First in a series of excerpts.
Note on the content: I know this is too long. You're not supposed to start off a novel with a long prologue. Maybe I'm hoping I can break the rules in this case; maybe I'm hoping I can move some of this out into flashbacks as the novel grows. Dunno. Just keep telling yourself this is a rough draft.
13 Oct 96
02:38 It began life as an ordinary ghillie
suit. Not an unusual piece of equipment for James’ line of work, per se, but this
one is quite unlike any other he’s encountered. This one is named Bear.
Its exterior still requires finalizing—which will be done
onsite—but that's just camouflage, not part of its special requirements; the
interior is the real point of interest, and the source of all his fears: how thoroughly thermally insulative those
layers are, and how badly it is going to suck to wear that thing while crawling
on the desert floor for kilometers at a time. He's test-worn the
outfit at various phases of development, and knows what the suit feels
like: pressing in on one's skin, sometimes for hours, basting the
body in one's sweat, chafing at all bony the ridges and cutting off circulation
at all the soft spots, restricting movement and wearing out muscle
prematurely. Fatigue is compounded by the effort involved with
suppressing the vigor of one's actions just to avoid overheating.
This is its first night trial. It will move to a
day trial if it meets tonight's requirements. The trial begins by
Bastardizing™ a standard battle dress uniform, by overlaying the silvery
thermal suit. The thermal layer is a laminate of
neoprene, spandex, fiberglas, foam rubber and Mylar. A man in the
suit resembles nothing, in form and function, so much as a potato baking in
foil wrapping, with bush sticking out in all directions. He's wearing it
tucked over his t-shirt and under his trousers, and at its extremities are
velcroed various accoutrements such as gloves, socks and a
facemask. No movement is comfortable at this point; even breathing
will become something of an endurance feat as he gets the test
underway.
James took to referring to the thermal layer as The Bastard™
early on in the project, long before it was even wedded to the ghillie suit. He
and Harold and Agent RED took turns trying on the various uncomfortable
incarnations while they worked out the thermal kinks. But RED has had other missions to tend to
these past few weeks, and Harold has since settled into the role of observer. And though they’ve worked out the thermal
problems—it is hoped—the suit has only become less comfortable with each
modification.
He has stuffed foam-wrapped electronics devices, such as a
GPS receiver and tape recorder into his cargo pockets, and secured them from
bumping and rattling by fixing them into oversized PocketWads™ molded to a mesh
of twine he has sewn into the pockets. He has applied a lot of
adhesive and a lot of Velcro to the remainder of the exposed fabric, availing
every available square centimeter for arcane purposes yet to be conceived.
Sighing, he straps himself into two crisscrossing
bandoliers, equipping himself with binoculars, night-vision gear, a miniature
videocamera modified for infrared use, a tiny folding tripod, a utility knife,
a snakebite kit and lots of spare batteries. Then he looks at the
load-bearing suspenders affixed to his pistol belt—carrying a handgun and ammunition, a small field
radio, a compass, a field dressing and first aid pack as well as two canteens
of water—and sighs
again. He removes the bandoliers, dons the belt and suspenders, and
replaces the bandoliers. He takes a moment to breathe and properly
appreciate the weight. He is already sweating profusely.
He has to stand with arms outstretched while Harold drapes
the bearsuit over him. It too is a composite of several layers, the
bottommost of which is a simple military-issue thermal blanket, chemically
treated with Harold's Phosphorus Goop™. The idea behind the Goop is
that it operates much like an ordinary phosphorescent material, except that
instead of storing visible light and reradiating it at longer wavelengths, it
stores near infrared and radiates it away slowly as far infrared. This
only covers a fraction of the range of potential detectors the Bear will have
to defeat, and is therefore only part of the heat-masking apparatus required to
conceal a human’s bodily heat signature; the Goop will have to be further
masked by ordinary camouflage, including natural material gathered from onsite.
The whole looks like a rather scraggly hillock of grass and
reeds. Harold gets poked in the eye while securing the arm and
shoulder straps, twice. Then James ties on the waist. The
legs aren't bound to him; he is supposed to crawl while dragging the heavy
train of it behind him, brushing out his trail.
The test course is a one-hundred meter strip of gravel road
running past Harold's parents' house, well north of Mobile,
Alabama. Harold has placed three infrared motion detectors at
various points and orientations along the course. James will have to
get past all three and set up the tripod and camera at the goal, operate the
camera for five minutes and crawl back the way he came without being detected
by any of them. To provide a certain real-world intensity, Harold
has also rigged seismic detectors, so that James will be required to move
tactically, essentially at a low crawl, for the entirety of the
course. Harold will use his own infrared-modified camcorder to track
James in realtime and gather data on his heat signature. They're not
necessarily aware of the specs of every infrared sensor that might be in use at
their targets; they’re planning for sensors that haven’t been invented yet.
Some of the detectors will simply try to spot any
significant temperature gradient that appears within their field of vision; a
hard-edged target, like a mammalian body, should produce a sharp bloom within
the sensor's field. Others will look for specific
temperatures and radiation patterns, so that they can (notionally) identify
humans and ignore (for example) desert foxes and rabbits. James has
to fool them all.
02:45 James is grateful for the additional
padding recently sewn into the Bastard™, and for his own modifications to the
BDU trousers, as he begins the crawl. He has to watch his breathing,
because the suit's design does not permit for radiative cooling or shielding of
his breath. He has to exhale slowly and steadily to keep the
temperature-gradient curve nice and flat around his head. So he
takes his time.
03:38 Two-thirds of the way down the
course, the second detector raises an alarm, and the trial is over.
Harold has long since given up trying to hold the infrared
cam steady on James, and has rested it on a lawn chair next to
him. All he's had to do is adjust its aim every five minutes to keep
James' slow ass in the viewfinder. He has swatted mosquitoes, taken
a leak and made a ham sandwich in the time it's taken James to get halfway
there. He is somewhat alarmed about the small hotspots James kicks
up when he walks and when he crawls, little pockets of higher temperature
transferred to the ground by friction. Harold's mind is already
working on redesign, but he doesn't think he's going to find a suitably durable
yet friction-free fabric within time frame. He's going to have to
tell James to pick his legs off the ground when crawling and not to drag his
feet.
