Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  “And I’m telling you that this,” said Timika, tapping the key insistently, “will blow the whole thing wide open. Jerzy obviously thought so, and the bad guys—whoever they are—think he’s right. Find this and we’re safe. The truth will set us free, right?”

  “But we won’t get anywhere near it!” said Jennifer. “We get caught by the government and packed off or imprisoned, or—assuming the bad guys are not working with them—we disappear.”

  “There’s always a way in,” said Timika. “I don’t care how secure a place is.”

  “Not this one,” said Jennifer. She thought of her experience at the Hapsel ranch. “They can see you coming miles away. And there are signs that say deadly force is authorized. And that’s the government! If they admit they’ll shoot you for looking, you don’t want to know what else they’re prepared to do.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t government,” said Timika. “That it was private money in support of corporate interests?”

  Jennifer sighed heavily. “I don’t know, Timika, okay? The more I think about it, the less I seem to know.”

  “Well,” said the other woman ruefully, “that makes two of us. So why not let Jerzy point us the right way?”

  “How? We can’t get in!”

  “Let’s ring the front doorbell and see.”

  “What?”

  “We drive up to the entrance,” said Timika, reasonably. “If, as you say, they intercept us before we get there, we talk our way in. I can be very persuasive.”

  “You’re insane,” said Jennifer.

  “Maybe,” said Timika as if she were seriously considering the possibility. “But I’ve been driven from my home, shot at, abducted and taken to goddamned Siberia, for Christ’s sake. I’m done. I want to know what’s going on.”

  “We won’t find out what’s going on. We’ll be arrested or killed or …”

  “Or something,” Timika agreed. “But you know what? If we run. They’ll come after us. And they won’t stop until they find us. I’ve been living like that for too long and I’m not about to spend the rest of my life like this. Turn the car around and we’ll find the entrance.”

  “To Area 51,” said Jennifer.

  Timika held up the little brass key.

  “To Jerzy Stern’s last secret,” she said.

  54

  ALAN

  Dreamland, Nevada

  THE THREE MEN DROVE SEPARATE CARS BACK TO THE base, then climbed aboard the blacked-out bus. If Hatcher had taken a Locust Alan figured he needed to be on hand and ready to fly at a moment’s notice, so while Regis went to his office and Morat went to check on repairs at the hangar, he took the bus to the flight facility and suited up.

  It was Hatcher who had brought him into this world—and that was no idle metaphor. Dreamland was like a window on a new universe. It was Hatcher’s faith that a rattled Harrier pilot could ride out his panic at the strangeness of this new universe and become a useful member of the team charged to protect it that had, he now saw, saved his sanity. Maybe even his life. That Hatcher was a rat was devastating. A personal betrayal. Another set of truths he had not questioned had turned out to be lies, and Alan was—again—in free fall.

  He went to see if Morat was still in the hangar, but there was no sign of him and he felt in the way. The techs had a hurried, anxious air as they busied themselves around the remaining Locusts. They’d also left the door open to the sleek, silver disk, where two men in hazmat suits examined the aircraft as if unsure what to do next. It occurred to Alan that, with the fleet depleted, it was possible that they might consider rushing the new aircraft into service before it had been fully tested. He didn’t like the idea.

  “Can we help you, Major?” said the red-haired man Alan recognized as Riordan.

  “No,” he answered. “Anything I can do?”

  “Not here.”

  The tension in the man’s voice was palpable. He was holding a tablet computer and looked keen to get back to work, but something in his manner made Alan’s irritation spike. He knew it was his feeling of powerlessness along with his confused rage over Hatcher’s treachery, but he suddenly felt the urge to punch Riordan squarely in the face.

  He turned on his heel and blundered down the hallway with its wash of white noise, desperate for somewhere he could be alone. He wanted to shout, to hit something, to release all the frustration of Dreamland’s constant secrecy. His hand was on the locker room door before he registered the stripe of yellow tape across the latch.

  C2, he recalled. Chemical spill.

