Area 51 (16 page)

Kennedy leaned forward. "Von Seeckt was on the airfield there at Tinian back when they launched the Enola Gay carrying that bomb, wasn't he?"

"Yes, sir. Von Seeckt was there," Quinn replied.

"And we still don't know anything about these foo fighters, do we?" Gullick asked.

"No, sir."

"Russian?" Kennedy asked.

Quinn stared at him. "Excuse me, sir?"

"They couldn't have been Russian, could they? The sons of bitches did beat us with Sputnik. Maybe they made these things."

"Uh, no, sir, I don't believe there was any indication they were Russian," Quinn replied. "Once the war was over, reports about the foo fighters ended for a while."

"For a while?" Kennedy repeated.

"In 1986 a bogey was picked up in the atmosphere by space surveillance and tracked," Quinn said. "The object did not fit any known aircraft parameters."

Quinn pressed a key and a new picture appeared on the screen. It looked as if a child had gone crazy with a bright green pen. A line zigzagged across the screen and looped back on itself several times. "This is the flight path of a bogey they picked up back in eighty-six flying at altitudes ranging from four to one hundred and eighty thousand feet." Quinn hit another button. "This is the flight pattern of our bogey tonight superimposed on the one from eighty-six." The two were very similar. "There's something else, sir."

"And that is?" Gullick asked.

"There was another series of unexplained sightings right after this one. The Navy along with the DIA were running an operation called Project Aquarius. It was, um, well, what they were doing--

"Spit it out, man!" Gullick ordered.

"They were experimenting using psychics to try to locate submarines."

"Oh, Christ," Gullick muttered. "And?" he wearily asked.

"The psychics were doing reasonably well. About a sixty-percent success rate on getting the approximate longitude and latitude of submerged submarines simply by sitting in a room in the Pentagon and using mental imaging of a photograph of each specific submarine.

"There was an unexpected thing that occurred every once in a while, though.

One of the psychics would pick up the image of something else at the same coordinates as the submarines. Something hovering above the location of the sub."

"And, let me guess," Gullick said. "We don't know what that something was, correct?"

"Space surveillance picked up . . ." Quinn hit his keyboard and let the flight-path schematic speak for itself: another radical flight pattern.

"Did anyone ever explain any of these sightings?" Gullick asked.

"No, sir."

"So we have a real UFO on our hands now, don't we?"

Gullick said.

"Uh, yes, sir."

"Well, that's just fucking fine!" Gullick snapped. "That's all I need right now." He glared at Admiral Coakley. "I want that thing recovered and I want to know what the hell it is!"

As the men filed out, Kennedy stopped by General Gullick and sat down next to him. "Maybe we should check with Hemstadt at Dulce about these foo fighters," he said.

"There might be some information about them in the Machine."

Gullick looked up from the tabletop and stared into Kennedy's eyes. "Do you want to go to Dulce to hook up to the Machine?"

Kennedy swallowed. "I thought we could just call him and ask. It's possible that the Machine might be controlling--

"You think too much," Gullick cut him off, ending the conversation.

- 134 -

11

VICINITY DULCE, NEW MEXICO

T - 113 HOURS, 3O MINUTES

Johnny Simmons awoke to darkness. At least he thought he was awake. He could see nothing, hear nothing. When he tried to move, panic set in. His limbs didn't respond. He had a horrible feeling of being awake but asleep, unable to connect the conscious mind with the nervous system to produce action. He felt detached from his body and reality.

A mind floating in a black void.

Then came the pain. Without sight or sound it exploded into his brain, becoming all his mind, all of his world. It was coming from every nerve ending in jagged, climbing spikes, far beyond anything he had thought possible.

Johnny screamed, and the worst of it all was that he couldn't hear his own voice.

- 135 -

12

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

T - 112 HOURS, 3O MINUTES

Las Vegas slowed down slightly at five-thirty in the morning. The neon still glowed, and there were people on the streets, most heading to their rooms for a few hours of sleep before starting over again on the games of chance.

