The Third Rescue

by Jay Mackey

  A few days later, Jack was in Aphrodite’s room, trying to learn more about her, under the guise of teaching her more English. He was quite curious about where she was from, not only because he was attracted to her, but because her accent was unusual.

  “Where were you traveling to,” he asked, “when your plane crashed?” He’d previously gotten “plane” into her vocabulary by making engine sounds and running around her room with his arms spread wide. He’d even sketched a rough—very rough—drawing. Even though they couldn’t see planes—there were no windows in her room because the new facility was entirely underground—they could sometimes hear planes from the airfield. She’d drawn her interpretation of a plane, which looked much more like a triangle than a plane, but had seemed to get the concept, along with the idea of her crash.

  But she just shrugged at his “traveling to” question. And at his follow-up: “Where were you traveling from?”

  At about that point, an officer came barging into Aphrodite’s room. Her door was open; whenever anyone was in the room with her, the door was to remain open, with a guard stationed out in the hall.

  “What are you doing, Lieutenant?” the officer asked.

  Jack, surprised by the sudden interruption, looked at him. “We’re working on my patient’s English, Captain. Why?”

  The captain, older than Jack by a few years, shorter by a few inches, but heavier by a few pounds, curled his upper lip. “Sounded like you were interrogating her.” He took a step closer to Jack, who was still seated on the chair next to the bed where Aphrodite was staring up with her mouth open, as if she were shocked.

  The captain stood uncomfortably close to Jack, and looked down at him. “What do you have to say, Lieutenant?”

  “I was merely trying to learn a little about my patient,” Jack replied.

  “That’s my job,” said the captain. “If you want to teach her a little language, fine. Makes my job easier. But your job is to get her body healed. Not to ask her a bunch of unrelated questions.”

  Jack rose from his chair and, being taller, he stared down at the captain’s crew-cut head. “I’m sorry, Captain. I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Doctor Omdahl. And this is my patient, Aphrodite.” He nodded toward her, while continuing to stare at the captain.

  After an awkward few seconds, the captain took a step back. “I’m Captain Vic Ernst, Doctor. I know who you are, and am well acquainted with Aphrodite.” He looked at her and smiled.

  Jack smiled back, every bit as insincerely as the captain. “Unless I’m mistaken, I don’t answer to you,” he said.

  “No, you don’t, Lieutenant,” said Captain Ernst. “But she does.”

  Maintaining his smile, Jack quickly processed. Aphrodite was no soldier. He was sure of that. He’d wondered about the ridiculous level of security surrounding the crash victims, but frankly, had been so focused on the medical challenges and duties that he hadn’t really questioned it. Could it be that they were prisoners? Foreign agents maybe? They did have an unusual accent, and no translator had ever been brought in. It was all very strange.

  “And why does she answer to you?” he asked.

  Captain Ernst raised his eyebrows and looked away. He moved back, then toward the bed where Aphrodite was watching him carefully. He pointed to her, and looked back at Jack, his smile gone. “Your patient and her friends are guests of ours.” He looked back at Aphrodite and gave her a fake smile.

  Jack sensed that Aphrodite was not happy to see Captain Ernst. Was that fear he detected in the way she was looking at him, or merely dislike?

  “As I said,” Captain Ernst continued, “we all have our roles. You see after the medical needs of our guests, and I am their host. You do your job, and I’ll do mine. Simple.”

  Jack wasn’t sure why this captain bothered him so much. He’d met many men in the Army who had been antagonistic assholes. Maybe it was because Aphrodite was involved. “Of course, Captain. I’m trying to do my job. But you understand, my ability to communicate with my patients is important in my treatment.”

  “Teaching her English is a good thing. Just stay away from things like where she came from and why she’s here, and we’ll all be happy. Okay?” Without waiting for a reply, he continued. “Good. Then we’re on the same page, Lieutenant.” He smiled once more, looked at each of them, and left.

  “Do you know that man?” Jack asked Aphrodite as soon as Captain Ernst had left.

  She seemed frightened at Jack’s tone. She shrank back, frowning at him, drawing both hands to her face, and shook her head.

  Jack tried again, more measured this time. “That man, Captain Ernst?” He pointed to the door. “Have you seen him before?”

  This time she seemed to grasp the question, and nodded.

  He continued to try to find out what she knew about Ernst, and with the aid of body language, signs, and multiple questions, found out only that, since the transfer to Groom Lake, he’d been talking to her frequently, sometimes in her room, sometimes in a room down the hall.

  Jack asked the other doctors and nurses if they knew anything about Ernst. The response from another of the transferred residents was typical. “Stout guy, big nose? Yeah, he’s around. Acts like he’s in charge, but I don’t know if he is. Not a crowd-pleaser, if you know what I mean.”

  38

  Nevada, April 2018

  “I hate to break it to you, but this is a major yawner, Doc,” said Penny from the back seat. “Why do you think we care about your autobiography? So you’re a doctor, and you’ve been in the Army. Big whoop.”

  “Wait, though,” said CJ. “This guy, Ernst. Wasn’t he mentioned in that article about your grandfather, Penny?”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right,” she responded. “He was one of the guys killed.”

