Nightstalkers

CHAPTER 10

Doctor “never call me Professor, I earned my degree” Winslow left his lab on the campus of the University of North Carolina into the darkening evening with the hunched shoulders of a man whose day had been less than fulfilling. He occasionally, but not often, wondered if everyone who worked for him in the lab, from the techs to the various levels of graduate students and postdocs aspiring to his own position, ever noticed his bored resignation.

Physics was a young man’s game, and now that he was in his forties, it wasn’t as though his synapses were going to fire more rapidly and come up with a brilliant new theory. He’d seen it in those older than him. It had been a gentle, almost unnoticed slide from original brilliance to his single decent, well-paying idea — now gently fading into the past — to his eventual harrumphing for or against whatever the topic was depending on who was paying him and how much he stood to lose intellectually. Physics was like acting or novel writing or any other venture where one stepped into it with youthful verve and high expectations, but only a handful became Tom Hanks or Hemingway or Einstein.

Winslow found it amusing that so few understood that blinding ambition was the necessary ingredient of any intelligence or talent. He had the ambition, and as he pushed open the building door into the stifling heat of summer and the almost empty parking lot, he thought it was ironic that Ivar, his most talented student, had no ambition at all. It was the reason so many successful scientists stole the work of their lessers. Someone had to do something with it. A mind was a terrible thing to waste.

He walked to his car, the sweat already ruining another good shirt, and thought of Darwin, who’d read Wallace’s letters about evolution; while they shared many theories, Darwin was the one who ran with the big one. How many people knew who Wallace was? Darwin had had the ambition while Wallace had been content to merely be mentioned by the greater man.

Winslow’s wife, Lilith, had a Serbian grandmother who’d filled her head with tales of Tesla and how Edison had screwed him over, and how even Einstein’s wife, well-educated in her own right and ahead of her time, had lost out on her contributions to her husband. Winslow wasn’t sure he bought into the latter part, but the fact that Lilith was raised with the concept that stealing was an integral part of science made them a good pair in the ambition area. She just didn’t realize he wasn’t Tesla. Poor Tesla, whose better concept for alternating current had been relegated to the electric chair instead of home lighting, due to the manipulations of Edison, who had some of his assistants “accidently” kill animals with AC current to show its “danger” and secretly lobbied to get AC in the electric chair. It wasn’t surprising that no one wanted to turn on a light that shared the same current that Sing Sing used to turn off someone’s lights.

Winslow smiled. He had to remember that for the dinner party. He pulled his cell phone out and hit the record button so he wouldn’t forget: “No one wants to turn on a light that shares the same current that Sing Sing uses to turn out someone’s lights.”

Talking into the phone was why he didn’t hear the footsteps behind him. It was only as he clicked the record app off that he heard the voice right behind him and almost jumped out of his shoes.

“I’ve been everywhere but the electric chair and seen everything but the wind.”

Winslow spun about, the phone held out as if there were some app that could protect you from a stranger sneaking up on you in the dark.

“Who are you? What are you talking about?”

The man wore a hat, his face in darkness. There was an implied threat in the way he stood, in just the way he breathed. “Something from my old life. It’s a Nada Yada.”

“A what?”

The man gestured with his hand and there was clearly something metallic in it. “Just unlock all the doors and get in the car, Doctor Winslow.”

Winslow hesitated, considering his options. Swing his briefcase? Run? Scream?

He pressed the unlock button on his car key as he looked anxiously about at the tall smokestacks poking up above all the lab buildings so they could vent the by-products of various procedures. A distant blue light indicated where you could press an alert for campus police. Very distant. Too distant. Maybe this stranger only wanted the car?

“Get in the driver’s seat.”

Winslow slid into the leather seat as the man got in the back, behind him.

“Hot out, isn’t it?” the man said, as if this were the most normal of occurrences for him. “You’d think there’d be Fireflies out, it’s so hot.” He laughed to himself, a private joke apparently. There was a slightly manic edge to his laughter.