Kelly Reynolds was doing the opposite, starting her day after catching three hours of sleep in her motel room. The first thing she had done when the alarm went off was call Johnny's apartment on the slim chance that he might be there or have changed the message.

She looked up as a red-eye flight roared in toward the horizon. Walk to the sounds of the planes, she thought to herself, paraphrasing Napoleon. She'd rent a car at the airport. Right now she needed the fresh air and the time to think.

This is what dad would have done, go for the strongest link.

The thought brought a sad smile to her face. Her father and his stories. The best time of his life had been over before he was twenty. What a horrible way to spend the rest of one's life, Kelly thought.

World War II. The last good war. Her dad had served in the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. He'd jumped into Italy during the last year of the war and worked with the partisans. Running the hills with a band of renegades licensed to kill Germans and take what they needed by force.

Then he'd worked in Europe as the war closed out, helping with the war crimes trials. Much of what he saw there had soured him on mankind.

Peace had never been the same. He'd turned to the slow death of the bottle and lived with his memories and his nightmares. Kelly's mom had retreated into her own brain and shut out the outside world. And because of them Kelly had grown up fast. She wondered if her dad had still been alive, if his liver had lasted a little longer, how the affair at Nellis would have turned out. She might have been able to go to him for help. At the very least, she would have considered what he would have done instead of blazing her own path to destruction. He certainly would not have bought into Prague's line so naively. He would have told her to approach the bait very slowly and to watch out for the hook.

The only legacy she had from her dad was his stories.

But she was his legacy and that was more than she could say for herself at forty-two. No children and not much of a career to counterweight that. As she walked to the airport, Kelly felt an overwhelming depression. The only thing that kept her going was Johnny. He needed her.

She stopped in an all-night market and bought two packs of cigarettes and a lighter.

AREA 51

Turcotte strapped himself into the plane seat and tried to get comfortable. He'd spent the last two hours, since leaving the underground control room, alone, waiting in a small room off of the hangar, until they rolled out the stairs to load the 737 to fly into Las Vegas and pick up the morning shift of workers. He was glad that he was going to be able to get out of here. First thing he would do in Las Vegas after getting his arm sewn up was call Duncan on the number he had memorized. He wanted to get everything off his chest. Then hopefully he could leave all this behind.

He noticed an old man come on board, accompanied by two younger men whose demeanor suggested they were bodyguards for the first man. Despite the fact that they were the only other passengers on board, the old man took the front row of seats on the other side of the plane from Turcotte. The bodyguards, apparently satisfied there were no immediate threats, sat down a few rows back as the plane's door was shut by the same hard-faced man who had greeted Turcotte with the breathalyzer a little less than forty hours ago. That man disappeared into the cockpit.

"They are fools," the old man muttered in German, his gnarled hands wrapped around a cane with a silver handle.

Turcotte ignored him, looking out the window at the base of Groom Mountain. Even this close--less than two hundred meters away--it was almost impossible to tell that there was a hangar built into the side of the mountain.

Turcotte wondered how much money had been poured into this facility. Several billion dollars at least. Of course, with the U.S. government having a covert black budget somewhere between thirty-four and fifty billion dollars a year, he knew that was just a drop in the bucket.

"They will all die, just like they did last time," the old man said in perfect German, shaking his head.

Turcotte looked over his shoulder. One of the bodyguards was asleep. The other was engrossed in a paperback.

"Who will die?" Turcotte asked in the same language.

The old man started and then looked at Turcotte. "Are you one of Gullick's men?"

Turcotte lifted his right hand, exposing the blood-soaked fabric. "I was."

"And now who are you?"

At first Turcotte thought he had translated poorly, but then he realized he had it right, and he understood. It was a question he had struggled with all through the dark hours of the morning. "I don't know, but I am done here."

The old man switched to English. "That is good. This is not a place to be. Not with what they plan, but I am not sure any distance will be enough."

