‘Geez,’ Lopez uttered, ‘now what do we do? How the hell would anyone know about Sophie’s connection to any of this unless they’re in on it somehow? You trust this McCain?’

  ‘You’re talking about the Deputy Director of the CIA,’ Kyle whispered. ‘Surely we have to do what he says?’

  Ethan turned to Kyle.

  ‘We’re going to need that next location real fast.’

  ***

  XXXVII

  The hood over General Mackenzie’s eyes had been in place for almost an hour before it was finally removed. He blinked in the light, struggling to figure out where he was.

  He had been bundled into a vehicle and driven away from the motel. His training as a soldier had kicked in instantly as soon as he had recovered consciousness, and far from fighting back against his abductors he had struck a deliberately defeated posture, shoulders slumped, head hanging low beneath the hood. Long experience had taught soldiers to remain passive in the face of being taken prisoner of war, and to make any attempt to forge a relationship with ones’ captors. Mackenzie had not spoken yet, but by not hindering his captors’ work he was indirectly causing them to be more considerate toward him. There was no rough shoving, no shouting or abuse.

  He had been driven for half an hour, and when he had been instructed to get out of the vehicle the voice had been that of an American. He had heard the sounds of jet engines and had known without a doubt that he was at an airport. It would not have been an airbase, as he was a Colonel and that would have been a very safe location for him. Judging by the number of departures and arrivals, he figured he was at McCarran.

  He was led up steps into the cabin of an aircraft, the height of which suggested a small regional airliner. He was sat in a seat and could sense the men surrounding him. The airplane had taxied out and taken off briskly, turning to the left during the climbout. Mackenzie’s best guess was that they were heading north west, but he wasn’t sure.

  Then, the hood was removed.

  He was in the centre of the cabin, and the view over the right wing revealed open deserts and mountain ranges basking in the heat. They were climbing through about ten thousand feet but strangely the airplane levelled off at about that height and entered its cruise, suggesting a very short flight indeed.

  The men guarding him were wearing smart suits, earpieces, sunglasses, every inch an American team. Mackenzie could not fathom why they had whisked him out of the motel, unless perhaps he was in some kind of danger and they didn’t want him to be recognised.

  He turned to the nearest of the men.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  The man looked at him, not a trace of emotion on his face, and ignored him.

  Mackenzie, a high-ranking officer in the military, was not used to being ignored. He knew that he should remain quiet, and he knew equally that he had not really done anything wrong. His subterfuge at the agency was more than offset by the need for security and the unusual nature of the case being studied. Mackenzie knew that if he was in trouble at the Barn he would have been hauled before the DCIA, not dragged onto a plane and flown out of Vegas.

  ‘I’m a Colonel,’ he said, trying again. ‘There’s no point in messing about, I’m not an idiot. We’re flying north west out of Vegas. What’s the story here and why the cloak and dagger routine?’

  The agents all looked at him, and this time the one who looked the oldest among them spoke.

  ‘You rank has no power here. You’ll find out soon enough. Sit back and enjoy the flight.’

  The agents, apparently deciding that he presented no threat, moved off down the plane and left him to look out of the window. Mackenzie did so for no more than about ten minutes when the airplane began to slow and descend. There was nothing to see but desert outside, distant mountain ranges and wide salt flats basking beneath the endless heat of the sun. It was then that he realised where they were going to land.

  The deserts below gave way to the blinding salt flats of Groom Lake. Mackenzie, running their flight trajectory through his mind on a mental map of Nevada, knew for sure that they were descending into Homey Airport, better known to civilians as Area 51. Mackenzie had never visited the site before, but he knew that a small fleet of airlines served the airfield from Las Vegas, flying workers at the base in and out on a daily basis. They were identified only by a thin red line down the otherwise white fuselage and the “Janet” callsign, which became something else when the aircraft was handed to Nellis Air Base controllers, and something else again when it switched to the unknown frequency used by Groom Lake.

  The airplane lowered its flaps and undercarriage and Mackenzie watched as the immensely long runway hove into view, dark asphalt against the brilliant white flare of the salt flats. The airliner, a Boeing 737, touched down and came briskly to a halt under reverse-thrust braking before it turned off the runway and taxied to a parking spot. Mackenzie was directed to get out of his seat by his guards, but there was no hood this time. He also realised that he was the only passenger on the plane. The exit was opened to a waft of hot desert air, steps were wheeled into place, and just like that Mackenzie walked down into Area 51.

  A white pick-up was waiting for him, crewed by two soldiers in camouflage fatigues and sunglasses. Mackenzie was directed to the vehicle and accompanied on board. The truck drove them across the airbase, where Mackenzie could see various hangars and buildings, all with their doors closed. He could see no signs of life on the base, and he knew that security directives would mean that his presence on the base would require a brief lock-down until he was safely within whichever building he was being taken to.

  From what little he knew for sure about operations at Area 51, every person who worked there was privy to information only concerning their own individual projects. Data was compartmentalised so that no individual knew everything, or even a sizeable portion, of what went on at the base. It was said that even the base commander himself was kept in the dark about many of the projects on-going at Area 51, for his own personal security: it would otherwise be too easy for a foreign power to abduct and interrogate him for information about the base.

