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  Quinn checked his computer. ‘The pilot is in the clinic in Vegas being worked on. Major Prague was killed in the crash. The third man, a Captain Mike Turcotte, was slightly injured but is here, sir.”

  “Send him in.”

  A quarter mile up a bedraggled and hurting Turcotte had been waiting for a half hour now. His Gore-Tex jacket was partly melted and he was black from soot and dirt. The bandage he had hurriedly put on his arm in Nebraska was soaked with blood, but he thought the bleeding was stopped. He wasn’t ready to peel the bandage off to check until he was someplace where he could get proper medical care.

  The helicopter had swung by the airstrip outside, dropping him off before continuing on with the pilot to Las Vegas, where the program maintained its medical clinic close by the hospital facilities at Nellis Air Force Base.

  Turcotte had been met by two security men who had hustled him inside the hangar.

  The interior doors were shut, but there was a bouncer in the portion next to the elevator doors. Turcotte studied the craft, recognizing it as the sister of the one that had flown by earlier in Nebraska. For all he knew it could be the same one. It didn’t take a genius to put together the cattle mutilations, the false landing signature lasered into the cornfield, and these craft to recognize that there was a cover-up operation of major proportion being operated here. Turcotte just didn’t understand how the pieces fit together. The mission he had just been on in Nebraska seemed very high risk and he could see no clear-cut purpose to it. Unless it was to draw attention away from this site, but that didn’t quite click.

  One thing was for certain, Turcotte knew. He certainly had something to report on now. It would be someone else’s job to put the pieces together. He was glad to have gotten out with his ass in one piece. He looked down at his right hand. The fingers were shaking. Killing Prague, although not the first time he had killed, weighed heavily on him. He turned his hand over and stared at the scar tissue there for a little while.

  With great effort Turcotte brought his mind back to his present situation. He wasn’t in the clear yet. He was confident that Prague’s burned body would raise no questions.

  He knew that the other helicopter aircrews would return later this morning or maybe even the following morning once they had finished sterilizing the crash site in Nebraska. And as soon as they were debriefed, the detection of the two civilians by the other AH-6 crew would surface.

  Then there would be questions asked that he couldn’t adequately answer. The clock on his career was already ticking, but looking at the alien craft told Turcotte that there were larger issues than his pension involved here. He also knew that the reaction of those in charge when they found out he had let the two civilians go might be more than a letter of reprimand in his official files. These people were playing hardball, and by killing Prague he had entered their playing field. He just hoped he could get out of here and that then Duncan would cover his butt.

  The elevator doors slid open, and the guard inside gestured for him to come in. Turcotte walked in and the floor seemed to fall out from under him as they hurtled down.

  The doors opened again, and Turcotte stepped out into the control room of the Cube. He looked about but the guards hustled him through the room to a corridor in the back. He entered a conference room where the lights were turned down low. There were several people sitting in shadows near the end of the table. Turcotte walked up to the ranking general.

  Turcotte made no attempt to salute; his arm wouldn’t allow it. “Captain Turcotte reporting, sir.” He noted the nameplate on the man’s chest—Gullick.

  Gullick saluted smartly. “What happened?”

  That voice—the same one that had been giving the orders to Prague over the radio—Turcotte remembered now where he had heard it before: the board of inquiry that had investigated what had happened in Germany. That voice had been one of six that had questioned him via speakerphone in the secure holding area in Berlin.

  Turcotte took a deep breath and cleared his mind of every thing but the story he now had to tell. There would be time later to deal with the other issues. Turcotte proceeded to describe the events of the previous night, leaving out the important facts about intercepting the truck with the two civilians and killing Prague, of course. Gullick was most interested in the attack by the small sphere, but there was nothing Turcotte could really say about that as he had not been looking out the front when it had hit the helicopter.

  Gullick listened to his account, then pointed back at the elevator doors. “They’ll take you in to the clinic in the morning. You’re dismissed.”

  So much for thank you, Turcotte thought as he left the room. Gullick had been the most outspoken in his praise of Turcotte’s actions in Germany, praise that had confused and sickened Turcotte. But obviously, the events of the previous evening were not in the same league. Turcotte had no doubt that if he had killed the two civilians and presented their bodies like trophies, he would have received a hearty slap on the back.

  The elevator doors closed off the control room to Turcotte, and he began his return trip to the surface. He should be able to get clear now.

  • • •

  General Gullick waited until the elevator doors had closed behind the Army captain. Then he returned his attention to Major Quinn. “That was no help. I want all the other personnel completely debriefed when they return from the MSS. Have you analyzed the data from Aurora?”

  “Yes, sir. We’ve got several good shots of the bogey.”

  “Put one on the screen,” General Gullick ordered.

  A small glowing ball appeared on Gullick’s computer screen.

  “Scale?” Gullick asked.

  Around the edges of the screen rulers appeared. “It’s three feet in diameter, sir,” Quinn said.

  “Propulsion system?” “Unknown.”

  “Flight dynamics?” “Unknown.”

  “Spectral analysis?”

  “The composition of its skin was resistant to all attempts to—”

  “Unknown, then.” Gullick slapped his hand on the tabletop, glaring at the picture as if he could penetrate it with his eyes. “What the hell do we know about it?”

