Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  “I saw a man earlier,” she confessed. “He was talking to a pilot from the base and another man. He is very dangerous. You need to alert their security.”

  “We can identify him,” Timika chimed in.

  The deputy shot her a disdainful look. Whatever else happened, that last demand would not be met.

  “You realize that making this kind of allegation is tantamount to making a terrorist threat?” he said. He was giving them one last chance, one final opportunity to let him keep his evening hassle free.

  “It’s true,” said Jennifer.

  His jaw flexed, his eyes held hers for one exasperated second, and then he was stepping backwards and speaking into his radio again.

  “We have a threat on the base,” he said. “Repeat: we have a threat on the base. Request back up and full security notification.”

  “Well,” said Timika, giving Jennifer a rueful smile across the roof of the Impala. “We have their attention.”

  “Yeah,” said Jennifer, her tone hollow. “Great.”

  The deputy spoke into his radio for a full two minutes, his eyes never leaving them, then stepped in closer, hand still close to his gun.

  “I hope this isn’t your idea of a joke,” he said. “Because if it is, things are going to get real expensive for you ladies.”

  She wasn’t sure how long they waited, saying nothing, breathing the dry desert night, wondering who would arrive first, the men in black with their EPA badges, the camo guys in their pickup, or someone else, someone perhaps who would—as they said in the movies—shoot first and ask questions afterwards. The deputy seemed to have rediscovered his bored exasperation, and though he checked his watch from time to time, and spoke a few monosyllables into his radio, he just watched them in silence.

  To her surprise, the vehicle to arrive first was a helicopter, but it thrummed overhead without descending. The next was an open-sided military vehicle, half-Jeep, half-pickup. A Humvee, she remembered. It was sand yellow and came, not from the road behind them, but from the base ahead. It had a bank of four spotlights on the front, so that as it roared to a halt in a billowing cloud of dust, she and Timika had to take their hands off the hot metal of the car to shield their eyes.

  The deputy stepped up to the vehicle as three men got out, all in military gear. The two in the back had automatic rifles. But it was the man in the front that scared her. He was broad shouldered, black, and his head was shaved, a phone jammed against the side of his head, his square jaw set. A man unaccustomed to being messed with.

  He was also the man who’d been chatting with Letrange and the pilot in the bar, less than an hour before.

  58

  ALAN

  Dreamland, Nevada

  ALAN WASHED HIS FACE AND DRANK STRAIGHT FROM the tap to soothe his burning throat before calling Regis.

  The security man had to shout over the engine of his vehicle.

  “Hatcher’s dead,” said Alan over the phone. “Found him in the locker on B corridor.”

  Regis’ hesitation was momentary. Alan could almost hear the big man locking away all his feelings as the implication slid home.

  “How?”

  “Throat cut,” said Alan through gritted teeth.

  “So Morat’s our rat,” he said.

  “Looks like,” said Alan. “You think he’s a defector?”

  “Unless he was never ours.”

  “That would mean that the whole mission at Safid Kuh was a set up, that he always wanted to be here. How’s that possible?”

  “Not sure,” said Regis. “I’ll look into it.”

  “Find out where he is,” Alan said. “And lock the base down.”

  He’d barely spoken when the alarm sounded.

  For a second, Alan thought it was Regis, sealing the facility so Hatcher’s murder could be investigated, but then he heard the words between the wail of the siren.

  “All pilots report to stations at once. This is not a drill.”

  “We’re being scrambled,” he said into the phone.

  “I heard,” said Regis. “Okay. Do what you have to. I’ll watch things on the ground. And Major?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Keep an eye out for Morat. He may be up there. And he knows you.”

  Alan nodded and hung up. Regis was right. There was nothing worse than being hunted by someone who’d trained you.

  Alan moved to the equipment racks and suited up, grabbing a helmet as he left, and made for the hangar, where what had been confusion was turning to chaos. The men knew their jobs, but did not know who was in command.

