Area 51

CHAPTER 12

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.

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-destruct?”

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.

“It was all very, very secret. They pieced it all out. Fermi had already done the first piece even before they had the knowledge I brought with me. His chain-reaction experiment gave them the raw material. I gave them the technology.”

“You did?” Turcotte asked. The plane was gaining altitude. “How did you know—”

Von Seeckt raised his cane. “Another time for that story, maybe. We worked nonstop until 1945. We thought we had it right, just like they think they understand the mothership. The difference was that there was a war then. And even so, there were many who argued we should not test the bomb, but everyone in power was tired. Then Roosevelt died. They hadn’t even briefed Vice President Truman. Their great secrecy almost cost them there. The secretary of state had to go and tell him about the bomb the day after the President died.

“After understanding the significance of what he was told, Truman gave the go-ahead to test. But I don’t think they fully informed him of the potential for disaster, just as they keep the President in the dark now. We took a chance then.”

Von Seeckt muttered something in German that Turcotte didn’t catch, then he continued in English. “They have a presidential adviser on the Majic committee, but there is much they do not tell her. I know they have not told her about the Nightscape missions. They believe this operation here, and much else that is secret in the government, is beyond the scope of the politicians who can be gone in four years.”

Turcotte didn’t respond to that. He had long ago decided that the country was run by bureaucrats who stayed in their slots for decades — not by politicians who came and went.

At least he was beginning to understand why Duncan had sent him in to infiltrate Nightscape.

“On the sixteenth of July, in the year of our Lord 1945, at five-thirty in the morning, the first atomic weapon made by man was detonated. We placed it on a steel tower in the desert outside of Alamogordo Air Base. No one quite knew what was going to happen. There were some — some of the finest minds mankind has ever produced — who believed the world would end. That the bomb would start a chain reaction that would not stop until it consumed the planet. Others thought nothing would happen. Because it was even riskier than history thinks. We were playing with technology we had not developed!”

That confused Turcotte. He had always understood that the U.S. had developed the A-bomb from scratch. He didn’t have time to focus on that because Von Seeckt was still talking.

“It was children playing with something we hoped we understood. What if a simple mistake had been made? What if we had connected the red wire where the blue wire was supposed to go? And even if it did work we weren’t quite sure of the limitations!

“Do you know what Oppenheimer said he was thinking about that morning?” Von Seeckt didn’t wait for an answer. “He was thinking of the Hindu saying: ‘I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.’ And we had. It went just as planned. We had death under our control — because it did not start a chain reaction and it didn’t just sit there on the tower and do nothing. It worked.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Turcotte asked.

“Because I think you are done here, as you say. And I am dying. And there is nothing left for me.”

Von Seeckt was silent for a few minutes, the plane rising up into the early-morning darkness. “Because I have lived in ignorance and fear for all my years but now I have nothing to fear. I am dead even as you see me, but it is only now in looking back with a different perspective that I know I was dead all those years.” He turned. “Because you are young and have a life ahead of you. And they are playing God down there below us and someone has to stop them. There are four days before they try to run up the mothership to full power. Four days. Four days until Armageddon.”

Turcotte asked several questions but Von Seeckt wouldn’t answer. The rest of the trip was made in silence.

It was still dark. Kelly waited in the terminal, staring out at the runway. A plane roared overhead, and in the runway lights she could see the red stripe painted down the side.

The plane touched down but didn’t turn toward the terminal. It pulled off to an area about a quarter mile away, behind a fence with green slats. Show time. Kelly ran through the main terminal dodging tourists and burst outside. She slid into the rental car she’d left at the curb, stuffing the ticket that had been placed on the windshield into her pocket. Following the airport service road, she paralleled the green fence, stopping as she neared a gate in it. She shut down the engine and turned off the lights. There was the faintest glow of dawn on the horizon.

“What now?” she asked herself. She opened one of the packs she had bought and lit up. The first breath in was awful, tearing down her throat. She felt lightheaded and nauseated. The second was better. “Three years down the tube,” she muttered. A bus pulled up to the gate and it swung open, admitting the vehicle. Kelly opened the door, stubbing out the cigarette. Just before the gate shut, a van with darkened windows pulled out.

“Shit,” Kelly said, jumping back in the car. As it turned the corner she got the car started and followed. The van turned onto Las Vegas Boulevard and headed north. They passed the Mirage, Caesar’s Palace, and other famous casinos that lined the street. At the edge of town the van made a right into the main gate for Nellis Air Force Base.