  “Uh…” Quinn paused and took a deep breath. “Well, sir, we’ve got it in our records.”

  “What?”

  In response Quinn split the screen, the photo taken by Aurora of the bogey sliding to the left and an identical object appearing on the right in grainy black and white.

  “Talk to me, Quinn,” Gullick growled. “Talk to me.”

  “The photo on the right was”—Quinn paused again and cleared his throat with a nervous cough—“the photo on the right was taken by a gun camera in a P-47 Thunderbolt on February twenty-third, 1945, over the Rhine River in Germany.” There was a nervous rustle from the other men in the inner circle of Majic-12 who were at the table.

  “A foo fighter,” Gullick said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s a foo fighter?” Kennedy asked.

  Gullick remained silent, digesting the revelation. Quinn looked at the information he had dredged up on his computer screen and continued for the others in the room who didn’t know their aviation history. “The object on the right was called a ‘foo fighter.’ There were numerous sightings of these objects made by aircrews during World War II. Because they were initially suspected to be Japanese and German secret weapons, all information concerning them was classified.

  “The foo fighter reports started in late 1944. They were described as metallic spheres or balls of light, about three feet in diameter. Since the bomber aircrews that reported them were usually veterans and gun cameras on board escort fighters occasionally recorded them also, giving factual support to those accounts, the reports were taken seriously.”

  Quinn was in his element. Before being assigned to the project he had worked in Project Blue Book, the Air Force’s classified study group on UFOs—reports of un identified craft other than the ones kept at Area 51. Blue Book has
also been a smokescreen for the Area 51 project and a purveyor of disinformation to mislead serious researchers. The foo fighters were in the Blue Book files and most aviators had heard of them.

  “The lid could not be kept on such a widespread occurrence, and reports of foo fighters did leak out to the general press, and they are even mentioned in some modern books about UFOs. What didn’t leak out, though, is that we lost twelve aircraft to the foo fighters. Every time one of our fighters or bombers would try to get close to one or fire on them—they were bogies, after all—the foo fighters would turn and ram the attacker, leaving our aircraft the worse for the encounter. Just like what happened to Nightscape Six. Because of these encounters, classified standing orders were issued by Army Air Corps high command to leave the foo fighters alone. Apparently that worked, because there were no further reports of attacks.

  “After the war, when intelligence went through Japanese and German records, it was discovered that they, too, had run into foo fighters and experienced the same results. We know they weren’t behind them from what we found. In fact, the records showed they thought the spheres were our secret weapons.

  “Of particular interest is an incident that is still classified Q, level five.” Quinn hesitated, but Gullick gestured for him to go on and tell the others. “On August sixth, 1945, when the Enola Gay flew the first atomic mission toward Hiroshima, it was accompanied the entire way by three foo fighters. The mission was almost scrapped when the spheres appeared, but the commander on the ground at the departure airfield at Tinian decided to continue it. There was no hostile action by the foo fighters and the situation was repeated several days later during the mission to Nagasaki.”

  Kennedy leaned forward. “Von Seeckt was on the airfield there at Tinian back when they launched the Enola Gay carrying that bomb, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, sir. Von Seeckt was there,” Quinn replied.

  “And we still don’t know anything about these foo fighters, do we?” Gullick asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Russian?” Kennedy asked.

  Quinn stared at him. “Excuse me, sir?”

  “They couldn’t have been Russian, could they? The sons of bitches did beat us with Sputnik. Maybe they made these things.”

  “Uh, no, sir, I don’t believe there was any indication they were Russian,” Quinn replied. “Once the war was over, reports about the foo fighters ended for a while.”

  “For a while?” Kennedy repeated.

  “In 1986 a bogey was picked up in the atmosphere by space surveillance and tracked,” Quinn said. “The object did not fit any known aircraft parameters.” Quinn pressed a key and a new picture appeared on the screen. It looked as if a child had gone crazy with a bright green pen. A line zigzagged across the screen and looped back on itself several times. “This is the flight path of a bogey they picked up back in eighty-six flying at altitudes ranging from four to one hundred and eighty thousand feet.” Quinn hit another button. “This is the flight pattern of our bogey tonight superimposed on the one from eighty-six.” The two were very similar. “There’s something else, sir.”

  “And that is?” Gullick asked.

  “There was another series of unexplained sightings right after this one. The Navy along with the DIA were running an operation called Project Aquarius. It was, um, well, what they were doing—”

  “Spit it out, man!” Gullick ordered.

  “They were experimenting using psychics to try to locate submarines.” “Oh, Christ,” Gullick muttered. “And?” he wearily asked.

  “The psychics were doing reasonably well. About a sixty-percent success rate on getting the approximate longitude and latitude of submerged submarines simply by sitting in a room in the Pentagon and using mental imaging of a photograph of each specific submarine.

  “There was an unexpected thing that occurred every once in a while, though. One of the psychics would pick up the image of something else at the same coordinates as the submarines. Something hovering above the location of the sub.”

  “And, let me guess,” Gullick said. “We don’t know what that something was, correct?”

