Area 51: The Mission-3 by Robert Doherty Read Free Book Online Page A

admiral, who was giving orders to one of his men. Done, he gestured for her to join him in front of a large computer display.
    "The guardian is talking" was his greeting. "The National Security Agency is picking up alien transmissions."
    "To who?" Duncan asked.
    "The guardian on Mars."
    "Was there a reply from Mars?"
    The admiral nodded. "Yes. Yes, there was."
    Duncan considered that piece of bad news. The nuclear attack on the Airlia compound on Mars via the Surveyor probe had been kept secret by the UNAOC for several reasons.
    One reason had been not wanting to admit that the

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    attack had occurred under the direction of STAAR, an organization about which they still knew practically nothing. The fact that STAAR had placed the nuclear bomb aboard the probe prior to launch, two years before, indicated that organization had been far ahead of any government in recognizing the threat the Airlia posed, or that there was even an Airlia base on Mars, something that seemed to have eluded NASA for years.
    There was also the issue that there was still a sizable percentage of the world's population that believed the Airlia represented good; that the destruction of the Airlia fleet was the most heinous act mankind had ever committed. The progressives, as they were called, felt that a remarkable opportunity for great strides in science—not to mention first contact with an alien race— had been destroyed.
    Duncan had been hearing reports that a major reason Admiral Poldan wasn't given the green light to nuke Easter Island was a powerful progressive lobby in the UN. This lobby felt that the guardian computer under Rano Kau was irreplaceable. While that looked clear on the surface, Duncan was concerned that there was more to the progressive camp than was readily apparent. The plan by UNAOC to send up space shuttles to rendezvous with both the mothership and talon seemed a bit rushed to her. Her paranoia, justified in her investigation into Majestic-12, was still alive and well.

    There was a growing movement in the progressive camp making an icon out of Kelly Reynolds. Nuking the island would undoubtedly kill her—if the nuke got through the shield—and UNAOC was very concerned that would bring about a martyrdom that might incur severe repercussions from the progressive camp.
    Several countries, most notably Australia and Japan, had threatened to pull out of the United Nations to

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    protest the preemptive strike against the Airlia fleet commanded by Aspasia.
    Duncan had been as surprised as Mike Turcotte at the backlash in the wake of the destruction of the Airlia fleet. It wasn't that Turcotte had expected a parade down Fifth Avenue for his daring mission aboard the mothership, but he had not expected to be vilified in so many quarters. Nabinger's interpretations from the guardian computer under Qian-Ling in China had been greeted with much skepticism, given that Nabinger had never made it out of China alive and they had only Turcotte's word that Aspasia had been the enemy of mankind. The fact that the Airlia had destroyed a navy submarine near the foo fighter base had been explained away as an automatic defensive reaction by the guardian computer—as was the wall they now faced around the island ahead of them.
    On the other end of the opinion spectrum the isolationists were pressing the UN to forget about the Airlia. They wanted Easter Island and the other Airlia artifact sites ignored. The isolationist thinking was that these artifacts had been on Earth since before recorded history—it had been only man's interference that had caused all the recent problems. In Duncan's opinion, the isolationists wanted to put the cork back in the bottle after the contents had already spilled out.
    China had already pulled its representative from the United Nations and completely closed itself off from the rest of the world over the matter. The fact that the UN had launched a mission deep into China to uncover information in Qian-Ling