Duncan let out an involuntary gasp as the train exited the tunnel and entered a large cavern, a mile and a half long. The ceiling was over a half mile above her head and made of perfectly smooth stone. It was dotted with bright stadium lights. What caught her attention, though, was the cylindrical black object that took up most of the space. The mothership was just over a mile long and a quarter mile in beam at the center. What made the scale so strange was that the skin of the ship was totally smooth, made up of a black, shiny metal that had defied analysis for decades.
“It took us forty-five years before we were able to break down the composition of the skin,” Ferrel, the physicist said, as they exited the tram. “We still can’t replicate it, but we finally knew enough about it to at least be able to cut through it.”
Duncan could now see scaffolding near the front—if it was the front and not the rear—of the mothership. The ship itself rested on a complex platform of struts made of the same black material as the skin. The rock sides of the cavern were also smooth, and the floor totally flat.
They walked alongside the struts, dwarfed by the sheer mass of the ship above them. Underhill pointed at the center as they passed it. “We call it the mothership not just because of its size, but also because there’s space in the center hold to contain all the bouncers and about a dozen more. There are cradles in there that are the exact dimensions to hold every bouncer. We believe this is the way the bouncers got here to Earth, as they are not capable of leaving the atmosphere on their own power.”
“But we still can’t even open the external cargo bay doors.” Von Seeckt spoke for the first time. “And you want to start the engine,” he added accusingly, glaring at Underhill.
“Now, Werner, we’ve been through all that before,” Underhill said.
“It took us forty-five years to simply get in,” Von Seeckt said. “I was here for all forty-five of those years. Now in the space of a few months, you want to try and fly this!”
“What are you so worried about?” Duncan asked. She’d read the file on Von Seeckt and personally, given the man’s background, she did not much care for him. His constant complaining did little to ameliorate that impression.
“If I knew what I was worried about, I’d be even more worried,” Von Seeckt answered. “We don’t understand at all how this ship works.” He stopped to catch his breath and the other members of the party paused also, over three quarters of the way to the nose.
Von Seeckt continued. “I believe part of the propulsion system of this craft works using gravity. In this case it would be the gravity of our planet. Who knows what it would do if it got turned on? Do you want to be responsible for affecting our gravity?”
“I feel so much better,” Von Seeckt snapped back.
A voice on a sound system echoed through the cavern:
“TEN MINUTES UNTIL INITIATION. ALL PERSONNEL ARE TO BE INSIDE PROTECTION. TEN MINUTES.”
“Gentlemen, enough,” Underhill ordered. They were at the base of the scaffolding. “We can see the inside later, but for now, let’s go over here.” He led the way toward a small doorway in a concrete wall. A metal hatch closed behind them and they were inside a blast bunker. “We have two men on board in the control room. They are simply going to turn on the engine, leave it on for ten seconds, and turn it off. They are not going to engage the drive. It’s sort of like starting a car engine but leaving the transmission in neutral.”
“We hope,” Von Seeckt muttered.
“FIVE MINUTES.”
“You are witnessing history,” Underhill said to Duncan. “We have every possible monitoring device set up here,” Ferrel added. “This should give us what we need to understand the engine.”
Duncan glanced over at Von Seeckt, who was sitting in one of the folding chairs along the back wall of the bunker. He seemed uninterested in what was going on.
“ONE MINUTE.”
The countdown now started by the second, reminding Duncan of the space shots she had watched as a youngster.
“TEN.
“NINE.
“EIGHT.
“SEVEN.
“SIX.
“FIVE.
“FOUR.
“THREE.
“TWO.
“ONE.
“INITIATION.”
Duncan felt a wave of nausea sweep through her. She staggered, then leaned over, feeling the contents of her breakfast in Las Vegas come up. She fell to her knees and vomited on the concrete floor. Then, just as quickly, it was over.
“ALL CLEAR. ALL CLEAR. PERSONNEL MAY LEAVE PROTECTION.”
Duncan stood, feeling the taste of acid in the back of her mouth. The men all looked pale and shaken also, but none of them had thrown up.
“What happened?” Duncan asked.
“Nothing happened,” Ferrel replied.
“Goddammit,” Duncan snapped. “I felt it. Something happened.”
“The engine was turned on and then off,” Ferrel said.
“As far as what the effect we felt was, we’ll have to analyze our data.” He pointed at a television screen. “You can see from the replay that nothing happened.” And indeed, on the screen, the mothership sat completely still as the digital readout in the lower right hand corner went through the countdown.
Duncan wiped a hand across her mouth and looked back at Von Seeckt, who was still in his seat. She felt embarrassed to have thrown up, but Ferrel’s response to her brief illness seemed a bit nonchalant. For the first time she wondered if the old man might not be as crazy as he sounded.
In the conference room Gullick and the inner circle of Majic-12 had watched the test on video, although there had been nothing to really see. The mothership had simply sat there, but the data links indicated that the power had indeed been turned on and the ship seemed to function properly.
Gullick smiled, momentarily erasing all the stress lines on his face and scalp. “Gentlemen, the countdown continues as planned.”
