Area 51: The Mission-3 Read Online Free Page B

doctor set up a microphone on a boom in front of Billings. He clicked on a recorder. "All set."
    Billings picked up a scalpel but simply stood over the body for a few seconds as he spoke. "Subject is female; age approximately forty, but it is difficult to determine. Height . . ." He waited as the other doctor stretched out a tape measure. "Seventy inches. Weight"—Billings looked at the scale reading on the side of the portable cart—"one hundred and fifty pounds."
    Quinn stepped out of the way as Billings walked around the body. "Hair is blondish, almost white. Skin color is very pale white. Body is well muscled and developed. No obvious scars or tattoos. There are six bullet entry wounds on the chest. Four exit wounds on the back."
    Billings leaned over and pulled up the left eyelid. "Eye color is brown . . ."
    He paused. "Looks like there's a contact." He put down the scalpel and picked up a small set of tweezers. He plucked out the contact lens and looked at it against the overhead light. "Hmm,

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    the contact might have been cosmetic, as it is brown-colored." Billings looked down.
    "Jesus!" Billings exclaimed. "What the hell is that?" Quinn stepped forward as the doctor gasped and moved back. Quinn looked into the right eye. The pupil and iris were red, the pupil a scarlet shade darker than the rest of the eye and elongated vertically like a cat's. Quinn pulled his cell phone off his belt and punched in to the Cube. "I am isolating this building as per National Security Directive regarding contact with alien life-forms. Request immediate bubble protection be put over us ASAP to prevent further contamination!"
    In the Cube, the operations center for Area 51 buried deep underground, Larry Kincaid heard Major Quinn's call over the speaker. He'd worked at NASA for over thirty years, and STAAR personnel, with their sunglasses, pale skin, and strange-colored hair, had been around for every space launch. They had been there under the authority of a top-secret presidential directive and as such had had complete access to every NASA facility. It was the way of bureaucracy that the correct piece of paper could override every suspicion and every bit of common sense for decades. The warning that they weren't human was startling but not earth-shattering, given all that had happened in the past several weeks.
    So as everyone else scrambled to comply with Quinn's request to quarantine the STAAR personnel autopsy area, Kincaid's attention was focused in an entirely different direction. He was tapped into the U.S. Space Command's Missile Warning Center.
    The Center was located deep inside Cheyenne Mountain on the outskirts of Colorado Springs, alongside the headquarters for NORAD. The Space Com-

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    mand, part of the Air Force, was responsible for the Defense Support Program (DSP) satellite system, which Kincaid knew quite a bit about from his work for JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which had been responsible for coordinating the construction of the boosters that had put those satellites into space.
    He knew that DSP satellites in geosynchronous orbits blanketed the entire surface of the Earth from an altitude of 20,000 miles. The system had originally been developed to detect ICBM launches during the Cold War. During the Gulf War, it had picked up every Scud missile launch and proved so effective that the military had further streamlined the system to give real-time warnings to local commanders at the tactical level.
    Every three seconds the DSP system downloaded an infrared map of the Earth's surface and surrounding airspace. Kincaid knew that most of the data was simply stored on tape in the Warning Center, unless, of course, the computer detected a missile launch, or something happened to one of the objects already in space that they were tracking. Right now, his computer screen showed the current DSP
    projection and nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
    Kincaid looked like a burned-out New York City cop. He was one