by Mack Maloney
After every object vanished, a pile of what looked like glowing embers appeared. They didn’t seem to quite touch the floor, though, as if they were hovering just above it. But now, after the three demonstrations, someone hit another button and a series of fans came on and blew the “embers” into the bottomless pit.
“That’s either an alien-built weapon,” Ben said, “or years ago someone found out how to zap all the hazardous material they were generating out here, so they could get rid of the evidence.”
Hunter studied the strange surroundings. He could see only two places in the vast chamber where one could enter or exit. One was another immense open door at ground level. It led out to another astonishing aspect of the chamber: an underground roadway, which they could clearly see from their position. It looked like a four-lane interstate, except it had been built inside a massively hollowed-out cavern. From the scope of it, it had to run for miles.
The only other means of entry was the big, round door they’d just passed through to get on to the gantry. Other than that there were no emergency exits, no other doors, at least none that could be seen.
Some hustle and bustle below indicated the beginning a shift change. Soldiers and technicians filed out the huge door leading to the underground roadway as an equal number filed in. The relieved shift got into trucks and disappeared down the cavern highway. The new shift went right to work, pampering the immense ray gun.
“Two doors,” Hunter said, almost to himself. “That’s it.”
Then he noticed something else. He pointed to the numerous conical-shaped dishes around the chamber. Most were about one-foot across. They were hanging everywhere, hundreds of them.
Hunter also saw lots of techs on the ground floor using what looked like ordinary handheld phones as controls instead of flicking switches and pushing control buttons.
“I think this place is run by sound waves,” he whispered to Ben and JT. “I’m guessing whoever built it didn’t want anyone to know they were down here. So instead of using a lot of electrical stuff and generators and creating heat and making noise, they run it all by bouncing sound waves back and forth via those handheld phones. It’s like everything is handled by remote control and sound is the transfer medium.”
“It would be a good way to lower your power output and reduce your IR signature,” Ben whispered back. “Not to mention your noise level. I mean, you can hear a pin drop in here.”
It was very quiet inside the huge chamber.
Hunter added, “And if each sound transmission is unique, you could have a million different signals running through this place easily.”
The shift change complete, the ray gun technicians were getting ready to zap another target.
But it was not a Hummer or a big truck this time.
About twenty ragged people were being led onto the expansive ground floor. They resembled the people they’d found in the hangar except these people were gagged and their wrists were bound. Ten were pulled out of the line and, fighting all the way, were forced into position by AMC soldiers.
Somehow the ray gun was activated, a beam shot out of it—and the people were gone.
Hunter was stunned; Ben and JT, speechless.
Before they could say a word, the remaining ten unfortunates were put in front of the ray gun and dispatched the same way.
Then the fans were turned on and the strange glowing embers left behind were blown into the bottomless pit. It all happened in less than a minute.
“Christ,” Ben finally whispered. “I know the AMC hates Americans, but is that what this is all about? Is this …”
He couldn’t say the words.
So JT said them for him: “Ethnic cleansing?”
They crawled out of the Hole about twenty minutes later.
St. Louis and some FCSF troopers were waiting for them.
Hunter told them everything. The long tunnel. The big door. The fantastic chamber. The UFOs. The underground highway. The ray gun zapping Hummers, trucks, and people.
“It looks like that place has been down there for a while,” he said. “I’m guessing the AMC just started using it recently and were careful to make all this up here look unoccupied, so no one would suspect all the action was underground. But whatever’s going on, we’ve got to do something about it.”
No one disagreed. But St. Louis said what was on everyone’s minds: “But what are we going to do exactly? There are only a few dozen of us, and it sounds as if there are hundreds of them down there—and hundreds more right down the road in Vegas. And thousands more down in L.A.”
Hunter started to say something—but then stopped.
Suddenly his body was vibrating. His eyes turned dark.
“Something is coming. I have to go—right now!”
He started away, but Ben grabbed his arm.
“But Hawk,” he said, “if you go, who’s going to, you know, come up with a plan?”
JT was very interested in his answer as well.
Hunter paused. He knew Ben and JT were considered the Wingman’s wingmen. But they must have been doing something right to survive during his ten “missing years.”
“Who’s going to come up with a plan?” he said, throwing their question back at them as he put his helmet on. “I’m sure you guys can handle it.”
Chapter 15
HUNTER’S SABRE WAS TEARING down Groom Lake’s runway a minute later.
The feeling …
Something was coming …
Airplanes …
Not friendly …
He screamed up to twenty thousand feet and saw them: two jet fighters wearing the triple red-ball symbol of the AMC, cruising at 15-Angels, about five miles away.
These planes weren’t old-timers like the Sabre. They were the same high-tech, swept-back, modern aircraft he’d seen during his recon of Nellis, identified off his surveillance footage as J-11s, a fearsome, Chinese-built fighter jet.
And they were heading right toward Area 51.
The jets undoubtedly carried infrared devices, and even if they were just on a night-training mission, if their IF gear was engaged, the pilots would see the activity at Groom Lake. And if they were carrying weapons, they might attack the FCSF force, or at very least report back to Nellis with the news.