Hearing the alarm, James rolls over, setting off the two
other detectors, and begins the arduous process of unbuckling himself from
everything. He sits up, then stands up, rocking unsteadily for a
moment, and then taking hold of the ghillie suit, drags it through the dust and
gravel of Harold's ancestral driveway and drops it at Harold's feet, where it
lops over into the lawn chair and covers the infrared cam. "You
do it next time," he says, and, taking the bottled beer Harold has just
brought out for himself from the kitchen, trudges into the house.
26 Oct 96
03:59 Harold does not in fact do it next
time; James is the field guy, and Harold the tech guy, and that's simply the
way it is. Harold's not particularly reticent about field work, he
claims, but he doesn't have anywhere near James' physical conditioning.
The Bear suit has been modified with an adapted
military-issue protective mask; an insulated hose has been taped to the output
vent, routing his breath beneath the ghillie suit. James is thrilled
that now in addition to breathing like he's got a pile of bricks duct-taped to
his ribcage, he gets to do it through a straw.
James makes it all the way to the goal this time, and gives
himself about five minutes of rest and cooldown before attempting to set up the
camcorder. He recalls unfondly the general sense of claustrophobia
which always accompanied physical exertion under a ghillie suit or while
wearing a protective mask. He has had to fight several times the
urge to break the mask's seal at the chin and gulp cool night
air. Such impulses can quickly lead to a rather ugly death on the
battlefield, but they’re almost irresistible when in mere field training, as he
knows firsthand.
He has been lying in a prone position for several minutes
cooling down when he decides to set up the camcorder. As he leans
back a bit on his elbows to provide access to the pockets in his bandolier, the
third detector—directly
ahead of him, opposite the goal—goes
off. He is somewhat flummoxed by this, and starts to roll over to
yell at Harold, who has been recording the event in his lackadaisical,
nudge-the-camera manner. Harold hollers "Stay put," and holds
the infrared viewfinder to his eye. He doesn't see anything obvious,
so he starts walking toward James. He amuses himself by watching his
own warm footprints cool away to nothing through the viewfinder. As
he pulls up on James, he sees a very slight warming to the front of the
goal. He asks James to stand up. James sullenly complies,
with a certain minimum of moaning and groaning. And there, on the
ground, is revealed the source of the alarm: a roughly rectangular
patch of ground warmed by conduction from the inside, the foil side, of the
bearsuit's thermal blanket. James' leaking body heat has been spread
into a neatly human-shaped package set in the middle of a slightly cooler
blanket-shaped mold. As Harold watches, chuckling, the blanket shape
cools away to nothing, and the human shape begins to follow
suit. James is already trudging back toward the house.
07:42 Harold rolls out of
bed. The ghillie suit is piled in a lump in the
corner. Harold stretches, gets to his feet and grasps the suit in
both hands—foil layer in
the left, burlap in the right—and
unceremoniously separates the two portions with a most satisfying ripping
sound. To keep to RED’s desired schedule, they've got two months to
get a prototype put together and field-tested. And last night's
results take them right back to the drawing board.
For the Army James was a soldier. In the private sector he was a tinker. The Group has made him a tailor and a spy. In his less charitable moments, he thinks it has made Harold a desk jockey with a steering wheel.
18 Nov 96
01:30 James likes the new Bastard™. Comparatively
speaking.
It is not so thick and ungainly, and it is not so
mind-meltingly hot as its predecessor, although it is substantially lumpier in
places. Certain problem areas of the suit have been augmented with
small Peltier coolers, helping maintain his comfort but exacerbating the problem
of heat disposal. The foam layer has
been replaced by a mesh of fine plastic tubes, flattened and wrapped like
ribbon around his bodily contours, through which courses a steadily-pumped
volume of liquid coolant. A foil conductive layer communicates his
body heat to the tubes. A battery-powered pump located over his
chest keeps the coolant circulating, and eight separate heat exchange pumps
transfer that heat to a heavily-insulated, doubled tube of coolant running down
his back. A separate pump at the small of his back routes the
coolant to the canteen pouches on his pistol belt, which house
precisely-manufactured, seriously-oversized thermos bottles. The
coolant in these bottles will take up heat from the tube, and hold it until
later, when the fluid can simply be poured out. James is, in effect,
wearing a distributed refrigerator which will essentially drain the heat away
from his extremities and bottle it away for later release. The assemblage is based on a more refined
design put together by RED, itself based on diagrams of the original A7L Apollo
space suit’s water cooling system.
They've already determined that the bottles can between them
store the equivalent of four hours' worth of heat output from a James-sized man
at rest before they bleed through the insulation and become detectable to the
simplest of Harold's sensors. James thinks that might translate to
thirty minutes' worth of heat output from a James-sized man crawling the desert
floor underneath a heavy Bear suit.
He powers up the rear pump and the chest pump, and the
extremity pumps come online automatically. His body is aware of
various vibrational patterns expressed in different directions across various
cross-sections and with varying degrees of resonance. He has a
feeling this sensation will have a lulling or numbing effect on him if he
remains in place for long.
This is their first attempt at an active cooling mechanism,
and while James is glad that it will eliminate their dependence on the thermal
blanketing and much of the insulation, he also knows this means there is
greater complexity involved, more potential for problems, more links to break,
more noise to compensate for. He usually prefers his uniform to have
few to no moving parts. He also doesn't like to have to worry about
changing the batteries.
He puts aside these misgivings as Harold drapes the Bear
over the Bastard™, which he’s already wearing, and Velcroes it in place. The
assemblage weighs noticeably less than in previous incarnations. The weight is concentrated at the pumps, but
well-distributed by the harness; it's also less restrictive, once bound to his
arms and body. He is going to have to get used to having his
canteens on his suspenders, rather than his belt, but it actually is a more
convenient arrangement for hooking up the mask's drinking tube, one he wishes
he'd arrived at long ago.
01:49 James begins
crawling. Harold begins recording.
02:23 James pauses to catch some slow
breaths and slow his heart rate. He absently pats himself down under
the suit, checking all his gear for securement. As he brushes the Thermos
strapped over his right glute, the tube breaks free of the thermos cap and
begins venting coolant steam directly through the bearsuit. Harold
watches through the viewfinder, capturing in perfect false-color detail James beginning
to squirm as a neat plume of hot steam jets from his backside into the cool night
air.
