by Will Hill
On the day she was interested in there were only two entries in the arrivals column without counterpart departures. One looked the same as almost all the rest: a string of Operator identification numbers, an operational reference and the access code and entry vector used by a vehicle entering the restricted airspace around Dreamland. This was most likely a returning mission that had departed on a previous day. The other entry, however, was quite different.
Where there should have been at least one ID number, there was merely an empty space. Where the Operational reference should have been was also blank, and instead of an entry vector, the word GATE 1 had been entered into the record. The access code that had been recorded was also different, unlike those recorded in every other entry for that day.
That’s him, she thought, excitedly. Whoever he is, that’s him. That’s when he arrived.
Larissa wrote down the access code on a scrap of paper, closed the logs, and opened the security rota schedule. This was a large spreadsheet, listing every guard point and security position across the entirety of the Dreamland site; it was a vast document, as it applied not just to NS9, but also to the Air Force detachments at Groom Lake and throughout the entire White Sands Missile Range. There were more than a hundred entry points listed, ranging from traditional barriers and guard houses to underground sentry posts that watched over the subterranean installations where the truly unpleasant work was being done: chemical and biological weapons, low-yield nuclear research, next-generation fission weapons, all of it in direct breach of dozens of international treaties, all of it carrying on far beyond the range of even the most sophisticated satellite.
She was looking for the rota for Gate 1, the guard post and barrier that controlled access from the long road that led west from highway 375 and was referred to by Area 51 conspiracy fans as the Front Gate. It was on government land, hidden from the public beyond signs that warned the curious not to go any further.
He came in there? wondered Larissa. By road? That’s weird.
She found the right column and scrolled down until she reached the date she was looking for. On duty at the Front Gate that day had been an Air Force Senior Airman named Lee Ashworth. Larissa closed the spreadsheet and entered Ashworth’s name into the personnel directory; it returned his file immediately. She scanned quickly down to the key line of information: Senior Airman Ashworth’s current posting.
Please don’t let him have moved. Please.
POSTING: Edwards AFB Detachment 559. GOLD SQUADRON. Groom Lake.
Larissa looked at the man’s photo, memorised his face, and logged out of the network. A minute later she was standing at the end of the Level 3 corridor, floating impatiently up and down as she waited for the elevator to arrive.
She got out on Level 1 and walked quickly down its main corridor; her destination lay at the opposite end of the base, beyond a heavy metal door.
Tim Albertsson had shown her the tunnel on her second day in the desert.
He had been ordered by General Allen to show her around and let her get a feel for the place. The functional stuff had taken barely half a day: the dining hall, the gym, her quarters, the Briefing Rooms and the hangar. With the official tour concluded, Tim had shown her what he called “the fun stuff”: the weapons ranges, the creepy, long-abandoned research labs sealed away on the lower levels, and the tunnel.
It was more than half a mile long, running directly beneath the mountain range that separated Groom Lake from Papoose Lake, and emerged inside the complex of buildings the outside world referred to as Area 51. It was part of a wide network of tunnels, covered walkways and canopies that had been installed to shield the installation’s men and women from the increasingly advanced eyes of the spy satellites that orbited overhead, and now served a purpose that its designers would likely never have envisaged: allowing Larissa to move around the vast majority of the two bases in broad daylight.
She reached the heavy door and ran her ID card over the panel beside it. Electromagnetic locks disengaged and the door swung open on well-oiled hinges. Larissa stepped through, pulled it shut behind her, then rose into the air and accelerated. She shot forward with a speed that would have been dizzying to any watching human eyes; one moment she was motionless in the air, the next she was a streak of black and glowing red. The half-mile of tunnel passed below and around her in less than five seconds; she slid gracefully to a halt in front of a door that was the mirror of the one she had just come through, unlocked it with her ID card, and emerged into a circular holding area made of flat, gleaming metal.
“Remain still,” ordered an electronic voice.
