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at Camp Rowe during World War II. The Son Tay commandos had also conducted their preparation for the raid into North Vietnam at a mock-up built next to the long runway. And the Delta Force commandos who had later conducted the ill-fated hostage rescue mission into Iran had also done their training at this spot in the North Carolina pine forests to the west of Fort Bragg. It was also the site of Phase I and Phase III training for Special Forces recruits.
    Now the remnants of those who had operated out of Area 51 called the remote site their headquarters. Given that Yakov was in Turkey and Turcotte was on Everest, and Che Lu and Mualama were dead, the only ones left here were Major Quinn and Larry Kincaid.
    The two worked out of a pair of communications vans that had been brought here from nearby Fort Bragg by the Delta Force commander, an old army buddy of Turcotte’s. The vans were linked into the military’s secure MILSTAR communication system. With access to this, both men could try to stay on top of the swirl of recent events.
    Larry Kincaid checked the latest imagery from Mars relayed from the Hubble Space Telescope. Kincaid had worked at JPL—the Jet Propulsion Lab—and NASA for decades. He’d been drawn into Area 51 when it was discovered that the Airlia had an ancient base at Cydonia on Mars. Since then he’d been monitoring activity on the Red Planet, specifically at Cydonia and the recent construction on the high slope of Mons Olympus.
    Prior to Yakov gaining control of the Master Guardian, the construction on Mons Olympus had seemed to be progressing swiftly. A series of black struts crisscrossed the massive bowl that had been excavated in the side of the volcano near the summit. By the shadows Kincaid could tell the struts were lifted above the ground about ten meters. On top of most of the struts, latticework was completed. It reminded him of a spider’s web with the spaces between filled in with shiny material. Looming over the bowl and latticework he could see three inward curving pylons, two apparently finished, twins of each other, the third slightly shorter, not yet done. Their scale was staggering, even given Mars’ lower gravitational field, only three-eighths that of Earth. Each one had to be at least fifteen hundred meters high, well over three times the height of the Empire State Building in New York City. And they curved toward the center of the bowl, coming within four hundred meters of each other.
    Even given the massive size of the construction, it was still dwarfed by the extinct volcano near whose peak it was located. Mons Olympus is the tallest mountain in the solar system. The peak is over fifteen miles above the surrounding Martian landscape. The base is 340 miles in width. The volcano, along with its smaller comrades that comprised the Tarsis Bulge, was so massive that it actually affected the rotation of the planet.
    The mech-machines that had been working on the construction had been forced to dig partially through a four-mile-high escarpment surrounding the mountain and build up a hundred-mile ramp to clear a path to the peak. The mechs had come from Cydonia, carrying scavenged material from the “face” that had long been noted from Earth at that location.
    Something had been destroyed there at Cydonia, Kincaid had concluded. And now they were rebuilding it at a much higher location. Yakov’s control of the Master Guardian had shut down the control the Cydonia guardian had exercised over the mechs and construction had been halted. So close to completion, Kincaid could tell, but completion of what?
    Something was nagging at the edge of Kincaid’s mind—he was certain he had seen something like this before. Where? When? And more importantly, what had it been? He cleared his mind. If he had seen something like it, then it had to have been somewhere here on Earth. He ignored the Mars angle and simply thought about the construction.
    A deep dish. Towers around the edge.