  “Where’s Agent Hatcher?” asked Riordan as Alan strode in. He looked scared.

  “He won’t be here,” said Alan. The other man waited for a split second and, when Alan merely held his eyes, the color drained from his face.

  “Status?” Alan asked, forcing the man back on track.

  “Sir, radar picked up seven incoming hostiles, moving supersonically,” said Riordan. “Seven of them. They are taking up positions close to the Wyoming nuclear missile fields. Reports suggest they’re tampering with the missiles’ launch sequences.”

  “What?” Alan exclaimed. “How can they do that?”

  Riordan looked uncomfortable. “There is,” he said, picking his words carefully, “historical precedent.”

  “Meaning what? This has happened before?”

  “Not on this scale, but yes. A long time ago.”

  “I never heard about it.”

  “You weren’t supposed to,” said Riordan, closing the subject. He said it simply, but the terror in his eyes gave away just how bad he thought the situation was.

  “Seven?” said Alan.

  Riordan nodded. “Nonconventional aircraft by their flight signatures,” he said.

  “Matching the ones we engaged two days ago?”

  “Not certain,” said Riordan. He glimpsed Alan’s impatience. “Probably, sir.”

  “And we have … what? Four?” He’d realized, when he found Hatcher’s body that Morat had lied about Hatcher stealing the fourth Locust.

  “Three, sir,” said Riordan. “Agent Morat took the fourth on patrol.”

  I’ll bet he did, thought Alan.

  “Pilots?”

  “Rodriguez, Jackson, and Hastings,” said Riordan. “And you.”

  “And what about that one?” said Alan, nodding towards the forgotten silver disk.

  “Still undergoing tests, sir,” said Riordan, his eyes wide.

  “Is it armed and fueled up?”

  “Well, sir, yes, but …”

  “What?” Alan demanded.

  “It’s a completely different operations system,” said Riordan. “None of the surviving pilots have any experience in it at all.”

  Alan considered the strange saucer across the hangar.

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  “I don’t think I can authorize …”

  “It’s on me, Lieutenant Riordan,” said Alan. “We’re under attack.”

  “Yes, sir. But …”

  “How does the disk perform compared to the Locusts?”

  Riordan hesitated, his eyes flashing from side to side as if looking for someone with the authority to take the matter from him.

  “Lieutenant!” Alan barked. “We don’t have time for this.”

  “Well, sir, it’s what you might call next generation tech,” he said.

  “Faster?”

  “Faster, more maneuverable, better armed …”

  “Get it out,” said Alan.

  “We don’t know for sure how …” Riordan exclaimed. “We’re still discovering how it …” He hesitated.

  “What?”

  “How it performs,” said Riordan, but there was something evasive in his manner. Even now, the sky threatening to fall in on them, Alan thought bitterly, he was being lied to.

  “Just get it out,” he said.

  Flying was all he knew how to do. He lived and breathed it. Always had. If this was how it w
ould end for him, so be it. What else was there?

  His phone rang.

  Regis.

  “What?” Alan barked.

  “Talked to the recovery team who went in at Safid Kuh to get Morat,” said Regis.

  “And?”

  “Among the kills was a man in US-made boots and underwear,” said Regis. “But he’d been shot at close range. None of my guys did it. He was wearing an Afghan coat, but his shirt was buttoned up wrong and his fly was unfastened. They figured he’d been caught napping, but they also thought he had had less sun than the others.”

  “You’re thinking this was the real Morat? That his killer put his clothes on and took his identity?”

  “Sounds that way,” said Regis, his voice heavy with frustration.

  “Jesus,” said Alan, striding across the hangar to where Riordan was presiding over preflighting the saucer craft. “So now what?”

  “Time to get out of the pocket.”

