standing on, and Army officers are preventing anyone from entering the area — or, presumably, from leaving the area if there’s anyone left alive to leave.” She paused for a moment, then continued. “As you can see, the men and women standing behind me are armed. They are Army officers, if I’m not mistaken. Regular Army — not National Guard. The question now becomes just what exactly is the Army doing? Their story is that they’re protecting the site of an aircraft mishap investigation. The gentleman standing behind me does not even know whether that’s true or not. He’s just carrying out orders. The larger question is exactly what the Army’s involvement in it is. Was it a military aircraft? Or is this the beginning of something bigger?”
She held still for moment, then made a chopping motion with her hand. The red light atop the camera went out.
She turned back to the Army officer. “OK, we’ll see you in three hours. Where is the briefing being held?” She scribbled down the directions, although she had no intention of being there. She managed to convey the impression of a disgruntled reporter but one that was willing to play by the rules. To her advantage, the officer assigned to the area was not part of the regular Army public affairs organization. Had he been, he would have known immediately what she had in mind.
Once they were all loaded up with the local affiliate and headed back down the road, Pamela turned to her cameraman. “You ready?”
The reporter from the local affiliate looked at her uncertainly. “Ready for what?”
She waved him off impatiently. “None of your business. As soon as we get around the next corner, stop and let us out. Then be back here in three hours for the press conference. Other than that, I don’t want to hear anything out of you. Got it?”
“What are you going to do?” the reporter asked.
“Got it?” she repeated, glaring at him. When he did not answer, she said, “Stop the van. Now!” The man driving ignored the local reporter and quickly brought the van to a halt. She and her cameraman jumped out, paused for a moment at the side of the road to survey the terrain. Then, without a backward glance, they began hiking up the hill.
An hour later, the two were on a peak overlooking Bull Run. Both were scratched, sweating, and bleeding in a few spots. The cameraman had even seen a couple of snakes, but he was being a trouper about it.
As Pamela surveyed the area, she gave a low whistle. He was already taping. “That doesn’t look like a plane crashed there. Not unless it had damned good aim.”
Below them, floodlights illuminated the charred remains of a small building. Two men were hosing down the remains. There were four Army vehicles there, including one that looked like an ambulance. All in all, the activity looked too military for the NTSB to be involved. Whatever had happened was already over, and this was simply the cleanup — or cover-up.
Pamela pulled out binoculars and focused on the area. What was it, a military facility? Or a civilian house? Whatever it had been, there was no evidence of any aircraft crashing into it, not the slightest trace of debris. Not that she had believed that from the very start.
In addition to a large number of military types, there were also a few civilians. Just behind the site, in an open field, she taught saw two helicopters. They were both powered down, waiting.
“You want to do a standup?” the cameraman asked.
She shook her head. “Not until we’re further away. You never know how sound will carry in the mountains.”
He shrugged. “Up to you.”
“Let’s just watch for a while. Be ready, in case anything starts happening.” No sooner had she said that than there was a flurry of activity, and two men emerged from the burned-out remains of what had to be the basement. They carried with them three bright orange body bags that they very carefully passed up to a man standing at ground level. A priest appeared, made a few brief motions, and the bags were loaded into the ambulance.
The camera clicked as the cameraman recorded it all. Pamela just watched, barely able to breath from the anticipation.
“Don’t move,” a voice said quietly. “Don’t move a muscle.”
Both Pamela and her cameraman froze. They’d been in enough situations like this before to know that obeying was their best bet of staying alive.
“That’s good — real good. Now, just keep it up while we have a brief look-see at your equipment.” Pamela heard movement behind her, but did not turn her head to look. She heard her cameraman swear quietly as he was relieved of his equipment. Hands moved over her roughly, opened her pack, and she was subjected to a thorough pat-down.
“OK, you can get up. Let’s move slowly.” Drake did as she was told, turning slowly around to face the intruders. She sucked in a sharp breath and knew why the voice had sounded so familiar.
The man shook his head quickly, cautioning her to keep quiet. “Let’s go down to my vehicle, shall we? Your story isn’t here. But I can hook you up with the guys who are going to be in the middle of it. You ever heard of a guy by the name of Abraham Carter?”
As Pamela followed her CIA contact to his vehicle, she couldn’t help smiling.
Staff Sergeant Joe Parker hated the desert. Raised in the mountains of Kentucky, proficient with a firearm even before he learned his alphabet, he had grown up under the sheltering protection of the Appalachian Mountains. He knew how to lose himself in thickly wooded forests that climbed the sides of the mountains and the narrow valleys that stretched between them. He understood the rhythms of the sun, the way the weather affected the animals and the terrain, and how to use the light and the weather to his advantage.
But this — this damn desert — was as completely alien as the moon. Dawn came suddenly, no long lingering shadows to hide you. Night came on equally fast, one moment light, then boom — darkness. The abrupt demarcation between light and dark seemed as dangerous and alien to him as the flat terrain that stretched out to the horizons, unbroken by any rise in elevation other than the occasional sand dune. He felt exposed and naked on the bare flat land. In theory, he knew that his desert-colored camouflage and the other concealment measures that they took worked well, but in his heart he never believed it.
The one thing he was grateful for was that the terrain made patrols more straightforward, if more dangerous. You drove or flew over somewhere and you saw what you saw. There was no puzzling out the shadows of the trees, no looking for odd shapes along a wooded ridgeline.
Although he’d slowed down some in the last two years, the result of deteriorating cartilage in his knees, Parker still led area patrols from time to time, if only to keep his hand in and show the youngsters how it was done. At thirty-two, he was considered an old man in the service. The average age in the Army was twenty-two.
This day was no different from any other one. They had been transported by truck to the drop-off point along with their gear and then set out to patrol their area. Another patrol headed off the opposite direction, and they remained visible for a long time on the flat terrain.
Sweat sprang up immediately on the nape of his neck and traced small streams down his back. The perspiration would slow down later on as he became dehydrated and accustomed to the heat.
“On the horizon,” his point man said, holding up a hand to stop their forward progress. “Look.”
Parker squinted in the direction that his point indicated. He raised his binoculars to his eyes, silently damning the deterioration in his eyesight over the last decade. When he was the point’s age, he could have seen it without the binos, too.
It was a small hump on the horizon, barely visible. Not moving, dark gray-green against the sand. A vehicle of some sort — nothing to indicate it was moving, no sand or clouds in the air around it.
“The intel photos showed a couple of abandoned trucks in the area,” he said. “Might be one of them.”
“Wonder if there’s anything left in it,” Point said.
“Worth looking at,” Parker said. “Come on.”
Captain Arless “Airless” Handshaw had been pulling alert for the last four hours, and he was getting pretty sick of it. They’d gone to an increased state of alert the day before, for some unknown reason probably having to do