20 Nov 96
03:36 On its second trial, the somewhat
reinforced and augmented thermal stealth suit completes the course
successfully. James manages to capture five uninteresting minutes of
video surveillance of the detector beneath whose very nose he lies
gasping.
26 Nov 96
04:20 Based on Harold's infrared footage,
they've identified several worrisome spots in the suit's coolant mesh, and
they've been busy in the shop reconfiguring the tubing and adding a smaller
capillary network across larger surface areas such as the upper
back. James' confidence in the latest revision speeds him on his
way, and he accomplishes a round trip in just over an hour. Back at
the starting line, he stands up, and all three detectors
blare. "Hey," he tells Harold, who is lounging comfortably,
watching the stars. "It's four-twenty." They
share the mandated moment of silence, and then James doffs the Bear while
Harold digs for a lighter.
2 Dec 96
05:00 They've made two runs today, one
during the heat of the day and one during the most wee hours of the night.
The upgrade involves the addition of two more thermos
bottles, these on the thighs, with structural provision for two
spares. Actually changing the bottles on the fly will unavoidably
result in some heat loss, so he doesn't want to have to do this very
frequently. On tonight's run he made it to the target and back in an
hour, even stopping midway both ways, once to change batteries in the infrared
cam and once to drink some water. But James believes this version
can keep him cool for over an hour at a good high crawl clip, good enough to
put the drop point reasonably distant from the target. That will
only get him one way, however; before making a full retreat, he will almost
certainly have to disconnect at least two of the bottles to swap them out for
fresh ones.
He's not worried right now, of course. He's
dreaming about two Alabama farm girls he met the last time he was out this
way. In the dream, this bit of land out here is his, and he has a
much nicer house sitting on it, and Harold is just some guy he knows from
church.
Harold, however, is worried right now. The
prototype is complete. The Group is eager to manufacture a dozen of
these things and distribute them to its field people, but they're going to want
a real-world field test first. Harold knows which target they're
going to ask James to surveil. The target they've been training for
the past four months is a particularly dangerous one, situated astride a stark
desert basin surrounded by rocky mountains. It's a place where
people who wander past the warning signs sometimes disappear.
14 Jan 97
10:15 The good Prof has given the go-ahead
for an onsite test. The cousins Washington leave the Prof's office
with a shared sense of mixed excitement and dread. They will build a
backup suit and use it to practice the mission over the next month, while
keeping this one mothballed. They will then need to watch for an
unpredictably uneven mix of weather and moonlight conditions so that on that
night, the real trial, the suit's strengths and weaknesses are properly
highlighted.
27 Feb 97
16:20 Harold and James Washington have
finalized the travel route, identified rally points, a primary and backup dropoff
point, and a primary and backup extraction point; they have rehearsed movement
to and from each of those points under bright moonlight and in complete
darkness, verified the calibration of their maps to the GPS data, and put
together reasonable estimates for gas mileage and travel times both relaxed and
emergency.
James has set off the detectors twice since rehearsals
began, but since the first round of tweaks, he hasn't failed; that makes for
something like eighteen successful trials. He has devised a
helmet-mounted optical camcorder which can be suitably insulated by foam if its
running time is kept to a few minutes at a time. He has augmented
his chest pack—housing a
coolant pump and some spare batteries—with
a palmtop computer, into which he can jack digital output from his GPS
receiver, Geiger counter and compass, and which can retransmit data over
infrared link to a laptop computer. The palmtop is stuffed with
additional memory and storage devices; it can sample his position and vital
stats at regular intervals and provide enough information post-facto to
accurately plot his route and condition. He has also added a
frequency-hopping transmitter cannibalized from a military radio, through which
he can send a high-frequency burst to the van, dumping all his data in case of
compromise en route.
James also is working on modifying a set of night-vision
goggles to provide a heads-up display of data fed in from the
computer. He has succeeded in getting textual information
superimposed over the background image, but has not gotten the text focused or
positioned to his liking yet. He hates wearing the damned things for
hours at a time, but they are just one more discomfort among many to be borne
at this stage.
For his part, Harold has worked on tweaking the DRIVE
program, which is to reside on the laptop computer mounted to the
buggy. Driving it remotely is still inordinately difficult using a
palmtop keyboard, but on reasonably flat terrain the buggy ought to be able to
home in roughly on the transmitter. The biggest problem is going to
be maintaining line of sight for the infrared link. James has
augmented the LED array considerably; he can talk to the buggy from nearly a
hundred feet away now at full power, but parallax makes DRIVEing the damn thing
nearly impossible at that range. If
time—and the supply of Basic Stamps—had permitted, James could have got the
buggy to home in on his location without manual input. But the chips had been backordered for weeks,
so he’d had to rely on RC receivers and servos.
The buggy could be easily driven by an ordinary RC transmitter, but the
weight and bulk of such a device had been prohibitive on this mission, which
demanded the use of small, multipurpose devices whenever possible. The buggy itself is collapsible, really just
a heavy-duty, highly-muffled go-kart, with an electric as well as a gas engine,
easily torn down to fit in the space afforded by the three-foot extension the
cousins have made to the back of the van.
They're feeling good about it. Both have indulged
their paranoia to the extent of their resourcefulness, both have worked hard
and both have accomplished a great deal. Both are practiced, both
are rested, and both are ready.
Now they're hanging at James' apartment in
town. They've just had a fantastic lunch, and James has a football
game on in the living room. He emerges from the kitchen carrying two
fresh beers and hands one to Harold's lazy fat outstretched ass on the
sofa. "Hey, it's four twenty," he says.
10 Mar 97
The two head to Las Vegas to set up their base of operations
and support network. They take turns driving, visiting several
potential safehouses, while establishing a generally touristy travel and
purchase pattern across the southwest.
12 Mar 97
16:32 The “van”—a highly-customized box
truck they’ve christened the African
Ingenuity II—pulls onto the eastbound shoulder of Highway 95, well
southeast of Indian Springs. James and Harold haul the tarps and the
Bear suit out onto the ground, spray them with adhesive, and kick sand and dirt
onto them. They wait for the adhesive to set before rolling
everything back up and loading back into the van. They have to keep
moving to avoid being clustered on satellite photographs. Their
predetermined route is planned to exhibit the randomness of a typical lost,
unconcerned tourist's driving. Harold drives somewhat slackly,
knowing the best arrival time, from an infrared-detection-avoidance standpoint,
is right at sunset. Guesswork as to which drop point will be best,
given the expected cloud cover, imparts some tentativity to his navigation.
