The Rift

by Bob Mayer

  Watkins typed in the new destination for the encrypted message and sent it.

  Then she dumped the phone back into the bag and held her baby tight, murmuring an apology. She was grateful for the check the Loop sent every month, because the death benefits just weren’t enough to cover three kids.

  And it made her feel a part of…

  What exactly, she wasn’t sure.

  She looked in her baby’s eyes and she saw his eyes and she felt that searing clash of joy over the life she held and agony over the life she’d lost.

  Then she couraged up and got the milk.

  The Archives elicited more excitement from Ivar than the Can had, perhaps because the Can reminded him of “bench time,” which some physicists loved but others avoided.

  “Somebody saw this and thought of the ending for Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Ivar said as they walked in the yawning steel doors in the front of the Area 51 Archive. As far as one could see were rows and rows of crates, vehicles, planes, boats, and weird-shaped objects covered in tarps, until it all faded into a haze. There was a far end; one could barely make it out in the distance. Ivar estimated it was over a half mile away.

  “It’s bigger than the Boeing Everett Factory,” Doc said proudly, as if he’d put in most of the rivets himself. He was beginning to really get on Ivar’s nerves, with his “I’ve been here longer than you and know more than you and am smarter than you and have more PhDs than you” attitude.

  Doc blithely continued. “People think the Boeing factory is the biggest building in the world. And,” he added, quite unnecessarily—Doc was well known among the Nightstalkers for adding the unnecessary, which on occasion had turned out to be necessary—“the Archives are underground, enclosed in this cavern inside Groom Mountain.”

  Ivar bit back his sarcastic reply that he hadn’t known they’d been inside the mountain for over an hour now. He’d worked under a lot of professors like Doc and sarcasm rarely worked. Most scientists took things quite literally. The Big Bang Theory was funny; Doc wasn’t.

  They stepped across the metal rail on which the huge doors rolled shut and entered the Archives, only after having their retinas scanned for the umpteenth time by a pair of guards who looked so bored, they might shoot someone just to watch them die, aka Johnny Cash style.

  “Warehouse 13,” Ivar said, choosing another approach. “Someone definitely took the last scene of Raiders as the idea for that.”

  “This is real,” Doc said, obviously not a TV or movie person. He pointed down. “The entire Archives is on large springs to absorb the impact if a nuke hit the mountain above us. They built this long before they built NORAD. The first building was just a World War Two prefab hut, but as you can see, it’s expanded considerably since then.”

  “Why?” Ivar asked.

  “During the Cold War—” Doc began, but Ivar cut him off when he was heading for the wrong pass.

  “I mean, why did Area 51 need an archive?”

  Doc sighed as they strolled down the main aisle. A golf cart came whizzing by, two men in white coats on it, one of them staring at a map, giving directions. It sped around a corner and was gone. Somewhere in the distance it sounded like someone was pounding a sledgehammer on a pipe, a distinct sound, occurring every twenty seconds or so.

  “World War Two,” Doc said. He, too, had a map, an actual paper map, in his hand and he consulted it. He pointed left. “The earliest stuff gathered is in that corner. From Operation Paperclip.”

  “Sounds innocent enough,” Ivar said, more interested to learn whether they had the Ark of the Covenant in here or at least some crystal skulls.

  “You have no idea what Operation Paperclip was.” Doc stopped, carefully folded the map, and placed it in his breast pocket. He adjusted his spectacles and looked Ivar up and down, as if he were a specimen that had crawled out from under some rock. “Very few things we deal with here are innocent. Innocence is something one leaves behind when coming to Area 51. Let me tell you about innocence and this great country we call our own. Do you know what the OSS was?”

  Ivar shook his head, surprised at Doc’s intensity. It wasn’t like they were talking about particle physics or quantum mechanics.

  “As the Second World War was coming to a close,” Doc said, “there were those in the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA and Special Forces, who were looking ahead. In a way, they were also our predecessors here in the Nightstalkers. They were already looking past the war to the next war. There’s always a next war,” Doc added.

