Area 51 (12 page)

He must have had hopes for someone taller and with more curves, she assumed.

He stood. "You have the money?"

So much for second impressions, Kelly thought. She pulled out an envelope and handed it to him. Johnny really owed her now, she thought. Jarvis looked in the envelope, thumbed through the bills, and then sat back down, signaling for the waitress. "Would you like a drink?"

"My tab or yours?" Kelly responded.

Jarvis laughed. "Yours, of course."

"11 have a Coke," she told the waitress while Jarvis ordered his "usual."

"What do you want to know?" Jarvis asked as he finished off the drink he had in front of him in one gulp.

"Area 51," Kelly said.

Jarvis laughed again. "And? There's a whole lot going on out there. Anything in specific?"

"Why don't you just start and I'll get specific as you go along," Kelly replied.

Jarvis nodded. "Okay. The usual, then. First, of course, you want to know how I know anything about Area 51, right?" He didn't wait for an answer. "I worked there from May 1991 to March 1992. I was a contract employee hired by the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office. I worked on propulsion systems, trying to reverse-engineer . . ." He paused. "Well, let me back up slightly. You know what they have out at Groom Lake, right?"

"Why don't you tell me?"

"Nine alien spacecraft," Jarvis said. "They're in a hangar cut into the side of the mountain. The government can fly some of them, but they don't know how the engines work.

Thus they can't replicate them. That's why I was called in."

"Where'd the government get these craft?" Kelly asked.

Jarvis shrugged. "Got me. I don't know. Some say we traded for them, kind of like an interstellar used-car lot, but I don't believe that. Maybe we just found them. Maybe they crashed, but the ones I saw seemed intact and showed no sign of having crashed."

"Why'd they bring you in?"

"To figure out the engines. I did my dissertation at MIT on the possibility of magnetic propulsion. We already use magnets on things such as high-speed trains, and the military has been working on a magnetic gun for a long time.

But all those systems generate a magnetic field of their own, which requires a lot of energy. My theory was that since the planet already has a magnetic field, if there was some way we could manipulate and control that field with an engine we would have an unlimited source of energy for an atmospheric craft."

"So the government just hired you out of the blue and took you to a top-secret installation?"

"No, they didn't hire me out of the blue. I had worked for the government before down at White Sands. A joint contract with JPL working on the possibility of using a long, sloping magnetic track on a mountainside to launch satellites into orbit."

"Not many mountainsides at White Sands," Kelly said.

Jarvis smiled, but it didn't quite reach his eyes. "Are you trying to test my credibility?"

"I paid you five hundred dollars," Kelly said. "I get to ask the questions."

"Okay, you're right," Jarvis agreed. "There aren't any mountainsides at White Sands. We were simply working on the theory on a small scale. Best we ever got up to was a one-to-thirty model. You can do that using a sand dune."

"So they brought you up to Area 51," Kelly prompted, making a notation in a small notebook.

"Yeah. It was weird. I reported to McCarren Field here in Vegas and they put us on this 737 and flew us out there.

I had a Q clearance already from my previous work, so that was okay. But, boy, they had the tightest security I've ever seen. You couldn't fart without someone looking over your shoulder. Those security people were scary, walking around in these black windbreakers, wearing shades and carrying submachine guns."

"Did you stay out there at Area 51?"

"No. They shuttled us back and forth every day on the 737. The only people who live out there are the military people, as far as I could tell. All the scientific people and the worker bees--they were on that plane."

"That plane flies every day?"

"Every workday. It's an unmarked 737 with a red stripe down the side."

"Get back to Area 51," Kelly said, flipping a page.

"What was it like?"

"Like I said, tight security. Everything out of sight. The saucers were inside a big hangar. They had three of them partially disassembled. Those are the ones I got to work on.

"They were about thirty feet in diameter. Silver metal for skin. Flat bottom.

About ten feet in from the edges on top the saucer becomes hemispherical to a flat semicircle top, about five to eight feet around."

