Rough draft, excerpt 5: Chapter 11

Note on content:  this excerpt takes place in Chapter 11 (according to the outline), and falls into Part II, the portion of the narrative told from the point of view of Michael Rowe.  This is not the entire chapter, but rather a portion intended to illustrate Michael's mental state, while tying him into the wider set of historical events that will continue to unfold over all three Volumes.

August 19, 1994:  Michael Rowe

Michael looked off to the west and caught a faceful of sunset.  The air was dry and flat, somnolent and heavy with the drone of cicadas.  Some brisk afternoon breezes had blown a lot of dust off the cornfields outside of town, and now a thick orange haze hung beneath those wisps of clouds still trying vainly to gather strength from the waning heat of the day.  The western horizon was ablaze, but above him was clear blue sky.  Behind him the air was evening-tinged and heavy, but the treeline along the barn fence obscured most of it from his view. 

            The barn had been rusting away quietly for decades in privacy, attended only by the burgeoning overgrowth and several generations of owls.  No livestock had been kept here in years.  What had once been a ranch had reverted, accidentally, to wildlife preserve.  The air barely stirred, now, but less than an hour ago it had been windy enough out here to thoroughly begrit with long-dry barnyard dust the face and throat of the unwary traveler.  He could content himself with the virtual certainty that the cowshit content of the dust was probably at an all-time low this summer, so long after the land had been used for grazing, but it probably still well exceeded the minimum requirement of pulverized insect husks.  And there were still plenty of quietly smoking, dessicated puffballs underfoot; he’d never gotten over his early phobia of inhaling spores and then growing poisonous fungi in his lungs.

            The place had never been well-tended, in any ranching sort of context, at least not during his residence there.  His parents had acquired all hundred and twelve acres when he was nine years old, and had used it as a base of operations for their separate ventures, most rather ranch-unrelated.  They’d tended some goats and let a few horses run on the place, but the pasture was by and large undergrazed, and the fields went fallow, then feral, as the tractor and other, more mysterious implements rusted in shame in the shadow of the barn.  There were gardens, and stock ponds now serving the needs of their piscene populations rather than those of actual livestock; and the grownups made some trails for taking dirt bikes and four-wheelers on.  But outside of a few more such nods to civilization, they pretty much turned the place loose to fend for itself.  As far as Michael knew.  There were parts of the property he wasn’t allowed to go on.

            Having been released into such a wide world at an age when his explorer’s spirit had just begun to emerge, he found himself strongly compelled to get out under the sun and do things, see things, check it all out.  He’d always been a rather pallid child, only as energetic as he’d needed to be to meet the demands of childhood.  In every photo taken of him outdoors, he was squinting, resentful at the sun. 

            Here at the cusp of childhood and adolescence, he’d found himself unfettered by urban space considerations and unsaddled of the overcrowded playground of urban obligations.  He had a vast landscape to wander, and he didn’t have to wander it with anybody else.  Over time, as his parents accumulated dogs of various sizes and breeds, he built up a companion base, but he was beholden to no one, and responsible for nothing, when he was out beneath the sky.   The fields were a world he didn’t have to share with anybody, an expansive, even scary one that he became accustomed to, and then enamored of, as he entered his second decade of living.

            He never thought of himself as solitary.

            He never thought of himself as strange.

            The sky did something to him.  As the years passed, and his memories accumulated to the point where he had to sort them into winter, spring and summer categories, his time spent outdoors—some radiative property of the sun, perhaps—thinned out the top of his skull, weathering away the topmost surface of the nearly impenetrable shell he’d begun to grow.  The sky was able to peek through the glaze as though through a peeled-up corner of window tint, and the peeling progressed as summers came and went. 

            Michael was not yet thirteen when he started to realize that the sky was reading his mind.  Not just the sky, but everything in it.  Birds passing overhead caught glimpses of his inner world.  Clouds chuckled among themselves at his erupting erotic fantasies.  Grasshoppers twittered to katydids about the arguments he’d had with his parents, the fistfights he’d had at school.  He knew that coyotes, possums, and turtles queried his dogs about his trials and tribulations, but the dogs at least kept mum.

