Matt Reilly Stories
THE STORIES
Matthew Reilly
Jerry eBooks
Jerry
eBooks
No
copyright
2011 by Jerry
eBooks
No rights reserved. All parts of this book may be
reproduced in any form and by any means for any purpose without any prior
written consent of anyone.
____________
PROLOGUE:
THE
PRISON OF NO RETURN
There
are several Great Military Myths out there.
One
of the most well-known is the Area 51 myth: that the US Air Force holds a
crashed alien spacecraft—and the aliens that arrived in it—inside a hangar
complex in the Nevada desert.
Another
is that Adolf Hitler did not commit suicide in his fortified bunker in Berlin
before the Soviet armies stormed it.
Rather,
the Soviets caught him and took him back to Moscow where he ended his days in
an isolation cell, going mad.
A
third is that the Israeli Mossad, the most ruthless secret service organisation
in the world, knew of the September 11 attacks in advance and did
not
tell
its ally America, thinking that such a shocking Islamist attack would only
enhance US support for Israel.
Interesting
conspiracy theories, yes.
But
one myth has long prevailed over them all.
A
legend which many in the United States intelligence community swear is
true—especially those CIA operatives who eavesdropped on the former Soviet
Union in the early years of the Cold War.
It
was they who heard the radio intercepts of whispered, frightened Russian voices
speaking of a place named:
(Complex
13.)
It
was the USSR’s Area 51, a high-security facility nineteen miles outside
Tunguska—the site of a famous meteor impact in 1908—where the Soviets
supposedly held their own array of extra-terrestrial creatures.
The
myths about Complex 13 are terrifying: that no prisoner who entered the complex
ever left; that the Soviets fed human prisoners to the aliens there; and that
the Soviets did foul experiments on the aliens themselves.
Members
of the Soviet prison system—political prisoners, anti-socials and military
deserters—knew Complex 13 by another name.
The
prison of no return
.
But
then an odd thing happened.
According
to the CIA, Complex 13 was decommissioned in December 1959, its furnaces
extinguished, its iron doors shut, its place on maps obliterated. It is not
mentioned in any Soviet transmission—radio or otherwise—after that date.
It
has not been found since.
In
1959, Complex 13 vanished from history.
THE
LONELY MOUNTAIN
Tunguska,
North-eastern
Siberia,
Present
day
The
American troops shouldn’t have been there—out in the barren northern mountains
of Siberia, a thousand miles from anywhere, breaching the sovereign territory
of Russia.
Indeed,
technically, since they were carrying weapons and wearing combat uniforms, not
only were they breaching the sovereignty of Russia, they were committing an act
of war.
But
these twelve battle-hardened Force Recon Marines didn’t care.
Their
mission was to be a quick one.
Get
in, verify that it was the right complex, get whatever documents they could
find on the subject, and get out.
Why?
Because this was
urgent
.
Their
own government had one big problem back home and this might be the
only
way
to solve it.
‘It’s
under this one!’ Rockmeyer indicated the ominous black mountain rising up
before them. It soared into the sky like a slab of seamless black stone, its
front face covered in the rocky detritus of a major landslide.
Master
Sergeant Rockmeyer held in his hands a high-density sonic-resonance imager,
aimed at the mountain. The imager now revealed that there was a cave-system
inside the mountain, but one that featured voids with
squared-off
corners.
A
man-made structure.
THE
FINISHER
The
commander of the team stepped forward.
His
name was Lieutenant John T. Armstrong, a quiet but effective man who excelled
at unusual missions.
Among
other things, he’d tracked down Saddam Hussein to a tiny hole outside Tikrit;
he was also the one who’d captured bin Laden after a gigantic firefight in a
cave in Tajikistan. America had not yet released that information to the world.
He
was the man the Marines called in for the hard missions, the tough ones.
His
call-sign:
the Finisher
.
Armstrong
called in his team’s only piece of heavy equipment: an M-19B tunnel-boring
machine. It looked like a tank fitted with a big cone-shaped drill-head on its
main cannon.
The
tunnel-borer roared to life, started cutting into the mountainside.
Within
an hour, it had penetrated two hundred metres into the landslide…
…where
it struck iron.
The
doors of Complex 13.
* * * *
THE
INSIDE OF HELL
Flashlights
in darkness—twelve of them—lancing through the hazy gloom.
Led
by Armstrong, the Marine team came to the giant iron doors of Complex 13,
hidden for nearly fifty years under the landslide, and now ripped open by
Armstrong’s tunnel-borer.
Scrawled
in spray-paint over the broken iron doorframe were Milton’s famous words,
translated into Russian: ‘
Abandon all
hope, ye who enter here.
’