“What did you say?” Winslow felt his fear lessen slightly at the odd comment.

“Fireflies,” the man repeated. “You have to wonder where they are. And relax your grip on your briefcase, Doctor, because if you swing that at me, it will only result in severe damage to that arm.”

Winslow tensed once more. “That’s an odd thing to say during a robbery — fireflies.”

“Who says I’m robbing you, Doctor Winslow? Maybe I want to sell you something?”

Winslow swallowed, feeling a wave of excitement greater than his fear sweep through his body. “So you have the fireflies?” he whispered, playing along on the sneaky spy stuff, figuring it was some code word.

“You don’t even know what a Firefly is, do you? But you do know what a Rift is, correct? You did get that e-mail from your former student. He didn’t know what Fireflies were either. None of you really know what you’re doing. What would you be willing to pay me if I said I have what you need? Does the name Craegan ring a bell?”

Winslow had to bite back the instant answer that formed on his tongue: Anything. He thought for a moment. “Fifty thousand.”

“Move the decimal place.”

Winslow wanted to turn and shout that was robbery, but he knew it actually wasn’t. Winslow glanced up at the rearview mirror. The man was sitting back, hat still keeping his face in the dark. Winslow reached for the light switch.

“Don’t.” The man laughed, the manic edge sharper. “The Fireflies got to me.”

“What are you talking—”

The man tossed something over into the passenger seat.

Winslow saw the hard drive with the ASU control number on the side. “I’ll need time to get the money,” Winslow said. “A week?”

“What are you going to do?” the man asked. “Take out a fourth mortgage on your house?”

Winslow started in surprise.

“I wouldn’t be here trying to make a deal if I didn’t do my homework,” the man said. “I know you don’t have the money. But there is someone who does have the money who actually lives rather close to you.” Burns tossed a slip of paper over the seat. “Tell him it’s an investment. He’s the sort of man who would be interested in that. But I wouldn’t cross him.”

Winslow picked up the paper. He read the name. “But—”

“Trust me on this,” Burns said. “He can loan you five hundred thousand. It’s nothing to him. Unless you don’t pay him back.”

Five hundred thousand was nothing to what he could reap if he made this work, Winslow thought. “All right. Five hundred thousand.”

“Smart man.” The man shifted in the seat.

Winslow resisted the urge to grab the hard drive and race back inside and start right away.

“Something you need to know,” the man said, “if you want to not get caught and stay alive. Unlike Mister Craegen.”

But Winslow’s mind was racing ahead, hearing the applause from the audience in Geneva. Forming the words to the speech that was now inevitable. “Yes?” he muttered, his mind on other things.

“You need to shield it so there are no emissions once it activates,” the man warned. “Especially muons.”

“Muons?”

“That’s how they can find you,” the man said.

“Who?”

“The Nightstalkers.”

“Uh-huh.” Winslow wondered how much the Nobel medal weighed. How it would feel on his chest.

The man held a hand between the seats. “Give it to me.”

As Winslow reluctantly handed the hard drive back he saw the scars on the back of the man’s hand. The drive disappeared and then the man extended a small slip of paper. “Once I see the five hundred thousand in that account, I’ll call you. Set up a dead drop so you can get the drive. You know what a dead drop is?”

Winslow tensed at the term.

The man laughed again, sounding a bit insane, but Winslow wasn’t listening. “Of course you don’t. Tradecraft. Not required learning for physicists. Put simply, I’ll call you and tell you where you can find it. It’s now on you, Doctor.”

The man abruptly got out of the car, slamming the door shut. Winslow powered down his window. “How soon—”

“As soon as you deposit the money.” The man was gone into the darkness.

As Winslow put the car into drive to race home, he began to hear the applause once more.

Moms and Nada sat in the CP still discussing various ways they could catch Burns. Arriving back at the Ranch just before dawn, most of the day had been spent standing down from the Courier operation and doing the After Action Report. Now payback was on their minds.