By the time he’d started hair on his chin, his thoughts were an open book to anybody within earshot.  He first noticed this at church.  It was the only place other than school where he would congregate among dozens of other people, and it was rather a more quiet and captive audience than he was likely to encounter there.  Long since bored of all the church talk, he would tune out the sermon and study the females.  He was learning to appreciate the curve of a thigh and the swelling of a breast.  And the girls his age, and just a little older, had been catching his eye lately in a way that no females of any age had ever managed.  He’d seen dozens of pairs of nice but much-older breasts over the course of his life, and few had made much of a dent in his consciousness; age somehow distanced them from his attraction.  And up until recently, girls his own age hadn’t had much to offer in that regard.

Girls, the younger variety of female, had always for him an abstraction, an annoyance, something he’d have to learn to dance with and kiss one day.  But now Girls were becoming Women, and had started to smell nice and move charmingly and to sound, and be, somehow, interesting.  They were tolerable.  Better than tolerable.

            In school he would fantasize madly about every nice pair of tits that swung his way, but no one pair could occupy his mind for more than a few seconds, before the next nice pair, or some other distraction, flung it out.

            In church, he had nothing but time, and he dwelled longingly on the features of every female that caught his fancy.

            The realization was long in the dawning, the first perhaps of many slow awakenings, and the scariest:  the girls knew he was thinking about them.  When his gaze fell on one spectactular bosom, viewed in, say, reverse three-quarter profile, the bearer of that bosom—a girl, say four pews ahead of him and several to the right—would turn away, or sometimes toward, him, either denying him the view or inviting him for more. 

            There was almost always some kind of reaction.

            When his thoughts turned to what his hands might do if allowed to wander beneath a skirt seated to his right, the grandmotherly figure seated on the other side of that skirt would clear her throat gruffly.  When he spotted a fortyish woman in a swelling blouse and observed that her nipples were straining at the fabric, she coughed, turned her head, and finally lowered it in feigned prayer.

The more he let his mind wander, the more the pews around him resounded with coughs, throat-clearings, and the shuffling sounds of crossing and uncrossing legs.

It was clear that his mind was incompatible with adult society.  If sex was the only thing he could think about, but none of the grownups in his vicinity wanted him to think about it, how the hell was he going to be able to get along in the world?

It soon became obvious to him that people to either side were more likely to pick up on his thoughts than were people directly to his front.  Evidently his ear canals provided a handy conduit for brainwaves.  Having realized this, he soon started expanding on his repertoire of nervous tics, working in a number of elaborate ear-covering routines.

            Coming into high school, Michael was finding the one-sidedness of it extremely maddening.              Everyone around him seemed to know what was going on in his mind.  Of the whole world, only his parents seemed generally unconcerned about what he was thinking.  But he was sure they were in on it too.

            He was never able to catch a glimmer of anyone else’s thoughts.  He did eventually come to appreciate the sensation of being looked at, and by the summer of his freshman year, he could tell when anyone was watching him, from any direction, at any range.

By the end of that summer, he felt as though he were being watched all the time.

That sensation would never leave him.

            Now an adult, he had come to recognize that some of his earlier perceptions were unfounded, rooted in ordinary adolescent fears of embarrassment and rejection.  He didn’t acknowledge that those fears that had stuck with him throughout early adulthood, in particular the feeling of being constantly watched, qualified as paranoia.  But he did come to doubt some of the memories he had of childhood, memories that in retrospect were simply too weird to be real.  Rejecting these memories was a form of therapy, a way of proving to himself that he was at least rational enough to know what was too odd to be true.

            There was, for instance, the time, around age five, when his grandfather took him to meet Jesus. 

