Nick knew this to be true. There were all sorts of stories associated with the Bermuda Triangle, many involving sightings of UFOs, lost aircraft, and lost ships.
“But Amie, the Bermuda Triangle is a huge area, some covering land, a lot just covering the ocean. When you say, ‘Bermuda Triangle’, it’s too vague for me.”
“Any of the islands in the place you call the Bahamas would do.”
That struck a chord with Nick, but at the time he didn’t know why. He felt upset for a moment, as if he were being pressured into something he knew he should not do.
“Listen, Amie, it’s time for us to return to work.”
“But Sedona is the closest vortex spot to us here,” she mentioned, watching him pack up to walk away.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow about this. Okay?”
“If you wish, Nick. I will be here. I am always here. Where else can I be? If you want to resume all of this tomorrow, I will be waiting for you here. I have until the end of my life to be here.” And Amie arose from her seat and returned to the hangar floor.
Nick spent a flustered afternoon chasing a growing tension headache with aspirins. “So much for only sharing one lunch with Amie per week,” he thought miserably. “She guilt-tripped me. I am now committed to her for tomorrow, too. Another lunch in the break room, with everyone wondering how I can stand being around her. How is this happening to me?”
The next day Nick was there, under emotional duress, sharing a table with Amie. He had spent another restless night, but this time his dreams were hard to remember. Nonetheless, he woke up feeling as if he had hardly slept at all and had been wrestling with something or someone the entire night. He felt off balance. His head hurt and his thoughts were dark and disturbed.
“Okay, assuming you can leave here, which you can’t, what will you do?” The thoughts Nick projected toward Amie were tinged with anger. “For example, if I drove you to Sedona, Arizona what would you do? Take a hike into the rock formations there and stand around waiting for someone to pick you up, like waiting for a bus? I don’t believe Seekers come by every day. And let’s be honest, Amie, with your particular features, you will soon be spotted and reported as unusual, to say the least. I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way, it’s just the facts. You look different from us.”
But Amie was sanguine. She knew that Nick was extremely torn between what he knew was best for his own self preservation and what she was compelling him to do for her. “I understand what you are saying. But I think I can pull it off, with your help. I have given much thought to what I could do.” She smiled at him and reached out to touch him once again, but this time Nick drew his arm back.
“No you don’t. Don’t try to persuade me that way,” he warned.
Amie cocked her head coquettishly and offered Nick her little smile. “I will have to go to one of those spiritual centers. Once there, I can send a signal. I then wait for their reply. It is that simple. However, it might take more than one try. I will have to stay somewhere nearby and remain secluded until they can come for me. “
“But when you say signal, what do you mean? I don’t get it. What, you just look to the sky and try and send a ‘help me’ energy vibration?”
“Actually, there is an enhancement tool that will greatly help my efforts. It should ensure a response.”
“Enhancement tool? What do you mean?”
“There are signal devices aboard the Seeker you captured. We are trained to use them in the event of a forced landing. The pilot would have used these at Rendlesham, but everything all happened so fast that we never had a chance to get them out in time.”
“Ah, a signaling device. I wondered about that! So that’s your secret. I wondered why we never found anything before.”
“Your people didn’t know where to look. And if you saw the device, you might not even recognize it for what it is. You don’t think we actually revealed all of our secrets to your government do you? You’re too smart to believe that.”
Actually Nick felt a little stunned. He never considered that this group withheld such information. After all, he thought they had been so cooperative. Now he wondered what else Amie hadn’t told him.
“I need you to get hold of this device for me, Nick. You know they won’t let me in the Seeker craft. They don’t trust any of us that much.”
“There’s something inside the craft you want me to steal for you? It’s not that easy, Amie. I might be able to fabricate a reason to get inside the ship. I’ve visited it often enough during this past year. But it would be nearly impossible to get the device out of there. You can’t take anything away from this facility, except for the clothes you walked in here with.”
“Exactly, I am certainly aware of that.” There was a pause. Amie’s vibration energy increased slightly and Nick felt it and was surprised at its intensity. Then the implication of her statement made sense.
“I get it. It must be a piece of clothing. It is something wearable that your crew left behind. But how does that work?”
“When you wear the special vest, in a high energy field, it helps to amplify your energy signature. Seeker ships are equipped with a special sensor that can detect this from very far away. Much like your satellites, Nick, that can read a heat signature of a person on the ground.”
“Our military would want that technology, if they knew about it.”
“Unfortunately, Nick, your race hasn’t evolved to the point where it would work for you. I believe only a very few of you humans could generate energy vibrations to enable contact.”
Nick looked around. Once again they were one of the few people still lingering in the break room. He looked at the security camera positioned on the wall. “Amie, I need to think about it, and we need to get back to work. I will not be having lunch again with you tomorrow.”
“Alright,” she smiled at him. “I am used to eating alone.” Another pause, and then, “So, do you think you could help me, Nick?”
