Groom Lake

by Bryan O

  The roar from the choppers drowned the thumps of approaching footsteps. As soon as Val realized the soldiers had surrounded him, a knee landed in his back and forced every breath of air from his lungs. They said nothing to Val and paid little attention to the blood-soaked shirt wrapped around his wound. Instead, they stretched the wound by pulling his ankles over his back and hog-tying them to his wrists. The last memory Val had was a sharp pain in his neck, an injection that put him to sleep.

  • • •

  The Bio Suit weighed on Blake like a novice backpacker’s overstuffed load. Hiking with the excess burden wouldn’t have been too hard on him, but running proved challenging. Yet he wasn’t tired. Spending the day snacking on MREs and protein bars had nourished his system, and fear again boosted his adrenaline, putting him in a mental zone that allowed his body to sustain a vigorous pace. A manly sound of exertion accompanied each outward breath—huh … huh … huh—as he pumped his arms and lifted his legs. He slowed his pace just once to watch the helicopters converge over Val.

  Val set the functions on the suit so all Blake had to do was follow the directional arrows on the head-up display. Few thoughts passed through his mind while he traveled across the terrain except those concerned with his movements: dodging Joshua trees like they were flagpoles on a slalom course; planting his feet on sand; stepping over rocks, holes and brush.

  He made good time rounding the sandy southwest tentacle of Papoose Lake and reaching another of Val’s bunkers. This locale offered the fewest amenities of the three refuges Blake had visited. Val had built it for emergencies. A folded camouflage net and a pile of brush that looked like a good snake sanctuary would be his building materials to fortify the shelter. Under the tarp, a gallon of water and small ammo box protected a day’s rations.

  Val had told him of the ATV hidden in the mountains less than four miles away from his present location. Climbing four miles with the Bio Suit’s added weight was not a feat Blake could accomplish before sunrise.

  Like the other mammals in the desert, Blake hunkered in his shelter to avoid the sunlight that was just beginning to silhouette the mountains on the eastern horizon. He didn’t look forward to the day ahead. When he sat still his skin itched and begged for a cleansing, and his lack of movement encouraged movement from the creepy-crawlies sharing the bunker with him. He occupied his time studying the help program on the Bio Suit’s computer.

  CHAPTER 47

  No matter how wide Val spread his eyes, he only saw black. Restraints prohibited him from lifting his wrists and ankles. His wounded leg was numb. His head ached and spun like he had a hangover. He needed more sleep.

  A door burst open, splashing light across Val’s body.

  “Wake up!” he heard a raspy voice order.

  The door slammed shut, returning darkness to the room. Feet shuffled and approached him. A small motor churned, raising the hospital bed, putting his body in a recumbent position.

  Click! On a pedestal at the foot of his bed, a halogen lamp cast an intense brightness, warming his face and stinging his dilated pupils. He saw his body, restrained, covered by a loose-fitting hospital smock, and his thigh, wrapped in gauze, tinges of blood visible. Like an old-fashioned police interrogation, the bright lamp washed out everything around him, including the man standing behind it.

  “Clever the way you built that bunker to hide in,” came the raspy voice. “Too much equipment in there for you to pack in on a single trip. We also found a couple manmade water troughs. That tells me you’ve been visiting us for some time.” The voice was emotionless, serious. “Spies rarely have a happy ending in this region. But we have a special set of circumstances surrounding your situation.”

  Val was confused. Maybe they ran fingerprints? But Grason had arranged to block his identity in the FBI database.

  “When you surrendered,” the raspy voice continued, “you were wearing far less than when my man shot you. Technology is like a fingerprint: distinct to its source. The description my man gave of your outfit matches equipment developed by DARPA and loaned through a certain congressman to the DEA. But they only received one suit, and you, Mr. Hunter, were apparently wearing the other.”

  Hunter? They think I’m Blake. Val said nothing, buying every minute he could to help Blake get away.