            Now there had always been a certain amount of weirdness hovering around his grandparents, and to even his naive and disconnected consciousness, the tension between them and his parents was fairly evident.  For the first few years of his life, his parents continually tried and shed residences, and a few such episodes during his toddlerhood resulted in stays of various durations at the grandparents’ country home in Bellville.  These were unhappy times for his father and his mother—he of a general San Fransisco hippie temperament and she an independent country hellcat—and strange times for Michael.  She was far too religious and conservative to marry an atheist anarchist, but that’s what she’d done, for reasons that would always remain unfathomable to him, to her, and to Michael.  But they remained together for the duration of his childhood, and the resulting resentment and long-standing incompatibilities made for a rather uncomfortable youth in a rather cold-hearted home.

            His grandfather was in real estate, or something, and seemed to always need to drive out to some house somewhere and walk around it holding tape measures up to things.  Michael would often ride along, providing his services as tape measure anchor.  Any day of the week, there was a decent chance he would find himself in the back of his grandfather’s big Cadillac, sleepily awaiting the end of a hot summer drive. 

            It was after one such trip, on the return leg, that Grandpa had gotten onto the highway headed south out of town instead of looping back around to the west side where they lived.  Michael half-wondered whether they were going to Sealy, maybe to the Dairy Queen there in town.  When he finally got around to voicing this concern, Grandpa answered, “Oh, no, we’re going to see Jesus.” 

            Michael still held out hope that there might be ice cream after the meeting.

            Grandpa often spoke of Jesus as someone he knew personally, and so although Michael had the vague idea that Jesus must be pretty old by now, and possibly kind of dead, based on all the imagery floating around, he didn’t really doubt that they were going to see him, in some sense.  Grandpa had a way of making magic things happen, and he was probably at least as good at going to see dead people as he was at pulling quarters out of Michael’s ears.  Michael didn’t really like meeting new people, though, and if Jesus was another of Grandpa’s stuffy religious friends, this wasn’t gonna be much fun. 

Michael wondered whether he lived close to Dairy Queen.

            Michael spent a lot of time staring out of the windows of moving cars, usually preferring the rear view but unable to attain it most times, being securely belted in.  There were parts of the county where he knew all of the trees along the road, could tell when one of them had recently lost a limb to rain or wind.  He could usually determine, without even looking out the window, whether he was being driven toward Cat Spring, or Eagle Lake, or Lake Somerville.  He was familiar with all of the little crossings over the Brazos River.  There wasn’t a major body of water, or stretch of highway, that he couldn’t identify blindfolded from just the smells or the sounds or the rhythm of the roughness of the road.  He dozed off, lulled by the flat amplitude-modulated Paul Harvey voice droning from the radio up front.  The radio was always on either Paul Harvey or Pat Robertson, and they were always putting Michael to sleep.

            When he woke up, they were at the edge of an unfamiliar body of water.  It looked like a lake, but not one that Michael had ever seen, unless they’d come in on an unusual route and were looking at it from the opposite side or something.  The banks were grassy, and it looked like this place had a tended lawn, but there weren’t any picnic tables or trash cans around.  The car was slowly edging into the water; the road went straight down into it.  A more cosmopolitan child might have recognized this as a boat landing.  Michael took it on faith that Grandpa was simply driving the Cadillac into the lake the same way he always did when going to see Jesus.

            He could feel a bit of a sliding, twisting motion, and he was aware of the tires losing traction beneath him, and then the car was treading water.  The tires spun gently as Grandpa applied the accelerator, and by means of a current either thusly generated or already present in the lake, they slowly floated around the curve of a grassy bank and lost sight of the road.

            After a few minutes, the tires found traction again, and the car began to slowly drive up out of the water.  This landing was well-concealed behind dense overgrowth, seeming to lead into an almost cavernlike pocket in the thick woods here.  The day was bright and clear, and the impossibly green leaves of the trees, and of the broad scythe blades of the bank grasses, seemed to actually sparkle in the sun.  To his front, everything was as crystalline as it could ever possibly hope to be, but this field of view was fairly narrow.  As he usually did on sunny days, Michael was squinting, and maybe it was the sleep that had gathered on the trip out here, but something made the edges of his vision really pale and smudgy, like someone had poured milk into his eyes. 

