Area 51 (32 page)

An arrowhead with a 2 inside it marked a road leading to the northeast. The other roads all appeared to be local residential streets. Kelly turned onto the arrowhead road and they began climbing the shoulder of the mountain. A sign indicated they were now on the Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation. A white Ford Bronco rolled past with two men seated inside and Turcotte twisted his head and watched it go by.

"Government plates," he noted.

"Yeah," Kelly said.

"Probably from the facility."

"I don't want to burst your bubble," Kelly said, "but you see a lot of U.S.

government plates out here. We're on ederal land, actually Indian land, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which helps run the reservations, is federal."

"But it could be from the base," Turcotte said.

"Ah, optimism," Kelly said, mimicking his Canuck accent. "I like that."

"There." Turcotte pointed to the right shoulder. "Stop there."

The road split. To the right it went down into a valley. To the left a wide, well-maintained gravel road curved along the back of the ridgeline and disappeared.

"It's around there," Turcotte announced firmly.

"Why not to the right?" she asked.

"Von Seeckt said it was behind the mountain. To the right is not behind the mountain." He looked to the back.

"Correct?"

Von Seeckt concurred. "I believe to the left."

Turcotte continued. "Also, since we left Phoenix that's the best maintained and widest gravel road I've seen." He smiled. "But mostly, the thing that convinces me that the facility is down that road--besides Von Seeckt's opinion, of course--are those little lines of what appears to be smoke hanging above the road." He pointed to the gravel road.

"See them? There and there?"

"Yes. What are they?"

"That's dust caught in a laser beam. A car goes down that road, the beam gets broken and a signal is sent.

There's two of them, so they can tell if a vehicle is coming or going depending on the order the beams get broken. I don't think the Bureau of Indian Affairs guards the reservations that tightly, do you?"

"What now?" Kelly asked, glancing over her shoulder at the other two men in the rear.

"I don't think this place will be as well guarded as Area 51," Turcotte said.

"All the work here must be done inside, so it obviously doesn't attract as much attention as the other facility. So that's to our advantage.

"The other thing to remember is a basic fact about most guarded facilities.

The goal of a lot of the security is not, as you would think, to prevent someone from actually breaking in. The goal is deterrence: to keep someone from considering breaking in."

"I don't understand," Nabinger said from the rear.

"Think of the security cameras in banks," Turcotte explained. "They work through deterrence. They keep most people from robbing the bank because those people know their picture will get taken and the police will eventually catch them. The same with most security. For example, if I wanted to kill the President, I could most definitely kill him. The problem lies with killing him and getting away afterward."

"So, you're saying we can get in to this facility but we can't get out?" Kelly asked.

"Oh, I think we should be able to get out. It's just that they'll know we did it."

Kelly shrugged. "Hell, that ain't a problem. They're already after us. We get Johnny, we go public. That's the only way we'll make it."

"Right," Turcotte said.

"So, back to my original question," Kelly said. "What now?"

"Back to town," Turcotte said. "We need a ticket to get us in. Once inside I'll get us to Johnny."

"And the high rune tablets," Nabinger added. "Von Seeckt told me that Dulce is where they keep all the ones the government has."

"And the high rune tablets," Turcotte amended. "Whatever you can find."

"Anyplace in particular in town?" Kelly asked as she turned them around and headed to the south.

"Know how cops always hang out at the local doughnut shop?" Turcotte said.

"Yes."

"We need to find where the workers from the base get their doughnuts."

T-73 HOURS, 15 MINUTES

"That one," Turcotte said. They'd watched a dozen or so cars with small green stickers on the front center of the windshield pull in and out of the convenience-store parking lot over the course of the past several hours.

Turcotte had pointed out the stickers and explained that they were decals used to identify cars that had access to government installations. As night had fallen, the lights had come on, illuminating the parking and leaving their van in the darkness across the street.

"I've got him." Kelly started the engine to the van and followed the Suburban out of the parking lot of the Minit Mart.