Larissa did as she was told; in the walls and ceiling machines were scanning her identification chip, taking photos, and logging the time of her entry.
“Proceed,” said the voice, after a short pause. She fought back the ridiculous urge to say thank you and walked through the door that had slid open in front of her.
This led her into Groom Lake Central Control, a large round room full of radar monitoring equipment, seismic read-outs and screen after screen of satellite imagery. One of the Duty Officers looked up as she entered, and nodded; the staff of Central Control had become quite used to her arriving this way. She nodded back, and asked the woman where she might find Gold Squadron.
“Building B12,” replied the Duty Officer. “Do you know where that is?”
“I’ll find it,” she replied.
B12 was a low, rectangular building near the centre of the complex and posed no access problems for Larissa; the route to its door was entirely covered by a wide central canopy, shielding her from the blazing late morning sun. Gold Squadron occupied a wide arrangement of open-plan desks and a row of offices that ran along the back wall of the building. There was a hum of activity as Larissa pushed open the door, a steady stream of radio chatter and the steady beeping of a number of radar screens. She walked up to the nearest desk and said hello to the woman sitting behind it.
“Oh, hi,” replied the woman. For a second, she seemed startled, then extended her hand. “You’re Larissa, aren’t you? I’m Carla Monroe.”
She shook the hand and nodded. “Larissa Kinley,” she said.
“Good to meet you,” said Carla. “Can I help you with something? I don’t mean to be rude, but we’re pretty swamped right now. We’re live testing today.”
“What are you flying?” asked Larissa.
“F-71 prototypes,” replied Carla. “We’re opening them up to fifty per cent, so everyone’s a bit on edge.”
“How fast is fifty per cent?”
“About Mach 5.3.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“In that case,” said Larissa, smiling broadly, “I won’t take up any more of your time. I’m looking for Senior Airman Ashworth.”
“Second office on the left at the back,” said Monroe, pointing towards a wooden door near the far end of the room. “He’s our Air Force Test Centre liaison, so I wouldn’t disturb him unless it’s urgent. He gets a bit short-tempered when we’re live.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” said Larissa. She gave Carla Monroe a final smile and set off across the long room. When she reached the door, she knocked sharply on it and pushed it open; she didn’t want to give the Senior Airman the option of refusing to answer.
“Who the hell are you?” demanded a loud voice before she had even closed the door behind her. Lee Ashworth was sitting behind his desk beneath a narrow window; he was a slender man in his mid-twenties with a shock of unruly black hair, a flushed face, and eyes that seemed full of instant dislike. He looked, in her opinion, like a man who was extremely stressed.
“I’m Larissa Kinley,” she replied. “NS9.”
“Is that supposed to impress me?” snorted Ashworth.
“No,” said Larissa. “You asked, so I told you.”
Ashworth eyed her for a second or two, then grunted. “What do you want, Kinley?” he asked. “We’re in the middle of a live flight test and my shi
ft ends in exactly two hundred and four minutes, so you’ll forgive me if I’m not in the mood to chat.”
“This won’t take long, I promise. I just wanted to ask you about the man that came through Gate 1 on January 22nd. As soon as you tell me who he was, I’ll be on my way.”
Ashworth’s eyes widened, and the red in his cheeks deepened alarmingly. “How do you know about him?” he asked.
“I don’t,” replied Larissa. “That’s why I want you to tell me.”
“Is this some kind of joke? Do you know what they’ll do to me if they find out I talked about that?”
“They won’t find out,” said Larissa. “I’m not trying to cause trouble, I just need to know who he is. I think he might be important.”
“I don’t know who he is,” said Ashworth. “That’s the truth.”
“I believe you,” said Larissa. “I just want you to tell me what you do know. I’ll find out the rest myself.”
“Maybe you will,” said Ashworth. “But you won’t get any help from me. Now get the hell out of my office.”