  “Okay,” said Alan. “No one seems to know what’s going on. With Hatcher dead and Morat defected, I’m taking over. Till someone steps up who outranks us, we’re calling the shots. Me in the air, you on the ground. Get communications command in touch with the Air Force, but make sure they know what we’re up against. I don’t want conventional fighters taking on those arrowheads. And put the word out about Morat.”

  “Will do,” said Regis. “And if you see him up there,” he added grimly, “take him down.”

  Alan hung up.

  “I have to caution you against this,” said Riordan. “It’s a very different ship from the Locust. There’s still a lot …”

  Again the hesitation, the evasion.

  “What?” Alan demanded. “I’m taking it up. That’s how it is. So if you know something that might help keep me alive while I’m in it, now’s the time to tell me.”

  Riordan’s internal struggle lasted only a second. The constant looping wail of the siren and its various warnings seemed to be getting to him.

  “It’s a captured ship, sir,” he said. “The tech is unfamiliar because we didn’t build it.”

  “Russian?”

  Riordan’s eyes flashed away.

  “That’s what I heard, sir,” he said.

  “You’re not sure? How is that possible?”

  “We’re just the engineers, sir,” said Riordan with a touch of hauteur. “Our job here is to figure out how stuff works. In this case, we’re still learning. We’ve had men working on it day and night for weeks, and we still don’t know …”

  “It will fly?”

  “Yes, sir, but we’ve only brought it to a controlled hover in the hangar. It’s never really gone up. The controls are minimal, keyed to the user.”

  Alan stared at him.

  “Telepathically,” said Riordan, looking more than uncomfortable. He was frightened of what he was saying, and Alan couldn’t blame him. It was staggering. “You hold on to the controller inside,” said Riordan, his voice low, “and it … reacts. To your thoughts. To be honest, sir, we haven’t dared take it more than a few feet off the ground. We just don’t know what it will do.”

  Alan nodded, feeling a strange calm come over him as if he were already in the pilot’s seat.

  “Maybe that’s the point,” said Alan. “You need to really want it to fly.”

  Riordan stared at him. Alan took one last look around the scrambling hangar, watching the three remaining Locusts pulling out into the open, and nodded.

  “Okay,” he said, turning back to the strange, saucer-like craft in front of him. “Let’s see what it can do.”

  59

  TIMIKA

  Area 51, Nevada

  TIMIKA SAW THE WAY JENNIFER STIFFENED.

  “Him?” she asked, staring as the African-American security officer hung up the phone, spoke earnestly first to one of the soldiers, then to the deputy, and finally came striding towards them, head lowered, bullish.

  Jennifer shook her head.

  “His friend from the bar,” she said, her voice low.

  The officer was in no mood for politeness. She could see it in the way he walked, the look in his face. His eyes flashed, and she thought she could hear, the sound riding the wind coming from the base, the distant keening wail of a siren.

  Something was going on.

  “You alleged an attack on the base?” he spat. “Details. Now.”

  “We have rights you know,” Timika ventured.

  The anger in the soldier’s face was terrible. He moved in close, and she could see how much he was sweating. His eyes were wide and his teeth clenched. For a second, she thought he was going to hit her.

  “I don’t have time for civil liberties, lady,” he said. “Talk quickly.”

  He didn’t need to threaten what would happen if they didn’t. Jennifer looked too scared to speak.

  “The man you were with before,” said Timika. “He’s a killer.”

  The security officer, whose nametag said Regis, blinked and stared at her, but something in his face changed.

  “Which man?” he said, and already, some of his fire was gone.

  “The man in the bar,” she said.

  Jennifer, feeling the change too, nodded.

  “Not Alan,” she said, pushing through the quaver in her voice. “The other one. He called himself Letrange, but he has other names.”

  “Morat,” said Regis, almost to himself.

  The two women checked each other.

  “I’ve never heard him called that,” said Jennifer. “Olive skin. Black hair. Good looking.”

  She said that last grudgingly and Timika gave her a sharp look, wondering just what had passed between the Englishwoman and the man she said had tried to kill her.

  Regis nodded thoughtfully.