Kelly made a quick decision and followed, merging into the flow of early-morning work traffic entering the post.

The air policeman waved her to a halt as she had expected, because she had no access sticker on her rent-a-car, but she was prepared.

“Could you tell me how to get to the public affairs officer?” she asked, holding up her press card as the line of cars piled up behind her. She could see the van still ahead.

The air policeman hurriedly gave her directions and waved her through, keeping the flow of traffic going. Kelly had watched the van and followed in the direction it had gone.

She was surprised to see it parked outside a building next to the post hospital. Kelly drove past, looped around, then parked in the lot outside a dental clinic across the street.

The side door of the van slid open and two men in black windbreakers stepped out, then an old man leaning on a cane, followed by a fourth man wearing a dirty and torn black parka.

The four disappeared into a door. Kelly leaned back and exercised what her dad had told her was the most important trait a person could have — patience.

Inside the hospital annex the man in the white coat was curt and to the point. “I’m Dr. Cruise. Please take a seat in examining room two, Professor Von Seeckt. You,” he said, pointing at Turcotte, “follow me.” They left the watchdogs in the waiting room.

Turcotte followed the doctor into examining room one. Turcotte estimated Cruise to be in his fifties, with carefully styled silver hair and expensive glasses. He appeared to be in good shape and was coldly efficient in bedside manner.

“Strip down to the waist,” Cruise ordered.

Turcotte remembered Prague’s nickname for him — meat. He was beginning to feel more and more like that was apropos. Hell, Turcotte thought as he watched Dr. Cruise prepare a needle with painkiller, he’d have sewn the wound up himself if he’d had access to the proper medical equipment. He’d been hurt worse on training exercises.

“Have you seen the pilot who was injured?” Turcotte asked as Cruise slid the needle into his side.

“Yes.”

Turcotte waited a few seconds but there was nothing further. “How is he?” “Fractured skull. Some bleeding on the brain. He was lucky whoever was with him didn’t take his helmet off, or he wouldn’t have made it here alive.”

Luck had nothing to do with it, Turcotte thought to himself. “Has he regained consciousness?”

“No.” Cruise put the needle down and picked up a charged surgical needle. He seemed quite preoccupied with some other thoughts.

Turcotte watched with detachment as Cruise began to sew the edges of the tear on his side together. He considered his situation. If Prague had suspected him, then the word hadn’t been passed along, because the two guards were obviously for Von Seeckt. That meant he was home free as soon as he was done here.

“Wait here,” Doctor Cruise ordered after he’d finished putting a bandage on the arm. He went into the office next door. The door swung shut but the latch didn’t catch and it was left slightly ajar. Looking at the mirror above the examining table, Turcotte could see into the office. Cruise was at the sink, washing his hands. Then the doctor placed both hands on the edge of the sink and stared in the mirror, saying something to himself.

Turcotte thought that quite odd. Then Cruise reached into a pocket inside his coat and pulled out a needle with a plastic protective cover over the tip. He stared at the needle, removed the cover, then took a deep breath and headed out of the office, through the far door, handling the needle very gingerly.

Turcotte hopped off the examining table and slowly opened the door to Cruise’s office. He looked about. There was some paperwork on the desk. Turcotte noticed a folder with Von Seeckt’s name neatly printed on the label. He flipped it open.

The top document was a certificate of death signed by Cruise with today’s date in the top right block. Cause of death: pulmonary failure.

Turcotte twisted the knob and threw open the door to examining room two. Cruise froze, the needle a few inches away from the old man’s arm. “Don’t move!” Turcotte ordered, drawing his 9mm Browning High Power from his hip holster.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Cruise blustered.

“Put the needle down,” Turcotte said.

“I’ll report you to General Gullick,” Cruise said, carefully putting the syringe down on the countertop.

“What is going on?” Von Seeckt asked in German.

“We’ll find out in a second,” Turcotte said, keeping the muzzle of his pistol on Cruise as he walked over and picked up the needle.

“What’s in it?” he asked.

“His treatment,” Cruise said, his eyes on the syringe.

“It won’t harm you, then, will it?” Turcotte asked with a nasty smile, turning the point toward Cruise’s neck.

“I’m — I—no, but—” Cruise froze as the tip touched his skin.

“This wouldn’t happen to be something that causes pulmonary failure, would it?”

“No,” Cruise said, his eyes wide and staring down at the gleaming metal and glass tube.