Larissa didn’t move; she merely stared at the Senior Airman, allowing an uncomfortable atmosphere to steadily build. Ashworth’s desk was neat, almost obsessively so; the files and folders and sheets of paper were equally spaced, their edges perfectly aligned. The only concession to anything personal was a photograph of a pretty blonde woman with her arms round two grinning children.
“All right,” she said, eventually. “We’ll talk soon.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” said Ashworth.
She gave him her best smile, then turned and left the small office.
Getting closer, she thought, as she left building B12. I’m on to you, whoever the hell you are.
Larissa was so lost in thought that she didn’t hear the chorus of voices shouting her name from across the central plaza of the complex. She didn’t become aware that there was anyone near her until a hand dropped on to her shoulder and her vampire side reacted. Her eyes flooded red, her fangs burst in place, and she grabbed the hand and threw whoever it belonged to through the air. Before they had even hit the ground, she had spun round, eyes blazing, teeth bared, to find herself looking at three of her friends.
“Jesus Christ, Larissa,” said Kara, her eyes wide with shock.
Larissa looked at Kelly and Danny, who were standing beside their friend, and saw similar expressions on their faces. Then she heard a low groan from behind her; she felt the red disappear from her eyes and her fangs retract as she turned to see what she had done, to see who she had hurt this time.
“That’s quite an arm you’ve got there,” said Tim Albertsson, a smile rising on his face. He was sitting on the tarmac, rotating one of his shoulders, checking the range of movement. His uniform was covered in dust, but he was looking at her with bemusement, rather than the anger she had been expecting.
“Jesus,” she breathed, hot shame flooding through her. “Tim, I’m so sorry. I was in a world of my own and then you… I’m really, really sorry.”
“It’s OK,” he said, getting slowly to his feet. “No harm done. My fault anyway, I shouldn’t have surprised you like that. I wasn’t thinking.”
I’m like a wild animal, thought Larissa, through a dark fog of self-loathing. There are rules for handling me.
Tim stepped forward, threw an arm round her shoulder, and faced the rest of her friends. Kara’s eyes had returned to normal, as Kelly and Danny began to smile, but there was still palpable unease in the air.
“No harm done,” repeated Tim. “Don’t sneak up on her, that’s my advice to the three of you. You’ll be taking your lives in your hands.” He grinned, and Larissa felt a wave of gratitude crash through her. Kara laughed, Danny and Kelly’s smiles turned into grins and, just like that, everything was all right.
Thank you, she thought, casting a glance at Tim. His arm was still round her shoulder, but she thought she could tolerate it, for a little while at least.
“How was Colorado?” she asked.
“Cold,” replied Kelly, shaking her head. “Full of vampires.”
“San Diego was sunny and full of barely dressed Navy SEALs,” said Kara. “In case that makes you feel any better?”
Kelly flipped her friend the finger and smiled.
“So,” said Tim, his attention still focused on Larissa. “Now that we’ve found you, we need to get you back to Dreamland asap.”
“Orders?” she asked.
Kara shook her head. “We’ve been given a forty-eight-hour furlough.”
“Furlough?”
“Forty-eight hours off, Larissa,” said Tim, and checked his watch. “Which officially started seventy-three minutes ago. So we need to hurry. It’s almost a two-hour drive to Vegas.”
“Vegas?” asked Larissa. “We’re going to Las Vegas?”
“Well, we are,” said Kelly, looking round at her colleagues. “But we were hoping you might want to come with us. What do you say?”
Larissa frowned. “Why would General Allen give us two days off? There are still Supermax escapees out there, we’re right in the middle of training the rookie intake, and—”
“Who cares?” interrupted Kara. “Let’s just get the hell out of here before he changes his mind.”
“It doesn’t make any sense, though,” persisted Larissa. “You don’t even work together. Why would the five of us get furlough at the same time?”
“You know why,” said Tim, smiling gently at her. “You’re just not saying it.”