CHAPTER 6
The data was being read before it was fully cognizant. The signal came from the northeast. The power reading was not accurate enough to give distance to the disturbance. A quick time check showed that it had not been long since the last time it had been awakened.
This time, though, it knew what had caused the disturbance. The data from the sensors matched information in its memory. The nature of the signal was clear and it knew the source.
Action had to be taken. Valuable energy would have to be expended. As quickly as the decision had been made, execution was begun. The order was given. The next time this occurred, it would be ready and have forces in place.
CHAPTER 7
Las Vegas, Nevada
T - 121 Hours
“Steve Jarvis?”
The bartender grimaced and pointed toward a booth at the rear. As Kelly walked toward it, she studied the man sitting there. She hated to admit it, but he didn’t look like the flake she had expected. Jarvis had straight black hair and wore wire-rim glasses. He was well dressed in a sport coat and tie. Not at all what she had expected from both the subject matter and the discussion on the phone. He was eyeing her as she approached and she could see his disappointment. He must have had hopes for someone taller and with more curves, she assumed.
He stood. “You have the money?”
So much for second impressions, Kelly thought. She pulled out an envelope and handed it to him. Johnny really owed her now, she thought. Jarvis looked in the envelope, thumbed through the bills, and then sat back down, signaling for the waitress. “Would you like a drink?”
“My tab or yours?” Kelly responded. Jarvis laughed. “Yours, of course.” “I’ll have a Coke,” she told the waitress while Jarvis ordered his “usual.”
“What do you want to know?” Jarvis asked as he finished off the drink he had in front of him in one gulp.
“Area 51,” Kelly said.
Jarvis laughed again. “And? There’s a whole lot going on out there. Anything in specific?”
> “Why don’t you just start and I’ll get specific as you go along,” Kelly replied.
Jarvis nodded. “Okay. The usual, then. First, of course, you want to know how I know anything about Area 51, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I worked there from May 1991 to March 1992. I was a contract employee hired by the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office. I worked on propulsion systems, trying to reverse-engineer…” He paused. “Well, let me back up slightly. You know what they have out at Groom Lake, right?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“Nine alien spacecraft,” Jarvis said. “They’re in a hangar cut into the side of the mountain. The government can fly some of them, but they don’t know how the engines work. Thus they can’t replicate them. That’s why I was called in.”
“Where’d the government get these craft?” Kelly asked.
Jarvis shrugged. “Got me. I don’t know. Some say we traded for them, kind of like an interstellar used-car lot, but I don’t believe that. Maybe we just found them. Maybe they crashed, but the ones I saw seemed intact and showed no sign of having crashed.”
“Why’d they bring you in?”
“To figure out the engines. I did my dissertation at MIT on the possibility of magnetic propulsion. We already use magnets on things such as high-speed trains, and the military has been working on a magnetic gun for a long time. But all those systems generate a magnetic field of their own, which requires a lot of energy. My theory was that since the planet already has a magnetic field, if there was some way we could manipulate and control that field with an engine we would have an unlimited source of energy for an atmospheric craft.”
“So the government just hired you out of the blue and took you to a top-secret installation?”
“No, they didn’t hire me out of the blue. I had worked for the government before down at White Sands. A joint contract with JPL working on the possibility of using a long, sloping magnetic track on a mountainside to launch satellites into orbit.”
“Not many mountainsides at White Sands,” Kelly said.
Jarvis smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Are you trying to test my credibility?”
“I paid you five hundred dollars,” Kelly said. “I get to ask the questions.” “Okay, you’re right,” Jarvis agreed. “There aren’t any mountainsides at White Sands. We were simply working on the theory on a small scale. Best we ever got up to was a one-to-thirty model. You can do that using a sand dune.”
“So they brought you up to Area 51,” Kelly prompted, making a notation in a small notebook.
“Yeah. It was weird. I reported to McCarren Field here in Vegas and they put us on this 737 and flew us out there. I had a Q clearance already from my previous work, so that was okay. But, boy, they had the tightest security I’ve ever seen. You couldn’t fart without someone looking over your shoulder. Those security people were scary, walking around in these black windbreakers, wearing shades and carrying submachine guns.”
“Did you stay out there at Area 51?”
“No. They shuttled us back and forth every day on the 737. The only people who live out there are the military people, as far as I could tell. All the scientific people and the worker bees—they were on that plane.”
“That plane flies every day?”
“Every workday. It’s an unmarked 737 with a red stripe down the side.” “Get back to Area 51,” Kelly said, flipping a page.
“What was it like?”
“Like I said, tight security. Everything out of sight. The saucers were inside a big hangar. They had three of them partially disassembled. Those are the ones I got to work on.
“They were about thirty feet in diameter. Silver metal for skin. Flat bottom. About ten feet in from the edges on top the saucer becomes hemispherical to a flat semicircle top, about five to eight feet around.”
Jarvis finished his drink and ordered another before continuing. “The bitch of working on the engines was that there really weren’t any. That really threw the military guys for a loop. You know how a jet fighter is designed: basically a large engine with a small place for the pilot to sit. Well, the disks were mostly empty on the inside. There were these sort of man-sized depressions in the center. I guess where the crew sat.
