Dulce Base (The Dulce Files Book 1)

by Greg Strandberg

  David just frowned to that, but got onto the train and settled down. Across the way the men of Walter’s team did the same.

  “Good luck, Walter!” Donlon called out over the platform.

  “You too, Roger!” Walter called back, and then there was an audible beeping for a moment, the doors slammed shut, and the two trains started down the tracks.

  24 – Taking Off

  Desert – East of the Jicarilla Apache Nation Reservation, New Mexico

  Thursday, May 24, 1979

  The X-22 raced over the desert at over 250 mph, the bottom of its rotor tubes missing the rocks by less than twenty feet at times. Turn stared out the window as New Mexico flew by at an unbelievable rate. First they’d passed by the Rio Grand Del Norte National Park and then the Carson National Forest. They skirted along Highway 111, but stayed high enough and far enough away that they weren’t noticed, not that anyone could see the black craft with no lights anyways. After that they’d turned north a bit, the better to skirt around the Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation. It was then that they’d dropped altitude, coming in down to almost touch the desert floor. It was that fast-moving terrain that Turn looked at, seated now in the back with the others, but he also listened as Captain Mark Richards, the Dutchman’s son, regaled them with his tales.

  “…and that’s the fastest I’ve flown,” he said, just finishing up a story of a race between two planets that none of the men had ever heard of, but which didn’t prevent both Andy and Billy in the back from staring, mouths agape.

  Turn frowned, shook his head at the two seated opposite him in the small back-seating area of the X-22, then turned back to look up at the Dutchman’s son sitting in the pilot’s seat…or at least that’s how he thought of Captain Richards, a man he didn’t really know, none of them knew. Biting his lip and firming his resolve, he cleared his throat.

  “Sir,” he began, and Mark stopped fiddling with a few controls and turned his head about to look at him.

  “Yes…question…?”

  “Turn” he began, saying his name which he expected the seemingly-cocky and cock-sure young man to have forgotten already. “Well, sir, it’s just that what you said about the dates and the ships and…it just didn’t make sense.”

  “What didn’t make sense?” Mark asked, his eyes narrowing slightly and his mouth tightening. Turn thought about shaking his head and laughing the whole thing off, but something told him Mark wouldn’t let him.

  “You mentioned something about ‘their ships,’ and I just thought that from your tone you were implying something, oh, I don’t know…larger, than what we’d be thinking of when we think of UFO.”

  Mark nodded and then smiled. “The first Gray motherships came over a three year period, from 1787 to 1789…right as the French Revolution was getting underway. They’d sent probe ships earlier – 1645 was the first recorded sighting from Europe – and this lasted until 1767. At the time it was just thought of as a mistake in the evolving science of telescopy, this moon appearing and then disappearing again – no one thought much of it.”

  “But…” Turn said, sensing it was appropriate.

  “But,” Mark nodded, “it wasn’t a moon, and those three moons that appeared in the late 1780s weren’t moons either. They kept coming, too – another mothership near Mercury in 1789, the Sun in 1859, and Mars in 1894. Besides that the moon of Pluto called Kerberos, or Vulcan now, is actually a mothership and has been there since the 1850s, although we haven’t officially ‘discovered’ it yet, that won’t happen until….”

  “Until what, sir…”

  “Never mind,” Mark said quickly and with a laugh, “now where was I? Oh yes…in 1878 an Andromedan an a Pleiadian mothership came in, ostensibly to monitor the Grays who’d been taking quite a bit of interest in our Sun at that time.” Mark trailed-off and stared-off into the distance before continuing, as if talking to himself. “It could also be that they were interested in the Reptilians, who first appeared in 1783 on the moon. They liked it enough that they came back in 1787 and set up their base their. Intrepid photographers were able to get shots of their ships in 1892, 1894, and 1912. After that they took greater pains to cloak themselves, seeing as our technology was ‘advancing,’ so to say.”

  Mark look back over his shoulder at Turn, then broke out into a smile and laugh. “Here I am, talking to myself again…you really must excuse me.”

