Area 51

CHAPTER 28

Major Quinn blinked hard, trying to keep his eyes open against the lack of sleep. He pulled the collar of his Gore-Tex parka tighter around his neck and shivered. It was cold in the desert at night, and the wind whipping in the open windows of the humvee did not help. They had left Hangar One ten minutes ago and were racing around the base of Groom Mountain, General Gullick at the wheel and Quinn in the passenger seat. He wondered why the general had had to choose the single vehicle from the motor pool that had no top to it, instead of one of the others, but he knew better than to ask.

There was no road. There never had been one. Roads showed up in satellite photos. They had stayed on the runway most of the distance, until they turned off and headed directly for the mountainside. Now they rolled across the desert floor, the suspension of the vehicle easily handling the rough terrain. Gullick leaned over and checked their GPS, ground positioning system, linked in to satellites overhead. It gave their location to within five feet, even on the move. The headlights on the jeep-like vehicle were off, and Gullick was using night vision goggles, allowing them to travel unseen to the naked eye. The outer security net was tight: no unwanted watchers on White Sides Mountain this evening. And the skies were being carefully watched with the invisible fingers of radar to keep out unwanted overflights. Helicopter gunships were ready on the flight line outside Hangar One.

Still, Gullick wanted to take no chances. He braked as a figure stepped out of the darkness. The man walked up to the humvee, weapon at the ready. The man snapped to attention when he recognized General Gullick. Despite the night vision goggles there was no mistaking the general’s presence.

“Sir! The engineers are just ahead, under that camouflage net.”

Gullick accelerated. Quinn was grateful when they finally stopped near several trucks parked under a desert camouflage net. An officer walked up to the humvee and smartly saluted.

“Sir, Captain Henson, Forty-Fifth Engineers.”

Gullick returned the salute and stepped out, Quinn following. “What’s your status?” Gullick asked.

“All charges are in place. We’re completing the final wiring now. We’ll be all set by dawn.” He held up a remote detonator the size of a cellular phone. “Then all it will take is a simple command on this. It’s linked into the computer that controls the sequence of firing.” Henson led the way to a humvee parked under the camouflage net and showed the general a laptop. “The sequence is critical to get the rock in the outside wall to come down in a controlled manner. Very similar to what happens when they demolish tall buildings in a built-up area — making the rubble come down on itself but not hit the ship.”

The general took the remote and turned it around in his hands, almost caressing it.

“Be careful, sir,” Captain Henson said.

Gullick reached down and pulled out his pistol. He pushed the barrel into the underside of Henson’s jaw.

“Don’t you ever dare speak to me like that, mister. Do you understand?” His thumb cocked the hammer back, the sound very loud in the clear night air. “Yes, sir,” Henson managed to get out.

Gullick’s voice rose. “I have had to take shit from civilian pukes for thirty years! I’ll be goddamned if I will accept even the slightest disrespect from a man in uniform. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir!”

Quinn froze, stunned at the outburst.

“You fucking people.” Gullick’s voice had dropped to a mutter, and although the gun was still pressing into Henson’s skin, his eyes had become unfocused. “I’ve given my life for you people,” Gullick whispered. “I’ve done all…” The general’s eyes refocused.

He quickly bolstered the gun and turned to the mountainside, behind which the mothership rested. “Show me the charges,” he said in a normal voice.

A voice yelled out shrilly. “They’re here! They’re here!”

Turcotte had his gun out, hammer cocked, as he kicked open the driver’s door of the van and went down into squat, peering around in the dark for a target. The screaming continued and Turcotte slowly relaxed and stood up he recognized the voice. He walked around to the right side and opened the door.

Kelly held Johnny, gripping him tightly around the shoulders. “It’s not real Johnny. It’s not real.”

Simmons was pressed up in the left rear corner, staring wide-eyed straight ahead. “I can see them! I can see them? I’m not going to let them take me again! I won’t go back!”

“It’s Kelly, Johnny! It’s Kelly! I’m here.”

For the first time since they’d picked him up, Johnny showed some awareness of his surroundings. “Kelly.” He blinked, trying to focus on her. “Kelly.”

“It’s okay, Johnny. I came and got you like you wanted. I came and got you.” “Kelly — they’re real. I saw them. They took me. They did things to me.” “It’s okay, Johnny. You’re safe now. You’re safe.”

Johnny turned away and curled into a ball and Kelly held on to him. Turcotte looked at Von Seeckt and Nabinger.

“Get some sleep. We’ll be leaving shortly.” He turned and walked back outside, sliding the door shut behind him.

Turcotte walked out into the darkness. The stars glistened above the mountains that surrounded him on all sides. It would be dawn soon. He could sense it in the slightest change in the sky to the east. Most people would have not been able to tell, but Turcotte had spent many dark nights waiting for the dawn to come.

He thought of the people in the van. Von Seeckt with his demons from the past and fears for the future. Johnny Simmons and the demons that had been forced on him. Nabinger with his questions from the past and his quest for answers. Kelly— Turcotte paused — Kelly had her own ghosts, it seemed.

He turned as the van door opened. Kelly slipped out and walked over. “Johnny’s asleep. Or passed out. I can’t tell which it is.”