  That struck a chord with Ivar because war had struck close to him just four years ago. “As Plato said a long, long time ago, ‘only the dead have seen the end of war.’”

  “You didn’t get the full in-brief from Moms and Nada,” Doc said. “But you get Moms talking, she’ll tell you the Nightstalkers were founded the day guys like you and me, scientists, split the atom and then learned how to turn that into a weapon.”

  “‘I am become—’”

  Doc’s tolerance for Ivar’s deep well of quotes was on a tight leash. “Yes, yes. I know what Oppenheimer said. Moms quotes it all the time. But World War Two changed warfare. We not only saw our own country invent, and use, the atomic bomb, but we also saw other weapons of mass destruction developed to even more lethal levels by scientists. All these weapon races got, and continue to be, despite proclamations otherwise, out of control.” Doc pulled the map out of his pocket and unfolded it. He nodded. “Follow me. Let me show you something.”

  They walked down a side aisle, high rows of heavy metal shelving towering over them on each side, as if they were in a super-super-Costco. Doc halted in front of a house-sized white square. Power lines looped down to the top of it and machinery was humming. Doc went up to a window and wiped away frost on a piece of thick glass.

  “Take a look,” Doc said.

  Ivar, who had spent a lot of time in labs, had a hard time figuring out what the contraption was inside the container.

  “It’s a nuclear weapon,” Doc said. “Once the Russians showed they had their bomb, President Truman, who I’ll get back to, demanded we build bigger bombs. Of course, he meant larger yield, but back in the late forties, larger yield literally meant a larger bomb. They used liquid deuterium as the fusion fuel—”

  “Thus the requirement for it to be kept refrigerated.” Ivar couldn’t help resorting to playing a physics card.

  “Of course,” Doc said. “This one was called Ivy Mike. Pretty much impractical as a weapon, as you can obviously see. But it had a big yield. Ten-point-four megatons.” He moved on to what was stored next to it. A large, cylindrical bomb, twenty-four feet long and six feet in diameter, rested in a metal cradle.

  “They worked on making the bomb smaller,” Doc said, “and this was the first deployable, large-yield one they came up with. A Mark-17 thermonuclear bomb. It remains to this date the most powerful nuclear weapon ever built by the United States. Estimated yield around twenty-five to thirty megatons.”

  “And we’re keeping one here in the Archives for…?” Ivar asked. “Isn’t that as stupid as the labs that keep the smallpox virus around?”

  “And we keep this around for the same reason,” Doc said. “To study and understand. We keep a lot of deadly things in the Archives. Which answers your earlier question of why we need an Archive. Which brings me back to Operation Paperclip. While we led the way in developing, and using, nuclear weapons, the Germans and the Japanese led the way in other scientific fields associated with killing, particularly chemical and biological weapons.”

  Doc tapped his chest as he led Ivar farther into the Archives. “We’ve faced down not only Rifts, but also nuclear weapons and some pretty serious biological and chemical mishaps over the years, including one or two cases of the smallpox virus you mentioned being played with in ways that weren’t smart or secure. You worked in a lab and l
ook what happened there because your professor had visions of a Nobel Prize dancing in his head. He threw all caution to the wind and opened a Rift.

  “You need to know the history of all of this. And you can come in here and study a lot of the things we, and our predecessors, have run into over the decades. I know Nada gave you a binder, but that has just an overview. The details, and they are important, are in here. In the original documents.”

  Doc stopped in front of a missile pointing toward the roof. “A V-2 rocket. Mint condition. The Germans were the leaders in rocket development and if they’d had another year or so, the East Coast might have seen an advanced version of the V-2 rocket raining down from the skies. If the Nazi scientists had another two or three years, some of those rockets could have had nuclear warheads on them. Think about that. I like to think that every soldier who died storming those beaches in Normandy gave his life so we could stop that from happening.

