Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  She was about a mile south of the farmhouse. The Hapsel ranch was extensive, but the protected habitat was only a few square miles, bordered by a rocky ridge that ran, if she remembered the Google Earth map, about two miles to the west.

  It took her an hour and a quarter, and though the night was a good deal cooler than the day, she was dripping with sweat by the time she mounted the wall-like escarpment with its clutter of EPA “Keep Out” signs. The fence was not—as far as she could see—electrified, or draped in razor wire, but it was purposeful, new and well maintained. She could get over it, but it was designed to make it clear that doing so constituted a serious violation of law. One sign said that the territory was both under continual electronic surveillance and subject to security patrols. For a long moment, she read and reread the signs, scanned the perimeter for the telltale red lights of cameras or motion sensors. The longer she hesitated in the dark, the more her determination flagged. She could, she told herself, just walk away. She should.

  And then what? Fly back to England and spend the rest of her life on the lookout for Letrange, or someone similar who thought she knew more than she did?

  That would be intolerable. And insulting. She gazed into the darkness beyond the fence and the same simple question floated back to her, with memories of her father’s rage as he tore down the strange chart in his study …

  Dad?

  He wasn’t out there, of course. Not really. But maybe if she could see what was out there, she would learn more about him, what he had done, and what he had tried to back away from or expose. And what had killed him. She set her teeth, pulled the cuffs of her shirt until she could wrap them around her fingers, and took hold of the wire.

  No electrical current. No unseen sharp edges.

  In seconds, she was over and running clumsily down the other side of the ridge, where the vegetation grew thicker and the starlight glittered on a series of streams emerging, she assumed, from an underground spring. Whether there really were Ash Mountain Speckled Dace, she had no way of knowing, but the water supply had at least made those claims plausible. It also made her own progress more difficult, since she now had to splash around the water’s edge in the dark, looking for places to cross, though since she didn’t have a set destination, that didn’t matter too much. But it was noisy moving around in the stream, and there was just enough reflected light off the water that she felt conspicuous. She headed deeper into the nature reserve and made for higher ground.

  The land was slashed by gullies and long, stony shelves that rose like the ribs of some emaciated torso, so that Jennifer found herself climbing and then stumbling down through swollen succulents and stiff, prickly plants over and over. On the fourth ridge, and still with no sign of any kind of facility or habitation, she opted to swing east along one of the ridges, skulking low to the ground in case anyone might be watching from below. There was a stand of low, twisted trees at one end, their bark smooth, their dry leaves pale and papery. She paused under them for a moment to scan the desert floor. Something stirred below her, a dog-like form picking its way through the grass, fifty yards away.

  Wolf? she wondered, momentarily anxious. The animal moved away from her in a light trot, its body rangy and low to the ground, its ears back.

  Coyote, she decided, though the name meant little to her beyond roadrunner cartoons. Maybe they were here too. The idea pleased her, putting a lightness in her step that made her momentarily careless. The stone under her foot turned as she put her weight on it and she lost her balance, falling on the baked earth and landing with one arm and the side of her face in a thorny, gorse-like plant.

  For a second, she lay still, eyes squeezed shut, her body shifting slightly to test how much damage she had done. The pain in her face and hand shouted loudest, but she was sure the scratches were all superficial. The throb in her ankle was more worrying. She had rolled it, and it felt tender even as she lay on her back, looking at the sky. What would it be like when she got up and put some weight on it?

  A point of light flicked into view overhead, fast as a shooting star, but then, quite suddenly, still. It stayed where it was, so that she began to be sure she had imagined its previous movement, but then it was swelling, and the light, at first singular and pinkish, divided into three lights, equally spaced.

  A triangle.

  Like the one on the chart in her father’s study so many years before.

  The triangle stayed where it was for a moment, then seemed to grow bigger, spreading evenly across the blackness behind it. Jennifer stared, her brain hurrying to catch up. It was coming down.

  A pair of slim red needles of light lanced down from the craft and flickered over the land below like scribbling pens. They seemed to flit from point to point, as if they were searching for something, or mapping the contours of the ground, and Jennifer rolled to watch them, suppressing a gasp at the twinge in her ankle as she shifted onto her side.

  The red lasers vanished as quickly as they’d come, and now the triangle was dropping steadily and silently toward the floor of the shallow valley. It was impossible to tell just how high it was until it was level with her and she saw that what she had assumed was very large indeed—the size of a football pitch, say—was in fact not much bigger than a double-decker bus on its side. There was a fractional hum, less a sound than a kind of sensible vibration in the air, and then the mechanical thunk of what might have been landing gear. It hung for another ten seconds before settling down soundlessly on the desert earth.

  There was no cover to speak of, but Jennifer was well hidden in the tangle of weeds and struck by something too close to awe to move a muscle. The craft had come down as if it weighed no more than gossamer, as if the laws of physics themselves had been suspended. It was like watching a magic trick, studying the conjurer’s hands for a telltale sign of the reality behind the illusion, but finding nothing. And this was no stunt designed for an audience. This was true. She knew it, and not just because her eyes told her so. Again, she thought of the chart on her father’s wall and knew in her heart that the craft etched palely on that blue print had just landed on the Nevada dirt only fifty yards or so from where she lay.