Jarvis finished his drink and ordered another before continuing. "The bitch of working on the engines was that there really weren't any. That really threw the military guys for a loop. You know how a jet fighter is designed: basically a large engine with a small place for the pilot to sit. Well, the disks were mostly empty on the inside. There were these sort of man-sized depressions in the center. I guess where the crew sat.

"Anyway. Getting back to the engines that weren't. I told you my theory: magnetic propulsion working off a field of energy that is already there. Most conventional engines take up a lot of space because they have to produce energy.

The disk engines simply had to redirect energy. There were coils around the edge of the disk, built into the edge and the floor." Jarvis smiled. "That also explains why they are saucer or disk shaped. The coils are circular and need to be in order to be able to redirect the energy in any direction."

Kelly found herself falling under Jarvis's spell. His words made sense, which was her second surprise of the day. She had to remind herself what she had learned on her last phone call earlier today before heading to the airport.

"The setup of the coils was relatively simple. The problem was that we couldn't replicate; hell, we couldn't even describe the metal that made up the coils. It actually wasn't a metal. It was more of a . . ." Jarvis paused. "Suffice it to say it was different and the best minds we had there couldn't figure it out."

"Why did they terminate your contract?" Kelly asked.

"Like I just said, we couldn't figure it out so there was no need to keep us around. I assume they brought other people in."

"What do you know about a man named Mike Franklin?"

"The nut who lives up in Rachel?"

"He's dead," Kelly said, watching Jarvis carefully.

"Took them long enough" was his only reply as he took another drink.

"Took who long enough?" Kelly asked.

"The government." Jarvis leaned forward. "From what I heard Franklin was a jerk. He led people up there on White Sides Mountain to look down at the Groom Lake complex. They would catch him and tell him not to come back but he kept coming back. What did he expect?"

"You don't seem very interested in how he died," Kelly said. "You just seem to assume it was the government that killed him."

"Maybe he had a heart attack." Jarvis shrugged. "I don't really give a shit."

"Aren't you worried about the government coming after you? You seem to be more of a threat than Franklin was."

"That's why I'm talking to you," Jarvis replied. "That's why I went on that talk show last year. That's why I keep myself in the public eye."

"I thought it was the five hundred dollars," Kelly replied dryly.

"Yeah, the money helps. But I really do it to keep the spooks off my ass. The government won't kill me because it would raise too many questions and actually make my story more valid. But they have blackballed me. I can't get a research job anywhere, so I make my living as best I can."

"I thought it might simply be because you never graduated from MIT," Kelly said.

Jarvis carefully put his drink down. "Our hour is almost up."

Kelly looked at her watch. "Not even close. You did work at White Sands, but the records show it was on the basic construction of a new research facility, not in the facility itself. In fact, there is no record of you receiving a degree any higher than a BS from the State University of New York at Albany in 1978."

"If you have any more questions you'd better ask them before your time is up,"

Jarvis said.

"Did you talk to a man named Johnny Simmons?"

"I don't recognize the name."

Kelly described Johnny, but Jarvis maintained ignorance.

She decided to go back on the attack.

"I checked with Lori Turner, who interviewed you last year for cable TV. She says most of your background doesn't check out. That makes me doubt your story.

That means either you're a liar or a plant to feed false information. In either case it tells me your story about Area 51 is bullshit."

Jarvis stood. "Time's up. Been a pleasure." He turned and walked out of the bar.

"Great," Kelly muttered to herself. She needed a way into Area 51 and Jarvis obviously was not the way. She'd just pissed away five hundred dollars and gotten nowhere.

Her hope had been that Johnny had contacted Jarvis.

She looked down at the notes she had made during the interview. What would her dad do in this situation? He'd always said the best way to overcome an obstacle was to approach it in a manner that was least expected. He'd also said that in the case of getting into a place that was

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guarded, approach it not at the weakest place, but at the strongest because that was the least-expected avenue.

What was the strongest thing about Area 51, from what Jarvis and the research said? "Security," Kelly muttered to herself, still looking at her notes. They had to have people employed to do their security. Driving out to the Groom Lake area would certainly bring her into contact with the security people, but Johnny had done that and he was gone.