Hunter couldn’t let that happen.
He watched them for a few seconds, praying they’d turn away. But they stayed on course to fly right over Area 51. He took a deep gulp of oxygen. He knew tangling with them would blow the lid off the entire operation.
But he had no other choice.
He dove on them, machine guns ablaze. There was no need to aim; no need to even think about it. This was not a dogfight—it was an assassination. His barrage instantly killed the lead pilot, causing his jet to flip over and clip the one behind him. Both burst into flames and crashed to the desert floor below.
His attack lasted just a few seconds, but everything had changed.
His quick, in-and-out mission was about to get very complicated.
Chapter 16
GENERAL ZHANG JIN was the AMC officer in charge of the operation beneath Groom Lake—or at least that’s what the AMC personnel working around him thought.
Zhang Jin was not his real name, not that it mattered. He had the reputation of being a harsh commander and failure to obey him carried the death penalty, and that was important. But he wasn’t really a “general,” or even a soldier at all.
He was in America, all were told, to conduct a “housecleaning.” To rid the American Southwest of Americans, to make room for people from the other side of the Pacific. But even that wasn’t entirely true. Before the AMC went ahead with its racial cleansing, they needed to solve the “Nazi Problem,” which meant they needed an expert. This man, not Zhang, was that expert. In fact, he might have been the only person on the planet who knew how to solve the problem. When he offered the AMC his services right out of the blue, they couldn’t hire him quickly enough.
The Nazi Problem po
sed a dilemma to any entity seeking to eradicate a sizable percentage of humanity. The problem was, when it came to genocide, there were always too many bodies. You couldn’t bury them all—it would take years. You couldn’t cook them all—the ovens would have to be enormous and expensive, and even then you’d still have to dispose of the leftover ashes, millions of pounds of them a year. And if you were somehow able to drop millions of corpses into the ocean, they would eventually pollute the seven seas.
This man, actually known by many names, had come upon a solution: a machine that could zap things into nothingness, the only residue being some strange little sparks that lasted a long time and could be disposed of by simply blowing them into a bottomless pit. That’s what the big ray gun did. Put any object in the right spot, activate its trigger and—poof! Gone …
The man knew about the big ray gun because he’d seen it operate years before, when the people who had originally built the chamber, and the road and the cavern beside it, had still been encamped there, experimenting with everything from nuclear bullets to Velcro to jumping universes. He’d seen the big ray gun another time, too, approximately seven thousand years in the future.
But he wasn’t sure exactly when, because some of the memories from that part of his very long life were a bit fuzzy.
The cavern below Groom Lake—some called it “S4”—was the perfect place to carry out this mission, and not just because the big ray gun and the bottomless pit were here. S4 lay beneath one of the most isolated places on Earth. It had good terrain cover, no huge energy footprint, and there were few ways to get in or out of it. And it was quiet. Very quiet. And as with submarines and stealth planes, quiet meant invisible. And invisible was ideal. It would take an army of experts to find them down here. It was no surprise that this was where the previous occupants hid all their UFOs.
It also had a highway that ran all the way to Las Vegas underground. That came in extremely handy for someone like the Man Not Zhang who was always trying to stay out of sight.
The Man Not Zhang presided over this place from a pod four stories above S4’s ground floor.
The pod had darkened windows, so no one could look in. But even if they could, they would not see his face, because he’d decided to wear a mask for this particular outing. He was dressed in all black as usual, head to toe, boots to hat, and the mask was black as well. Two slits for eyes were all he required; he hadn’t breathed in anything in centuries, so no nose holes were needed.
When the time came to actually zap some of the great unwashed subjects brought to him from above, the Man Not Zhang rarely activated the big ray gun himself. While its trigger was the most prominent thing on his main console, he couldn’t be bothered with the technical end of things. (In fact, he wasn’t even sure how the damned thing worked; all he really knew was that activating a button made things disappear.) He had two aides with him around the clock. When it came time to do the dirty work, he would usually just wave his hand in their direction and one of them would push the right buttons on his handheld phone, the phone would make the right noise, and—poof! Gone …
They’d been doing it down here for a few weeks now and so far everything was running well. To that end, the masked man had a couple milestones he wanted to reach. His first was to dispatch several hundred test subjects within, say, a twenty minute period, then study the logistics. Bump it up a little, and maybe one thousand an hour wouldn’t be unreasonable. It was mostly a matter of getting the unwilling subjects to stand exactly where you wanted them. Figure out that little quirk and expand the already expansive facility, it might be possible to do ten thousand or more an hour or even in one shot.
That was the beauty of the big ray gun. It didn’t make any difference how many targets you put in front of it, just as long as they were placed within its “field of vision.” Beyond that, the line could stretch to infinity and everybody and everything within it would be gone.
So, make S4 a little bigger, work out the logistics of getting a regular, unending flow of undesirables down into it, and Area 51 could become the AMC’s eradication factory, just like that.
