Area 51: The Mission-3 Read Free Page B

to those discoveries and the world was still reeling, many not willing to accept these new facts.
    The wind blew, ruffling the edges of the pages sticking out of the notebook.
    In the distance, the sound of helicopter blades approaching became audible.
    Deep underneath Rano Kau, Kelly Reynolds had become one with the guardian. Her body, pressed up against the side of the twenty-foot-high golden pyramid that housed the alien computer, wasn't important to the machine. The golden glow that surrounded her body kept it in a stasis field where it hung in suspended animation. But a thick golden tendril that tapped into her mind was fastened directly to her head.
    Kelly Reynolds had been drawn into the Area 51 mystery because of the investigation of her fellow reporter, Johnny Simmons. His death at the hands of the Majestic-12 committee that ran Area 51 and its sister

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    bio-research facility at Dulce, New Mexico, had galvanized her. She had not believed that the Airlia were evil or bad, but that mankind's best hope lay in communicating with the aliens—and the best way to do that had been the guardian computer. But since coming down here just before Turcotte destroyed the Airlia fleet, she had not moved.
    Easter Island was the most isolated spot on the face of the planet, part of Chile but over two thousand miles from that country on the west side of South America. That remoteness had obviously been the reason the Airlia had chosen it to hide the guardian computer.
    The island was shaped roughly like a triangle, with a volcano at each corner.
    Landmass totaled only sixty-two square miles, but despite the small size it had once boasted a bustling civilization—one advanced enough to have built the Moai, giant stone monoliths for which the island was known. How the statues, some almost sixty feet high and weighing over ninety tons, had been moved from where they were carved to their positions dotting the coast had been a mystery, one that the presence of the Airlia computer might shed light on. There was no doubt now that the Moai were representative of the Airlia—the red stone caps like the red hair of the aliens, the long earlobes similar to what had been seen on the holograph of the Airlia under Qian-Ling. So another mystery of the ancient world had been partially solved.
    The destruction of that early Easter Island civilization had always been accounted to the breakdown of the island's ecosystem. By the time the island was discovered by Europeans, on Easter Day in 1722—thus the English name—it was virtually unpopulated and stripped of almost all trees.
    It was under Rano Kau that the guardian had been

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    secreted over five thousand years earlier. And on that strangely shaped computer a small panel, only four inches high by three wide, now opened. A microrobot, less than two inches in height, tottered on six mechanical legs, looking like a metal cockroach. It skittered across the floor to the base of the communications console. The pointy tips of the front two legs turned horizontal. They jabbed forward into the wooden leg of the table. The microrobot began climbing up the leg. It reached the top and headed for the machinery.
    One of those devices was a computer with a direct sat-link into the Department of Defense Interlink system. The microrobot used its arms to pull a panel off the side of the computer. A thin wire came out of the top of the Airlia creation and poked into the innards of the computer. The screen on the computer flickered, then came to life.

    High on the rim of Rano Kau's crater, a satellite dish aligned with the nearest FLTSATCOM satellite and made a connection. Built into the side of the crater itself, with technology that the UNAOC scientists had only been able to guess at, a communications array, an Airlia one, also came alive. It reached out into space, toward Mars. Making contact, it received a message from the Red Planet. A plan and the order to implement it.
    The guardian reached out around