Larissa thought it through. If Allen had given Tim and his Special Operations Squad time off after Nuevo Laredo, it would still have surprised her, but it would have at least made sense. But there was nothing that united the four people standing in front of her, apart from the fact that they were—
“This is because we’re friends,” she said, slowly. “Isn’t it?”
“Of course it is,” said Tim. “You know the Director adores you and you’re not going to be here for long. This is a gift, from him to you. We just get to come along. So, as you can imagine, we’re pretty keen for you to agree to our plan.”
“But there are things that need doing,” said Larissa. “I don’t see how we can—”
“Look, it’s really simple,” said Kelly, cutting across her. “If the Director didn’t think the Department could survive without us for two days, he wouldn’t be letting us go. So why don’t you trust him to know what he’s doing, come with us to Vegas, and thank him when we get back. What do you say?”
A grin emerged on Larissa’s face, huge and happy. “I say yes.”
34
THE SUM OF OUR PARTS
“Are you benching me?” asked John Morton. “You are, aren’t you?”
Jamie shook his head, trying to buy time. He hadn’t expected the rookie to so quickly work out why his squad leader had come up to the Level A dormitory to see him. “No,” he said. “That’s not what’s happening. But you should know, because I wouldn’t want you to hear it from anyone else, that I asked the Interim Director to place you on the inactive roster. He refused.”
Morton stared. “You don’t want me on your squad?”
“That’s not true,” said Jamie. “What I want is you at your best, ready to face what’s out there. And I don’t think that’s where you are.”
“I’m fine,” said the rookie. He pushed his chair back from his desk and turned it to face his squad leader. “Really, sir. I’m fine.”
“I don’t think you are,” said Jamie, softly. “I think you’re scared.” He saw colour begin to rise in Morton’s cheeks and moved to defuse the situation. “It’s not a criticism, John. It takes people different amounts of time to adjust to being part of Blacklight, to come to terms with the reality you get shown. There’s no shame in it.”
“I’ve been scared, Jamie,” said Morton. “I know scared. This is something else.”
But you admit there is something, thought Jamie. That’s a start, at least.
&nb
sp; “What is it then?” he asked. “It will stay between us.”
Morton looked down at his hands for a long moment. “Afghanistan,” he said, eventually. “Last summer I was attached to a Recon Marine battalion, working the mountains in Helmand. I saw everything you can imagine, and probably stuff you can’t. Dead kids, men who’d been tortured over hearsay, women who’d been gang-raped for teaching girls to read. We came into this village one morning, where three Taliban fighters were supposed to be holed up. We’d pounded the area all night, drone strikes from twenty miles away. I don’t know how many missiles, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred. I don’t know. We had air surveillance at both ends of the valley and they confirmed that no one had got out, in any direction.
“So, when dawn came, they sent the six of us in. We came over the rise at the head of the valley, and where the village had been there was just rubble and dust. Nothing standing, nothing moving. We just walked right down the middle of the track, because there was no way anything could have lived through what the drones had done, and we found the first body about twenty metres outside the village. It was an old woman, gone below the waist, just a spray of blood. She was face down in the dust. There was a square in the middle of where the village had been, a little patch of dust not much bigger than this room. Two kids were lying on the ground, holding hands. Both dead. In the ruins of the buildings we found more bodies, bits of bodies really, almost all of them children, some women. Maybe two or three men, old and grey, beards down to their knees.
“We finished our sweep on the other side of the village, where we found a dead teenage boy and the only thing that had survived, this mangy little dog. It was eating the dead boy, chewing at a hole in his stomach. One of the Marines, a guy called Brody, shot the dog and we headed back to our extraction point. Thirty-four dead was the final count. Thirteen women, four men, counting the teenager, and seventeen kids. No sign of the fighters, and when we got back to Bastion no one could show us the intelligence that had suggested they were there. So it got written up and the CIA redacted most of it and suppressed what was left, and two days later they gave me a medal and a week later I came home. That was seven months ago.”