“I want to Amie, believe me, I really do. But I need time to think about it some more. This is a big move for me. I would be risking everything for you. And please don’t send me any thought-messages in my dreams. I know it must have been you manipulating me. Stop it! If I decide to help you, it will be because I make that decision on my own.”
“Nick, if you decide to help me, you’ll need this.” Amie removed the strange medallion she always wore around her neck and handed it to him, along with a tiny piece of paper she had palmed in her hand so as to not draw attention.
“The paper will explain what to do with it. If you decide not to help me, just give me back my medallion.”
An astonished Nick accepted the necklace, placing it quickly in his pocket, but told her again that taking it didn’t mean he was agreeing to do anything to help her. He still needed to make up his own mind.
“Okay, that’s fair,” was Amie’s final verbal comment as she left Nick sitting there to clear their trays from the table, while she hopped up and left the break room immediately.
Chapter 9
That night in his hotel room, brooding over a glass of wine, Nick’s thoughts turned to Amie. What was he going to do? He knew the wisest option was to do nothing, but every time his mindset moved in that direction, an emotional dissonance strained him. It was as if some force was compelling him to action on her behalf.
Nick poured another glass of wine, vowing to determine where her plan was leading. Amie had told him she had put much thought into it. Why did she suddenly give him that weird piece of jewelry she always wore? He had left it in his coverall pocket, inside his locker at work. So what if he did get that special vest for her. It was just clothing, and it was hers. Maybe the comforting vibrations it seemed to allow would help her live a few years longer. Why shouldn’t he help her with something simple like that? The “spiritual center” talk was probably all just wishful thinking on her part. But she had said that the vest would somehow help her in contacting her own kind. Well, once she had the vest
, if she was caught leaving the hanger with it that was her problem. Nick had no intention of leaving with Amie, like he had daringly done in his dream.
However, Nick knew, as he poured himself the remainder of the contents of the wine bottle, that even one small step in helping Amie, like trying to retrieve the vest she mentioned, could be viewed as trying to help her escape. The special vest or, in fact, any item in the craft, was supposed to be listed as inventory by an employee before being removed. Nick could not remove an unlisted item from the top-secret spaceship environment without it being considered theft.
Yet, three week’s later, during his next routine monthly visit to Nevada, Nick found himself putting in a request to go over to the other hanger and board the Seeker. He brought with him a government laptop from his workplace, with its design specs. In the past year he had done this often. He was working on a special aerodynamic design on the craft. So no one thought it unusual that Nick would put in a request to spend time at the ultra-secret hangar where this special craft was stored.
Warren, the contract security guard, possessed all the secret code numbers needed to let Nick pass into one of the most highly guarded rooms in the nation. The guard was an affable fellow, retired from a long career in the Army and working for years at Area 51 in security. Now he held this rather easy and enviable position, as the gatekeeper to the ultra-secret inter-planetary craft, which Amie and her crew had manned before their crash landing years before.
Warren stood by the door of the spacecraft, while Nick boarded with the government laptop and, as usual, proceeded to examine the control panel. Warren watched Nick for a while, and even tried to talk football with him. But Nick wanted the guard to leave him alone and began ignoring his comments while typing diligently into his laptop. The elderly guard took the hint and quieted down. He soon grew bored, and his feet began to pain him from standing idly by the ship’s doorway.
“How long do you think you will be, sir?”
“Quite a while longer, I think. I need to evaluate the control systems for the propulsion. Why, is there a problem?”
“No, sir. But if you don’t mind, I’m going to wait over by the door. I don’t see why I need to be standing here, hanging over you in the first place. It’s not like you’re going to remove anything and take it away. Right?”
“Right, really no point at all. Make yourself comfortable over there and wait for me to finish.”
Warren had parked a chair in a convenient spot by the entrance door, and it wasn’t long before he ambled over to sit and wait for the engineer to finish his examination of the design workings of the craft. This had happened numerous times before. Occasionally the old guard even nodded off. Nick had counted on that.
As soon as the guard settled into his chair, Nick pulled from his jumpsuit pocket the note Amie had given him. It described the location of the storage bin locker where the special vests were stored. Since it held an important purpose for them, he reasoned the locker should be easy to identify. On the contrary, as he looked in the area Amie had described, he could not locate it. All the walls inside the cabin, except for the pilot’s area, felt smooth to the touch except for their raised symbols, which obviously had meaning to the aliens in their language. Since Nick now understood the aliens had, at times, been disingenuous with the American staff, he realized they might have given disinformation concerning these specially located bins as well. Amie had drawn the symbol representing the storage for the special vests and Nick looked at the symbol on his notepaper and compared it with those in front of him. After a while he matched the symbol, but the wall behind it appeared smooth, with no discernable cracks or openings, as if nothing existed behind it.
Nick had noted years ago that Amie and her crew always wore one piece of jewelry around their necks that differentiated them from their human counterparts. All three wore strange looking medallions, with odd hieroglyphic-like symbols embossed on the periphery and a large, blue colored jewel in the center. Once, about two years back, after they had grown to be friends and were sharing occasional lunches together, Nick had asked Amie about hers. Amie replied that it was a medallion given to each of the Seeker crew upon completion of their training. The language inscribed on the medallion meant the equivalent of the title “Cosmic Voyager”, the name given to the Seeker crews by their government. “Earth has cosmonauts or astronauts. We are cosmic voyagers,” she had explained.