16:45 They break for a late
lunch. As the sun heads west, they revisit tonight's weather
forecast and confirm the A site as the drop point. Harold will park
the van in a niche in the rocks well off the road, dropping off James and the
buggy. He will then retreat to a distance reasonably safe from
surveillance, and patrol the highway out beyond the Mailbox. The
moon is an eigthth past its prime, well above the horizon and very favorable to
night vision equipment. The Group’s Weather Report—a bulletin
comprising not just local weather conditions, but a full range of atmospheric
and global readings—holds little of immediate interest to James, so he scans it
hastily and leave it to Harold to extract anything of import.
The Camo Dudes can mount armed SUVs and helicopters in
pursuit; they are not constrained by roads. The van is hopped up for
escape and evasion, but it is not invisible to satellites and all too easy to
track by aircraft.
17:02 They run down the 1-hour
checklist. In the extended cabin of the van, Harold checks the van's
data storage and transmission facilities, and James inspects his
equipment. He decides to pack some spare magazines for his
Beretta. The undersuit he's wearing out this time has been
Rad-paked, a detail he has insisted upon since last year after Red's close call
in Utah. The earliest version of Rad-paks was little more than
modified Polaroid filmpacks sewn into a battle dress uniform; the latest
generation consist of adhesive patches which can be applied directly to the
neoprene of the Bastard™.
He dons the helmet and extends the
headset. Harold is monitoring radio frequencies, trying to intercept
transmissions from Groom Lake, knowing that all the interesting stuff is going
to be sent over frequency-hopping channels, and possibly encrypted as
well. There is a lot of static and interference, indicative of
strong radio and radar activity in the area, suggesting heightened patrol
activity. Increasing the speaker volume, he programs the scan
computer to scan 100 frequencies at a time across random military bands.
17:03 A sudden loud brief burst of noise
from the speakers causes James to recoil; turning toward the noise, he bangs
the night-vision set on some nearby miscellaneous equipment and breaks the
boom.
"Shit," he says, matter-of-factly.
"Shit." Harold agrees.
17:04 James attempts to piece it back
together using duct tape. The results are less than satisfactory;
the boom sags, and the visor dangles, preventing a tight seal around the
eyepieces.
"No time," says Harold. "Rip it
off if it's in the way." He's concerned about that blast of
noise, worried that it might have been a nearby burst transmission or perhaps
an attempt to jam radio communications in the vicinity.
James counts to ten, narrowly suppressing the sudden urge to
hurl the helmet into Harold's radio receiver. He's got concerns of
his own. It’s easy for Harold to say “rip
it off” about something he regards his life as depending on.
18:02 Harold pulls up at drop site A, a
nice rocky niche well off the road. They unload the buggy, do a
final comms check, and then Harold hauls off back to the highway. He
and James will each spend a few minutes brushing out tire tracks from their
respective ends of this trail. Then Harold will begin leisurely
touring Highway 375 while James struggles into the suit on his own and begins
humping toward the objective.
19:27 James comes to rest against a low
berm. Behind him is a long stretch of rolling, rocky terrain, what he has
come to think of as “dunes” despite being much more solidly packed than
anything he’s seen at the beach or in photos of Tunisia.
His knees are bruised and his feet are cramping. But he’s here.
He has defeated ground surveillance radar and infrared
motion detectors. He has detoured around angry-sounding rattlesnakes
and brushed away scorpions and tarantulas. He has winced at the
sudden close approach of bats and moths, and frozen in place, awed, as three
coyotes trotted a few meters away from him, sniffing. He has been
bitten by ants and mosquitoes, and has braved the unabashed attentions of a
loose passel of vultures circling above. Now at his objective, he
has to piss like a goddam racehorse.
He pauses to gather his breath, resisting the urge to crack
the seal on his mask. The eyepieces are steaming up, but so far
Harold's infrared Goop™ appears to have been preventing heat leakage to the
front.
He withdraws the tripod and begins slowly, quietly to set it
up. A roughly rectangular grid of buildings and roads spreads out a
little more than a kilometer to his front, a long runway stretching off to his
left, roughly southeasterly. All is picked out by streetlights and
various typical nighttime illuminations, including a soft silver cast from the
retreating moon.
He winces as the tripod clicks into open-and- locked
position, and gingerly begins threading the camcorder onto
it. Absently, as he aims the camera at the southeast end of the
facility, he reaches up with right glove and touches the button activating the
helmet cam. He double-takes at a bright point hovering above the
facility, right around where the runway joins it. He watches for a
second or two as it glimmers, twinkling in the shifting desert air above the
airfield. Then he grabs the camcorder and angles it upward at this
new find. Possibly an instrumentation balloon, more likely a
helicopter on its way to intercept him, it is certainly worth investigating
while he just happens to have two video recording devices pointed in its
direction.
He loses it. It's suddenly not where he's
looking. He shakes his head and blinks, then begins to scan the
area. It has either turned off its anticollision light or
disappeared entirely. He withdraws the broken night-vision set from
his bandolier and begins scanning the sky.
19:34 He spots against the green glaring
canopy of stars a tiny point of light moving in a long slow arc, like a
satellite viewed through binoculars. It is evidently very high and a
matter of several clicks to the north of the airfield, but it appears to be
descending and gaining luminosity fairly rapidly. He watches as it
begins to execute wide swinging maneuvers, almost like the drift of a leaf
falling; he starts to have trouble tracking it through the goggles and removes
them. He can make out a bluish-white dot swooping around off to the
north and northwest. It settles down into a straight slow descent,
which it holds for about a minute, and which brings it to a rest a few hundred
meters above the ground well to the west, directly to his right. It
then begins a very swift, curved approach, ringing the airfield at a distance
from it about equal to James'. He tries to lean to his left and hold
the infrared cam on the object, which he realizes is going to pass directly
over him. As it approaches, he recognizes that it is substantially
solid, most likely metal, and the bright lights are just its most visible
component. He is starting to suspect that what he is seeing is
actually just the propulsion system. It's not a particularly
stealth-oriented system, evidently. The outlines aren't clear in the
glare, but the object is noticeably eclipsing the stars above.
