Prologue: Awakening
Aim for Heaven and you get Earth thrown in; aim for Earth and you get neither. - C.S. Lewis
Thule Island, if it could be called that, was a small rocky outcropping that was roughly equidistant between Iceland, Norway, and Greenland. Long the subject of territorial claims by several nations, in the disaster following Second Impact the United Nations took possession of the small island and declared it international territory. Some years later high-placed officials asked the UN for possession of the place, for the purposes of installing "surveillance and support" equipment in support of NERV's Angel defense mission. The UN ceded the territory to NERV, whose European-based Third Branch then built a very small unmanned installation on the island.
The island was barely visited since NERV had taken it over, save for infrequent trips by maintenance staff to check various components of sensors mounted there. When the Angels began their attacks in the middle of 2015, there was one expedition to the installation that expanded the facility and placed something else inside, and then the island was abandoned. A combination of sensors and automatic defense measures that included land mines and unmanned gun emplacements kept unwanted visitors at bay.
After both NERV and the UN collapsed at the advent of Third Impact, the little island was forgotten about. Virtually anyone at NERV or its branches who knew about it was either dead or captured, and with the massive damage to the GeoFront facility at Tokyo-3 and a problematic transition to new management what remained of NERV had far too much on its hands to worry about such a minor outpost.
Not everyone had forgotten about Thule Island, however. In the early dawn a small group of catamaran boats sailed quickly to the island in the cold, rough waters of the North Atlantic.
Landing on the shore, the boats disgorged about twenty soldiers and sailors onto the rocky beaches. Dressed in black uniforms and heavily armed, the soldiers fanned out on the beach as one of them operated a computer terminal and worked on finding the islands security program and disarming it. After some time the soldier operating the terminal was successful and was able to key off the surveillance program that operated the land mines and sentries. The soldiers moved carefully onto the island, knowing that there may still be many booby-traps present.
Marching perhaps six hundred meters from the shore, the team found the abandoned installation, which looked like nothing more than a group of grey cement blocks surrounding a pyramid made of concrete and steel. The small group examined the set of structures and pyramid, and again consulted the computer terminal, which showed them the functions of each structure. After confirming what he saw against the information supplied on the display, the team leader used duct tape to strap a homing device on the larger pyramid and then ordered his men to move back away carefully, following the path they took in.
Once the team was back on the shore they took cover at the beach and then a moment later a faint jet noise was heard as a combat drone flew over them. Diving at the island the drone let go of two bombs it was carrying and then climbed rapidly as the bombs plunged into the largest pyramid in quick succession. One bomb landed a few seconds before the other, allowing the second bomb to explode within the crater caused by the first, completely exploding the pyramid from the surface.
Once the bombs were clear the black-clad soldiers moved back into the complex of structures. Blowing up the pyramid revealed a cement staircase, damaged from the blast but still passable, that led deep under the structure. The team leader looked at the thing and realized the whole complex was not unlike some sort of Egyptian tomb, and what they were doing on behalf of their masters was akin to grave robbing.
The leader and several men moved carefully down the stairs, watching out for traps along the way. The information they were provided about the underground chamber was accurate and after deactivating the last line of defenses inside they made their way to a dark room at the bottom of the pyramid.
Lying at the middle of the round room was a black sarcophagus. Large and cylindrical in shape, it was made of polished black metal, and emblazoned with various logos. The team leader saw another marker printed in large print on one side that said simply:
KAWORU-02
The technician plugged in his terminal to the black coffin and worked at deactivating the final lock. A moment later the black cylinder rolled open its outer shell. The leader and others in the team peered inside curiously to see what the ultimate objective of their treasure hunt was.
The inside cylinder, which was about two meters in length, had a thick glass surface through which could be seen a red-orange liquid that filled the cylinder. Contained in the LCL was the slender, naked body of a teenaged boy. His eyes were open and his mouth held in a frozen smile, but he was lifeless and unmoving, as if he were frozen in time. The other soldiers looked at each other in amazement as the team leader began texting information to his superiors on his communicator.
Within a couple of hours the team of men labored to bring the cylinder to the surface of the island, where a helicopter waited above them. Strapped onto a cargo harness, the helicopter lifted the cylinder to a larger ship waiting nearby. The package would then travel through several other means to reach its final destination, where waited the old men who had put the recovery into motion. The men had important plans for the clone body, plans that would ultimately bring about the final battle for the future of mankind.
