towed through the hangar doors facing the complex of runways. Noticing that all the shades had been pulled over the windows, he reached to open the one nearest him. Captain Sykes leaned back in the seat in front of Mercer and closed the shade again.
“Sorry, Doc. Think of it as blackout conditions.” Sykes had a wad of tobacco in the corner of his mouth and appeared to be swallowing the juice.
“Any idea how long the flight will be?”
“Long enough for you and I to play a whole lot of gin.”
This was just getting better and better. “Do you know Admiral Lasko?”
“I know he authorized this flight,” Sykes replied, “but I’ve never met the man. Way above my pay grade.”
“If you happen to meet him before I see him again” — Mercer settled deeper in his seat, stretching out his six-foot frame and closing his eyes — “tell him he’s a dead man.”
“So, no cards, Doc?”
“Try solitaire.” Mercer felt the plane leap from the tarmac a few minutes later. There was no sense speculating about their destination. The same went for trying to guess what Ira wanted him for. Instead of frustrating himself further with mental gymnastics, he allowed his mind to slip into a balance between sleep and consciousness. If this was going to be a long flight, the least he could do was tune out most of it.
Hurtling into the unknown. It was a phrase that just popped into his head and immediately reminded him of the first time he’d been involved with a mine rescue. The visions came back to him with a dreamy quality, a kind of hyperreality where Mercer seemed to be standing still while the events rushed past him. He was twenty-seven at the time, on one of his first consulting jobs. A fire had broken out eleven hundred feet below ground at a West Virginia coal mine where he’d been plotting the best way to extract a newly discovered vein. As the only miner there who’d trained with South Africa’s famed Proto Team, the world’s best subterranean rescue group, Mercer had been the first volunteer to go down into the mine. He led four other men into the elevator cage after it had been verified that not all the men who’d gone down on their shift had returned when the mine was evacuated.
Mounted above the cage was a crude sign: THIS MINE HAS OPERATED FOR 203 ACCIDENT-FREE DAYS. Not anymore.
Smoke billowed up the shaft like pollution from a factory’s chimney, so thick that their lanterns were reduced to pinpricks. Smudge built up on their full-face oxygen masks and simply smeared when they tried to clean them. Fear caused Mercer’s breathing to come in sharp gulps.
The elevator dropped — hurtling into the unknown — past ten levels and deeper into the smoke. As it approached eleven the heat was brutal, radiating from the rock like an oven. But none of the men were willing to stop. Not until they knew what had happened to the twenty-six unaccounted miners caught up in the conflagration.
The scene when the cage doors opened was worse than the most gruesome image of Hades. The walls, ceiling and floor smoldered with the residual energy of the fire’s overflash. Anything combustible was a searing pocket of flame — men mostly, horrible twisted shapes of char. Almost worse was that some of them were still alive. The rescuers used portable fire extinguishers to shoot out jets of foam to smother the flames. As the sound of the fires waned, the pitiable cries of the dying grew.
The first explosion had exhausted most of the mine’s supply of air, but even with the industrial fans on the surface shut down, it was drawing in more like a flue. The blaze would reignite the swirling eddies of coal dust as soon as enough oxygen had been drawn down. Mercer understood that he and his team had minutes. They dragged the wounded into the skip hoist. Two of the rescue workers wanted to stay down and look for others, but Mercer wouldn’t let them. The mine was too hot. The risks they were taking already bordered on suicidal.
The second explosion, as violent as the first, rocked the hoist when they were fifty feet from the surface. Without the protection of their retardant suits, the overpressure wave would have scalded them to death. They used their bodies as human shields to protect their fallen comrades until the hoist reached the top. Scrambling amid a hellish torrent of smoke, they carried the seven men they’d saved clear of the heat. A triage station had already been established. Topside workers carried the wounded to the building as Mercer and his men stripped out of their scorched suits. By the time Mercer staggered into the first-aid station, only one of the men was still alive, and even he didn’t survive long enough to make it to the nearest hospital. The mine continued to burn for twelve days. After the bodies were recovered, level eleven had never reopened.
Of all the mine rescues Mercer had been involved with, that one struck the deepest in his mind. Not because it was the first, but because it was the only one where he hadn’t saved at least one miner who survived long enough to be found.
Mercer shook his head as if to dislodge the images. His memory was so full of such horrors that he tried not to revisit them. He blamed his uncharacteristic dark mood on the fact that this whole situation had him on edge. The unknown was perhaps his most feared adversary. As soon as he knew what was happening, the mood would pass.
A little over four hours later, the engine’s steady drone changed in pitch. They were beginning their descent. Guessing the aircraft cruised at five hundred knots, Mercer estimated they’d covered about twenty-four hundred miles. But not knowing their direction could put them anywhere in a circle large enough to touch on South America, the Azore Islands, the tip of Greenland and as far west as…
It couldn’t be.
Maybe it could. There was one easy way to find out. Sykes wasn’t exactly asleep, but he hadn’t turned the page of the book he was reading for the past fifteen minutes. Before his escort became aware the plane had left her cruising altitude, Mercer inched open his window shade. The darkness outside the aircraft was absolute. They could be over the Atlantic as far as he knew, but he doubted that very much.
The bright moon played against the underside of the clouds above the Gulfstream, and when Mercer pressed a hand to the Plexiglas to cut the glare from the cabin lights, he caught the dark reflection of mountains running off to the horizon.
The plane made a gentle turn and a riot of light erupted from the ground. It was a garish display, an unworldly sight like no place on earth. It was Las Vegas.
And Mercer knew of only one place near Vegas that was secret enough to warrant the level of security he’d endured. It was a remote section of desert euphemistically called Dreamland, but known more widely by its designation on an old Department of Energy map.
Area 51.
AREA 51, NEVADA
Knowing his destination only deepened the mystery surrounding Mercer’s clandestine trip.
What little he knew about Area 51 came from cable television. The secluded facility, along with Nellis Air Force Base and the Yucca Flats Atomic Test Range, encompassed a territory larger than Switzerland and had first been used for flight testing the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s. Since then most of America’s premier aircraft had gone through flight trials at Groom Lake, the massive dry lake bed on which Area 51 was built. The SR-71, the F-117 Stealth, the B-2 Spirit bomber and the F-22 Raptor had all first taken flight here. Rumors persisted that they were currently developing a hypersonic spy plane to replace the Blackbird, called Aurora, and that it was stationed at Dreamland. While the military continued to deny the existence of the base, these were the most acknowledged facts about Area 51.
Mostly, however, the legend of Area 51 grew from the myth that a flying saucer, which reportedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, had been transported to this isolated desert facility for study. Conspiracy theorists took the government’s denial as proof it really had happened. They strung together reports of strange lights, the testimony of charlatans and crackpots, and their own paranoia into a fantastic story of reverse engineering on the ships and bizarre medical experiments on the crew.
Mercer didn’t believe a word of it. Area 51 was simply the place where the military developed our next- generation aircraft in secret. Disregarding the absurdity that an advanced civilization was clumsy enough to crash