"Who are you?"

The old man inclined his head. "Werner Von Seeckt.

And you?"

"Mike Turcotte."

"I have worked here since 1943."

"This is my second day," Turcotte said.

Von Seeckt found that amusing. "It did not take you long to get in trouble,"

he said. "You are going to the hospital with me?"

Turcotte nodded. "What were you talking about earlier? About everyone dying?"

The engine noise increased as the plane taxied toward the end of the runway.

"Those fools," Von Seeckt said, gesturing out the window. "They are playing with forces they don't understand."

"The flying saucers?" Turcotte asked.

"Yes, the saucers. We call them bouncers," Von Seeckt said. "But even more, there is another ship. You have not seen the large one, have you?"

"No. I've only seen the ones here in this hangar."

"There is a bigger one. Much bigger. They are trying to figure out how to fly it. They believe if they can get it to work they can take it into orbit and then back. Then there will no longer be any need for the space shuttles, but more importantly they believe that it is an interstellar transport, that we can bridge centuries of normal development by simply flying the mothership. They think we can have the stars right away without having to make the technological breakthroughs to do it." Von Seeckt sighed. "Or, perhaps more importantly, without the societal development."

Turcotte had seen enough the past couple of days to accept what Von Seeckt was saying at face value. "What's so bad about just flying the thing? Why are you saying it's a threat to the planet?"

"We don't know how it works!" Von Seeckt said, stamping the head of his cane down on the carpet. "The engine is incomprehensible. They are not even sure which of the many machines inside is the engine.

"Or there may be two engines! Two modes of propulsions. One for use inside of a solar system or inside a planet's atmosphere and the other once the ship is outside significant effect of gravity from planets and stars. We simply don't know, and what if we turn the wrong one on?

"Does the interstellar drive create its own wormhole and the ship is pulled through? Maybe. So, maybe we make a wormhole on earth--not good! Or does it ride the gravitational waves? But in riding, does it disturb them? Imagine what that could do. And what will it do if we lose control?

"And who is to say the engine will still work properly? It is a flaw of inductive logic to say that just because the bouncers still work that the mothership will work. In fact, what if it is broken and turning it on makes it self-de-struct?"

Von Seeckt leaned over and spoke in a lower voice. "In 1989 we were working on one of the engines from the bouncers. We had removed it from the craft and placed it in a cradle. The men working on it were testing tolerances and operating parameters.

"They found out about tolerances! They turned it on and it ripped out of the cradle holding it. They had not replicated the control system adequately and lost the ability to turn it off. It tore through the retaining wall, killing five men. When it finally came to a stop it was buried sixty-five feet into solid rock. It took over two weeks to drill into the rock and remove it. It wasn't damaged at all.

"I have seen it before. They never learn. I understood the first time. There was a war. Extreme measures were called for then. But there is no war now. And all the secrecy! Why? What are we hiding all this for? General Gullick says it is because the public will not understand, and his cronies produce all sorts of psychological studies to back that up, but I do not believe it. They hide it because they have hidden it for so long that they can no longer reveal what they have been doing without saying that the government has lied for so many years.

And they hide it because knowledge is power and the bouncers and the mothership represent the ultimate power."

The plane was gathering speed and moving down the runway. "It all used to make sense," Von Seeckt said. "But this year something changed. They are all acting very strangely."

Turcotte had cued into something Von Seeckt had said.

"What do you mean the 'first time'?"

"I have worked for the government of the United States a very long time," Von Seeckt said. "I had a certain"—Von Seeckt paused--"knowledge and expertise that they needed so they, ah, recruited me in mid-1942. I came out here to the West. To Los Alamos, in New Mexico."

"The bomb," Turcotte said.

Von Seeckt nodded. "Yes. The bomb. But in 1943 I moved to Dulce, New Mexico. That is where the real work went on. Los Alamos, they worked off of the information we gave them.