In the Den they were discussing various ways to kill him.

Given the state of the van, it had to have been, as Nada had immediately surmised, an inside job. Someone who knew the Protocol, knew the vans, knew the Couriers, knew it all.

It only took till early afternoon for Ms. Jones’s long arm to discover that Burns was off the grid.

“‘How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,’” Eagle quoted.

“About twenty times in the past year,” Mac said. “Why don’t you come up with something original?”

“I never liked Burns,” Roland said. He was throwing a hatchet at the three-foot-high stump of a tree. How the stump of a tree had found its way out here to the desert and down into the Den was a mystery, but it had quickly become the magnet of all matters of throwing devices: hatchets, knives, spears. Bored men needed some release. Bored killers liked to throw killing devices.

Mac snorted. “Moms named him after Major Burns from M*A*S*H for some reason. Moms never likes naming anyone and she was surprised when Ms. Jones chose it. I don’t know what they picked up in him. He didn’t like the name either.”

Eagle went over and grabbed the handle of the hatchet. He grunted with effort, trying to pull it out after Roland’s throw. It came on the second jerk. He walked to the other end of the team table and prepared to throw.

“Duck!” Mac yelled as Eagle let loose.

Kirk took it seriously and dove under the table — just in time, as the top of the weapon hit the stump and it recoiled back, skidding across the table and then clanking to the floor.

“Dude, we have a rule!” Mac said as he picked up the hatchet. “You don’t get to throw.”

Eagle frowned. “I’ll get it eventually.”

“You’ll get one of us eventually,” Mac said, holding the hatchet out to Kirk. “Let’s see how our new man does.”

Kirk remembered the woodpile, the one Pads had forced him to make that summer after finding him hiding in the hollow of the old tree down by the creek. Pads had ordered him to cut the old tree down and stood there pulling from the bottle as Kirk, then known as Winthrop Carter, did it. Then Pads had given him a quota of wood to be cut every day from the dead tree, until there was nothing left of that tree but kindling. No more hide spot, and every log tossed on the fire that winter was a reminder that you couldn’t hide from Pads.

Kirk threw, and the hatchet flashed across the room, hitting the trunk with a solid thud, the blade burying deep into the wood.

“Damn,” Mac said. “You can throw.”

From the corner of the room, Doc said a single word. “Rifts.”

All activity ceased as Doc continued. “While you gentlemen have been concerned all day with Burns and his betrayal, I believe we need to further educate Kirk on Rifts, since we might well be facing one sooner than anticipated.”

Mac and Roland sat down at the team table. Kirk grabbed the seat closest to Doc, who was in the armchair that had been in the CP for the in-briefing with Nada and Moms.

“Let’s start with what we don’t know,” Doc said. “We don’t know what Rifts are, nor do we know what the Fireflies are. Not exactly. But skipping all the scientific jargon and theories, let’s construct a framework from which you can conduct operational tactics.”

Kirk said nothing, beginning to understand Nada’s warnings about the scientists.

“My best guess is that Rifts are tears to the multiverse. To either a world parallel to ours or another world entirely. And the Fireflies are probes. Some think the Fireflies are living entities who have crossed over, but the way they inhabit objects and creatures indicates a level of programming and not innate intelligence to me. Some of the choices the Fireflies make aren’t exactly the best — the cactus in the Fun Outside Tucson, for example.”

“Tell that to Burns,” Roland said. “And that rabbit didn’t seem a smart choice, but if Nada had been a shade slower, it would have torn your neck open and you wouldn’t be here. And the rattler did get you.”

Doc flushed; whether in embarrassment or anger, it was impossible to tell. “Yes, yes.”

“Doc,” Roland said, “as even you said: he don’t need theories.” Roland put his heavy hands flat on the table. “We’re the Nightstalkers. We, the Shooters, kill Fireflies, and Doc there, the Scientist, he shuts the Rift. That’s it. Moms and Nada told you how we kill the Fireflies. If it’s living, I usually ending up flaming it until there’s nothing but ash. Other stuff, Mac and I and the rest of the team blast and flame until there’s nothing left. Then this little gold thing floats up out of whatever it was in and — poof — no more Firefly.”