It was now close to 0200 hours, 2 a.m.
The masked man looked out on the chamber from his perch. He’d zapped more than two dozen subjects already that night and was expecting another group from up top to arrive soon. (At last report, they were still in the tunnels.) If these people went with no problem, the Man Not Zhang would try a hundred test subjects before the night was out.
But then his radiophone started beeping.
He was soon speaking to the AMC commander at Nellis, seventy-five miles to the south. The man had some startling news: two of his jet fighters on a night-training mission had been shot down very close to Groom Lake. Nellis had no idea who did it or what it meant. But as a result, Nellis was now in a high-emergency security mode.
And with that, the Nellis CO hung up—or his line went dead. It was hard to tell.
Either way, the Man Not Zhang was furious. The AMC was a confederacy of idiots; he’d witnessed a lot in the past few months, but he’d chosen to put up with them, just to see where all this would lead. But the one thing he didn’t think they could possibly fuck up was security for S4 and its environs. In the past, this lair had existed with millions of people living within a 250-mile radius. These days, barely twenty-five thousand people lived between there and Los Angeles. And the AMC couldn’t even handle that?
But the masked man knew what he had to do. He turned to his aide and held up three fingers. That meant Procedure 3 had to be enacted. But the aide paused for a moment; he wasn’t quite sure what Procedure 3 was. The Man Not Zhang punctured the aide’s eyeballs with his two long fingernails, casually blinding him. The second aide began enacting Procedure 3 instantly.
S4 was going into lock down. Everyone anywhere inside had to freeze in place until security guards checked their ID badges.
This was the first time the procedure had been enacted inside S4. The roughly three hundred techs and soldiers inside the chamber had to stop working, stop moving, until the security sweep was complete.
Even though everything had suddenly become uncertain, Procedure 3 gave those three hundred people a rare opportunity to at least stand still and not work for a few minutes.
Not able to relax, though, were the thirty people who’d entered the S4 chamber just seconds after the security alert was called.
They were stuck on the top-level gantry. The big round door had slid shut behind them, warning buzzers were going off all round them, and security men with megaphones were shouting up to them from below, telling them to stay in place until they could take an elevator up to them and check their IDs.
This was not good—because five of this group of thirty were FCSF operators in AMC uniforms, Ben and JT among them.
Their plan had been to come back down to the chamber, same as before, in AMC uniforms. But this time, they’d bring a “bladder bomb” filled with aviation fuel with them, drop it on the big ray gun, and destroy it. Then, if possible, eliminate as many of AMC personnel below as possible.
The plan had been bold, simple, and highly workable. It was probably very close to what Hunter would have come up with himself.
It was just their bad luck to get caught inside S4 seconds into its first-ever security lockdown.
Chapter 17
THE AIR DEFENSE SYSTEM at Nellis was modern for the times, integrating fixed SAM launchers with mobile AA guns into one central control house. But because the base’s AMC commanders never dreamed they would be attacked from the air, this powerful-but-expensive ADS was rarely turned on.
But then came the brief-but-chilling radio call from one of Nellis’s pilots participating in a night-training exercise. The base went on immediate high alert, with the air defense system finally switched on.
But it was already too late.
The Sabre jet roared over Nellis just seconds after the two J-11s were confirmed as lost. Flying just twenty-five feet off the deck, its fir
st target was the checkerboard-painted air defense control station. A well-placed five-second burst from the plane’s machine guns was all it took. The air defense hub burst into flames.
The attacker stayed low. A hard bank to the right, and it sent a barrage into the base’s communication building, shredding its main computer and setting the building ablaze.
The silver jet then banked hard left, went up to fifty feet and fired again, destroying the base’s control tower and killing most of its personnel. Then another hard right and it was gone, lost in the night.
While not quite sure about what had just happened, the base commanders quickly scrambled Nellis’s interceptor unit. Six highly trained veteran pilots were in their J-11 jets inside a minute.
J-11s needed only thirty seconds to warm up and get rolling. Before another minute went by, the six of them were already taxiing for take off.
But they had moved too late as well.
The silver jet roared back over the base, the intense glow of Las Vegas to the east masking its approach. It came down the base’s main runway heading south, just as the half dozen J-11s were taking off, heading north.
The jet fired six quick, perfectly timed bursts into each plane, hitting their full gas tanks. All six jets blew up before they got off the ground. The silver jet continued down the length of the runway and fired on the base’s external communications antenna, severing its mast, before vanishing into the night again.
With many major fires suddenly erupting, the base’s emergency crews were called out—but chaos and panic had already set in. The ghostly jet roared over the huge airfield a third time, just twenty seconds after it had left, and fired a long, sustained burst into the base’s enormous and unprotected fuel dump. The tanks blew up so quickly, the attacker had to pass right through the flames it had created.
But then it was gone for good.
Hunter yanked off his oxygen mask and breathed in the hot air of the cockpit.
He’d left Nellis reeling—taking out its scramble jets and its fuel supply; making it electronically blind and deaf; and fouling its main runway.