            Out of the cave and into the sunlight walked Jesus.  He was a bearded man, with long brownish, kinda curly hair.  He was tan, and his exceedingly white robe contrasted sharply.  There was no other real adornment, just a belt and some sandals.

            Michael didn’t leave the backseat.  He never really spoke to Jesus, or shook his hand, although the man did look into the back window and wave and smile when Grandpa introduced him.

            Grandpa and Jesus chatted idly through the window; Grandpa never opened the car door.  Michael never heard or never understood anything they said, and the conversation was therefore just as boring as he’d feared.  It at least didn’t last all that long.  Grandpa appeared to have arrived merely to deliver some message, and then after exchanging some pleasantries, he turned the car around—pulling off a three-point turn in the dark hollow in the woods, which permitted Michael the brief opportunity to spot what looked like a rudimentary camp site—and drove back into the lake.  Ten minutes later, they were driving back out on the opposite landing.

            In later years Michael would try to figure out just where this had taken place.  He’d had no real idea where they were going, other than a general southern or southwesterly sense.  It might have been Butler Lake, but they’d have had to drive through Cat Spring to get there, and Michael would have remembered that.  He was also fairly certain that no Cadillac would float on the surface of any lake.

            He knew only one thing for certain:  it was no dream.  In dreams, he wasn’t cognizant of the passage of time.  In this memory, he grew bored and fatigued from the drive and fell asleep, to awaken later at the objective.

            Weirdness didn’t stop there.  He wasn’t just feeling things and seeing eerie reactions in people around him.  He was witnessing, and experiencing, unusual events.  Freaks of nature, he thought, or perhaps pranks thereof.  There were places on the ranch where to stand was to invite intermittent feelings of pure terror, and places that simply felt strange.  Odd tangled growths of roots seeming to project faerie-auras; flat circles of hard dirt, inexplicably free of green grass and of animal tracks; deeply shadowed pockets in the wooded areas lining the fences, eldritch semisubterranean depressions along the banks of the creek, eerily quiet culverts under the road which felt of drowning and death.

            Once, at the age of fourteen, while patrolling the fenceline with his dogs, looking for critters to annoy, he entered the shade of an old elm at the corner of the south and east fence.  Here he felt more strongly the sensation of being watched; and unlike the ordinary sensation, which he felt most of the time when awake, this time it was directional.  Something in the woodline was eyeing him keenly. Unable to resist finding out once and for all what was behind those eyes, he climbed the fence, crossing over into neighbor territory, and scouted around.

            He found nothing but the severed head of a black bird, left there perhaps by a predator, propped up neatly on the flat stump of its neck.  Watching him through dead, open eyes.

            This memory he never questioned.  There was no surreal feeling about it, no milk-blurriness to his vision.  It happened, just as he remembered it, although he never noted the date, the time of day or the season of the year.  It was just another odd memory in a life full of them.  But although he was aware of the spookiness of this and other events, he had no external frame of reference against which to compare them.  It wasn’t until he graduated high school and entered the workforce, and the relative familial chaos of his earlier years had settled into the dry routine of adult life, that he even began to appreciate some of those events as unusual.  He had rarely shared any of his experiences with his parents; after their initial disinterest in the first couple he did relate, he never again bothered.  The few friends he had at school were never privy, either, as he preferred talking to them about hunting and fishing, about guns and spaceships and tanks, things he knew they also had a keen interest in.  

And there were of course some memories that went beyond spooky, which were recognizeable as weird even at the time, because they involved what could only be described as ghosts.  These events he kept to himself, not because he believed them prosaic and beneath his parents’ notice, but because he knew they were entirely outside the bounds of what most people—most grownups, anyway—regarded as “normal” and “real,” and if he told anybody about them, he would be regarded as a liar, or crazy, or both.