“But how did this start?” Kirk asked.

“When the first Rift was opened,” Doc said.

“Who did that?” Kirk asked.

“A German scientist here at Area 51,” Doc said. “Near the end and after World War II we brought a bunch of their scientists over here to work on—”

“Fucking Nazis,” Mac said.

“—various projects under the auspices of Operation Paperclip. We fought the Russians for the brain trust left from the Third Reich. It made Guantanamo look like a joke. Most people know about the ones we used in the space program, but we took whoever we could grab, and there were several theoretical physicists who had really produced nothing of practical use for the Germans, but were let loose in the labs in Area 51 to experiment—”

“Fuck around,” Mac said.

“—and one of them developed a way to open a Rift in 1948,” Doc said. “You can read about it in the binders that Nada gave you. It turned out to be a mess, since no one had encountered the Fireflies before and it took them a while—”

“And a lot of good men,” Mac interjected.

“—before they were able to figure it out, shut the Rift, and destroy the Fireflies. The first version of the Nightstalkers was formed under the supervision of a committee called Majestic 12 and originally headquartered at Area 51. Their primary mission was to find and destroy Fireflies and close the Rift they came out of. Since 1948 there have been twenty-seven recorded openings of Rifts.”

“All in the US?” Kirk asked.

“Most,” Doc said. “The theory behind them is the key, and ever since 1948, it’s been like the Holy Grail of physicists to create a controlled Rift and figure out what’s on the other side. No one has even been able to control one and no one has ever figured out what’s on the other side.”

“They’ve all dropped the Grail,” Eagle said. “They can open them and Doc here can shut them, but they can’t be controlled. Pretty much everyone who has opened one gets sucked through. To where, we have no idea, but such is the price of stupidity.”

“What about Rifts outside the US?” Kirk asked.

“The Russians have a team like us,” Doc said, “and between us we cover the world. We’ve done five missions overseas.”

“Not fun,” Roland noted.

“The problem,” Doc said, “is that science has the potential—”

“To screw things up,” Moms said from the door of the CP. Kirk reacted without thinking, hopping to his feet and popping to attention like he was back in the Ranger Bat.

Moms smiled. “I like this. It’s like the real army.”

“Don’t get used to it,” Nada said from behind her.

“Chill, dude,” Mac said.

Kirk sheepishly sat back down, the habits of the Rangers hard to let go of.

“In my opinion, the real birth of the Nightstalkers,” Moms said, “was not 1948, but on the sixteenth of June, 1945, not too far from here in the desert outside Alamogordo Air Force Base.”

“A Rift?” Kirk asked.

“No. Worse.” Moms came over to the team table and took a seat. Nada also grabbed a chair. “On that day, at five thirty in the morning, the first atomic weapon was detonated. You have to understand the context. They were trying something unknown. There were no computer projections. Those guys were using slide rulers. Some of the smartest people out there in that desert, people who had helped build the bomb, were convinced they were going to start an atomic chain reaction that would consume the entire world. And they detonated it anyway.

“Oppenheimer looked at the mushroom cloud and thought of a Hindu saying: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. At that point, man crossed a line that few have really focused on. We became capable of destroying ourselves.”

“And we haven’t stopped since,” Nada said. “Not long ago, at the supercollider near Geneva, they discovered the — what is it, Doc?”

Doc had a defeated look on his face, having been through this discussion before. “The Higgs boson particle.”

“Often called the God particle,” Eagle threw in.

Nada picked back up. “But when they first turned that thing on, there were some scientists who speculated they might actually cause a black hole and consume the planet,” Nada said. “But they turned it on anyway.”

“That held an incredibly small possibility,” Doc argued.

“But a possibility nonetheless,” Nada said.