They followed the truck as it went north through town and then turned onto Reservation Route 2. They were a quarter mile from the split in the road.

"Now," Turcotte ordered.

Kelly flashed her high beams and accelerated until they were right on the bumper of the Suburban. She swung out and passed, Turcotte leaning out the window and giving the finger to the driver of the truck as he screamed obscenities.

Kelly slammed on the brakes and they skidded to a halt at the intersection with the gravel road. The driver of the Suburban came to a stop on the gravel road, headlights pointing at the van.

"What the fuck is your problem, asshole?" the burly driver of the truck demanded as he stepped out and started walking toward the van.

Turcotte jumped out of the passenger side of the van and met him halfway between the two vehicles, caught in the glow of the headlights.

"You an idiot or what?" the driver demanded. "You pass me and — Without a word Turcotte fired the stun gun, dropping the man immediately. He cuffed him with plastic cinches from his vest and dragged the body into the back of the van.

"Get into the truck," he ordered Von Seeckt and Nabinger.

The two men scuttled over into the backseat of the Suburban.

Kelly drove the van a hundred meters down the tar road, where the turn concealed them from the intersection.

There was no place to conceal the van, so she just pulled off to the shoulder.

Turcotte made sure the man was secure and quickly frisked him.

"This isn't much of a plan," Kelly muttered as she locked the van and pocketed the keys. "And I'm not sure I buy your easy-to-get-in-and-out theory."

"One of my commanders in the infantry used to say any plan was better than having Rommel stick it up your ass on the drop zone," Turcotte said as they jogged up the road toward the truck.

"I don't get it," Kelly said.

"I never did, either, but it sounded good. What's really interesting," he said, pausing for a second and looking at her in the starlight, "is that you're the first person who ever said that about that quote. I never told my commander I didn't get it."

"And?" Kelly said.

He began jogging again. "It means you listen and you think."

Turcotte took the wheel this time. He scanned the interior and reached above the visor; an electronic card key was there, such as those used in hotels to open doors. He checked the name: Spencer. "The plan is getting better by the minute."

He tucked the card between his legs next to the stun gun. "Everyone down. We're going to be on camera in a second."

Throwing the engine into gear, he rolled down the gravel road, past the laser sensors. There was no way he could see it, but he had no doubt that the vehicle was being surveyed by infrared cameras to check for the decal and insure it was authorized. He knew the decal was covered with a fluorescent coating that could easily be seen through such a device. He watched the road carefully, hoping that there would be no more forks where a decision had to be made.

A sign appeared in the headlights warning that they were now entering a federal restricted area and the fine print listed all the dire consequences unauthorized personnel would face and all the constitutional rights that they no longer had. Four hundred meters past the sign a steel bar stretched across the road. A machine such as those used at airports to give out parking tickets was on the left side.

Turcotte pulled up and inserted the card key into the slot.

The steel bar lifted.

He continued on, then the road split. Turcotte had less than three seconds to make a decision. To the left loomed the mountain. To the right the valley floor.

He turned left and immediately was in a narrow valley. The sides closed in and camouflage netting covered the road, staked down on the rock walls on either side, confirming his decision. A thirty-foot-wide opening in the base of the mountain appeared directly ahead, carved into the side of the mountain. A dull red glow came out of the opening.

A bored security guard in a booth just inside the cave opening hardly looked up, waving the Suburban in. A large parking garage was off to the right and Turcotte turned that way. The man-made cave was dimly lit by red lights.

That was both to defeat detection from the outside by not having bright white light coming out of the entrance, and also to allow people to begin getting their night sight when departing.

The slots were numbered, but Turcotte took his chances and went to the far end, out of sight of the guard, and parked. There were about ten other cars in the garage.

Over fifty spaces were empty, which meant that the night shift was a skeleton crew, for which Turcotte was grateful.

There was a pair of sliding doors set in the rock twenty feet from where he had parked. "Let's go."