            The memories, then, suffered nothing from retelling:  no embellishment, no doubt imposed by the scorn of an unbelieving audience.  At the same time, they got little reinforcement, never being put into words, and simply slipped further into the past with each new year.  At least the memories of newer events got better—clearer, more in context, less doubtful—as he got older.  Still, certain things about them, such as frequency and association with previous events, could only be appreciated in rewind.  And this was a time for rewinding, the first such since he’d initially left home.  More than a year after his parents’ death, he was finally taking something like ownership of the land, finally reestablishing ties with it.  At the same time, he was in search of something to clarify the distinction between real and unreal.  Michael’s migraines had come back this past month, and while the actual headaches weren’t nearly so bad as they had been a few years ago, their sensory interference, their “auras,” were eroding his faith in reality.  For a couple of weeks now, he’d been replaying odd memories, dreams and migraine fugues, searching for patterns, trying to make sense of things.                      

            This was why he was back here now, wandering over the old property for the first time in years, checking out some of the old haunts.  He was trying to reexperience some of that weirdness, to prove to himself that it had happened.

            At age nine, when trying to catch crawdads in the swampy terrain along the west fence one evening, he had seen a cluster of people standing by the fence, their silhouette partially broken up by a clump of mesquite growing on the spot.  He was able to hear whispers, which the wind blew away and the cicadas overrode when he tried to listen.  There was nothing to do but to approach and try to hear better. 

            It was darkening rapidly when he got to the clump, and he was startled to see that they were all black men.  Five of them.  More startling than that, though, was their appearance of having been wounded.  They all looked bloody, and they all had torn clothes.  Military uniforms, actually, in various stages of being faded and shredded by heavy use and weaponry.  One had a helmet on, one of the steel round ones they showed soldiers wearing in the news clips that had been on television so much a few years ago, back when Michael was little and nobody knew he was watching.  He was the tallest, and stood in the middle of the group, with two shorter men to either side in a neat arrangement that matched the spray of mesquite fronds growing from a recently-cut stump in front of them.  They were just on the other side of the fence, close enough to spit on.  The whites of their eyes stood out in the dusk, and they were all watching him, some smiling slightly.  The one furthest to the left was also grinning broadly, cartoonishly wide.  Michael suddenly realized it wasn’t a grin he was looking at, not a mouth at all.  The man’s throat had been cut, and it was hanging down, gaping, showing a cross-section of skin and meat facing him with a yawning shadowy chasm of opened trachea and esophagus behind.

            Michael startled again, and thought about running, but the man put up a hand and casually waved, and he felt that if the guy was a ghost, he was probably a friendly one.  He didn’t approach any closer, but he kept watching, to see if they would talk to him.  He did feel hair standing up on the back of his neck and arms, but it wasn’t the first time, and he had learned to deal with that.

            He tried to find wounds on the others, and was able to see some gunshot wounds and some cuts—shrapnel wounds—here and there.  But the bodies were more or less intact other than that.  No missing limbs, no severe burns.  No big holes in faces or exposed organs.  Nothing truly scary, other than that slit throat, which that guy seemed to be pretty embarrassed about.  He hung his head in an apparent effort to conceal the damage.

            “Hey,” said the tall man in the middle.  To Michael, it sounded kind of like a cicada’s call shaped into words, wispy and dry, but still exhibiting some of the deep, throaty character of a big man’s voice, as if sounding from within the chest of a human being.

            “Hey,” he said.  “What are y’all doing here?”

            The tall man exchanged glances with the guy to his right, the one between him and the cut-throat guy.  “Waiting on you, I guess.”

            Michael shuffled his feet.  “What for?” 

            “Cuz you one of us,” said the tall man.  Michael noticed that none of the others were talking.  When he looked more closely at the one to the tall man’s right, he saw bullet holes in the throat.  He couldn’t spot anything on the ones to the left, but he guessed they also had some kind of injury that prevented them from speaking.  He found himself taking another step forward, in spite of himself, and he made himself stop.

