyes followed the jet as it narrowly missed his craft. Iranian markings. At least that gave him an idea of where he had been when he passed out. Other than the noise, the rounds had no apparent effect on the surface of the alien craft.
    He shook his head, immediately regretting the act as his head throbbed painfully. Coming down off the blood doping and amphetamines he had taken in order to survive on Everest was proving as painful as climbing the mountain had been. At least he wasn’t cold, his body drenched in sweat inside his heavy clothing. He took a moment to take off the outer garments. As he did so, he saw sunlight glinting off metal close by.
    He turned, reaching out for the sword that lay next to the slight depression in the center of the bouncer, wrapping his fingers around the handle. Reality and the immediate past came back to him in fragments. Excalibur. Sword of legend, made by aliens. The key to the Master Guardian hidden for generations on the nearly inaccessible north face of Mount Everest.
    That told him why he was where he was and where he had been heading. The Master Guardian. Yakov—the Russian must have made it into the second mothership, known as Noah’s Ark in legend, and located the alien computer. Turcotte briefly closed his eyes and brought up a mental image of this part of the world. Turkey was west and slightly north of Iran. And Ararat was in eastern Turkey.
    The jet was coming in for another gun run, this time from the opposite direction. Turcotte pressed forward on the control stick. The bouncer accelerated and easily outdistanced the jet as it reached two thousand miles an hour. The ground was zipping by below. The Iranian jet faded in the distance behind.
    Turcotte grabbed the mike and keyed it. “Quinn, this is Turcotte. Over.”
    An excited and concerned voice answered. “Geez, Major, we thought we lost you again. You just dropped off the air.”
    “Have you heard from Yakov?”
    “Negative. We haven’t received communications from him or any of the Delta men who went with him. I’ve intercepted some National Security Agency intelligence briefs indicating a lot of military action around Ararat. I don’t think we were the only ones going after the Ark and Master Guardian. Fortunately, it appears Yakov got to it first.”
    Which meant Ararat—and the mothership/Master Guardian—weren’t secure yet, Turcotte realized.
    “Do we know anything about Duncan?”
    “Not much more than we did,” Quinn admitted. “I’ve been checking and there is no indication there is another Majestic-12. No one knows who took Duncan but I don’t think it was any government agency.”
    “I’m heading for Mount Ararat,” Turcotte said. “I want to see what kind of mess Yakov’s gotten himself into. Keep looking for Duncan. I want to find out what the hell her story is. There’s another layer to all this that we don’t know yet.”
    Mount Ararat, Turkey
    Yakov stepped back from the Master Guardian and staggered, almost falling off the narrow platform on which the red pyramid sat. He blinked, reorienting himself from the world the guardian had shown him to the real world.
    The large Russian smiled broadly in victory. He’d shut down the Easter Island, Qian-Ling, and Cydonia guardians. The damn aliens—both sides—were minus their base of power now.
    Yakov had spent most of his adult life serving in Section IV, the secret Soviet organization that had tried to keep track of the aliens and their minions just as the American’s Majestic-12 had. It had been a mission fraught with danger. Yakov vividly remembered going into the wreckage of Section IV’s base on the remote island of Novata Zemlaya, seeing the bodies of his comrades, killed by the Ones Who Wait, Airlia-Human clones who had waited millennia for Artad to be reborn. They’d done that to recover something from the Section IV archives. Today he had paid them back for that deadly deed.
    The room he was in was deep