  “It’s perfectly all right, it’s just…I think I have more questions than before I asked.”

  “The good ones always do – now about what’s coming up,” he said with a smile, then turned back around even further this time, making sure both Andy and Billy were paying attention. They were. “What we’ve got coming up, boys, is some serious security measures, having to do with that sonic weaponry system the Grays have.”

  “We were briefed on that,” Andy said.

  “Good, then you know we have to disable it before the other teams can do anything, don’t you?”

  Turn looked across at the two younger soldiers, and all three nodded.

  “Good, because–”

  WOOSH!

  There was an amazing woosh of air and the X-22 shook about, so much so that Turn thought they’d been struck by something and were going down. A moment later a shimmering blackness appeared before them, blacker even than the surrounding night and desert floor.

  “There she is,” Mark said to himself but loud enough for the others to hear, his teeth gritted but his mouth smiling, “right on schedule.”

  25 – Drawing Near

  “Five miles,” Aaron said, turning a few knobs and then looking over at Captain Moses Cochrane.

  “Check,” the pilot of the Puma helicopter said, then swiveled his head a bit to shout back to the men in the rear, “maintaining our 5-mile distance from CAT-3 and about 100 miles out.”

  “Hear that, boys?” Ronnie said with a laugh. “Just 100 more miles and we’ll be blastin’ aliens!”

  Sergeant Jerry Carol and Corporal Jonny Wake didn’t look too thrilled at that prospect, but beside them Sergeant Paul Carson was all smiles.

  “Yeah, real easy for you to be happy,” Sergeant Lewie Yates said from across the floor of the helicopter, “you’re one of the super soldiers – you got nothin’ to worry about.”

  “You don’t either, not if you stay close to me,” Paul said.

  “Everyone needs to stay close,” Eddie said, “at least until we get those HUB doors blown and those sonic weapons systems taken out.”

  “And then what?” Johnny asked.

  “Then we open up on ‘em with everything we got,” Stan said with a smile, though it was hard to see from under that bushy handlebar mustache of his.

  “Well, you men will,” Stu said, his usual white professor’s jacket switched out for a set of Delta Force black, “Eddie, Ronnie and Stan will be trying to–”

  “Contact!” Aaron shouted from the cockpit, his fist held up. “The X-22 just made contact!”

  ~~~

  Captain Mark Richards gritted his teeth and pulled back on the controls of the X-22, thankful the three men in the back couldn’t see how close he’d just come to crashing into the UFO after it’d suddenly descended upon them. Now he was hovering just over it, closer than he had been to the desert floor, about ten feet. And up ahead was Dulce Base.

  It’d been just another patch of blackness on an already black horizon, but then there was a shimmer and an open pair of blast doors were suddenly there before them, still about a mile off, but coming up fast, the yellow light spilling out into the darkness of the night as the holographic blanketing projectors were turned off and the base was revealed to the world, however fleeting it might be.

  “What is that?” Billy said from the back.

  “That’s Dulce,” Mark said, his knuckles white on the controls. They were half a mile out and he was still too high. If he was going to then he’d have to do it…

  Mark swiveled the controls and brought them down right on top of
the alien craft they were riding in with, the one that was meant to block them from view. It was working, so far, and now just inches from the top of the craft and the doors coming up and–”

  “Now!” Mark shouted, and turned the X-22 to the right just as they were about to enter the Dulce Base port.

  It was a sight, a huge floor with a command building of some sort dead center, row upon row of small, triangular…fighter craft was all Turn could think of them as…lined up all across the port’s floor. The walls looked made of concrete and metal and stretched more than a hundred feet up to the ceiling above them. But what really had Marks’ attention, Turn could tell, were the pair of mounted-laser guns on the wall ahead of them.

  Mark swerved to the right, putting the alien UFO between them and that gun while putting the second right in front of them. He pushed a button, unleashing two Hellfire missiles right toward that mounted laser as it began to swivel toward them. It’d made it a few inches before the Hellfires blew it to pieces.

  “Woo-hoo!” Mark shouted, and Turn almost expected him to reach up for a cowboy hat that wasn’t there, waving it about in glee. Instead he cut the speed of the X-22 dramatically by tilting the thrusters and bringing them down. In the same motion he re-aimed the missile guidance system, hit the button unleashing two more Hellfire missiles, and took care of the other mounted laser just like that.

  “Goddamn!” Andy said from the back of the X-22, and beside him Billy nodded, wide-eyed.

  “Not so fast,” Mark said from the cockpit, and turned them about quickly. The men in the back couldn’t see it, but the alien UFO that they’d rode in on was trying to turn about in an attempt to get out of the now-compromised entry-port to Dulce.

  SHOOM! SHOOM!

  “Shit,” Mark said as two lasers fired what looked to Turn to be just inches above the X-22’s glass cockpit canopy. They didn’t seem to faze Mark too much, however, for he just re-angled the X-22 and fired off another Hellfire, then gave it a little pitch and yaw and fired off another.

  Turn didn’t know a thing about flying hovercrafts, but he was pretty certain he knew what another two mounted lasers being blown to hell sounded like.