“What do you think they did to him?”

“Screwed with his brain,” Kelly said bitterly. “Made him think he got picked up by aliens and taken aboard a spaceship and had all sorts of experiments run on him.”

“Think he’ll get over it?” Turcotte asked.

“Why should he? He did get picked up by aliens,” Kelly said.

“What?”

“Whatever they did to his brain is real. So for him it’s all real. So, no, I don’t think he’ll ever get over it. You never get over reality. You just get on with your life.”

“What reality happened to you?”

Kelly just looked at him.

“You said that you’d tell me, first chance you got,” Turcotte said. He waited.

After a minute Kelly spoke. “I was working for an independent film company. Actually, I was part of an independent film company. I owned a piece. We were doing well. We did documentaries and freelance work. National Geographic in its early TV days had us work a couple of their pieces. It was before all these cable channels — Discovery and the like. Hell, we were before our time. We were on the right path.

“Then I got a letter. I still have the damn thing. Eight years ago. From a captain in the Air Force at Nellis Air Force Base. The letter stated that the Air Force was interested in making a series of documentaries. Some on the space program, some on their work in high-altitude medicine and other things.

“It sounded interesting, so I went to Nellis and met this captain. We talked about the various subjects he had mentioned in the letter, then, almost as an aside, he mentioned that they had some interesting footage in the public affairs office there.

“So I say, ‘Of what?’ And he says, ‘Of a UFO landing at the air base here.’”

“I about choked on my coffee. He said it like you would mention the sun came up this morning. Very calm and almost uninterested. I should have known from that, that it was a setup. But like I said, I was hungry. We were still struggling and this was the biggest thing ever thrown our way.

“Then, of course, he showed me the film. That removed all doubt. It was shot in black and white. He told me it had been taken in 1970. They had picked up a bogey on radar at Nellis. At first they thought it might be a stray civilian aircraft. They scrambled a pair of F-16’s to check it out. The first half of the film they showed me was from the aircraft’s gun cameras. It starts out with blank sky, then you catch a glimpse of something moving fast across the sky. The camera centers in and there’s a saucer-shaped object. It’s hard to tell the size because there’s no reference scale. But I could see the desert and mountains in the background, moving. The disk cut across a lot of terrain. If it had just been against sky I might have questioned it more. The disk looked to be about thirty feet in diameter and silvery. It moved in abrupt jerks back and forth.

“If it was a fake, it was a very good fake — not someone hanging a hubcap out the window of their car and taping it with a video camera as they drove. Believe me, I’ve actually seen a couple of those.” She walked a little farther along the edge of the overlook and Turcotte followed.

“So the camera tracks this saucer and it descends. I can see an airstrip at the base of some mountains come into view. At the time I thought it was Nellis Air Force Base, but now I know it must have been the airstrip at Groom Lake. The saucer goes down, almost to the ground, and the F-16 goes by and that’s it for the gun camera. There’s a splice in the film and then I get it in color from the ground. Shot from the control tower, Prague tells me.”

“Wait a second,” Turcotte interrupted. “Give me that name again.”

“Prague. That was the Air Force captain who I met and who sent me the letter. Why?”

“I tell you when you’re done,” Turcotte said. “Go on.”

“So the saucer comes to a hover over the runway and stays there for a few minutes. I could see emergency vehicles being deployed — fire trucks with their lights on. I could see the reflection of the lights off the skin of the saucer — a very difficult effect to fake. Pretty much impossible to do, given the technology of the time. Then Air Force police vehicles being deployed. Then the saucer starts to go straight up and it just outraces the ability of the camera operator to track it and it’s gone.

“I asked Prague why he wanted to give me this film, and he said the Air Force was trying to get people off its back concerning Project Blue Book. That they wanted to show that the Air Force wasn’t covering things up and that there wasn’t this great conspiracy that many UFO enthusiasts claim.

“So I left Nellis and went straight to two major distribution companies and told them what I had just seen. Of course they didn’t believe me and of course, Prague hadn’t given me a copy of the film. He had to clear release with his superiors, he told me, and for that he needed to know who I was going to distribute it through.

“So when these companies call Nellis and try to get hold of Prague, they’re told that such a person doesn’t exist. When they mention the film, they get laughed at, which doesn’t do their disposition much good. I got trashed. I was labeled a nut and nobody wanted to deal with me. I was bankrupt within three months.”

“Describe the saucer you saw again,” Turcotte said.

Kelly did.

“The film was real,” Turcotte said. “That sounds like ones of the bouncers in the hangar. They really set you up good.”

“I know,” Kelly replied. “I wouldn’t have gone to the distributors for financing if I didn’t believe the film was real. That’s what really pissed me off about the whole thing.” The sky was getting noticeably brighter in the east.

“That’s what’s so cunning about what they’ve been doing there in Area 51. It is real, but they set up the people who could truly expose it as frauds or kooks.” Kelly pointed at the van, which was fifty feet away.

“They destroyed Johnny the same way. In his mind, after what they did to him in that tank, he thinks he was really abducted by aliens. And the fact is that he was abducted. That he probably did see things they didn’t want him to see. But if he goes public with it, he’s laughed at. Yet in his mind it is real. That’s about the worst thing you can do to a person next to physically killing him. It can drive you insane.”