“The pursuit of knowledge—” Doc began, but Nada cut him off again.

“Us and the Russians, both our teams, we were over there, waiting that day.” Nada shrugged. “We weren’t sure what we could do, but we were ready to try if anything went wonky. And they actually did — nine days after that thing was turned on it broke.”

“Magnet quench,” Doc said, as if anyone had an idea what that meant.

“Right. Clusterfuck,” Nada clarified. “We’d redeployed back to the States and had to fly back over there. They lost five tons of super-heated helium. Took forever to cool it down. Faulty electrical connection, they said. Took the thing off-line for over a year. And that still didn’t stop them. They fired it up again. And again and again. Until now they found one of the things they were looking for. But what if they find something they weren’t looking for?”

“Would you have us move back into caves?” Doc asked.

“I’d prefer if we didn’t blast ourselves back into caves,” Nada argued.

“The Higgs boson could hold the key to figuring out the Rifts and the Fireflies,” Doc shot back. “It might make that part of our job unnecessary if we really can control the Rifts.”

“I don’t want to control the damn things,” Nada said, “I want to stop them. Forever. I’ve lost friends to the Fireflies.”

“All right, gentlemen,” Moms said, cutting off the growing argument. “Speaking of caves, Doc, show our newest member the Can. The rest of you, grab some sleep.”

Doc made a face indicating it was not a task he relished, but he got to his feet. “Come with me, Kirk.”

Doc hated this part of his job, but it was necessary. Every member of the team had to understand the process. The elevator inside Groom Mountain had been descending fast for over ten minutes and suddenly came to a jarring halt next to massive air ducts that poured cold air into the cavern.

“Don’t like being underground?” Kirk said as the whine of the elevator wound down.

“Not particularly,” Doc said. He didn’t want to get into how his mind was calculating how much rock and dirt was above them, automatically figuring out the weight, and what kind of pressure that would exert if it suddenly collapsed. He knew the odds were unlikely, but that knowledge was scant comfort.

They were over two miles below Area 51. This facility, having taken over three years to build and costing over fourteen billion dollars, served one purpose: to detect Rifts as they developed and then locate them.

Doc shoved aside the metal gate to the high-speed elevator and they walked down a corridor carved out of solid rock, over ten feet wide and ten high.

“Ahead is a natural cavern, a void that was discovered early in Area 51’s history. No one thought much of it, until it was decided we needed to put in a Super-Kamiokande.”

“Right,” Kirk said. “The Can.”

Doc glanced at him and noticed Kirk had a slight grin.

After two hundred yards, the tunnel opened into the large natural cavern eighty yards deep and eighty wide. They paused in the entrance as Kirk took it all in.

“Most people think there is only one Super-Kamiokande in the world. Over in Japan, deep inside a mine shaft. But we have this one and the Russians also built one, after we figured out that it could detect a Rift in early formation. Sharing data with the Russians and Japanese, we can eventually triangulate the location of a Rift.”

A steel grating extended out over the open space, with several workstations.

Doc pointed down. Flat black water reflected the overhead lights. To Kirk it looked like the water in the quarry back home, on a moonless night. Scary, dark, and deep.

“This is a stainless-steel tank holding that water. Sixty meters wide by sixty deep. Along the walls of the tank are over twenty thousand photomultiplier tubes. They are extremely sensitive light sensors that can detect a single photon as it travels through the water and reacts with it. They are all linked together to those displays over there.”

A young Asian man was watching the displays Doc indicated, one of two people on the duty shift. The other on-duty person was a young woman five desks away, peering at her screen with a rather bored expression.

“Since we built this, the Can has detected the formation of every Rift in the past seven years: nine altogether. So it is not exactly the most exciting place to work, unless something bad happens.”

“Sort of like the Nightstalkers,” Kirk said.

Doc raised his voice so the two worker bees could hear. “The Can is critical in getting us on-site as quickly as possible. We even managed to block three Rifts from opening by arriving before the formation was complete.” He walked over to the young man. “Anything?”

