Area 51: Excalibur-6 Read Online Free PDF Page B

he had enjoyed the comforts of a warm shower and a sharp razor.
    "I'm cold," Duncan muttered.
    Turcotte let go of her shoulders and blinked, looking about, taking in their surroundings, as if realizing for the first time that he was standing in a morgue and Duncan was sitting on a stainless-steel autopsy table. She looked small and vulnerable inside the bloody robe. Her short dark hair was plastered against her skull and her face was pale and drawn.
    Turcotte scooped Duncan up in his arms and headed for the door. Yakov, Professor Mualama, Che Lu, and Major Quinn followed, the core of the group that was leading the fight against the alien presence on Earth. By default they were the ones who now ran Area 51.
    Turcotte carried Duncan to a parked Humvee and slid her into the passenger seat before going around and getting behind the wheel. The others piled in, Quinn just managing to get inside before Turcotte stomped on the accelerator. He drove toward the large hangar cut into the side of Groom Mountain. To one side a long runway stretched out of sight along the dry bed of Groom Lake. Various hangars and support buildings were clustered around the end of the runway, between it and the mountain.
    Area 51 was about ninety miles northwest of Las Vegas, in the middle of nowhere on the way to nowhere, established on land that held no value other than its isolation. Numerous mountains surrounded the dry lake bed, land that the US
    government had gobbled up to make the location secure. The spot had gained its name from the training area

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    designation number it received on the military map for the Nellis Air Force Base range of which it was ostensibly a part.
    Most had thought Area 51 was placed in the location because of its remoteness.
    The truth, however, was that it had been placed where it was because of the shocking discovery during the early days of World War II of a massive alien spaceship in a cavern underneath Groom Mountain— the mothership. Over a mile long and a quarter mile in width at its center, the craft had both stunned and intrigued the scientists sent to investigate it. Images on plaques found in the cavern led the Americans to discover smaller atmospheric craft, called bouncers and shaped like golden flying saucers, in Antarctica. They had been brought to Earth in one of the holds of the mothership.
    The entire discovery was classified at a higher level than anything had ever been in the United States. A committee— Majestic-12—was established to oversee the alien artifacts. For over fifty years Majestic kept the truth secret from not only other countries but Americans also.
    But even Majestic hadn't known the real truth about the aliens: that Earth had been visited by aliens over ten thousand years earlier and they had headquartered themselves on a large island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—the legendary Atlantis. And that when other aliens of the same species, the Airlia, had arrived thousands of years later, there was civil war between them.
    One side was led by an alien named Aspasia, the other by Artad. The initial battling resulted in the destruction of Atlantis and a tenuous truce. Aspasia was banished to an Airlia base underneath the surface of Mars at Cydonia, where human astronomers had long been intrigued by anomalies on the surface. Artad and his followers, the Kortad, went to China, underneath the massive tomb of 31

    Qian-Ling, and like Aspasia and his people, went into suspended animation.
    But each side continued a subversive war throughout the millennia on Earth.
    Aspasia's side was represented by the Mission, led by a continually regenerated human, Aspasia's Shadow, who passed Aspasia's memories and personality through succeeding generations via the ka, a memory device that could be updated much like a computer hard drive. Artad's side was represented by the Ones Who Wait, Airlia-Human clones, and Shadows of Artad, such as King Arthur and ShiHuangdi, the first emperor of