She turned back to face Turcotte. “So now you know why I’m not too trusting.” “I can understand that.”

“What was on sublevel one?” Kelly asked.

Turcotte succinctly told her, leaving out his two phone calls after escaping. Kelly shuddered. “These people have to be stopped.”

“I agree,” Turcotte said. “We’ve made a start on that. You might be pleased to know that Prague was—” He paused as there was a thumping sound inside the van.

They both turned as the door to the van shot open and Johnny appeared, holding the arm of one of the captain’s chairs in his hands and swinging it about wildly. “You won’t get me!” he screamed.

Turcotte and Kelly ran forward, but Johnny turned from them and sprinted along the path.

“Johnny, stop!” Kelly yelled.

“You won’t get me!” Johnny screeched. He halted, brandishing the chair arm. “You won’t get me.”

“Johnny, it’s Kelly,” she said, slowly taking a step forward. The others were piling out of the van, Nabinger rubbing the side of his head.

“I won’t let you get me!” Johnny turned and climbed up on the railing.

“Get down, Johnny,” Kelly said. “Please get down.”

“I won’t let them get me,” Johnny said, and he stepped out into the darkness and disappeared.

“Oh, God!” Kelly cried out as she ran up to the edge and looked over. Turcotte was right behind her. In the early-morning light they could just make out Johnny’s body lying on the rock, two hundred feet below.

“We have to get him!” Kelly cried out.

Turcotte knew there was no way down into the gulley without climbing equipment. He also knew Johnny was dead; not only no one could have survived that fall, the twisted and still way the body was lying confirmed it.

He wrapped his arms around Kelly and held her.

Fifteen minutes later a very somber group was seated inside the van. Nabinger had a bump on his head where Johnny had hit him with the arm of the chair before bolting from the van. It had taken ten of the past fifteen minutes for Turcotte to convince Kelly that they couldn’t get to Johnny and that he would have to stay where he had fallen.

“All right,” Turcotte began. “We have to decide what to do. The first thing is to agree on our goal. I think—”

“We get these bastards,” Kelly said. “We get them and we finish them. I want to see every one of them — every single one out at Area 51 and in Dulce — be brought to justice.”

“We have to stop the mothership from flying first,” Von Seeckt cut in. “That must be our primary goal. I understand your desire for vengeance, but the mothership is a danger to the planet. We know that now from the translation of the tablets. We must stop that first.”

“It’s the one with the shortest fuse,” Turcotte said. “We have to stop what they’re doing there and in Dulce, but that can come after we stop the mothership test flight.” He looked at Kelly. “Do you agree?”

She reluctantly nodded, her eyes red rimmed from crying.

“All right,” Turcotte said. “If that’s our primary goal, the way I see it, we got two choices. One is to go public with this. Head to the nearest big town — maybe Salt Lake city — and try to get the attention of someone in the media. That way we use public opinion to stop the test. The other option is to take matters into our own hands, go back to Area 51, and try to stop the test ourselves.”

Turcotte turned to Kelly. “I know it’s hard, but we need your input on this. Will going to the media work?”

She closed her eyes for a few moments, then opened them. “To be blunt, going public is the way you would think we should go. It’s the way I would like to go. The problem is that going to the media does not guarantee that your story will get to the public. We have no proof of—”

“We have the photos of the tablets,” Nabinger cut in.

“Yes, Professor,” Kelly said, “but you’re the only one who can translate them. And since you’re with us, I think people are going to look at that a bit skeptically. There was a stone found in America — I think in New England — that the finder claimed showed that ancient Greeks were in the New World a millennium before the Vikings. Unfortunately, the man’s proof rested on his translation of the markings on the stone. Other scholars, once they had a chance to study the stone, disagreed. Even if we find scholars who would agree with your translations, it would take too long. Certainly more than two days.”

Kelly looked around the circle. “The same is true of all of us. Von Seeckt could tell his story but no one would believe it for a while, if ever, without proof. People in the media don’t report or print everything that comes to them, because a lot of what comes to them is bogus and our stories are, to say the least, somewhat outrageous.” She looked out the window. “Johnny’s dead now. We don’t even have him.”

“Another thing we must keep in mind,” Turcotte said, remembering the conversation he’d had earlier that morning with Colonel Mickell, “is that we have committed crimes. I’ve killed people. We all entered the facility at Dulce illegally. We might not get much of a chance to tell our story before we’re hauled off to jail, and once that happens we’ll be under the control of the government.”

“Then we must do it ourselves,” Von Seeckt announced. “It is what I said must happen all along.”

“This isn’t going to be as easy as Dulce,” Turcotte said. “Not only do they have better security at Area 51, but they are going to be prepared. You can be sure that General Gullick is going to tighten things down the closer the test gets.”

“You know the area and the facility,” Nabinger said, turning to Von Seeckt. “What do you think?”

“I think Captain Turcotte is correct. It will be next to impossible, but I also believe that we must try.”

“Then let’s start planning,” Turcotte said.