            “Shoulda been here earlier, though,” said the tall man.  “Too dark to talk now.  You need to find us when the sky is orange.  You’ll be able to see us better.”  His face was fading with the waning sunlight, and his voice was fading too, falling into the rasping of the crickets and katydids.

            “I don’t get it,” Michael said, inadvertently stepping forward again, and then the dusk was complete.  The men became shadows, their facial features and their injuries lost to the darkness.  Then the Dead Soldiers were gone entirely, leaving only a spray of mesquite saplings occupying the same profile.

            In the years since then, Michael had made a few half-hearted attempts to find them at that same spot.  He’d show up at the mesquite clump in broad daylight, or linger in the fields until after dark and wander past.  But never showed up just at sunset.  Something in him resisted the idea of being there when the sky turned orange, just as strongly as it drew him there in the first place.  The saplings, all scions from a single cut stump, grew up throughout the ensuing years, gradually distorting the shape that had so resembled a group of men, and were eventually cut down again.  After that, he no longer felt the need to wander by that spot. 

            And yet, here he was now, daring himself to do just that, to stand near where the mesquite tree had once struggled to regrow, and wait for the dusk.

            His woolgathering had allowed the sun to sink a good way, and the breeze to settle a bit, and the noise of the evening insects to rise considerably, before he realized how late it had become.  There was nothing unusual directly to his front.  He cast his gaze over the fence, scouting up and down for human silhouettes.  Further down the property, as the terrain depressed toward the creek that ran along the back fence, the shadows under the trees were dark and heavy, and his eyes were drawn toward them.  As he shifted that gaze back leftward, toward his position, it froze over a clump of mesquite fronds growing from a long-ago-cut stump some twenty yards from his current position.

            There was something humanlike about their outline, and he found himself walking slowly in that direction.

            “Bout damn time,” the tall Dead Soldier said as he approached.  His voice sounded like a mouthful of cicadas, pulsating steadily, their chatter given shape by moving lips.  He had not aged in the fifteen years that had passed since their first meeting.

            Michael kept his voice steady.  He was seeing ghosts, yes.  And his hair was standing on end, just as before, and adrenaline was hammering his insides hard.  But he was an adult, and he was sane, and he knew ghosts cannot hurt the living.  “Who are you?”

            The tall Soldier smiled.  “We the Weapons Squad,” he said.  A couple of the others nodded.  The guy on the left of the line, furthest to the tall one’s right, had a cravat tied around his neck, mercifully concealing the horrible wound to his throat.  The others still exhibited their various injuries, though, and in this somewhat better light, Michael was able to make out shrapnel wounds to the throats of those who were free of bullet holes.  All had taken damage to the face and neck from close-range attack; only the tall one, evidently, retained the ability to speak.

            “Do I know you?”

            This caused more exchanging of glances among the Soldiers.  “Hell yeah, you know us.  You’re the Coyote.  You’re the point man.  We never go anywhere without you.”

            For the first time, Michael noticed that the Soldiers were carrying weapons; their profile on their first visit would not have accommodated them.  The cut-throat guy had an M60 slung across his chest; the guy next to him had a slung rifle, and was balancing a machine gun tripod across his shoulders.  With the eyes of an Army veteran, Michael picked out the details of a Vietnam-era weapons squad:  one man with an M79 grenade launcher in one hand, balanced on his shoulder, and wearing a grenade vest; the tall one toting a slung M-16; the remaining guy with no rifle, just a .45 pistol in a holster on his belt and two or three heavy belts of M-60 ammo draped over his shoulders.  There were other new details, too.  The tall one in the middle was presumably the squad leader, and his uniform shirt was unbuttoned, exposing the worn, stained t-shirt beneath.  The grenadier, all the way to the leader’s left, was wearing a bush hat; other than the leader, none of the others had any headgear on.  Their uniforms were unkempt, field-modified, torn, halfassed.