  “Fuck that,” he spat.

  He twisted the latch and shouldered the door open, tearing the tape from the jamb in the process. He stepped inside, sniffing the air and, when he smelled nothing, flipped the light on.

  The changing room was complete with toilets and shower stalls, as well as the equipment lockers and racks of hanging flight suits. As the door closed behind him he slammed his fists onto the counter and bellowed a stream of curses into the mirror. He did it again, and again, and then he stopped, and the room fell silent.

  Or almost silent. In fact, the sound of Alan’s labored breathing bounced off the hard white tile. Distant noises from elsewhere in the building echoed vaguely through the ventilation shafts. He considered his reflection. He looked gaunt, haggard. The hairs on the back of his neck had started to rise. His rage gone, he felt strangely ill at ease.

  In the mirror he saw that one of the shower curtains had been pulled closed. It felt … off.

  Alan took a step towards it.

  “Hello,” he said, wishing base security permitted the carrying of sidearms. “Anyone in there?”

  There was no response, no sound of any kind beyond his own breathing. He reached out, hesitated, then seized the curtain and pulled.

  Nothing.

  He released the breath he had been holding and chuckled at his own nervousness, then turned to see a dark stain on the linoleum floor, a pool of blood seeping from one of the toilet stalls. He pushed open the nearest stall door and recoiled.

  Sitting on the toilet, fully clothed, his suit drenched in blood from the savage slash across his throat, was Special Agent Martin Hatcher.

  Alan staggered back.

  55

  ADMIRAL RICHARD E. BYRD

  Santiago, Chile, March 1947

  EXTRACT FROM CHILEAN NEWSPAPER EL MERCURIO, March 5, 1947:

  [EXT]Admiral Richard E. Byrd warned today that the United States should adopt measures of protection against the possibility of an invasion of the country by hostile planes coming from the Polar regions. The admiral explained that he was not trying to scare anyone, but that the cruel reality was that in case of a new war, the United States could be attacked by planes flying over one or both poles at incredible speed. This statement was made as part of a recapitulation of his own polar experience, in an exclusive interview with International News Service. Talking about the recently completed expedition, Byrd said that the most important result of his observations and discoveries is the potential effect that they have in relation to the security of the United States. The fantastic speed with which the world is shrinking—recalled the admiral—is one of the most important lessons learned during his recent Antarctic exploration. ‘I have to warn my compatriots that the time has ended when we were able to take refuge in our isolation and rely on the certainty that the distances, the oceans, and the poles are a guarantee of safety.’

  56

  JERZY

  Newport News, Virginia, March 1947

  I TOLD CAPTAIN JENNINGS THAT HIGH JUMP WAS MY LAST mission for the Navy, and that I wanted other assignments ashore. I told him I wanted to be at the forefront of research and development in the exciting new field of aviation and rocketry. I told him that if scum like Hauptsturmführer Ungerleider could come to America and stay on a government salary, then so could the people whose lives he had destroyed.

  Jennings said there was nothing he could do. Ungerleider had been added to a list of
scientists, engineers and technicians who the US deemed valuable in the anti-Soviet efforts that would dominate the decades to come. Operation Paperclip, it was called. Some Nazi scientists would be dragged back to Germany, in spite of the US, to face war crimes trials, but that was difficult and required hard evidence, and lots of it. Ungerleider had spent most of the war quite literally underground, and most of the people who’d seen him up close were dead. Now he was a valued member of the United States, a man who might help them build faster, better aircraft or rockets to the moon …

  I thanked Captain Jennings for all he had done for me, shook his hand, and resigned my commission. I disembarked from the USS Kitchener and stood for a moment, giving the destroyer a long look, but from that day to this, I have not set foot on a ship of any kind ever again.

  I went to Nevada, following what I had heard about his deployment, where I got a job at an airstrip near Groom Lake, partly on Jennings’ reference. I had been there a year and a half before I heard anything more about Ungerleider, though I often drove around the areas where I’d heard he might be, looking for him. Then one day I opened the local paper, and there he was, smiling at the camera with a group of other scientists, standing in front of some engine or other. His name had been changed, but I would have known him anywhere.