  “Space surveillance picked up…” Quinn hit his keyboard and let the flight-path schematic speak for itself: another radical flight pattern. “Did anyone ever explain any of these sightings?” Gullick asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “So we have a real UFO on our hands now, don’t we?”

  Gullick said.

  “Uh, yes, sir.”

  “Well, that’s just fucking fine!” Gullick snapped. “That’s all I need right now.” He glared at Admiral Coakley. “I want that thing recovered and I want to know what the hell it is!”

  As the men filed out, Kennedy stopped by General Gullick and sat down next to him. “Maybe we should check with Hemstadt at Dulce about these foo fighters,” he said.

  “There might be some information about them in the Machine.”

  Gullick looked up from the tabletop and stared into Kennedy’s eyes. “Do you want to go to Dulce to hook up to the Machine?”

  Kennedy swallowed. “I thought we could just call him and ask. It’s possible that the Machine might be controlling—”

  “You think too much,” Gullick cut him off, ending the conversation.

  CHAPTER 11

  Vicinity Dulce, New Mexico

  T - 113 Hours, 30 Minutes

  Johnny Simmons awoke to darkness. At least he thought he was awake. He could see nothing, hear nothing. When he tried to move, panic set in. His limbs didn’t respond. He had a horrible feeling of being awake but asleep, unable to connect the conscious mind with the nervous system to produce action. He felt detached from his body and reality.

  A mind floating in a black void.

  Then came the pain. Without sight or sound it exploded into his brain, becoming all his mind, all of his world. It was coming from every nerve ending in jagged, climbing spikes, far beyond anything he had thought possible.

  Johnny screamed, and the worst of it all was that he couldn’t hear his own voice.

  CHAPTER 12

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  T - 112 Hours, 30 Minutes

  Las Vegas slowed down slightly at five-thirty in the morning. The neon still glowed, and there were people on the streets, most heading to their rooms for a few hours of sleep before starting over again on the games of chance.

  Kelly Reynolds was doing the opposite, starting her day after catching three hours of sleep in her motel room. The first thing she had done when the alarm went off was call Johnny’s apartment on the slim chance that he might be there or have changed the message.

  She looked up as a red-eye flight roared in toward the horizon. Walk to the sounds of the planes, she thought to herself, paraphrasing Napoleon. She’d rent a car at the airport. Right now she needed the fresh air and the time to think. This is what dad would have done, go for the strongest link.

  The thought brought a sad smile to her face. Her father and his stories. The best time of his life had been over before he was twenty. What a horrible way to spend the rest of one’s life, Kelly thought.

  World War II. The last good war. Her dad had served in the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. He’d jumped into Italy during the last year of the war and worked with the partisans. Running the hills with a band of renegades licensed to kill Germans and take what they needed by force. Then he’d worked in Europe as the war closed out, helping with the war crimes trials. Much of what he saw there had soured him on mankind.

  Peace had never been the same. He’d turned to the slow death of the bottle and lived with his memories and his nightmares. Kelly’s mom had retreated into her own brain and shut out the outside world. And because of them Kelly had grown up fast. She wondered if her dad had still been alive, if his liver had lasted a little longer, how the affair at Nellis would have turned out. She might have been able to go to him for help. At the very least, she would have considered what he would have done ins
tead of blazing her own path to destruction. He certainly would not have bought into Prague’s line so naively. He would have told her to approach the bait very slowly and to watch out for the hook.

  The only legacy she had from her dad was his stories.

  But she was his legacy and that was more than she could say for herself at forty-two. No children and not much of a career to counterweight that. As she walked to the airport, Kelly felt an overwhelming depression. The only thing that kept her going was Johnny. He needed her.

  She stopped in an all-night market and bought two packs of cigarettes and a lighter.

  Area 51

  Turcotte strapped himself into the plane seat and tried to get comfortable. He’d spent the last two hours, since leaving the underground control room, alone, waiting in a small room off of the hangar, until they rolled out the stairs to load the 737 to fly into Las Vegas and pick up the morning shift of workers. He was glad that he was going to be able to get out of here. First thing he would do in Las Vegas after getting his arm sewn up was call Duncan on the number he had memorized. He wanted to get everything off his chest. Then hopefully he could leave all this behind.

  He noticed an old man come on board, accompanied by two younger men whose demeanor suggested they were bodyguards for the first man. Despite the fact that they were the only other passengers on board, the old man took the front row of seats on the other side of the plane from Turcotte. The bodyguards, apparently satisfied there were no immediate threats, sat down a few rows back as the plane’s door was shut by the same hard-faced man who had greeted Turcotte with the breathalyzer a little less than forty hours ago. That man disappeared into the cockpit.

  “They are fools,” the old man muttered in German, his gnarled hands wrapped around a cane with a silver handle.

  Turcotte ignored him, looking out the window at the base of Groom Mountain. Even this close—less than two hundred meters away—it was almost impossible to tell that there was a hangar built into the side of the mountain.

  Turcotte wondered how much money had been poured into this facility. Several billion dollars at least. Of course, with the U.S. government having a covert black budget somewhere between thirty-four and fifty billion dollars a year, he knew that was just a drop in the bucket.