Area 51 (11 page)

"Get some sleep. You'll need the rest," Prague said, appearing suddenly at his shoulder. "We'll be ready to move after dark and you won't get any sleep for a while." Prague smiled. "Sleep good, meat, " he added in German.

Turcotte stared at him for a second, then walked over to where the other off-shift security men were dozing in the shade offered by several trees. He grabbed a Gore-Tex bivy sack and slid into it, zipping it up around his chin. He thought about everything he had seen so far for about five minutes, wondering what Prague had been told about him.

He finally decided he didn't have a clue what was going on or what Prague knew, and switched his brain off.

As he fell asleep, his mind shifted to other scenes.

Prague's final words in German echoed through his brain and Turcotte fell into an uneasy slumber with the echo of gunfire and German voices screaming in fear and pain.

THE HANGAR, AREA 51

T-129 HOURS, 4O MINUTES

Lisa Duncan had read the figures and studied the classified photos, but they had not prepared her for the sheer size of this operation. Flying into Area 51 on board one of their black helicopters, she had been impressed with the long runway and the aboveground base facilities, but that impression had been dwarfed by what was hidden out of sight.

Taking the elevator up from the Cube, she and her scientific escorts entered a large room carved out of the rock of Groom Mountain. This was the hangar, over three quarters of a mile long and a quarter mile wide. Three of the walls, the floor, and roof--one hundred feet above their heads--were rock. The last side was a series of camouflaged sliding doors that opened up onto the north end of the runway.

The true size of the hangar could only be seen on the rare occasions, like now, when all the dividers between the various bays were unfolded and a person could look straight through from one end to the other. Duncan wondered if they had done that to impress her. If they had, it was working.

She was still bothered by her confrontation with General Gullick. She'd been briefed for the job by the President's national security adviser, but even he had seemed uncertain about what was going on with Majic-12. It actually wasn't that surprising to Duncan. In her work with medical companies she'd often had to deal with government bureaucracy and found it to be a formidable maze of selfpropagating, self-serving structures to negotiate. As Gullick had made very clear: Majic-12 had been around for fifty-four years. The unspoken parallel was that the President whom Duncan was working for had been around for only three.

She knew that meant that the members of Majic-12 implicitly believed they had a greater legitimacy than the elected officials who were supposed to oversee the project.

The CIA, NSA, the Pentagon--all were bureaucracies that had weathered numerous administrations and changes in the political winds. Majic-12 was another one, albeit much more secretive. The issue, though, was why were Gullick and the others in such a rush to fly the mothership?

That issue and other disturbing rumors about Majic-12 operations that had sifted their way back to Washington was the reason Duncan was here. She already had some dirt on the program, as she'd indicated to Gullick; but that was past dirt, as he'd indicated in return. Most of the men involved in Paperclip were long dead. She had to find out what was presently happening. To do that she had to pay attention, so when her guide spoke up, she put away her worries.

"This is the hangar we built in 1951," Professor Underbill, the aeronautics expert, explained. "We've added to it over the years." He pointed at the nine silvery craft parked in their cradles. "You have all the information on how and where we found the bouncers. Currently, six are operational."

"What about the other three?" she asked.

"Those are the ones we're working on. Taking apart the engines to see if we can reverse-engineer them. Trying to understand the control and flight system along with other technology."

She nodded and followed as they walked along the back of the hangar. There were workers on each of the craft, doing things whose purpose was unclear. She had indeed studied the history of these craft, which seemed simply to have been abandoned in various places some time in the past. From the conditions of the locations they were found in, the best guess had been about ten thousand years ago.

The craft themselves seemed not to have aged at all.

There had been very few answers about the origin or purpose or original owners of the craft in the briefing papers. Something that didn't seem to concern the people out here very much. That bothered Duncan, because she liked thinking in analogies and she wondered how she would feel if she had left her car parked somewhere and came back later to find that it had been appropriated and someone was taking the engine apart. Even though the bouncers had been abandoned long ago, centuries might be just a day or two in the relative time scale of the original owners.

"Why does everyone out here call them 'bouncers'?" she asked. "In the briefing papers they were called 'magnetic-drive atmospheric craft' or 'MDAC' or simply

'disks'.

Underbill laughed. "We use the 'MDAC for scientific people who need a fancy title. We all call them 'disks' or 'bouncers.' The reason for the latter, well, wait till you see one in flight. They can change directions on a dime. Most people who watch them think we call them 'bouncers' because they do seem to suddenly bounce off an invisible wall when they change direction--that's how quick they can do it. But if you talk to the original test pilots who flew them, they called them 'bouncers' because of the way they got thrown around on the inside during those abrupt maneuvers. It took us quite a while to come up with the technology and flight parameters so that the pilots wouldn't be injured when they had the aircraft at speed."

Underbill pointed at a metal door along the back wall.

"This way, please."

The door slid open as they approached, and inside was an eight-passenger train on an electric monorail. Duncan stepped into the car along with Underbill, Von Seeckt, Slayden, Ferrel, and Cruise. The car immediately started up and they were whisked into a brightly lit tunnel.

Underbill continued to play tour guide. "It's a little over four miles to Hangar Two, where we found the mothership.

In fact, that's the reason this base is here. Most people think we picked this site because of the isolation, but that was simply an added benefit.

"This part of Nevada was originally being looked over to be the site of the first atomic tests early in World War II, when the surveyors found that the readings on some of their instruments were being affected by a large metallic object. They pinpointed the location, dug, and found what we now call the mothership in Hangar Two. Whoever left the ship here had the technology to blast out a place big enough to leave it and then cover it over."

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 Underbill.

"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?"

"That's my area of expertise," Ferrel said, "and I can assure you there are no problems."

"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," Underbill 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," Underbill 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 ofMajic-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."

6

The data was being read before it was fully cognizant. Thesignal 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.

-

94 -

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.