  “I assume you were taking pictures of that little light you saw in the sky, and the film is with the suit. Did you hide the items, thinking you could sneak back and retrieve them later?”

  Val remained silent, listening more than he appeared to, hoping for clues about the man in his words. His spiel, however, was contrived, containing no spontaneity that might reveal facts.

  “Of course you hid it. At first I thought that you had an accomplice. You did a decent job of covering your tracks, but in a couple of locations the soldiers discovered two sets of footprints. The winds have destroyed much of our evidence, but a few tracks remained. A closer examination has us thinking you made multiple trips along the same route.”

  Val saw the man’s forearms extend from his brutish physique and rest on a steel railing surrounding the bed. White shirt cuffs with pewter cufflinks protruded from beneath black suit sleeves. One hand held a steaming mug of coffee.

  “How’s the leg?”

  “Com—” Val coughed, his throat dry, hoarse. “Comfortably numb,” he managed to say after swallowing.

  “It’ll heal. The medic says it’s a deep flesh wound. The bullet went in and out. Had they shot you between the eyes, I’d be in less of a predicament. We’d throw your body in a cooler until someone came looking for you. How long before your people know there’s a problem?”

  Val didn’t know how long he’d been there, or where there was.

  “Your failure to respond tells me you don’t wish to discuss your experience here. Let’s try talking about more personable topics, get to know one another while we pass the time until you’re ready to conduct business.”

  Val watched him dip a finger in the steaming coffee.

  “I love my coffee scalding hot.” He removed his finger, now red. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve tested myself by taking showers either freezing cold or hot enough to make my skin itch. If you can tolerate nature’s extremities just short of causing physical damage to yourself, you have an edge over others.” He sipped the coffee, making a hissing sound as he chased it with a slow breath of air to cool his tongue. “How about you, Blake? What’s your threshold for pain?”

  Not wanting to see where this conversation was going, Val suggested, “Maybe I should have some legal counsel.”

  “You’re not being charged with anything. We’re just having a discussion while you recuperate enough for us to take you home.” Owens could have extracted information from Val using the hypnotic equipment at his disposal, like he had done with the Chinese operative. Unlike foreign governments, however, the FBI could react if their agent returned home in a different mental state. “I’ll be back when the numbness in your leg wears off. I may be reluctant to hurt you, but my Hippocratic oath doesn’t cover preexisting conditions.”

  CHAPTER 48

  High noon. One hundred seven degrees.

  Ants had survived the ice age and wouldn’t be defeated or scared into hiding by one man who had invaded their turf for a day. “Frickin’ ants!” Blake yelled, brushing off another invasion of his suit. He hadn’t relaxed all morning. If the ants weren’t making him restless, it was a lizard or spider. Once he spotted a small brown scorpion near his foot. He could only imagine what might be nesting on his backside amid the Bio Suit’s shredded burlap.

  Looking across the dry lakebed, he saw the wavering heat create an oasis, making the pristine white sand appear covered with a sheet of glimmering water.

  He spent hours fiddling with the Bio Suit’s computer, attempting to access Val’s surveillance records—the video of the craft—but couldn’t break the password.

  He considered prisoners sentenced to solitary confinement and wondered how they managed.
With eight more hours until nightfall, the task seemed impossible. This was Blake’s loneliest birthday ever.

  CHAPTER 49

  Val awoke again in sheer darkness, but sensed his surroundings to be different because a ventilation fan whirled somewhere overhead. His bed and restraints felt the same, but his head was groggier than the last time he awoke. They must be controlling my consciousness intravenously, he thought.

  A motor churned—it sounded like an old garage-door opener—and echoed throughout the vast enclosure. Like doors to an airplane hangar, the walls in front of his bed began to separate. Sunlight splashed into what Val now realized was some type of storage bay. Through the open doors he could see the northern end of Papoose Lake. The sky was painted red, and dusk had set on the land.