  The ship was dark now, because the lights she’d seen came from its underside and had dwindled to nothing as it had drifted lower than her vantage point, but as she watched, a new set of lights swelled around the triangle’s edge, a soft, amber glow that seemed somehow alive. She heard a series of dull clicks in a broken and uneven stream, and then the desert was white and green, every stunted plant and water-starved bush casting long, hard-edged shadows. The blue-white glare came from beneath the craft itself and was so bright that, though she wanted to watch, Jennifer twisted her head away and shut her eyes.

  When she looked back, the ship was gone. It took her a moment to see the triangulated lights, already getting small as the ship rose steadily into the night sky. The points of white pulsed once, and then it vanished, speeding away like a bolt of lightning, arcing across the sky, then taking an impossibly hard cut to the west and out of sight.

  For at least a minute, Jennifer did not move, and when she got to her feet at last, it was reluctantly, like she was the last person to leave a movie theatre as the final credits rolled out and the house lights came up. Reluctant and uncertain. Those last few minutes had shaken her, challenging a lot of things she thought she knew about the world and her place in it. These thoughts would surely have swamped her, left her gazing up at the heavens until the sun rose, except that a sound from the valley below had caught her attention.

  A breathy grunt, a groan, as of exertion …

  Jennifer scoured the desert floor.

  There, just where the impossible triangle had just taken off, getting unsteadily to her feet, was a woman.

  49

  ALAN

  Rachel, Nevada

  ALAN HAD BEEN NURSING THE SAME BEER FOR OVER AN hour, and as it warmed and turned flat, it had become, even by his undemanding standards, undrinkable. The wai
tress twice offered to get him another, but he’d shaken his head and tried to suggest—more kindly than the English woman had—that he wanted to be left alone. She seemed to get the message. He pushed the glass to the edge of the table where it sat beside the phone he had turned off.

  He was not in the mood to talk to anyone.

  It was amazing, given all that had happened, that the English woman—Jennifer, she’d called herself—was in his head at all. But then her little speech, her accusation that he wasn’t serving American freedoms, had gotten under his skin. On a night like this, when calls would be made to the parents and wives of soldiers who’d been lost on a classified mission somewhere, it needled him to think their sacrifices might be called into question.

  But it was worse than that. He’d heard such rants before and had always been able to dismiss them, but this time, in this place, he was less sure.

  What if she was right?

  What exactly was he doing here? Who was he fighting, and on whose orders? He had never had a problem with the secrecy of a mission before. It made sense to him that military strategies and objectives should be kept from the public, lest the enemy learn of them and use that information to better their position. But the Locust program was a different kind of secrecy, in which everything—equipment, methodology, purpose, hell, even the nature of the enemy—was unknown, not just to the press and the general public, but to ninety-nine percent of the military, including top brass. He was used to covert ops as part of a larger and officially-sanctioned war, but this was different there too. He didn’t know what he was doing, how he was doing it, or who was calling the shots.

  Possum Plant, Hatcher had called the R&D division, because when people look too closely, everybody plays dead.

  And maybe that was how things had to be. But it didn’t feel right.

  He’d always had questions, but he’d always been able to take the answers to those questions on faith, as he’d been trained to. Now there were five dead pilots, lying in some secret morgue, and they hadn’t known what they’d been doing any more than he did. What if they hadn’t been serving US freedoms? What if they had been lied to from the outset, used, exploited?

  That would be more than insulting to their memories. It would be a violation of everything Alan had always believed his country stood for.

  Another hour slid by, and it was the only thing he could see. Twenty minutes later a car pulled up outside and Barry Regis came in. He ordered a beer and then nodded to the door.

  “Feel like getting a little air, Major?” he said.

  Alan frowned but he went with him, out of the diner and along the empty desert road. For a moment, neither of them said anything, and then, when they were a good couple of hundred yards from the bar and surrounded by the emptiness of the desert, the FAC man gave voice to an idea at least as dreadful as those haunting Alan.

  “We were set up,” he said.

  Alan stared at him.

  “You were a lure,” said Regis. “They kept their distance and waited for the rest of the squadron. That means it was a trap.”

  Alan said nothing.

  “Someone on the inside,” said Regis. “Has to be.”

  “Yes,” said Alan at last. His voice was flat, and as dead as he felt, but it made sense.

  “A leak?” Regis mused. “Or a rat?”

  Alan scowled into the settling night. Neither option was good, and he feared the worse of the two was more likely.

  “This isn’t just giving information away,” he said. “This is active sabotage.”

  “A rat, then,” Regis agreed. “Who do you trust?”

  There was a long silence while Alan thought, his eyes fixed on the middle distance.

  “You,” he said at last.

  “And?” Regis prompted.

  Alan bowed his head, eyes closing for a moment.

  “You,” he said again.

  Regis turned to look at him, a long, searching gaze ending in a nod.