During their meeting weeks before, when Amie had suddenly presented Nick with her medallion, her action had thoroughly confused him, until he read the paper explanation accompanying it. “You must press the large center jewel against the symbol I drew for you on the paper. This is the energy key that activates the lock. Press and gently twist the medallion until the hidden drawer automatically slides out. Then you can remove the special vest.”
Now pressing it and twisting as Amie directed, Nick heard a whirring noise and then a whoosh as the drawer moved towards him expelling, stale, trapped air. He looked inside. It was there, amongst several others, just as she had described. He removed the small, flimsy-feeling vest, folded the thin material once, and placed it beneath his jump suit over his stomach. How that tiny bit of fabric could be so important, Nick didn’t know, but he was realizing apparently there were many secrets yet to be uncovered about these aliens. To close the compartment, Nick pressed the medallion once again to the symbol, as Amie had directed, and the drawer slid closed and locked.
Nick spent a little more time in the craft as a cover for his actions, and then emerged and walked with the guard to the hanger’s exit. Nick paid no attention, as the guard related some story to him about his adventures in a Las Vegas strip club several years back. All Nick could hear was a small voice in his head telling him that he had crossed a line. He was now committed to Amie. He had violated his trust with the government and performed an illegal act for her.
Thanking the guard for his help, Nick returned to the X-56 hanger at lunchtime. He bought a sandwich and a soda from the vending machines, and found Amie sitting with X-ray in the break room.
Nick knew, the minute he sat down beside them, that Amie was aware he had the vest. She was eerie like that, and sometimes it creeped him out a little. He didn’t have to say anything, as both of them nodded at him, and Amie thought-spoke him a powerful “thank you”.
After they allowed Nick to eat his sandwich in silence, Amie sent a thought message his way. “X-ray will meet you in the washroom right after lunch. There are no cameras there. You can pass the vest to him when you are alone together. X-ray will then bring it to me when we are returned to our resident pod for the evening. Again, thank you for doing this for me. You are a true friend.”
It was a month later that Nick and other leaders of the special X-56 project at Area 51 were called to a conference room at the aerospace company in Maryland to receive an urgent notification. The government had run out of funding and was canceling their project.
“Well, that’s that,” Nick’s boss stated flatly. “DoD, at the strong urging of a Congressional Committee, has decided to withdraw funding for the project. We need to wrap up whatever we have done in the next two months.”
His boss took Nick aside, as they left the conference room. “I guess this won’t affect you too much, since you were planning on retiring at the end of the year anyway. You’ll need to finish out the rest of the year here in Maryland, tying up loose ends and writing up some final reports. It will work great for you. Allow you to take it easy before you head off in the sunset to Margaritaville.”
Nick was surprised by the sudden change in direction, but throughout his career these events had happened on other government funded projects. He was more surprised that he hadn’t caught wind of it coming sooner, but lately his thoughts seemed to revolve more around Amie. He realized that once he finished up in Nevada, he would never see her again.
“When, exactly, is the last day? Have you got a date?”
“The last day of September. That ends the fisca
l year and the funding shifts to other priorities. Remote controlled drones are getting most of the emphasis now, I think. That’s what the brass in the Pentagon seem to be buzzing about for the upcoming year.”
“Okay, thanks for letting me know. I’ll pass it along to my team in Nevada and reset the schedule to complete as much as I can before the big date. Do you have any idea what will happen with the X-56? Will they just let all our work lie dormant?”
“I don’t know, haven’t got that far, Nick. You know how it goes with the government. Wasting money means nothing to them.” Then he laughed and clapped Nick on the back. “Who knows, we may pick up the contract again in another few years when a new administration takes over. Hey, you never know, we might even need to recall you from retirement down there in Florida, to help us out if we start it up again.”
Nick decided to wait until the following week before he gathered the team and gave them the bad news. That would give him a little time to do the necessary planning to wrap up the project and figure out the priorities before shutting it down. It would also give him time to figure out what his news would mean for Amie.
Chapter 10
When Nick returned to Las Vegas on the following week, he was greatly concerned about the reception he would get from his fellow team members. He planned to call a special meeting in the large hangar conference room first thing and lay out the bad news directly, no sugar-coating, with plenty of time for questions and answers. Amie, of course, would be in attendance and Nick wondered how she would take the discouraging news.
Nick was thinking these thoughts as he crossed the footbridge that led over the main avenue and into the casino area of MGM Grand. He had just finished dinner at a nice restaurant in the New York, New York hotel with his assistant, Shelley. She was a short, slender, very competent woman who had worked with him on the project for years. She had been extremely shaken to hear of the project shutdown and was full of questions about her future. Nick imagined it would be the same for the rest of his team.
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