19:38 It comes to a hover above him, maybe
five meters to his rear. He scoots around to keep the helmet cam
aimed at it, and picks up the infrared cam, fumbling to release it from the
tripod. He is tempted to roll onto one side or his back for better
flexibility, but that would immediately defeat the bearsuit's
camouflage. For about forty seconds it hovers behind him, and he
alternates recording it through the camcorder with watching it through the
infrared goggles.
He is holding the goggles up to the mask's misty eyepieces
when it drifts back over him, closing in on the airfield. As it
passes overhead, one of the out-of-focus numbers in the lower-left corner of
the goggles' field of vision changes suddenly. The number is the one
which indicates James' overall radiation exposure level. It has
changed from being a fuzzy one-digit zero to being a fuzzy three-digit
number. As the craft moves over the berm back toward the Area, the
number drops rapidly to fuzzy zero again.
19:40 James is on the point of packing up
the infrared cam, but cannot bring himself to pry it from his eyes, given the
enhanced visibility it confers on the aircraft above. He reaches up
to power down the helmet cam, and sees several more bright lights in the sky
over the base, moving southwesterly over the mountain ridge behind
it. Their motion is uniform with respect to each other; it is like
watching a single string of beads being pulled from behind the mountain would
be, if the beads were giant and glowing. With a jolt James realizes
the lights are all part of a single object, like brilliant round portholes in
the side of—well,
what? Something long, solid and linear. Something that
moves pretty damn fast for something that big. He leaves the cam on
and watches.
The smaller craft is back over the center of the facility
now, and generally descending, but it seems to have spotted the larger object
and does some sort of double-take. James watches in growing
amazement as the thing begins to shudder, casting weird reflective glints off
its wobblings in the shifting air. When the larger craft throws a pale
green beam of light onto the smaller one, James remembers how badly he needs to
urinate. He's going to have to recommend they put a few extra tubes
in the suit's next upgrade.
He removes the infrared cam from his eye and sees through the night-vision lenses what
appears to be a pale green beam of light. He pulls the night-vision away long enough to peek at the scene with naked eyes; they cannot make out any detail, but they do see what what appeared to be a pale green beam of light is actually a pale blue beam of light. Cerenkov radiation, he thinks, and
immediately packs the IR camera.
When he looks up again, the glow is still faintly visible in the night-vision goggles, and the smaller craft's light is lost in
it. The distance between the two is narrowing. James
guesses the bigger one is hauling the smaller aboard. He is no
longer seeing the Craft in profile; the small one is now somewhat between it
and his position. The big one looks like a flat broad triangle, and
it is indeed quite expansive.
Reality has begun to reassert itself over the novelty of it
all, and he's had enough. The blue-white beam has shortened to
nothing; as he watches, trying to convince himself to move, the small craft
disappears into the triangle's brightly-lit nose, which then goes
dark. James rolls over and gets to his feet and 19:41 hauls
ass still wearing the Bear suit and 19:42 trips over the long tail and
rolls down a rocky dune, 19:43 shedding the Bear exterior camouflage and
rolling back to his feet. Before he can stand fully upright, the air
above and behind him goes hollow and then solid as it is rent by the passing of
a large, black triangle a bare hundred meters overhead. He cracks
the mask and lets it fall away from his face; it hangs at his chin and James
fondles the palmtop computer at his chest. He takes an additional
moment to doff his gloves and stuff them in cargo pockets; he can't operate the
keyboard efficiently all fat-fingered. He opts against dumping his
data now; the Craft above him will, if true to form, interfere with his radio
transmission anyway.
He isn't terribly frightened now, just generally
anxious. The Craft isn't so much flying as drifting, following
roughly the reverse of the course he took to get here. At this close
range it is fucking huge, but nearly silent; there's just a sort of airy wind
sound, and then almost total silence as it passes above, blacking out stars as
if sucking in the light, damping sound as if sucking in the
noise. After about ten seconds or so it's past him and scooting
along behind him, in the direction of the drop point.
And he realizes it's a perfectly good time to be terribly
frightened, because that thing is going to have a bunch of Feds tailing it within
moments, and it is going to lead them straight to his dune buggy.
He regrets he must abandon the camouflage, but he's not
trying to run across the desert under that shit, and at least it's not likely
to carry any recognizeable fingerprints. Nothing else must be left
behind. He unzips the Bastard™ undersuit and removes his helmet,
which he carries in his left hand; for balance he carries the Beretta in his
right. Fighting the urge to holler after it, he races up and down
the dunes, steadily losing ground. Within seconds he's giggling like
a child.
Chasing a UFO across the Nevada desert, on
foot. He lets loose a war whoop. There’s an element of déjà vu to the moment,
which he doesn’t indulge. When on
missions for the Group, he does sometimes encounter situations reminiscent of
things he’s recently dreamed about.
Nothing new here. Except for the
honking big UFO scooting nape-of-the-dunes ahead of him.
20:03 He's still got it in sight, but no
hope of catching up. It's cruising, nonchalantly, as though leading
him on, perhaps to just over the next hill. He hears a familiar but
unwelcome air-rending clamor behind him and knows that two helicopters
(Apaches, sounds like) are trailing the triangle craft. They will no
doubt spot him unless he takes cover (and if they're FLIR-equipped, they
already have). Now, his mind screams at him in a pissed-off drill
sergeant voice, would be a good time to have the Bear suit on hand.
He dives to the ground and curls up around a clump of desert
grass clustered on a yucca plant. The hissing, whisking motion in
the dusty grass by his face is probably the tail of an unhappy coachwhip snake,
and he's glad to be facing the blunt end. Those things have a
tendency to go for the eyes when pissed. And they're always pissed.
He's momentarily dusted with sharp sand and dry vegetation
as the lead chopper passes directly overhead at about the same altitude as the
ship; the wingman is higher and a hundred meters or so behind and to the
south. If they're monitoring infrared instruments they will most
likely have spotted him, but if they're all focused on the UFO, then he might
be good for another minute or two. He feels a strong need to take a
break and regroup, but knows you never really have more than a few seconds of
break in the action. To make the point, the moment the second copter
has passed out of sight over the hillocks ahead, the coolant tube to thermos
bottle #3 ruptures, and James' right leg is doused in hot, steaming
liquid. For a second he thinks he has finally just let his bladder
go. For another second he considers just playing along and doing it
anyway, but Harold probably wouldn't let him back into the van.