            He was not aware that the men standing here could have, at best, constituted one-half of a complete weapons squad; that in the late Vietnam era, a full-strength weapons squad would have two complete machine gun teams and two grenadiers in addition to the squad leader.  But he nonetheless sensed that the group was incomplete.  Cuz you one of us, the tall one had said, so many years before.

            “Are you from Vietnam?”

            More laughter.  “Hells no.  We ain’t from Vietnam.  We in Cambodia, though.  Or—actually—we’re in you, in your head right now.  We’re wherever you are.  You just can’t see us most of the time.”

            “You’re dead, though.  Right?”

            “Yeah, we dead.”  The leader spat.

            “When?  What year?”

            “Nineteen seventy.  May 12.”

            The year Michael was born.  Several months before.

            “What about me?” he said.  “Where do I fit in?”

            The leader leaned back as he laughed, and blood leaked from bullet holes in his abdomen.  “You the Coyote,” he said simply.  “You the man.”

            “The point man?”
            “Yeah.  You always out front.  First squad.  We attached to first squad; we go where you go.  You got the shotgun; you got the eyes.  You see what we don’t see comin.”  The leader was still laughing, chuckling a half-friendly, half-ironic cicada sound as he spoke.

            Michael sensed that this, finally, was the crux of the matter.  This was the message the ghosts had come to deliver:  what he was being haunted by.  “What happened?” 

            The leader shrugged.  “You didn’t see it comin.  You got us killed.”

            This stunned Michael; the sounds around him went quiet for a moment as the blood rushed through his ears.  He could almost remember…almost--

            “I stepped on a mine,” he said, finally.

            The leader nodded.  “You stepped on a mine, or crossed a tripwire.  Somethin.  Set off an ambush.  We all got hit by an RPG while settin up.  Somethin like that.”  The men to either side nodded in vague agreement.  They all had met such a sudden death, he presumed, that they were not quite clear on what happened.

            Michael shook his head.  He tried to say I’m sorry, but he could barely mouth the words.  The red-orange light of sunset was rapidly giving way to dusk, and he felt pressed for time.  He cleared his throat and pressed on.

            “Why are you here now?”

            “Somethin about your brain, my man.  We’re not really here, anyway.  We like, trapped.  Trapped between two worlds, as they say.  You can help us, and then maybe we can help you.  Alls I know for sure is we have to get your attention, and then you can figure out the rest.”

            His head was still spinning, but this fit; it made sense; it seemed true.  It put the earlier visit, and much of the weirdness of his childhood, into perspective.  Beings from beyond the grave had been reaching out to him, signalling him using everyday objects and situations, the apparatus available to them in this, his world.  If he sat down to map it all out, he might be able to figure out the grand scheme, the message—

            The darkness was obscuring their features; only the whites of their eyes, and the grinning teeth of the squad leader, remained.  “One more thing,” he said, desperately trying to hold them here.  “Was I—was I black, like you?”

            “Was you—“ the leader broke off to laugh heartily, and the others laughed with him, whispery insectile sounds wafting from the fading shapes of their heads.  The machine gunner, unable to laugh, instead hissed rhythmically.  The leader leaned sharply forward, straining to see Michael.  “Why, what color are you now?”

            Then the Dead Soldiers were gone, and there was only a clump of mesquite saplings where they had stood. 
            Darkness had fallen.

            

Rough draft, excerpt 2: Interlude

Note on content:  this excerpt falls between Book I and Book II of the novel, stitching the events of the Prologue to the start of Chapter 25 (approximate).

13 Mar 1997

00:04     Conversing minimally, listening to R&B and classic-rock stations as they waft into and out of range, they roll on. 