  “How do you know Major Young?” he asked.

  “I don’t,” said Jennifer. “We just met.”

  “Okay,” he said, and he was quiet now. “Okay. And you just came to tell us about this Letrange guy?”

  Jennifer nodded.

  “Wish you’d gotten here an hour ago,” said Regis. There was a bitterness there, but it wasn’t directed at them.

  “There’s something else,” said Timika, fishing the folded page from Jerzy Stern’s journal from her pocket and thrusting it into Regis’ face. “We need to go here. It’s important.”

  “What?” asked Regis, stepping back and focusing on the hand-written words, his face screwed up in disbelief. “You can’t come on the base. This is a military installation. I’m grateful for the warning, but there are things I need to do. The deputy here will escort you back to the main road.”

  “This attack,” said Timika, “whatever this Morat guy is trying to do—it’s about this place. We need to go there.”

  “You’re not listening to me …” said Regis, something of the frustration coming back into his face.

  “No,” said Timika. “You’re not listening to me. Something is going on at the base, right? Something bad. It’s about this. We need to go there. Now.”

  Regis stared at her, stalled by her determination, then he took the fold of paper and barked at one of the soldiers behind him.

  “Put these coordinates into the GPS,” he said, reading them off. “37°16´35˝ North. 115°45´19˝ West.”

  The Humvee had a bracket in front of the passenger-side dash. It held what looked like a tablet computer and other equipment. Timika walked towards the vehicle as the soldier climbed in and entered the coordinates. Regis seemed to consider stopping her, but didn’t. Jennifer sidled up alongside her as Regis read the numbers back again.

  “There’s nothing there, sir,” said the soldier. “It’s not Groom Lake. It’s further east. Restricted territory, but not the base itself.”

  He had pulled up a Google map. The little red exclamation point that marked the spot was alone on a blank white screen. As Timika watched, Regis leaned over and zoomed out until a complex of roads appeared, a few miles from the coordinates they’d input. Regis f
rowned.

  “The man’s right,” he said. “There’s nothing there.”

  “Switch to earth view,” said Jennifer.

  The soldier did so. The screen filled in with tan-colored earth. The complex of roads marked the Groom Lake facility in the pale area of the dry lake bed, a distinctive pattern of crossing lines indicating runways, but the red exclamation point to the east tagged an otherwise unmarked landscape of desert scrub.

  “Zoom in,” said Timika, fighting back a pang of despair. They’d come all this way. For nothing?

  “There’s nothing there,” protested the soldier.

  “Just do it,” she shot back.

  When no counter order came from Regis, the soldier did so.

  “What’s that?” asked Jennifer, leaning in. “There’s something there. Faint lines. You see that?”

  Regis stared at the screen. She was right.

  The red exclamation point now sat in the middle of a pale circle at the intersection of two broad lines forming a T. Though faded and apparently unserved by any current road, their resemblance to the Groom Lake base a few miles west was undeniable. Yet while the modern, secret installation sat clear and bright in the pale hollow of the lake bed, the location on the right of the screen looked faded with age, disappearing back into the landscape. But there was no doubt that they were looking at airstrips.

  “What the hell is that?” muttered Regis.

  “How old is the Groom Lake base?” asked Timika.

  “Damned if I know,” said Regis, his eyes still on the screen. “Sixties, I guess. Why?”

  “There was a facility here before that,” said Timika. “In the early fifties. That’s where we need to go.”

  Regis turned to consider her, but before he could say anything, the soldier at the data terminal spoke up.

  “She’s right, sir,” he said, scanning the page he had just pulled up for data. “Indian Springs Auxiliary field number 1. Administratively part of Creech Airbase, close to Vegas, but separate. Looks like it hasn’t been used since the fifties.”

  “We need to go there,” Timika said again.

  She could feel the tension and strangeness in the air. Regis looked unsure, and she had the distinct impression that he was unused to feeling unsure.