  “Of course, that’s the noble side of warfare. There’s another side.” Doc plinked one of the metal fins. “So at the end of World War Two, OSS operatives, along with intelligence officers from the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, a mouthful like many military organizations are, were sent into Japan and Germany. Sometimes they were actually snatching scientists away from army war crimes units. Sometimes they got in firefights with similar units from the Russian Army. The Brits also were in on it, although their efforts came nothing close to us and the Soviets.”

  Doc glanced at Ivar. “The Russians have had their own version of the Nightstalkers for a while and we’ve done some joint missions together, but things were tense for a long time during the Cold War. There were times we suspected the other side of doing things that looked a hell of a lot like developing new weapons of mass destruction.” Doc shrugged. “And to be honest, I think it was true on both sides. We cleaned up our own messes and theirs sometimes. And they probably cleaned up some of ours in different places.”

  “World War Two?” Ivar said, trying to keep Doc on track.

  “The worst of the Nazi and Japanese scientists everyone was looking for were the ones who worked on biological and chemical weapons. While the United States was still stockpiling World War One mustard gas as its primary chemical weapon should the need arise, the Germans had perfected tabun, soman, and sarin and proven their effectiveness with ruthless use in the camps. The Japanese had also developed some nasty bugs at Unit 731 in Manchuria and used them on prisoners of all nationalities, sometimes vivisecting the subjects to study the stages of the diseases.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Ivar said. “Vivisection of humans?”

  Doc snorted. “I’ll give the Russians this: They at least tried a bunch of the people from 731 they captured. Sentenced most to labor camps in Siberia, which was, in effect, a death sentence. We gave the Japanese scientists we got a free pass in order to get the knowledge they had. The Japanese even have a memorial to Unit 731 in Tokyo.”

  Doc moved on, deeper into the Archives.

  “At the end of World War Two, President Truman signed an executive order banning the immigration of Nazis into the United States. He also signed the executive order forming Majestic-12. Sometimes orders can conflict.”

  “No shit,” Ivar said.

  Doc ignored him. “NASA got the rocket engineers. But the nuke, bio, chem guys came here to Area 51. Both the Nazis and the Japanese. Also, not even known by most of the Paperclip operatives, we were grabbing the leading physicists from Germany and Japan. It was a plan with a double edge—not only gain the expertise of these people, but also deny their own devastated countries their abilities. It’s taken over a generation for those countries to begin to redevelop their brain trust. And, of course, we wanted to keep them from the Russians.”

  “And those physicists opened the first Rift,” Ivar said. “Here.”

  “Correct,” Doc said. “That is why we are here and why you must know the history. The men who opened the first Rift were not good men. They were evil men.”

  “And the ones who built Little Boy and Fat Man?” Ivar observed.

  Doc stiffened in anger and then gave a sad smile. “The victor writes history.”

  “What happened to the ones who opened the first Rift?” Ivar asked.

  Doc stared at Ivar. “You’re the only person who has opened a Rift and didn’t die or disappear through it.”

  “So did they die?”

  “No. They disappeared. And a lot of soldiers and scientists died and disappeared trying to close the Rift. Those were the first Nightstalkers.”

  “You’re giving me the eye like you want to vivisect me,” Ivar said.

  Doc ignored him and moved on, then halted in an aisle bounded on both sides by modern filing cabinets. “Ms. Jones, in fact most of the Black Ops world, doesn’t trust computers. They don’t even trust paper records, as evidenced by the destruction of your own file. But they do accept that we need to keep some sort of historical record of what we do. And our research.” He waved a hand. “This is Section Twenty-Two-Charlie. The section on Rifts and Fireflies.”

  Ivar was overwhelmed and excited at the same time. There were at least sixty drawer cabinets.

  “Where should I start?” Ivar asked

  “At the beginning,” Doc said, pointing to the left.

  “You were dead for under a minute,” Nurse Washington said. The resuscitation cart was behind her, wires for the defibrillator dangling. “Only took one jolt to bring you back.”

  Only took one jolt to kill me, Neeley thought. She was still on the floor, her chest throbbing with pain. She tried to lift a hand. “My phone.”