20:19 He's less than three hundred meters
from the buggy's camouflaged position, and he can see he's been
compromised. At least one white SUV is on the scene, faintly visible
in the moonlight, parked behind the low hill to his front. The buggy
is parked in a tiny draw in the side of that hill, and covered with a web of
camouflage netting, but he can tell by the metallic gleam projecting from the
lump that the netting has been at least partially peeled back. There
will be at least two, maybe four or six Camo Dudes checking out the
area. Most likely the driver is still seated in the SUV, pulling
security over it and the surrounding area while the guys on foot move about in
a search pattern.
He drops to the prone position and begins to high
crawl. He can call the buggy to his position, but driving it
remotely at this range will be like trying to control an RC airplane through a
periscope. And there are guys with guns between it and him.
He has been wanting to wonder why they haven't made his
position, but he's not given himself time. Now, downshifting to a
more leisurely gear, he lets himself wonder. He's willing to bet
that every infrared detector, every ground-surveillance radar antenna, every
seismic sensor beneath the triangle's trajectory has been disabled by its
passing. He knows his chest computer is still on, and he can still
feel the coolant pumps in the undersuit vibrating, but he has no confidence in
his radio, and suspects that infrared communication with the buggy may be
limited. Those big ships have a way of knocking out sensitive
electronic equipment, particularly communications equipment. But if
he's correct, then he has some leeway in how he can approach. Surely
he can't set off any sensors here that the Dudes wouldn't themselves be
triggering with their every move.
He crawls up to within a hundred meters of the buggy, and
makes out four Camo Dudes. Two are cautiously checking out the buggy
itself, not quite to the point of rifling it; they're probably concerned about
booby-traps, but it's only a matter of time before they're satisfied enough to
climb aboard, disable the engine or disconnect the motor or
laptop. There's another Dude on the other side of the mound, facing
roughly northward, providing security for the team at the buggy. The
last Dude is about forty meters in the other direction, facing away, preventing
flank approaches.
James knows there'll be someone still at the wheel in one or
more of the SUVs. This is not at all a tight perimeter; there are
probably additional vehicles on the way right now to close the gaps.
Then his hackles creep and his skin crawls and he feels
strongly that he's being watched. He scans to the right and sees a
dark figure skirting the dunes about fifty meters to the side. A man
in black. He'd be almost invisible except for the pale skin of his
neck and face catching all that nice moonlight. He grins broadly for
a moment. Then he realizes his flashy teeth will defeat his dark
skin and give him away. He ducks, trying to clear his
head. He's fatigued and dehydrated and very, very
excited. He doesn't know whether the guy has actually spotted him,
but he does know the guy knows where to look; James is being
flanked. He's also pretty sure the guy will have a partner, who is
probably approaching from the opposite direction. James hasn't
spotted him yet; so that one is probably black.
This is as desperate as it gets. He doesn't want
to shoot anyone, but it's altogether preferable to being
caught. Best to just avoid that whole scene
altogether. He's got to create a diversion.
He withdraws the palmtop computer from its pocket at his
chest, and removes the electrical tape covering its infrared LED
array. Leaning over the dune, he keys the "pulse burst"
macro, and sweeps the computer in an arc in the direction of the MIB he's
spotted. Then he ducks and waits, hoping that he's lit up detectors
for a quarter-click or more to that side.
Presently he hears some chatter, and peeks up for a
look. The guy in the SUV is passing some information on to the guys
at the buggy. They begin to trot toward the phantom intruder James
has created, and the guy behind the wheel starts the engine, preparing for a
fast interception. When James looks to his right, the MIB is only
about ten meters away, but looking back toward the SUV; he reverses and begins
a fast walk back toward the SUV. There's still no sign of a partner.
The SUV's engine noise is the only cover James is going to
get. Aiming the palmtop at the buggy, he presses the key combo to
launch DRIVE, and the buggy's laptop acknowledges by starting its electric
motor, which spins silently until James engages the gear. There's
about a two-second burst of confusion from all quarters as the buggy quickly
backs out of the niche and executes a rapid turn, heading for James as fast as
it can manage in reverse. James plays hell with guiding it to him,
trying to steer it backward using only chiclet-sized cursor keys. It
has cleared about half the distance to him when somebody opens
fire. It's too dark for tire shots to be very effective, but the
bullets are still aimed, randomly, in his direction. He keeps his
head down until he feels the air and sand parted by the buggy's passing
immediately to his right, then hurls himself in, rolling onto the floor in
front of the passenger seat. He continues to drive it by keyboard
for about the next minute, not daring to sit up. He's heard six
shots so far, and he knows none of the bad guys are close to having to replace
a magazine yet.
The SUV haltingly gives chase, but it has to stop twice to
let Camo Dudes get on board and is no match for the buggy on the desert
floor. He's got to get to Groom Lake Road before other vehicles
arrive to roadblock it. He hits ESC, bringing the vehicle to a
stop. Then he climbs into the driver seat and turns the wheel,
effectively cancelling DRIVE's control of the vehicle. He kills the electric motor and starts the
gas engine, which has more range and speed. As he labors to put
kilometers between him and his pursuers, he fumbles with his radio and sends a
burst signal which Harold will recognize as coming
in now, coming in hot (assuming of course that Harold's
awake). Orienting himself on the buggy's GPS reading, he races for
the rally point.
20:40 The van is waiting for him on the
Road. There is no sign of any bad guys yet, but a helicopter doesn't
have to be visible or audible in order to have them in its
sights. He knows that the Road will be crawling with white, angry,
armed SUVs in minutes.
Harold trots around the back of the van, putting down the
ramps for the buggy. James drives the buggy up, and sets the brake,
then hops out and quickly dismantles it, pulling pins that allow the frame to
collapse and fold. He leaves it in a
heap, looking like a pile of scaffolding frames with go-kart parts mixed in. Harold
steps up to help get him out of some of the gear he's wearing; James lets him
get the belt and bandoliers off before cutting him short and stepping back down
the ramp. There, in the ditch by Groom Lake Road, James Washington
takes his first piss in over four and a half hours. He will never,
ever drink that much coffee before a night surveil again. After
tonight, memories and adrenaline should be more than enough to keep him awake.