  He was not the only one, of course, and many would go on to become famous and wealthy. Walter Dornberger, who had once been Werner von Braun’s commander, went to Bell Aerospace. Rudi Beichel to Aerojet. Magnus von Braun (Werner’s brother) got a job at Chrysler, Alexander Lippisch at Collin Radio Company, Hans Multhopp at Martin Marietta and Heinz Schlicke at Allen-Bradley. There were many more and I could not keep track of them all, let alone punish them. They were successful men who had spent a portion of their lives trying, in various ways as suited their talents, to destroy the allies and eliminate people like me.

  But Ungerleider became, in my mind, their representative, and as such, with the memory of Ishmael burned into my heart—I had no choice but to act.

  One day in 1952, I followed Ungerleider home from work. He lived in a large, ranch-style house almost a mile from the closest neighbor. A nice house. It was a typically hot Nevada day, and I found him in his kitchen, taking a beer from the refrigerator. He was not married, I was relieved to find, and lived alone. He was not particularly surprised to see me, though he had no idea that he had actually met me several times before. He thought he vaguely recalled me from the Antarctic mission, but had no recollection of forcing me to work the henge at Wenceslas, or the specifics of gunning down my brother.

  “It was war,” he said with a shrug. “It was not personal.”

  It was neither apology nor explanation, but I nodded in agreement before I shot him.

  The metal box with the German eagle was in his closet. He had kept it all this time. Perhaps he had convinced the authorities that it was vital to his work. Perhaps no one had ever shown any interest in it. I had no way of knowing. The key was in a pouch of his wallet. It looked like it hadn’t been touched for years.

  There was another beer in the fridge, so I took it and drank it, sitting opposite him as he died, thinking of Jennings and Ishmael and my parents, while I waited for the police to come. After twenty minutes, it was clear that the shot had gone unheard, so I had to telephone them.

  They did not seem to understand what I was saying, and it took a long time for them to realize that I was not merely raving. Though I was no longer active military, they opted to hand my case over to the Navy. I was briefly held in a facility in New Mexico, until the government decided what to do with me. All the while, the metal box that I had claimed from Ungerleider’s home had been stashed away and I said nothing about it, until it was clear what the powers that be determined to do with me. They wanted no scandal, no awkward questions about the past, no reopening of old wounds. I was squirreled away and looked after, with others who had seen or done things that could prove embarrassing.

  The box I left in Nevada, locked away in a facility I knew was to be abandoned, where it would wait to be found by the right person.

  It gives me some measure of peace, after all these years, to hope that I may have found such a person.

  57

  JENNIFER

  Nevada

  THEY DROVE BACK TOWARD RACHEL, TOWARD THE BAR, but ultimately toward Area 51. Jennifer wasn’t sure she’d really changed her mind, but something of Timika’s fire had got into her head. She was tired. She wanted it to be over, and if necessary, she would go down fighting. That was what she did. It was who she was, and there was no way she was going to change that now.

  She didn’t hate governments. She hated the greed of people who worked for them, manipulated them in the name of profit. Whether they hid behind flags or shareholders didn’t much matter to her. She had been fighting it all her adult life. Today was no different.

  From time to time, the two women got glimpses of sensors with antennae and, perhaps, cameras, sprouting out of the ground up on the rocky escarpments on the side of the road, which stretched back towards the base, where increasingly strident signs warned against trespass and photography. They chose the road to the main gate, feeling the tension rise with each passing mile.

  At first, the landscape didn’t change, but gradually all signs of civilization, already few and far between since fleeing Rachel, fell away entirely and they were alone in the desert. Once a night bird, some kind of owl or nightjar, flashed across the road ahead, and on one rise, they caught the silhouette of something Timika pronounced a mule deer, and on another a jackrabbit that reminded Jennifer of Mrs. Winterburn. Otherwise, the night was utterly still.