  “Along with that other guy that you said you knew, Anthony Faccio,” added CJ, looking at Jack, who appeared to be concentrating on the road, which ran straight for as far as CJ could see. The spare landscape was peppered with scrub brush, with desert hills visible in the distance.

  “Yes, I knew them both. Not at the same time, but I knew them.”

  “So were these two the connection to my grandparents?” asked CJ. “Is that where this is going?”

  Jack wagged his head back and forth. “Oh, they each played a role, that’s true. Tony Faccio was an asshole, but Vic Ernst, Captain Ernst, he was the devil,” he said, not taking his eyes off the road. “He made my life hell back in those days.”

  “Why?” said Oval, sounding as if he was just waking up from a nap in the back seat. “What’d he do?”

  “Well, for one thing, he got me kicked out of Groom Lake, at least for a while,” said Jack, shaking his head as if he were remembering some of the details.

  “So what?” said Penny. “I thought you wanted to get out of there.”

  “It’s complicated,” said Jack.

  He sat quietly for a few minutes. CJ wasn’t sure if he was thinking about what had happened to him, or how to tell his story, or if he was going to stop.

  “So keep going,” CJ said, after what seemed like a long wait. “You wanted to drive us to Carson City so you could tell us all this stuff. You’ve got a captive audience.”

  “We may be captives, but that doesn’t mean you need to torture us,” said Penny. “Let’s get to the good stuff.”

  Jack didn’t respond immediately, but after a bit he looked at CJ and said. “I’m going to skip ahead. To 1964. I was back at Groom Lake—”

  “Wait a minute,” interrupted Oval. “The crash victims were still there?”

  “They were still there,” Jack replied. “Prisoners, now, more than patients, although they continued to have medical issues.”

  “Who were they?” asked Oval. “Why were they prisoners?” It was clear from his tone that he didn’t think this story was holding together. But then he brightened, and said, “Wait a minute. Maybe Donna’s story about Russian spies was true, after all.”

  “No, they
were not spies, I’m afraid,” said Jack.

  “What then?” asked Penny, getting interested again.

  “I’ll get to that,” said Jack.

  Oval, shaking his head, said, “Okay, we’ll play your game. But I thought you just said you’d been kicked out of Groom Lake, and now you’re back there.”

  “I was kicked out, for five or six years, in fact. But I was called back, not permanently, but for specific cases. I got to be a pretty good surgeon . . .”

  “Still in the Army?” asked Penny.

  “Still in the Army. I was . . .” Jack paused and took a breath. “I wasn’t really allowed to leave, as part of the deal when I was kicked out of Groom Lake.”

  He frowned, from the memory, or from the difficulty telling about it. CJ couldn’t tell. Only that Jack found it painful.

  “So why were you kicked out, anyway?” CJ asked.

  “I, uh, I did some stupid things. Ernst caught me. I was dumb, and he—he had me.” Jack rubbed his face. “It was my fault, and he was within his rights to do what he did.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you thought so,” said CJ.

  Jack didn’t respond to that, but shook his head and said, “Look, this isn’t what I wanted to tell you. Let me get back to the story. See, I was back at Groom Lake . . .”

  “Where is that, anyway?” asked Oval. “I’ve never heard of it. And what about this Muroc you mentioned? Where is that?”

  “Those are the old names, I guess,” said Jack, seeming relieved to talk about something other than the painful story of his banishment. “Muroc Army Air Base is now Edwards Air Force Base.”

  “That’s over in California, isn’t it?” said Penny. “Not too far.”

  “Right. Between Barstow and Bakersfield,” said Jack. “And Groom Lake is a small base, where top, top secret projects were developed. In the desert north of Vegas.” He looked at the Oval and Penny in the rearview mirror. “People sometimes call it Area 51, I understand.”

  Penny sat up and leaned over the seat back, trying to talk right into Jack’s face. She said, “Oh, I get it now. Area 51. The crash victims were aliens, right? That’s what this is about.”

  Jack leaned away from her, swerving the car into the opposite lane. Fortunately, there were no other cars in sight. He said, “That’s not what this is about, but yes, they were from somewhere else, not Earth.”

  CJ turned to Jack, and said, “And you didn’t think to mention that until now? That this is a story about aliens?” Disgusted, he leaned back in his seat. “I see now why they call you a crackpot.”

  Oval added, “Yeah, here you were, working on little green people, and you left that part out? Really? I mean, it’s epic, but come on.”

  “They weren’t little green men,” said Jack, defensively. “In fact, I had no idea they weren’t from Earth. Not for a long time. They didn’t look different than us, at least from the outside.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Penny. “Do they look different inside?”

  “No, but there are differences which show up when you’re a doctor,” said Jack. “Larger than normal heart, smaller liver, large pancreas. And then the blood chemistry; that was always a problem. But none of these by itself was completely out of whack.”

  “So how did you find out?” asked Oval.

  “The medical things,” said Jack. “Plus all the security, the special treatment. Lots of little things that caused us to ask questions. Finally, we were told the crash wasn’t a plane. It was a UFO.”