“Nope. Everything’s quiet.” He nodded toward a stack of papers. “The latest printouts are there for you, Doc.”

“Technically,” Doc continued to Kirk, “this is a ring-imaging water Cerenkov detector. Cerenkov light is produced when an electrically charged particle travels through water. The reason this has to be so far underground is to allow the earth and rock above us to block out the photons emitted by man’s devices on the surface of the planet. It also helps that we are in the middle of the desert.”

“Yeah,” the young man said, “but we’re underneath Area 51. Some researchers do some strange experiments in that place. Once in a while we pick up some weird readings.”

“Yes,” Doc said, not wanting to dwell on that. “But most of the Can is focused into the Earth. It covers the entire planet. Since charged particles should not be emitted by the Earth itself, no one thought to use it that way. It was only when, at the most classified levels, information on the Rifts was shared among various governments, that someone checked the data over in Japan and found they’d picked up abnormal readings through the planet when each Rift occurred. So we had the Japanese keep an eye out, and sure enough, for the next Rift, they picked it up, even before it opened. So it became a priority to build one here and in Russia.”

“What exactly are you looking for?” Kirk asked, pretending to be interested. He now also appreciated Nada’s last Yada: Just tell me how to kill it. This place was all about telling them where the “it” to be killed was, and he appreciated that, but still…

The young man answered that. “We’re looking for muons.”

“Right,” Kirk said. “Moo-ons?”

“Seriously,” Doc said, “there is a reason Moms makes me take every new team member down here. I know all you are thinking of is just tell me how to kill it.” Doc laughed at the surprised look that flashed over Kirk’s face. “Yes, every Shooter focuses on that. But you have to understand the Rifts aren’t fantasy and the Fireflies aren’t magical. It’s science. We will figure it out someday.”

Doc pointed down at the dark water. “Eighty years ago physicists thought the building blocks of matter were the proton, electron, and the neutron. They also knew about three other particles: the photon, neutrino, and positron. But there was a problem. The protons in the proximity of the nucleus, holding equal charge, should repel each other, but they didn’t. It was a Japanese scientist who found the reason, and he was awarded the Nobel for his brilliance.

“He came up with a new force to keep the protons in place, which required a new particle, which he called the meson. He determined that the ratio of the force in this new particle was inversely proportional to its mass. This made the meson two hundred times larger than the electron.

“Once the theory was out there, lots of scientists started looking for mesons. One of the best ways of doing that was to study the sun because it puts out the strongest electromagnetic field in the solar system.”

“Sort of the way Eddington proved Einstein’s relativity right by studying eclipses,” Kirk said, causing Doc to take a couple of intellectual superiority steps backward.

“I had a really good teacher,” Kirk explained, seeing Doc’s surprise. “Everyone needs at least one really good teacher, even someone from Parthenon, Arkansas. He liked giving us weird information ’cause he knew some of us liked it.” Pads didn’t, Kirk recalled. He’d learned early on to keep the little nuggets to himself or else Pads probably would have kept him from even going to school. It was only because of the free lunch that Pads allowed any of them to walk the three miles to the small schoolhouse.

“That is true,” Doc agreed. “I went into physics because of a high school teacher.”

“So we got something in common there,” Kirk said.

“We have the team in common,” Doc said.

“That too,” Kirk allowed.

Doc stared at him for a few moments. “All right. Back to the physics. What they found was that it was more than just the meson. There were two particles: one had the strong charge with little mass: the pion. The other had a lot of mass but little charge: the muon. Both are very unstable and decay rapidly when separated. The muon decays into three particles: an electron, a neutrino, and an antineutrino. Discovering this was the start of particle physics, which opened the doorway to what you just referred to: quantum mechanics and special relativity as well as Einstein’s energy-mass relation.

“Which brings us to the Rifts,” Doc said. “For some reason, as they form, they start emitting muons. And the muons decay in a weird way. Which is why I came up with my multiverse theory. I believe that this difference means the rules of physics on the other side of the Rifts are different than our rules.”