  They were perhaps two miles from the main gate when they saw the pale pickup truck, parked on the bluff above the road. The Impala’s high beams splashed the truck with light for a second. Two men stood beside it, both in desert camo, with binoculars around their necks. The momentary glimpse left Jennifer with the impression that their faces were covered by masks. It was unsettling.

  The lights and sirens came up behind them less than five minutes later. Jennifer looked at Timika.

  “This is as far as we go,” she said.

  “Maybe,” said Timika. “Let’s see how they play it.”

  “You think this could have been one of the cars we saw in the desert?”

  Timika tipped her head doubtfully, then shook it. “Would have seen the lights on top even if they weren’t on,” she said.

  The man in the car was a sheriff’s deputy—local law enforcement rather than military, or anything more sinister, like the bizarre men in black, who Jennifer had come to dread. He got out of the car, flashlight at shoulder height, and approached the driver’s window with a slow swagger, muttering into his lapel radio. He was perhaps forty-five, white, with arms that suggested off-duty time in the gym but a belly that suggested he spent an equal amount of time at McDonalds. He looked slightly bored, but officious, and he considered the two women with something close to contempt.

  “You ladies blind?” he drawled. “This is a restricted area. License and registration.”

  Jennifer produced the Alamo paperwork and her international driving license. The deputy took it and considered it skeptically, holding it by one corner as if afraid to soil his fingers.

  “And you, Miss?” he said. “See some ID.”

  “I don’t have any,” Timika said. “My purse was stolen.”

  “That right?” said the deputy, not troubling to conceal his disbelief. “Wait here please.”

  He stepped away from the car and spoke into his radio. Jennifer caught “foreign national,” and, “local but undocumented,” and risked a glance at Timika, who was sitting very still.

  “What will they do?” she whispered.

  “Turn us around and send us on our way, probably,” said Timika. “That’s what normally happens. I’ve read a hundred accounts of crazies sneaking around Area 51. Worst case scenario—if they insist on driving to the base to stop the little green men f
rom monitoring their thoughts or whatever—they wind up in the lock-up for the night, with a big fine to deter them from doing it again when they get released. Right now, I really don’t need a big fine.”

  “I’ll cover the fine,” Jennifer said.

  “Yay for that,” Timika said.

  She sounded nonchalant, but Jennifer wasn’t buying it. The deputy was back.

  “Turn the car around and drive away,” he said. “Watch the signs. If you cross back into the restricted area, you’ll be placed under arrest.”

  Jennifer nodded, mouth dry.

  “We need to keep going,” said Timika.

  Jenifer gaped at her.

  “No, you don’t,” said the deputy with a short patience that said he wasn’t going to warn her again.

  “We really do,” said Timika. “We need to get inside the base. It’s important.”

  The deputy turned away for a second, sighed at the way he was being inconvenienced, and said, “Step out of the vehicle please, Miss.”

  “What?” said Jennifer, unsure who she was talking to. “She didn’t mean … It’s just a misunderstanding. We can turn around …”

  “You too, please, Miss,” he said. “Hands on the roof of the vehicle where I can see them. Yeah,” he added into his radio. “I’m going to need back up. Two for the lock-up.”

  “I said we needed to get in,” Timika said. “Tell him, Jennifer.”

  “I don’t think he wants to hear about Jerzy’s lost journal …”

  “No,” Timika shot back. “Tell him about the threat to the base.”

  For a moment the desert was quiet.

  “What did you say?” said the deputy. One hand strayed to the pistol holster on his hip. Ready.

  “We believe the base has been penetrated by a hostile agent,” said Timika. “Tell him, Jennifer.”

  The deputy turned to look at her, and she felt his disbelief, edged with a wariness that frightened her. She wanted to leave. To get back in the car and drive to Vegas and a plane to … anywhere. Again. But this bloody woman had dropped her even further in it, and that didn’t seem possible.