  Mackenzie was driven to a non-descript prefab building on the north west corner of the base that to him looked like little more than a storage shed. The vehicle stopped and the guards silently got out. Mackenzie followed and was led into the building by one of the men while the other three stood guard.

  The inside of the shed was unremarkable in that it was completely empty but for an elevator shaft. The guard opened the grated metal doors and gestured for the colonel to get in. Mackenzie obeyed in silence and then the doors were shut behind him. The guard pressed a button and Mackenzie descended within a shaft that sank down through the floor.

  It crossed his mind that perhaps those who encountered the secretive forces controlling investigations into the UFO phenomena within the government were sent down here into a seething lake of fire or something, never to be seen again. Right now, all he could see were hewn rock faces passing before him and the occasional glow from light bulbs connected by electrical wiring. The elevator rattled downward for what he guessed was a couple of hundred feet, and then it slowed before a steel door.

  The door hissed open, and DDCIA McCain stood awaiting him.

  ‘I knew it,’ Mackenzie said as McCain yanked open the gate.

  ‘Sorry about the heavy hands,’ McCain replied, extending his own with an earnest look. ‘That’s just the way this stuff has to happen.’

  Mackenzie shook the proffered hand. ‘You’d better fill me in on what the hell’s going on. I take it the Men in Black aren’t waiting for me down here.’

  McCain shook his head.

  ‘I wish they did work for me, they’d probably be quite useful,’ he replied mysteriously. ‘Come this way, we need to talk about this.’

  Mackenzie followed McCain down a corridor, off of which were various doors marked with what seemed like entirely innocuous names. McCain noticed his look of surprise.

  ‘This is part of the research facility that works on lasers and directed energy weapons. Any regular physicist would be right at home. It’s only the security level that keeps everything secret.’

  ‘No alien spaceships, no invisibility cloaks?’ Mackenzie asked.

  ‘Sadly, no,’ McCain replied. ‘Although we are working on dynamic polymers which are used on airplanes and allow them to take on the appearance of their background. Quite remarkable when you see it in action, you can barely see the airplane at all.’

  Mackenzie frowned. ‘Not much good if you can hear its engines.’

  McCain smiled. ‘This is why I got you the FID job, I knew you’d be a great asset here.’

  ‘Wait one, you got me onto that damned desk?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ McCain said as he gestured to an open door that led into an office. ‘I’ll tell you about it.’

  ***

  XXXVIII

  The office was small, containing only a single table and two chairs. On the far side was another door. McCain closed the door through which Mackenzie had walked, and then gestured to the table.

  Mackenzie saw that in the center of the table was a clear plastic box, and within it were pieces of what looked like metal.

  ‘What are they?’ he asked.

  McCain walked across to the box and spoke softly, as though even here in the most well-guarded and secretive place on earth there might still be those who were listening in.

  ‘These are the remains of what was found at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.’

  Mackenzie’s breath caught in his throat. Like most everyone on the planet, he had heard about Roswell all of his life: the stories, the legends, the supposed cover-ups and conspiracies, the lies, the false histories. He had both believed and rejected all of it, convinced that whatever had happened was so far in the past now that the truth could never be recovered.

  ‘Seriously?’ was all that he could say.

  ‘Yes,’ McCain insisted. ‘This is the real deal.’

  ‘Why is there so little of it?’

  McCain sat down, folding his arms as he looked at the fragments.

  ‘People seem to forget that this thing didn’t touch down gently at a local airport and welcome us aboard. The damned thing crashed, at high velocity, during a raging thunderstorm. By the time our people got there in ’47, having finally realised that a flying disc had actually crashed, all that was left was fragments. All the stories you’ve heard, of workers here supposedly reverse-engineering UFOs and flying them about all over the place, all of it’s crap.’ He sighed. ‘But then, so is the cover story of the debris being a surveillance balloon belonging to Project Mogul: they didn’t tend to launch those balloons in heavy weather because they were so fragile, not that anyone in the media seems to have realised that.’

  Mackenzie approached the box and sat down opposite McCain, his eyes fixed on the pieces of metal fragments before him. That they were metal was clear, the silvery, twisted chunks glinting in the light.

  ‘What happened to the rest of the fragments? There must be more.’

  ‘Destroyed over the years during tests,’ McCain said. ‘An entire department sprung up here to study the materials, and materials was all we had by the way. There was nothing found in the way of proper engineering, nothing that we could dismantle and re-build to understand. All that we had was the remnants of a shell, disc-shaped in form, with almost nothing that resembled an interior or cockpit that could be understood by engineers, then or now. All that they could do was try to figure out what this thing was made of, and attempt to speculate from that basis what these things are.’

  Mackenzie nodded, peering closely at the metal. ‘What did they learn?’

  McCain smiled.