  “Gone. Along with the man who came here to visit Mr. Schmidt, who I assume wasn’t his son. Mr. Schmidt is no longer among the living and was past bringing back. And I assume you’re not just an FBI agent. There’s a lot of people outside. Lots of police. Lots of people with black sunglasses. And”—Washington looked down at Neeley as if to judge how much more bad news she could handle—“an army helicopter crashed just down the road. Four dead. I figure that has some connection to you and the man who was here.”

  Neeley closed her eyes. More dead and she’d failed. The number of ways in which she’d failed was as overwhelming as the pain in her chest.

  “How long since the helicopter crashed?” Neeley asked.

  “’Bout fifteen minutes,” the nurse replied.

  “It won’t be long now,” Neeley whispered.

  “Who loved you?” Hannah asked Moms.

  Moms sat in the seat facing Hannah’s desk deep underneath the puzzle palace of the NSA, feeling very different than when she faced Ms. Jones at the Ranch. Jones was a known, after working together for so many years. Hannah, while Moms had heard rumors, was a wild card. Her youth and attractiveness disconcerted Moms. Hannah was everything that Moms wasn’t, physically, at least.

  The one certainty was that the Cellar ruled all: the Nightstalkers and the cluster of other organizations, many of which Moms assumed she had no clue about or what they did.

  The person and the setting were unsettling enough, but the question was bizarre.

  “Why don’t you ask me who I loved?” Moms countered. “Can one really know if someone loves them?”

  “You can save the question-answering-the-question for Dr. Golden,” Hannah said. “That’s shrink play.” She leaned back in her chair, steepling her fingers, regarding the woman across from her. “You receive a stipend every month. You went to see Mrs. Sanchez about it.”

  They were not questions, so Moms followed a Nada Yada and said nothing.

  Hannah continued. “She couldn’t help you. It’s a survivor’s benefit. Someone thought enough of you to put your name in that particular box on that particular form. It seems such a simple thing, filling out a form. But it isn’t for that form. The survivor benefits form is asking a person to rank-order those in their lives in case
of their own death. But the ordering can have different meanings. For example, the man you call Kirk on your team, he rank-ordered his family. His siblings that he has to take care of. So much so, he took part of your team off the reservation on an unsanctioned operation.”

  “That’s being dealt with,” Moms said.

  “Yes, yes,” Hannah said. “Sending them like wayward schoolchildren to Fort Bragg. Do you know that what your Mr. Roland did with my agent Neeley in South America was the first time in years she’s ever brought someone on a Sanction with her?”

  “So it was a Sanction?” This time it was a question.

  “Of course. Neeley would never stray. But it crossed the line between Cellar and Nightstalker missions.”

  “As you’re crossing them now going after Burns. And we already crossed when you brought me into the White House last year.”

  Hannah smiled, revealing even, surprisingly white teeth. “Touché. The world is changing. Our areas of operations are increasingly overlapping. But that isn’t why I wanted to speak with you.”

  Moms folded her legs and put her hands in her lap, like an obedient schoolgirl summoned to the principal’s office over the PA system. To be praised or punished, it wasn’t clear yet.

  Hannah said, “Ms. Jones has a speech she likes to give your team. Why we are here.”

  “You don’t have to repeat it,” Moms said.

  “I’m not Ms. Jones and my reasoning is different from hers,” Hannah said. “People like us, you and me, we’re the broken ones. The ones not in the bell curve and not necessarily on the good side of the curve.”

  “And we protect those inside the curve,” Moms said. “The average person who goes through their day not knowing how close they come to extinction. How many dangers are out there.”

  Hannah smiled. “That there are boogie men in the closet.” She tapped her desk. “Do you know why I’m here?”

  “To police the world of covert ops,” Moms said.

  “On a base level, yes,” Hannah agreed. “But as you tend to go deeper with your own why we are here, beyond the Rifts and Fireflies to the Trinity Test as the start point for the Nightstalkers, I like to go back and examine history and determine why an organization like the Cellar was and is needed.”