Then, only then, does he squirm out of the Bastard™. He hopes to never wear it again. It gets unceremoniously stuffed into a
compartment, with little heed to the damage that might be done by kinking the
hoses.
20:45 Harold has sensed James' exhilaration and guessed that something traumatic has happened. "I take it the suit didn’t work," he says, casually hauling major ass. He knocks on the center
console, indicating that James should open it up.
"The suit worked," says James, opening the console
and withdrawing a beer.
"So what happened?"
"Psssht." James' wide-eyed half-nod,
half-shrug manages to convey I don't know where to begin long enough for
him to pop the beer's top.
Harold gives one of his little weaving head-nods, which
generally signify both nonchalance and impatience. "Long story."
"Coupla hours, probably."
"I got all night."
"You will after we put some serious miles behind. And you don't need to be distracted by
me." James nods and points out the
window. "Thataway. Now."
"Did you get made?"
"Shit yeah.”
In spite of himself, James begins storytelling. “There were like
six Dudes by the buggy when I got back. They didn't spot me, but they spotted
my ride."
"Mmmm-mmm. How'd you get away?"
"African ingenuity. Brother can drive,
you know." Harold laughs while he takes his first sip,
immediately understanding the significance of the emphasized word. Laughter
is an incredibly soothing sound right now, but James could use some music, too;
any and all creature comforts within reach, in fact. He powers up
the stereo, watching the green glowing panel light up; this reminds him of the
spike in the palmtop’s radiation reading, and he decides he needs more than
beer. He needs antioxidants. He opens the glove box and
retrieves the field care package within; it holds a mini-first-aid kit, salt tablets,
vitamin supplements. "We got any fruit?"
Harold shrugs, head-faking to the right. "In
the back."
James gets up, leaving the beer in a cupholder on the
console but taking the bottle of vitamins. "I'll secure the
buggy." He scoots between the bucket seats into the back of the
van.
Among their food stores he finds a bag of oranges and an
apple. Working his hands down through the stack of steel tube
frames, he locks the buggy's tires into the chock trenches on the floor, then
straps the pile down with tiedowns, washes his hands from a canteen, and tears
open an orange. Then another. He chows down three of
them, finishes off the canteen with a handful of vitamin tablets, and heads
back up to the front of the van with the apple. He's thrown into the
back of the passenger seat when Harold slams on the brakes; the apple tumbles
loose and bonks Harold on the head, flattening a tuft of his loose, spiky
Afro. Had James not secured the dune buggy, it would surely have
flattened him against the seats; as it is, everything else loose back here is sliding,
rolling, or bouncing into him.
They are abreast of the Mailbox, and directly to their front
is a solid white SUV stopped across both lanes of blacktop. On
either side of it, leaning into it from solid, wide-footed stances,
are Camo Dudes with firearms pointed firmly at their van.
"Shit," says Harold, slowly.
"Shit," agrees James, more slowly and louder.
They're both reaching for sidearms when a brilliant white
beam of light strikes the SUV from above. Both James and Harold are
forced to shield their eyes with their hands, but James keeps his fingers
spread enough to keep an eye on the SUV. It's lost in brilliance,
but he does notice that their own headlights are fading, and the instrument
panel is going dark.
"Floor it," he barks. Gotta keep the
engine running, gotta move, gotta go--.
"I can't see—"
"Hit the gas. Now. I'll
steer!" Now, he
thinks, before their electrical system goes dead. Harold knows that
his cousin's sense of urgency is usually best met with all due
haste. He stomps it. James steers them off the right
shoulder, and a moment later, jerkily, back onto the road. The engine
coughs as they pass the SUV, but they make it back onto blacktop, and as they
speed away the headlights and dashboard regain full brilliance.
"What the fuck." Harold's
utterance is half question, half exclamation, and more than half
rhetorical. "What the hell did you do back there?"
James knows the big black triangle is behind them, hovering
over the SUV, and that it's too high for Harold to pick out in his rear view
mirror. "It’s a long
story. " Another chuckle. He's starting to feel
a bit elated, perhaps a bit giddy. He's either going into shock, or
just barely fighting panic back in the way he's always done since
childhood. He takes his seat, contemplatively fastens his seat belt,
and picks up his beer, which has discharged some of its contents onto the
floor. "Cousin, that was a spaceship. It was
out over the Area. I got it on tape." He takes a
swig. "It sucked up one of their aircraft, I
think. One of ours, I mean. Locked on with a tractor
beam, or maybe put the small one onto some sort of autopilot mode. I
couldn't tell, but I thought the small one was a Sport Model. The
big one just ate it up, and then flew right over me." He sipped
beer, as slowly as he could, consciously resisting the urge to babble, trying
to present the calm exterior that Harold generally relied on when things got
hairy. "Know something? It looked to me like it
stopped their vehicles back there, but gave us just enough room to get past
them and keep going." Another cool, calm sip.
Harold has apparently noticed this too. He thinks
he has his breath under control enough to speak again, but he doesn't like the
stress he hears in his voice when it comes out. "You ever hear
of that, where a UFO just knocks out some vehicles but not others?"
Shrug. "We got
away, they didn't." James has never
thought of himself as an optimist, but he's definitely the more
glass-is-half-full of the two. "If they're on my side, they're
automatically good guys. For the time being, until such time as they
show otherwise...or my needs change." He takes a serious swig
from the bottle and gulps determinedly, offering a brief, contented
"aaaah" to the van's interior. The glass of the windows
reflects the lights of the interior, creating a warmly-visible boundary between
inside and outside, and for the moment, as long as the outside, and everything
to do with it, remains outside, then he will be able to seek some manner
of rest and relaxation.