She circled 757 on her pad. That was it. Tomorrow morning she would go out to the airfield and see if anyone got off the plane. If they did, she'd follow them and see what she could turn up. And if tomorrow morning didn't work, then there was always tomorrow evening.

8

DEVIL'S NEST, NEBRASKA

T-119 HOURS

"We're green," Prague announced to the men gathered around him in the dark. "Our eye in the sky says the objective is clear. I want all three birds airborne in two mikes.

Move out." Prague headed toward one of the small AH-6 helicopters and gestured at Turcotte. "You're with me, meat. Backseat."

Turcotte grimaced. The meat comment was getting real old, but now was not the time to face it down. He followed Prague and joined him in the helicopter.

Prague took the seat up front next to the pilot, while Turcotte had the entire backseat to himself. The doors were off and the cold night air swirled inside, making Turcotte regret he had not put on long underwear. He wished he had been better briefed on what was going to happen. He zipped his black Gore Tex jacket up tight over his coveralls and took the headset that was hanging on the roof and placed it on, over the small plug already in his ear for the FM radio on the team frequency.

Because he was on the same bird as Prague--the mission commander--Turcotte was immediately plugged into the mission's secure satellite communications traffic as they winged their way to the southwest over the fields of Nebraska.

"Nightscape Six, this is Cube Six. Status. Over." The voice on the other end sounded familiar to Turcotte, but he couldn't quite place who Cube Six was.

Prague replied from the front seat. "This is Nightscape Six. En route to Oscar Romeo Papa. Will hold there. Over."

Turcotte followed the military terminology easily—ORP stood for "objective rally point," the last place friendly forces held before hitting an objective.

Except in this case, Turcotte still didn't have a clue what the objective was, nor was he impressed with how friendly the forces around him were, if Prague was to serve as the example.

The other, deep voice continued. "Roger, this is Cube Six. Break. Bouncer Three, status? Over."

A new voice came on the air. "This is Bouncer Three.

Airborne and en route. Over."

"Roger. Wait for my command. Cube Six out."

The pilot of the AH-6 swept even lower over the cornfields, the UH-60

Blackhawk following just to the rear and above. The other AH-6 flew trail. The corn gave way briefly to pasture with cattle breaking in all directions as the helicopters came over, then the terrain turned back to corn. Turcotte had never seen this many fields, even in Germany. It seemed like all of Nebraska was one big checkerboard of cultivation and ranching. Through his night vision goggles he could see an occasional patch of trees off in the distance, sometimes with lights peeking through the trees, indicating that was where the farmers and ranchers lived. What are we going after out here?

Turcotte wondered.

The pilot pulled back on the cyclic and reduced throttle.Turcotte could see Prague checking their location on a ground positioning receiver (GPR). Prague gave a hold signal to the pilot.

"Cube Six, this is Nightscape Six. At Oscar Papa Romeo.

Request final clearance. Over."

"This is Cube Six. Eye in the sky still shows you are clear for a twelve kilometer radius. No traffic within eighteen klicks. Proceed. I say again, proceed. Out."

"Roger. Out." Prague pointed out the windshield and they were swooping across the dark sky again. "Phase one initiated. Start the watch."

THE CUBE, AREA 51

T - 1 1 8 HOURS, 3O MINUTES

"Sir, we've got a shadow on Bouncer Three."

"A what?" Gullick spun around in his command chair.

"What do you mean a shadow?"

Major Quinn pointed at the screen. "There's a bogey right behind Three. We didn't pick it up before because it's so small, but something's following Bouncer Three. I've checked the tapes and it's been there ever since Three left the hangar. Must have been somewhere in the vicinity when Three took off."

"What is it?" Gullick demanded.

"I don't know, sir. We were only able to catch it by tracking satellite and infrared signature."

The Cube was hooked in to the U.S. Space Command's Missile Warning Center, located inside Cheyenne Mountain outside Colorado Springs. The Space Command was responsible for the Defense Support Program (DSP) satellite system. DSP