  “Ooh, flying saucers,” said Oval.

  “Sort of,” said Jack.

  “Wait,” said Penny. “How could aliens look just like us? That makes no sense.”

  “The theory, held by some of the, quote/unquote, ‘aliens’ was that we were related somehow,” said Jack. “Same ancestry, somewhere in history.”

  “Same Adam and Eve?” said Oval.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” said Penny. “We’re descended from apes. How can some aliens be descended from the same apes? Huh?”

  “Maybe some very advanced civilization founded both our worlds a long, long time ago,” said Jack. “Maybe we’re not descended from apes, but from them. I don’t know.”

  Suddenly CJ exploded. “So what.” He pounded his fists on the dashboard, startling everyone. “I don’t care about your stupid alien fantasies. This is all bullshit. I still don’t get what this has to do with Nini.”

  Nobody spoke for a minute or two. But then Jack said quietly, “Just let me continue with my story.”

  CJ shrugged. “I got nothing better to do. But this is still bullshit.”

  Penny added, “Yeah. Tell your story. But you know none of us believes a word.”

  “Fair enough,” said Jack. “Maybe that will change.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” she said.

  39

  Groom Lake, July 1964

  When Jack arrived at Groom Lake in July of 1964, he was immediately thrown into a tough medical situation: Neptune was in crisis yet again. He was suffering a failure of both his liver and his one remaining kidney. And this time, efforts to save him failed.

  They held services for him in the small commons room, a central area that served as cafeteria, meeting room, and social area for the crash patients. It was the hub for the medical complex, which included a hospital wing where Jack spent virtually all his time, a wing with patient living quarters, another wing with administration offices, and a fourth, a research wing.

  At the funeral services, Jack looked for Aphrodite. When he saw her, she came not from their residences as he expected, but from the medical wing. And she was in a wheelchair.

  “What’s going on?” he asked as he walked over to meet her. “I didn’t know you were in medical. I just came from there.” He was worried; Aphrodite looked pale. Someone should have told him about her.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said. “They want to run a few tests, keep me close to monitor me.”

  “I hope they’re not Blankenship tests,” said Jack. He was referring to tests run by the research team led by Dr. Kenneth Blankenship, who Jack detested. They’d had a number of arguments over the years. Jack suspected that he was doing unethical research using the crash victims as his test subjects, but Blankenship denied doing anything wrong.

  “Don’t,” said Aphrodite. She and Jack had this conversation many times, but the testing had never stopped, despite Jack’s efforts.

  They sat together in the front row for the brief service, conducted by the base chaplain. Neptune was the first of the crash victims to die since the first few days following the crash. Aphrodite seemed to take his death particularly hard.

  Following the short service, the two sat together, waiting until she was called to go back to her room in the hospital wing. She leaned over and whispered in his ear, “You’re going to save me.”

  He immediately pulled back to look into her eyes. He was afraid to say anything, to ask what she meant, so he searched her eyes for some clue. But she only smiled at him, and grasped his hand, before the nurse pulled the wheelchair away.

  As Aphrodite disappeared up the hall, Jack realized that she’d left a crumpled piece of paper in his hand. Trying to look nonchalant, he waited until he was back in his own room before looking at the paper. Smoothing it out, he read the short note:

  BE IN THE PANTRY AT 11:10.

  The pantry was a small room just off the commons area—a large closet, really—where those in the living quarters, as well as doctors, nurses, and guards, could get supplies like extra linens, toilet paper, and cleaning supplies. Jack had used it on occasion, when he was on site for longer than a few days.

  He arrived a few minutes early and tried to make it seem as if he were looking for something, in case someone came in other than whoever was to meet him. He didn’t know who that would be, but figured it wouldn’t be Aphrodite, given her condition.

  It was Mercury who finally showed up. He was the youngest of the patients, and the smallest, smaller eve
n than Aphrodite. But like the others, he was attractive, blond, smoothly muscled, lithe. If you saw him standing alone, you wouldn’t realize how small he was. It was only when he stood next to one of the guards or medical staff that you realized he was barely over five feet tall and weighed just over a hundred pounds.

  The conversation was brief. Mercury told Jack that he needed to get Aphrodite outside.

  “No one else can do it,” he said. “Not one of us, not even a guard, can get her out of the building. But a doctor can. You can.”

  The look he gave Jack seemed to seek affirmation, so Jack nodded. It was true, he could take a patient out of the medical wing. He’d done it before, done it with Aphrodite, although that had been years before, and was simply to get her some fresh air, not to help her escape.

  Mercury told Jack that the two of them needed to be outside, where a vehicle would pick them up at 12:20 a.m. in two nights’ time. He handed Jack a key.

  “For the research wing,” he said. “There’s a back way out, and no guards.”

  The questions flooded Jack’s mind. He tried to ask just a few, “How are the rest of you getting out? Where will you go after you escape? What about the security gate you’ll have to pass when you leave the base?”

  But Mercury put his finger up to his mouth, shh, and looked to the doorway. Jack knew a guard would be nearby, as the patients were not allowed to wander freely.

  Jack continued, “But how—”