  ‘Technically, I shouldn’t tell you yet as you haven’t been cleared, but I think that’s a formality now. The metals contain recognisable elements such as iron, but the atomic arrangement is different to earth-based iron. That is, it was created or manipulated in processes different from those we’re used to and understand. That difference gives the metal remarkable properties.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well, for a start it does not respond to normal forces in the way that we would expect. The metal is both ultra light and yet stronger than any steel, to the extent that large sheets of this stuff weigh little more than sugar paper but would protect you from a rifle bullet. The bonds are extremely strong. It does not reflect radar signals very easily. The scientists who worked on this in the 1970s managed to figure out that, in conjunction with a disc or boomerang-shaped form, radar energy would flow around the object and continue on its way, rather like water flowing around a pebble, thus preventing a clear radar signature on all but the most sensitive of devices.’

  Mackenzie nodded, as though he’d known all along.

  ‘Is that the only reason they’re disc shaped?’

  ‘No,’ McCain replied. ‘That seems to be to do with their propulsion.’

  ‘I thought that no energy source was found?’

  ‘It wasn’t,’ McCain confirmed. ‘What has since been discovered is that the oval form of the original craft would have acted as a resonance chamber for electromagnetic energy. The best guess of our brightest minds is that the craft harnesses natural forces such as gravity or electromagnetism and essentially rides the waves through the sky.’

  Mackenzie could not really add anything to that.

  ‘What about occupants?’

  ‘None,’ McCain replied, ‘and that’s not the CIA uttering an official explanation for public consumption. There were never any bodies or indeed any biological remains discovered in or near the craft when it was recovered.’

  A word slipped out of Mackenzie’s mouth of its own accord. ‘Drone.’

  McCain slapped the table with an open palm in apparent delight.

  ‘Exactly! It took the boffins here thirty years to come up with that conclusion. This thing was a drone, an automated craft. It got caught out in a freak storm and bam, it’s in our hands. The United States Army Air Force admitted it had caught a flying disc and went public with the information because it genuinely assumed that the craft was Russian, and the capture would be a major public relations coup that would say to Ivan; “Hey, we know what you’re up to and we’ve got one of your new toys, so be careful whose backyard you’re playing in.” It was only when they got it under study at Wright Patterson Air Force Base that they realised this was nothing to do with Russia or any nation on earth, so they hurriedly issued a cover story about the crashed balloon and went quiet thereafter. Everything you’ve heard since is mere speculation and conspiracy theories.’

  Mackenzie smiled.

  ‘No smoke without fire. They were right then, that this was from another planet.’

  McCain nodded.

  ‘Yeah, they were right. But that’s not the big deal, believe it or not.’

  ‘You’re kidding? Evidence of visitation from another species isn’t the big deal?’

  ‘Come on, Scott, you’re a man of the world as much as we all are,’ McCain replied. ‘People the world over may not know the truth but they all think the same. It’s spoken about in pubs and in family gatherings every day somewhere on the planet; the universe is too damned big for us to be here on our own. There must be other life out there. If you factor in the known facts that every chemical we’re made from was forged in ancient stars, and that intelligent life could have first arisen several billion years ago, it becomes a no-brainer. It’s not just that there should be life out there, or that there should be intelligent life out there: the universe should be bursting with life, and it’s only the huge distances between star systems that prevents us from easily contacting, or being contacted by, other civilisations.’

  Mackenzie knew that his boss was right. There had to be other life out there, and if there were, then it was probable that they would have the same curiosity about the universe around them as mankind did. If they were more advanced, they would spread out into that cosmos in search of new life, new planets and new experiences just as man had done on earth.

  ‘They’d send out drones,’ Mackenzie said out loud. ‘Lots of drones, robots, AI, all searching the cosmos.’

  McCain grinned.

  ‘Of course they would, just as we send robots and satellites to other planets and moons in our own solar system. Send the machines in first to check things out and return data, and then send people in for a better look.’

  Mackenzie realised that he was following a natural thought experiment and let it continue out loud.

  ‘The drones find points of interest, send the data back to home base, and they come out to have a look for themselves.’

  ‘And find us,’ McCain said. ‘They want to have a look at us.’

  Mackenzie frowned. ‘But it would take too long for the messages to cross light years back and forth to other star systems, that’s the whole problem. If a planet is forty light years away, and we send them a message, it would take eighty years to get a reply, right?’

  ‘Right,’ McCain said. ‘If you’re thinking like us.’

  ‘Like us?’

  McCain leaned forward on the table. ‘Scott, what you’re about to learn is something that is kept between only a few people on earth. I’m not exaggerating. Believe me when I say that the secrecy is so high not because we want to control it, but because we don’t know what the hell to do about it ourselves. I asked for you to be brought into this because of your patriotism and your reliability. Right now, you’re in danger, your life and that of your family has been threatened and you’ve been abducted by your own countrymen, yet you’re sitting here with me and fully engaged in what I’m telling you. No board of control is ever going to turn you away now but I need to know that I can count on you, because what’s through that door will change your life forever once you’ve seen it.’

  Mackenzie glanced at the other door, the one that had been closed the entire time. Somehow, he knew not to ask what was behind it. There was, he figured, no point. The point was that he could only see it if he agreed to whatever terms McCain was about to place before him.

 

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