The van is of course as heavily-modified as any of the
equipment the men rely on; like James, it is fast, relatively quiet, full of
customizations and can change color at the flip of a switch. The
van's clearcoat is actually a thin plastic layer containing liquid crystals,
arranged in various patterns at different layers, and exposing a number of
tints, including rust, Bondo, white, brown and gray. Harold
activates the Cuttlefish switch on the instrument panel, selecting
"gray", and the white paint covering the van suddenly appears to
tarnish. Electrostatically tickled, the pigments have realigned
themselves; the van is now a dark matte gray, more or less
uniform. The Cuttlefish system is very unreliable for extended use,
as the stresses of the road quickly break the fine films used on the body
panels to contain the various liquid crystal layers. This has the
effect of randomly, irreversibly, and in James' terms, coolly aging the
finish. Camouflage is something they will be able to use at most
twice on this trip, and judicious use demands that they use it immediately, to
try to confuse satellite surveillance and blend in with ordinary traffic.
James hits the "identity" toggle on the dashboard;
the fake license plates mounted front and rear are withdrawn into the body,
revealing an entirely different set of fake license plates. Harold
is shaky and sweaty, but silent. He fidgets as he drives, constantly
scanning his rear view. James is self-consciously calm, projecting
his best "a spaceship ain't nuthin but a thang" cool.
They barrel toward 375 with a purpose. To
satellite surveillance, they must appear to be fleeing to Vegas; before they
enter the city proper, however, they plan to make another color change and
dogleg to the southeast.
Harold feels his sweat drying in the air conditioner, and
reckons he's calm enough to try to converse. Not to be outcooled, he
clears his throat with slow gravitas. "What if they're just
abducting the guys they came to first, say those Dudes back there, and they'll
be coming for us next?"
"Don't you think they could have stopped both our—" James is
cut short by another blast of brilliant light, this time slicing down onto the
bare road fifty meters to their front. Again Harold slams on the
brakes. The van goes nose down, and James hears a bunch of thunks
behind him as various loose items impact their seats. He keeps his
grip on the beer bottle, but the bottle loses its grip on most of the remaining
beer.
By the time they screech to a halt before the column of
light, it's already fading away; but there is still something visible in the
road, picked out by their headlights. A short white thick column,
rather like an altar or podium.
Then the light goes out, and there's just them and the
object in the road. And a whole lotta silence.
21:14 "We need that," says James.
"Nuh-uh.” Harold readies some excuses
involving the lack of room in the van. The
capacity of the cargo compartment is actually the least of his issues right
now, but it’s what he’s got to work with.
All he can vocalize is “No room.”
"We'll make room." James is getting out
of the van. He chuckles again, and grins broadly. "I
think I know what that is." He hesitates, caught up in the
reality of the moment: the aliens have just given him the means to
save the world. He barks another laugh, bolder and louder. The
night is theirs, for miles around. "Holy shit,
dude. I know what that is."
Harold is not above babbling at this
point. "You don't know you know what it
is. Trojan horse is what it is, man, a goddam bomb, a doomsday
device, a fucking practical joke. Man, this is Dreamland. You
think anything out here is safe to just pick up and
go?" The last couple of sentences are trodden on by James, and
for a few seconds they're competing for volume.
"Our guys didn't leave that there,
Harold. They did. You think they'd go to the
trouble of beaming a bomb down onto the road when they could fry us from the
air?"
"You an expert in alien psychology,
now? Huh? They've been hiding from us for years, flyin
around doing weird shit, blowing up cows n shit and burning circles into crops,
impregnating women, for God's sake, and we're supposed to think the
first random thing they drop in front of us is a fucking birthday
present?"
James is already walking to the object. It is
almost featureless, smooth and reflective, like molded plastic. He
glares back toward the van. "You gonna help me with this or
what?"
21:20 They've got the device loaded into
the van, and have used a couple of cargo straps to secure it against the rear
wheels of the buggy. They're back in their seats, quietly buckling
themselves in, about to get underway again, as calmly as though finding
unidentified alien machines in the middle of the road is just a way they spend
their weekends.
James really wants to ride in the back, to sit on or near
the thing, to at least continue touching it in some way. It is
surprisingly light, surprisingly warm, and generates a sort of calming, albeit
very quiet, hum. He thinks that maybe this hum might have a calming
effect, like the vibrations of the bearsuit pumps—
"Dammit." He winces, hard, and resists
the urge to punch himself in the thigh. "Shit,
Harold." He turns a forlorn gaze to his driver, the better to
drive the point home with eye contact. "We gotta go back."
Harold's face is just about tired of the rapid seesawing of
emotions, and this time he just allows his eyes to widen in the green glossy
glow of the van's interior. "And why, pray tell? Wh—"
"The ghillie suit, Harold. I left
the camouflage." He grits his teeth, hating
himself. "If they find it, they'll figure out what it does,
what we were doing, and they'll ramp up their perimeter defenses
again." Worse, they might figure out who constructed it. At least there should be no clue in its
construction as to the IR defenses of the Bastard™, but the Dudes will
certainly be interested in finding out just how close the driver of the buggy
got to Dreamland.
This is just about beyond the craziest notion James has ever
flown past Harold in the field. Almost as bad as...well, no, this
was actually worse than that time. You do not ever try to engage the
Camo Dudes, or the Men in Black, on their own goddam turf. "If
they've got the suit, man, they've got it. There ain't no way we're
gonna get it back."
There's truth in those words, but there's also a chance—albeit slim—that the Dudes haven't found
it, that it's right where he left it.
"If you're thinking of following your tracks back to
where you left it, forget it," Harold says
flatly. "They've already done that, or they're doing it right
now. They'll get there first."
James, still giddy from the night’s so-far miraculous
successes, does not want to concede anything even remotely associated with
defeat, but for the moment he's at a loss as to how to proceed. He
opens his mouth, tries to start one sentence, hesitates, tries another, and
leans back hard, banging his head deliberately into the headrest. He
opens his mouth again. "I—"
There's a sudden loud flump at the front of the van,
which rocks slightly on its wheels for a couple of seconds. Both men
jump, briefly and silently, but neither changes his expression. Even
their startle reflexes are becoming sanguine about the night's proceedings.
There, sitting on the hood of the van—and starting to slide off the front of it—is the Bear suit. It
appears to have been dropped from above.
There's a hollow noiseless sound in the air above the van,
and then their ears pop as a sudden vacuum is created around
them. Then there's thunder, and a bright streak of blue-white light
racing for the horizon to the southeast.
Harold and James look up, each variously swallowing,
counting to ten, clenching jaws, and trying to get his heart rate back to something
more normal.