  Somewhere behind him Val heard whispers. Shhlip, shhlip, shhlip, came the familiar footsteps. “Does our little home meet your wildest expectations?” he heard the raspy voice ask.

  “What home are you referring to?”

  “The popular culture calls this place S-4. Silo Four is its true name. Hasn’t been used much in recent years and the doors are tucked far enough under the cliffs that they are not visible from above, so little is known about it. The Atomic Energy Commission built it to store nukes, but that was no longer feasible after the military took possession of Area 51. The military used it for various projects until those alien back-engineering stories surfaced. What a nightmare. It wasn’t worth the hassle to continue using this place.”

  “There’s no point using it when you’ve got a subterranean base nearby.”

  “Those are your words. Obviously those gravity anomaly maps we found with some of your provisions led you astray.”

  “Are you telling me the maps are misleading?”

  “I’m saying it doesn’t matter what those maps show because this silo is where we’d bring the politicians who insisted on knowing the truth.”

  “You think it’s that easy to hide an entire base?”

  “What base?” Owens said with a haughty demeanor. “You ditched the video with proof of your claim.”

  Val took the raspy-voiced man’s statement as an indication they still didn’t know about the real Blake Hunter.

  “Even if you got the okay to bring a tractor out here and dig, we’d stop you,” Owens said. “Actually, your own people would stop you when members of the excavation crew dropped from radiation exposure.”

  “There’s no radioactivity in this valley.”

  “Maybe, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make someone contract the sickness. After that, no politician would support investigating your hunches at the risk of death.”

  “Those anomaly maps aren’t a hunch.”

  “We’ll explain them as nuclear fissures. Not all underground blasts cave in and form craters.”

  “There wasn’t any nuclear testing authorized at Area 51.”

  “Are you familiar with Project Plowshare from your studies of this region?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “The project investigated applications of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes: mining, building shipping ports, moving mountains. We’ll blame the craters on testing associated with Plowshare. Records show the Nevada Test Site was used for Plowshare events that created underground cavities from nuclear detonations. So we admit to a few more detonations than were sanctioned. Plowshare existed long enough ago that we could blame the illicit detonations on dead intelligence agents. You couldn’t even punish anyone. We’d apologize, label Papoose as a nuclear wasteland, end of story for ten thousand years.”

  Val didn’t care to enter a rhetorical battle with someone too cowardly to show his face. The conversation was moot if Blake escaped with the video. “So what happens to me?” he asked.

  “I suppose once we find the gear we’ll send you home. Our friends in Washington will do the rest. That crusading congressman in San Diego will soon lose his political support and your operation will become extinct. The truth is, most politicians want to be reelected more than they want to stir trouble. And we’re trouble.”

  “Sounds unlawful. If I remember my history, the biggest argument against forming the CIA was that such a power could be used against Americans, including politicians, and defeat our democratic way of life.”

  “I never said I was CIA, but I understand your point. Let me just say, I am as patriotic about my duties as you are about yours. In fact, I’ve studied your background, and I like you, Hunter. We’re adversaries from an ideological standpoint. That’s the irony of the situation: we’re on the same side. Unfortunately that we the people discourse only means something in history class. In order for there to be history classes in the future, we need to keep a few things secret. I guess the balance in our conflict is power; whoever has the most power gets to call the shots. As it stands, that puts me in control,” Owens said as he increased a sedative drip on Val’s IV and watched him fade back to sleep.

  Owens returned to an observation room where Kayla was seated and watching his exchange with their prisoner on a monitor. He knew the man was not Blake Hunter. Earlier that afternoon a crosscheck with California DMV records confirmed the prisoner they suspected was Blake, was someone else, another FBI operative. Owens hadn’t sorted out the details yet, but he now knew that Blake Hunter was still unaccounted for, as well as the Bio Suit and its data.

  “They still haven’t spotted any vehicles near the perimeter that might be Hunter’s, and there’s no sign of any hikers,” Kayla informed him.