“Anyway. Getting back to the engines that weren’t. I told you my theory: magnetic propulsion working off a field of energy that is already there. Most conventional engines take up a lot of space because they have to produce energy. The disk engines simply had to redirect energy. There were coils around the edge of the disk, built into the edge and the floor.” Jarvis smiled. “That also explains why they are saucer or disk shaped. The coils are circular and need to be in order to be able to redirect the energy in any direction.”
Kelly found herself falling under Jarvis’s spell. His words made sense, which was her second surprise of the day. She had to remind herself what she had learned on her last phone call earlier today before heading to the airport. “The setup of the coils was relatively simple. The problem was that we couldn’t replicate; hell, we couldn’t even describe the metal that made up the coils. It actually wasn’t a metal. It was more of a…” Jarvis paused. “Suffice it to say it was different and the best minds we had there couldn’t figure it out.”
“Why did they terminate your contract?” Kelly asked.
“Like I just said, we couldn’t figure it out so there was no need to keep us around. I assume they brought other people in.”
“What do you know about a man named Mike Franklin?”
“The nut who lives up in Rachel?”
“He’s dead,” Kelly said, watching Jarvis carefully.
“Took them long enough” was his only reply as he took another drink. “Took who long enough?” Kelly asked.
“The government.” Jarvis leaned forward. “From what I heard Franklin was a jerk. He led people up there on White Sides Mountain to look down at the Groom Lake complex. They would catch him and tell him not to come back but he kept coming back. What did he expect?”
“You don’t seem very interested in how he died,” Kelly said. “You just seem to assume it was the government that killed him.”
“Maybe he had a heart attack.” Jarvis shrugged. “I don’t really give a shit.” “Aren’t you worried about the government coming after you? You seem to be more of a threat than Franklin was.”
“That’s why I’m talking to you,” Jarvis replied. “That’s why I went on that talk show last year. That’s why I keep myself in the public eye.”
“I thought it was the five hundred dollars,” Kelly replied dryly.
“Yeah, the money helps. But I really do it to keep the spooks off my ass. The government won’t kill me because it would raise too many questions and actually make my story more valid. But they have blackballed me. I can’t get a research job anywhere, so I make my living as best I can.”
“I thought it might simply be because you never graduated from MIT,” Kelly said. Jarvis carefully put his drink down. “Our hour is almost up.”
Kelly looked at her watch. “Not even close. You did work at White Sands, but the records show it was on the basic construction of a new research facility, not in the facility itself. In fact, there is no record of you receiving a degree any higher than a BS from the State University of New York at Albany in 1978.”
“If you have any more questions you’d better ask them before your time is up,” Jarvis said.
“Did you talk to a man named Johnny Simmons?”
“I don’t recognize the name.”
Kelly described Johnny, but Jarvis maintained ignorance.
She decided to go back on the attack.
“I checked with Lori Turner, who interviewed you last year for cable TV. She says most of your background doesn’t check out. That makes me doubt your story. That means either you’re a liar or a plant to feed false information. In either case it tells me your story about Area 51 is bullshit.”
Jarvis stood. “Time’s up. Been
a pleasure.” He turned and walked out of the bar. “Great,” Kelly muttered to herself. She needed a way into Area 51 and Jarvis obviously was not the way. She’d just pissed away five hundred dollars and gotten nowhere.
Her hope had been that Johnny had contacted Jarvis.
She looked down at the notes she had made during the interview. What would her dad do in this situation? He’d always said the best way to overcome an obstacle was to approach it in a manner that was least expected. He’d also said that in the case of getting into a place that was guarded, approach it not at the weakest place, but at the strongest because that was the least-expected avenue.
What was the strongest thing about Area 51, from what Jarvis and the research said? “Security,” Kelly muttered to herself, still looking at her notes. They had to have people employed to do their security. Driving out to the Groom Lake area would certainly bring her into contact with the security people, but Johnny had done that and he was gone.
She circled 737 on her pad. That was it. Tomorrow morning she would go out to the airfield and see if anyone got off the plane. If they did, she’d follow them and see what she could turn up. And if tomorrow morning didn’t work, then there was always tomorrow evening.
CHAPTER 8
Devil’s Nest, Nebraska
T - 119 Hours
“We’re green,” Prague announced to the men gathered around him in the dark. “Our eye in the sky says the objective is clear. I want all three birds airborne in two mikes. Move out.” Prague headed toward one of the small AH-6 helicopters and gestured at Turcotte. “You’re with me, meat. Backseat.”
Turcotte grimaced. The meat comment was getting real old, but now was not the time to face it down. He followed Prague and joined him in the helicopter. Prague took the seat up front next to the pilot, while Turcotte had the entire backseat to himself. The doors were off and the cold night air swirled inside, making Turcotte regret he had not put on long underwear. He wished he had been better briefed on what was going to happen. He zipped his black Gore-Tex jacket up tight over his coveralls and took the headset that was hanging on the roof and placed it on, over the small plug already in his ear for the FM radio on the team frequency.
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