  “Then we are, as they say, of one mind,” he said.

  “I wish we weren’t,” said Alan.

  “No shit,” said Regis. “So, next question. If we were set up, if the enemy wanted to punch out our air strike capacity, you’ve gotta think something is coming. What?”

  “Damned if I know,” said Alan.

  Something in his voice caught the other man’s attention, and his eyes narrowed.

  “Someone meant it to happen, and we need to find out who. And why.”

  “Doesn’t seem like I know much of anything anymore,” said Alan.

  Regis just shook his head.

  “Gotta be someone high up,” he said. “I don’t know. This wasn’t spur of the moment. That don’t feel right. Feels to me like this was planned a long time ago. Has to be someone who’s been pulling strings all along.”

  “Hatcher?” said Alan, turning to face him.

  “Think about it,” said Regis. “We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him. He came in, overruling every branch of the military we’d ever heard of. I don’t know. He gave you the Moscow mission?”

  “Sure,” said Alan, shrugging. “He gave me every mission I’ve flown since I got here. Maybe he was fed bad data.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did he ever say why he brought you here?” asked Alan.

  “Some say I’m good at my job,” said Regis with a crooked smile.

  “Yeah, and I’m not bad at mine,” said Alan, “but the CIA only got interested in me when I saw something they couldn’t explain away, and they opted to bring me on the inside. But you were in the bunker when that ship appeared in Afghanistan. You didn’t see it. So why did they bring you?”

  “He never really said,” answered Regis. “But he implied it was partly to—what were his words?—ease your transition. I wasn’t feeling too kindly disposed to you at the time, if you recall …”

  “I recall,” Alan inserted. “Vividly.”

  “So I wasn’t too keen on being your babysitter, but then he showed me what you were flying and … Well, that changes a lot of things, doesn’t it?” said Regis, with a touch of wonder in his voice.

  “You can say that again,” said Alan, flatly. “Do you ever wonder what we’re doing? Why it’s all so secret? Who we’re fighting and who we’re obeying?”

  Regis kicked some of the dust off his boots. Alan knew he was stalling.

  “Sometimes,” he said at last, avoiding Alan’s eyes. “I guess.”

  “I mean,” said Alan, fumbling for the words, “I don’t mind risk. I don’t mind sacrifice. So long as it’s worth something.”

  “You don’t think it is?”

  “I don’t know. Not for sure. Do you? I go up there in those impossible airplanes and zip around, spying on people, running from people when they shoot at me, shooting back, without ever knowing who any of those people are, or what happens to the information I gather, or what war we’re fighting. I mean, I can handle the fact that the newspapers don’t know what we’re doing. But who does? The Pentagon? The government? I swear to God, Barry, I have no clue.”

  “You told anyone else you feel this way?”

  “No,” said Alan. “And I wouldn’t. Like I said, I trust you. And no, whatever uncertainty I’m feeling now would not make me change sides or put anyone on our side at risk. I hope I don’t have to say that.”

  “You don’t,” said Regis. “Major, it’s what happened to those other pilots. You feel responsible and it’s playing on your mind. That’s to be expected. It’s normal. Hell, I’d worry about you if you didn’t go through it. But you and me? We’re the rookies here. There’s a lot we’re not told.”

  “Maybe that should change,” said Alan, with sudden certainty.

  “Maybe it should,” Regis agreed. “And maybe tomorrow we’ll set up a meet with Hatcher …”

  “Hatcher,” said Alan, frowning.

  “You really don’t trust him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Alan, honestly. “But like you said, if I was
set up—if those other pilots were sent out to get killed, their machines shot to pieces—that takes some serious access.”

  “And some stone cold son of a bitch,” said Regis. “You think Hatcher has that in him?”

  “If I were honest, no, but I also know he has, every step of the way, shown me what he wants me to see, a bit at a time. Enough to keep me interested and compliant, not enough for me to glimpse anything like the whole picture. If he turns out not to be the man he says he is, I can’t say I’ll be totally surprised.”

  “The problem is that by the time we find out for sure …” Regis began.

  “It will be too late,” Alan concluded for him.

  “So what do we do? The clock is ticking. I don’t even know how to go up the chain of command here. It’s a fiefdom. Or at least it feels like one. We could go to Langley, or even to National Intelligence, but if we’re wrong and we bypass the chain of command …”

  “That would be bad.”

  “No kidding,” said Regis. “And maybe it is all above board, but when you have this degree of secrecy, your best case scenario is that no one knows what the fuck is going on.”

  “And the worst case?”

  “Then it’s like you said. We don’t work for the people we thought we worked for. We’re screwing our own country. We’re accidental traitors.”

  “Jesus,” breathed Alan.

  “I think I need that beer now,” said Regis. “You?”

  “Not sure I feel like drinking but I’ll sit with you.”

  They walked back toward the bar. When they got there Regis’ beer was waiting for him, and the waitress had replaced Alan’s.

  “That one was looking a bit old,” she said.

  He nodded his thanks. They had barely taken their seats when the door opened and Morat came in.