“Then there’s no problem if you get a dose,” Turcotte said, pushing the point into Cruise’s neck.

Sweat was pouring down Cruise’s face as Turcotte’s thumb poised over the plunger.

“No problem, right, Doctor?”

“Don’t. Please. Don’t,” Cruise whispered.

Von Seeckt didn’t seem too surprised by any of these events. He was putting his shirt back on. “What is in it, Dr. Cruise? My friend with the needle, he has had a hard night. I would not provoke him into doing anything rash.”

“It’s insulin.”

“And please tell me what that would have done to me?” Von Seeckt asked.

“An overdose would cause your heart to stop,” Cruise said.

“Your death certificate is filled out on the good doctor’s desk,” Turcotte said, looking at Von Seeckt. “He already signed it. The only thing blank was your time of death, but it was dated today.”

“Ah, after all these years.” Von Seeckt shook his head.

“And you are a doctor,” he added, shaking his head at Cruise. “I knew General Gullick was evil, but you should know better. You swore an oath to preserve life.”

“Gullick ordered this?” Turcotte asked.

Cruise almost shook his head, but thought better of it given the steel needle in his throat. “Yes.”

Turcotte slid the needle out, but before Cruise could even draw a deep breath, he slammed his elbow up against the doctor’s temple. Cruise crumpled to the ground unconscious.

“Thank you, my friend,” Von Seeckt said. He pulled his jacket on and picked up his cane. “And now?”

“And now we get the hell out of here,” Turcotte said.

“Follow me.”

He opened the door and stepped out into the waiting room, pistol first. There was only one guard there, reading a magazine. He looked up and kept very still. “Keys to the van,” Turcotte ordered. “With your left hand.”

The guard slowly took the keys out of his pocket.

“Put them on the table, then get on your knees, face to the wall.” The man complied.

“Get them, Professor,” Turcotte said. He edged toward the door, keeping his weapon on the guard. “Where’s your partner?”

The man kept silent, which is what Turcotte would have done in his position. Turcotte slammed the barrel of his pistol down on the back of the man’s head and he dropped to the floor.

“Let’s go.” Turcotte carefully opened the outside door and looked out. Because of the tinted windows he couldn’t tell if the other guard was inside the van, which was parked. Turcotte stuck the hand with the gun inside his parka pocket. He walked out with Von Seeckt, straight up to the van, and slid the side door open. Empty. “Get in.”

On the other side of the street Kelly watched the two men get into the van, the younger of the two holding a gun in his hand. She shifted her eyes and watched the other man, the guard who had come outside to smoke a few minutes ago, turn around and start walking toward the front of the building.

Turcotte turned the key and nothing happened. He tried again. “Fuck,” he muttered.

Von Seeckt leaned over and pointed at a small device under the steering column. “Electronic theft protection,” he explained. “There’s a small conductor that is placed there. Without it, no electrical power. They have begun installing—” “All right, all right,” Turcotte cut in. He hadn’t seen the driver take it out and it wasn’t on the key ring. He looked back at the front door of the clinic. A shadow crossed his peripheral vision — the other guard coming around the corner of the building.

Then it all fell apart. The front door opened and the other guard staggered out, pistol waving about, firing, blinking blood out of his eyes.

Turcotte kicked open the driver side door. “Get out!” he yelled to Von Seeckt. He fired three rounds quickly, deliberately high, causing both guards to drop to the ground.

“Jesus!” Kelly flicked her cigarette out the window and started the car’s engine. The man who had just fired swung around and looked at her, his eyes piercing right through the windshield from twenty feet away, then he spun about and fired again at the black-jacketed men. Too high, Kelly thought, and that decided her.

With a squeal of rubber she peeled out of the parking lot. She drove to the near side of the van, slamming on the brakes and skidding to a halt. “Get in!” she yelled, leaning over and throwing open the passenger door.

The man with the gun shoved the old man in, following right behind. “Go! Go! Go!” he exhorted her.

Kelly didn’t need the advice. She fishtailed out of the parking lot. The two men ran out into the road behind, firing. A group of airmen waiting outside the dental clinic ran for cover.

There were a few plinks as bullets hit the trunk. Kelly took the next corner with her foot still pushing down on the accelerator. They were out of sight of the two gunmen. The main gate to the base was four blocks directly ahead.

“Steady through the gate,” the man with the pistol said. “We don’t want to attract attention.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Kelly replied.