  ~~~

  “Goddamn, there ain’t gonna be nothing left!” Aaron said from the helicopter that was now just a mile from the still-open Dulce Base blast doors.

  “Better find some wood to knock on,” Moses said beside him, “because I have a feeling there’ll be plenty.”

  He angled the Puma downward and just a dozen feet from the desert floor and they covered the remaining distance to the Dulce port quickly.

  “Bring ‘er down easy,” Aaron said beside him as they flew into the port.

  It was a rectangular port, really nothing more than a large underground parking lot, this one just for UFOs. There were several lined up in ‘parking spots,’ lighted-off areas that almost seemed to conform to the shape of the ship sitting in them, and the area could obviously afford much larger craft, for the ceiling was more than a hundred feet off the floor.

  “There!” Aaron said, pointing out the window to a clear spot on the floor, just before and below where the X-22 and the alien transport craft were still hovering, and turning about it looked like.

  “Got it,” Moses said, then brought the bird down.

  “All right,” Aaron shouted, ripping off his headset and jumping back to the other men, “let’s hit ‘em hard!”

  26 – Making Entry

  Dulce Port (Level 1) – Dulce Secret Base, New Mexico

  Thursday, May 24, 1979

  The attack was textbook, with the CAT-3 forces blowing an entry into the port and taking full control of their landing zone within 55 seconds of the X-22 breaching the port. Hovering, the X-22 continued to use its rockets and guns to rake any enemy weapons in the port area, silencing them before the Air Force helicopter piloted by Moses Cochrane started to enter the open port doors.

  Moses brought the bird in fast and put her down on the main floor of the chamber where the troops would have the cover of a nearby disk as they ran for the passenger entry hatch. Mark knew it was time.

  “All right, you bastard!” he said, his teeth gritted but his smile wide. “See how you handle this!”

  Turn’s eyes were wide as he watched the alien disc-shaped craft begin to move forward, most likely trying to dart out of there. Instead Captain Richards brought the X-22 forward and then jerked left on the controls, something that caused the left wing of the X-22 to slam downward toward the alien ship. At the last second he kicked the props into a full downdraft, nearly flipping the UFO over onto its top.

  “Ha!” he laughed, but all the while he was struggling with the controls. “Hang on boys!” he shouted back to them next.

  “Shit!” Turn said, then grabbed onto the hand-straps and braced himself.

  Mark managed to straighten-out the X-22 but he was coming down, and would have to land the vehicle. It’s tires hit the port’s pavement hard and they bounced a bit, but once again they were lined-up perfectly with the alien craft, enough so that Mark could unleash two Hellfires toward it. The craft managed to dodge one but the second hit it straight on and it fell a good forty feet, and right on top of a few triangle-shaped craft that had been sitting there.