“Can I ask you something?” Kirk said.

“That’s why we are here,” Doc replied.

“What happens to the Fireflies if the Nightstalkers aren’t around to destroy them?”

“They are very destructive, depending on what they occupy. Before the Can, the Nightstalkers had to focus on police reports, news reports, anything that indicated a strange occurrence and then go investigate.”

“Maybe we’re pissing them off, opening Rifts into their world,” Kirk noted.

“Maybe,” Doc allowed. “But we live on our world.”

“Not arguing with you, Doc.”

“The Can gives us thirty-eight minutes of warning that a Rift is starting. It picks up activity, but we can’t locate it for thirty-eight minutes. At that point, there’s enough activity that one of the other Cans picks up activity, which starts us in the right direction. Then, after forty-six minutes, we can triangulate and pinpoint the exact location.”

“Not much time.”

“It’s why the Protocol for getting to the Snake, loaded, and airborne is thirty minutes,” Doc explained. “And there’s something else,” Doc added. “Another reason we take this so seriously. Why the Russians might even be more worried about the Rifts than us.”

“And that is?”

Doc glanced at the young man at the computer. “Let’s head back up. It takes a while.” Before he walked away, Doc picked up the thick stack of printouts.

They went back down the tunnel and got on the elevator.

“Tunguska,” Doc said.

“And that is?”

“A place in the middle of Russia. Where there appears to have been a nuclear explosion before there were nuclear weapons. In 1908 something went off; most think it was a meteor exploding in the air, just before it hit the surface of the planet. It blew with a thousand times the power of the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima and took out eighty million trees.”

“That’s a lot of trees,” Kirk said as the rock walls surrounding the elevator raced by.

“Yes, it is,” Doc said. “The kicker, though, was when the Russian Can went online. They picked up very, very faint traces of the exact same type of weird muonic activity from Rifts still emanating at Tunguska. Right in the center of where that blast occurred.”

“That’s not good.”

“It is not.”

“So the Rifts can develop into something very bad,” Kirk summarized.

“Ms. Jones believes so. She thinks there is a possibility that a Rift can become a Portal. She thinks that what was forming on our last mission was a case where a Rift was changing, trying to grow. Trying to send something else through. Something that might have come through back in 1908 and caused the Tunguska explosion. Or the explosion might even have been a Portal failing.”

They both swayed as the elevator abruptly slowed, then came to a halt. Two Support guards were waiting, one sliding open the gate to the elevator, the other maintaining security. They walked down a hallway, out a door guarded by two more contractors, and then into a massive hangar, burrowed into the side of Groom Mountain. It was quite the contrast as Doc got behind the wheel of the old beat-up Jeep and drove them out to pass by the most advanced aircraft being tested in the world.

As Doc pulled into the growing darkness, Kirk looked over at him. “You know, Doc, in Sniper School, they’ve got a real problem in their recruitment program.”

“What is that?”

“They’ve got to select individuals who can do two contradictory things. Shoot another human being on nothing but an order. And also not shoot on order. Lots of people can do one or the other, but it’s a rare man who can do both.”

They passed through the Area 51 rear gate, heading toward the Ranch.

“I imagine so,” Doc said. He glanced over. “I also imagine there is a reason you bring this up.”

“It occurs to me, no offense intended,” Kirk said, “that you’re just like one of those people we go after who open up Rifts. You want to figure the Rifts out, too. What’s causing them, what’s on the other side. It’s just that you’re smarter than those other scientists.”

“How so?”

“You’re doing it from the inside. All those printouts are important to you. The Can is important to you beyond simply being an early warning device. It’s a research device.”

A muscle on the side of Doc’s face quivered. “I’m not a traitor.”

“I wasn’t saying you were,” Kirk said. “I’m saying you’re doing it the smart way. Takes a unique man to do that. Perhaps that’s what Ms. Jones saw in you.”