  “He won’t be moving until dark. That suit gives him an advantage. We need to anticipate where he’s going.”

  “They said they’ll concentrate the helicopters near the wildlife refuge tonight, as you instructed.”

  Owens thought again about how he would conduct such surveillance in the desert. How he would sneak on the base. He would need a lot of portable gear. Protection from the elements. Close and direct access … the Nevada Test Site.

  CHAPTER 50

  The nightfall Blake thought would never arrive brought with it an increase in helicopter activity: the steel insects buzzed through the sky like giant mosquitoes looking for a heat source to attack. Black helicopters. No lights. Nothing to suggest where the crew focused their attention. They flew in side-by-side formations working back and forth across the valley like crop dusters, and Blake knew it was him they wanted to eradicate.

  Before venturing from his lair, Blake double-checked the Bio Suit’s temperature display, making sure it was in synch with the air temperature and eliminating his heat signal.

  He moved at a furious pace, his body aching, drained and weak, but he was motivated, knowing his journey was short. His body could rest later, behind the wheel of Val’s truck with a large cup of coffee to keep him awake as he drove home.

  His trek turned steep almost immediately. Twice he lost his footing and fell. He could see the top of the desolate mountain though, and pushed himself to climb harder, often using his hands in synchronicity with his feet for stabilization as he scaled, crawled and pulled his way upward from Papoose Valley.

  With Val’s ATV hidden less than a mile away, Blake had one more hill to conquer. As he neared the top, he heard another helicopter, faintly at first, and with the Bio Suit’s helmet acting as a buffer, it was harder to pinpoint the direction. As the sound increased, Blake realized the helicopter was in front of him, blocked from view by the mountain. He fell to his stomach, not on flat ground, but across a rock, his butt higher than his head, and froze with his neck kinked sideways, his eyeballs straining to look above. Like a soaring hawk searching for food, the helicopter flew into view, cresting the mountain and swooping downward along the contour of the mountainside, passing not more than a few stories over Blake. The sound was deafening and the rotor wash slapped his back.

  As quickly as the chopper had appeared, it vanished into the distance. Close call. Blake reached the mountaintop and increased his pace, traveling much of the last mile downhill. The GPS guided his ever
y step with its LED arrows on the head-up display pointing in any one of twelve compass positions to keep him on course. Val told him if he followed the course, he didn’t need to worry about perimeter cameras or motion sensors. Blake never broke pace, pumping his arms and legs, unaware of when he crossed the invisible line of demarcation between Air Force property and the Department of Energy’s Nevada Test Site.

  The ATV was where Val had told him it would be, hidden with brush and camouflage netting. He drove conservatively, guided by night vision, keeping a watchful eye out for the treacherous nuclear sinkholes and radioactive sites Val warned about. Blake knew if he made a wrong turn, it could be years before he was inflicted with the cancerous consequences. So he took his time, riddled with anxiety that overwhelmed any sense of accomplishment he might have felt from successfully traversing Area 51 on foot.

  Blake found the Nevada Test Site an eerie place. He passed barbed wire fences that cordoned off contaminated soil. Radiation warning signs hung from the barbed wire. The biohazard insignia on the signs gave him a ghoulish feeling, like he was driving through a graveyard. Shivers tingled his spine. The shivers turned to panic when something moved ahead on his right. Death, graveyards and distant movements in the dark were not things he cared to contend with in combination. He cut the quiet electric motor on the ATV and eased to a stop. Whatever was out there wasn’t alone and wasn’t small. He strained to decipher the movements, but they were too far away. Then he remembered reading about the zoom feature on the helmet when he read the help program. “Zoom five times,” he commanded. Nothing happened. He then recalled needing to first turn the voice-activation system on and used the keypad on his forearm to do so. “Zoom five times,” he said again. The picture through his face shield enlarged and he found himself watching a herd of wild horses. Val had said something about horses at the Test Site. Their survival didn’t seem possible, but there they were, grazing.