  “Woo!” Mark shouted again. “Took out two fighters with that one – woo-ee!”

  ~~~

  “And…she’s down!”

  Command Sergeant Major Aaron Haney looked from Moses in the cockpit to Jerry by the helicopter’s large bay door, and nodded.

  The door was already thrown open by the time he yelled ‘open ‘er up’ and Sergeant Paul Carson jumped out, his M240 leading the way.

  BOOM!

  Paul looked over as the alien UFO Captain Richards had tailed-in on crashed down atop some other type of alien craft. He quickly directed his attention back toward the HUB doors, which were the main entryway into the base from the port. If those were closed to them then the base was effectively sealed off. What’s more, they still had to secure the small port facility command post, the one that housed the may well house the sonic controls for the entire base – he wasn’t convinced they were only on the lower level. It was a lot of shit to handle, and Paul let off his frustration by bringing the machine gun up and firing at a Gray coming out from behind the side of the command post, the first he’d seen yet. The thing had obviously been expecting something to happen that didn’t, for its body seemed to slink down and it was just trying to back off when Paul opened-up on it.

  “Damn!” Johnny said as he jumped down beside Paul, his sawed-off Remington shotgun up and aiming in the direction the Gray had been. “You split that one’s head clean in half!”

  “Happens,” Paul said matter-of-factly, and a moment later Jerry and Lewie were down on the concrete of the port as well.

  “Let’s secure this facility!” Aaron shouted from inside the helicopter, his two Uzis held at his sides, just aching to be used.

  “What about the others?” Paul called out as Aaron jumped down.

  “They’ll wait ‘till we secure the area then work their magic.”

  Paul smiled. “Then it’s time for me to work mine.”

  He started toward the port command post fifty yards away, the other five men fast on his heels, guns a’ blazin’.

  27 – The Battle for Command

  “Go, go, go!” Jerry shouted, his arm waving as Johnny, Lewie and then Aaron all rushed past. He put his AR-15 assault rifle to his eye, or close enough as his large, black-framed glasses would allow, and fired.

  Coming just around the bend and raising up what looked like a pen was a Gray. Jerry’s shot took it in the shoulder, but since its frame was so small and the force of the gun so much, the blast took of the thing’s whole side. Blowing out his breath in relief that the alien hadn’t gotten the flash gun up in time, Jerry started forward.

  “There it is,” Paul was saying when Jerry got up against a parked alien UFO of some sort, another one beside it so they had
some cover.

  “See it,” Aaron said, emptying out the clips from his guns and then re-inserting them again, a nervous habit he had.

  “How are you gonna–”

  Lewie’s words were cut off as a laser or weapon of some sort blasted right into the UFO near their heads.

  “Sombitch!” Jonny said, those large black lips of his quivering in anger. He grabbed hold tightly of his shotgun, jumped up, and fired a shot off in the direction the laser blast had come, then another and another before falling back down.

  “They’re movin’ in,” he said, his eyes darting this way and that.

  “It’s alright,” Paul said, his voice level and calm, like always, “we just have to get to that door, get it open, and that’s that – the controls to the sonic and all the rest of Dulce are in there.”

  “The sonic – that’s down below on Level 7!” Jerry shouted.

  Paul shook his head. “It’s in here, too – I know it.”

  “Then let’s move,” Jerry said, narrowing his eyes at him, and started to rise up, “you men move and I’ll cover the rear – get that door open!”

  The others didn’t have much choice in the matter – Jerry jumped up and began firing his machine gun rapidly, those thick glasses of his obscuring his eyes, but not the wicked grin on his face.

  “Move!” Aaron shouted, and the others took off, Lewie charging forth across the open floor toward the command center thirty yards away, Paul and Johnny and then Aaron behind him.

  “C’mon,” Aaron shouted once they’d moved a bit and Jerry was still behind, shooting at the Grays behind them, “we can’t get too far from Paul!”

  Aaron kept back-stepping as he said it, and within another moment he was already ten yards from Jerry.

  “Jerry, c’mon!” he shouted again, but it was too late. Paul was far enough away now, as well as the protection his mental blocking ability afforded. One of the Grays somewhere in the distance or firing upon them from afar, sensed this, and began to work its mental muscle.