Turcotte glanced over his shoulder at the three people following him--Kelly short and compact, Von Seeckt leaning on his cane, and Nabinger bringing up the rear. Kelly smiled at him. "Lead on, fearless one."

He slid the card key into the slot on the side of the elevator. The doors slid open. They crowded inside and Turcotte examined the buttons. They ranged from HP, Garage, down through sublevels 4 to 1. "I'd say HP stands for 'helipad.'

They probably have one cut into the side of the mountain or maybe even on the top of the mountain above us. Any idea what floor we should go to?" he asked Von Seeckt.

The old man shrugged. "They had stairs when I was here last, but we did go down."

"I'd say bottom level," Kelly suggested. "The greater the secret, the deeper you go."

"Real scientific," Turcotte muttered. He hit sublevel 1.

The elevator dropped, the lights on the wall flashed, then halted at sublevel 2.

A message appeared on the digital display above the number lights: ACCESS TO SUBLEVEL 1 LIMITED TO

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

TOP SECRET Q LEVEL CLEARANCE REQUIRED.

DUAL ACCESS MANDATORY.

INSERT ACCESS KEYS NOW.

Turcotte looked at the two small openings--made for small round objects--one just below the digital display and the other on the far wall. They were far enough apart that one person could not operate both keys--just like the launch systems of ICBM. "I don't have the keys for that, and our Mr. Spencer didn't have them on him either."

"Let's try this level," Kelly suggested.

Turcotte pressed the open button and the doors slid apart, revealing a small foyer and another door and another warning sign:

SUBLEVEL 2

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

RED CLEARANCE REQUIRED.

An opening for a card key to be passed through was just below the sign.

Turcotte held up the card key he'd appropriated from the Suburban. It was orange. "We're still out of the depth of Mr. Spencer's security range." He stepped forward and shrugged off the small backpack he had on.

"But I think I can handle this little roadblock." He removed a small black box.

"What's that?" Kelly asked.

"Something I found in the van. They had all sorts of goodies back there." A card key was attached to the box by several wires. Turcotte slid it into the slot in the direction opposite that indicated by the arrow. "It reads the door code backward, memorizes it, and then reverses the code.

I've used similar devices in some of my other assignments."

He slid it down in the proper direction and the two doors slip open to reveal a guard seated at a desk ten feet away.

"Hey!" the guard yelled, bounding to his feet.

Turcotte dropped the box and reached for the stun gun.

It got caught in his pocket and he abandoned the effort, sprinting forward. The guard's gun had just cleared his holster when Turcotte jumped into the air, feet leading, and flew over the desk. The bottom of his boots caught the guard in the chest, knocking him back against the wall.

Turcotte was back on his feet first and he slammed a turn kick into the side of the guard's skull, knocking him out.

He turned to the desktop and looked at the computer screen that was built into it. It showed a schematic, with rooms labeled and green lights in each little box. The others quickly gathered around.

"Archives," Turcotte said, resting a finger on a room. He looked up at Nabinger and Von Seeckt. "That's yours." He reached into his pocket and pulled out the stun gun. "You meet anyone, use this. Just aim and pull the trigger, the gun does the rest. You've got five minutes. Then be back here whether you found what you're looking for or not."

Nabinger oriented himself with the diagram and looked down the corridor. "Right.

Let's go." He headed off with Von Seeckt.

Turcotte pointed. "I'd say your friend is in one of these two places." One was labeled HOLDING AREA and the other BIOLAB.

"Biolab," Kelly said.

They sprinted in the opposite direction from the one Von Seeckt and Nabinger had taken. The hall was quiet and they passed several doors with nameplates on the outside--obviously offices for the people who worked here in the daytime.

"Left," Kelly said. A set of swinging double doors waited at the end of a short corridor. They halted and Kelly arched her eyebrows at Turcotte in question as they heard someone cough on the other side.

"We charge," Turcotte whispered.

"You don't have much of a tactical repertoire," Kelly replied quietly.