In Alamo, they pull into a car wash and quickly rinse off as much Area 51 as they can.  They change the tires, dumping them where a Group recovery team can find them once the sun comes up.  They would ordinarily attach an encrypted note to any recoverable items, but James doesn’t want to tip their hand too far just yet.  “My Negro-Sense is tingling.  Something is weird about tonight.”  He feels weird, too, unusually tired—perhaps that’s understandable—and a little sick.  He hasn’t yet told Harold the whole story, and now that the superficial forensic caretaking has been seen to, maybe it’s time to bring him up to speed.

02:43     They pull into a truck stop, populated sparsely by truckers and a motley collection of what the cousins take to be tweakers of various kinds, gamblers distraught over their losings, drunks bounced from other establishments.  Situated among the other dregs, they debrief, generally unconcerned about the listening of those too drugged or self-absorbed to be credible witnesses.  Nonetheless, James uses code to review the events, knowing that this area teems with Area 51 obsessives.

“OK, so it was a long haul.  But uneventful.  In that sense, it was inconclusive, I guess…no way to tell whether the suit…uh, met with everyone’s approval, or there was just no one around to disapprove.”

Harold nods.  Evidently James had seen no masts or tripods on which ground-surveillance radar antennas or motion detectors could be mounted. 

“So I get to the…party.  And it’s hoppin.  There’s stuff going on upstairs and downstairs, you know?”  Harold gets it:  activity on the ground and in the airspace. 

“I get to do some group photos, and things…seem pretty interesting.”  James falters, on the verge of delivering banality.  He’s definitely fatigued beyond what he would expect.  He’s never had to low-crawl for as long as he has tonight, in one go, but he has certainly marched greater distances and done more intense workouts.  Perhaps the stress and the long preparation, the anticipation, the early wakeup have contributed to his condition.  And he’s probably more dehydrated than he realizes.

“So you got some good shots.  Fantastic,” Harold goads.  He has two modes of blending in:  affect a heavy southern black dialect and get lost among the other southern blacks in a crowd, or affect a bland southern or midwestern accent and get lost among everybody in a crowd.  He’s going for the second option now, but he’s tired too, and he’s not exactly nailing it. 

James hangs his head and draws some deep breaths, trying to gather his wits.  “Okay, so I’m getting some shots of the upstairs crowd, when this party crasher shows up.  Before I know what’s going on, the crasher has taken over the whole party.  The whole upstairs scene…got totally ate up.”  Harold’s just gonna have to puzzle over this wording until he can provide more context.  “Disappeared.  So the downstairs partygoers have to send this delegation to find everybody.  Then the bouncers showed up and started…showing me the door.  So I had to bail.”

Harold’s still mystified, but he gathers at least that the scramble signal had less to do with Washington being spotted onsite than with some kind of abnormal activity taking place at the Area that compelled him to leave in a hurry.  The suit may well have worked.  “But you got some good shots, right?”

“I got some good shots, man.  You won’t believe it.  But…we really should get them developed as soon as possible.”

James is having trouble focusing, not just on his words but on the surroundings.  His eyes are fatigued and blurring, and he cannot resolve the facial features of the nearest denizens of the café.  Under these conditions, his paranoia is heightened.  He withholds further account while orange juice and pancakes are served.  He forgoes  coffee, hoping to nap en route to the next checkpoint.  He wolfs down bacon and eggs along with the pancakes, not so much out of appetite—which is rapidly waning, being replaced by mild nausea—as out of necessity.  Protein, vitamins, fats, carbohydrates.  He’s heading off the cravings that he suspects are just hours, or minutes, away, and he intends to try to sleep through their onset.

He chases everything with two glasses of ice water, and, full to near-nausea, he follows a troubled Harold back out into the parking lot.  He does not notice—cannot actually see—which heads turn to note their exit, which eyes follow them back to the van.

04:16     They roll on, eating up Route 93 with a purpose, but watching the speed limit.  They can be in Las Vegas within two hours, there to get thoroughly lost in the all-night traffic tumult.  Their actual objective is a motel in Boulder City, one of two safe houses the Group operates in the area (the other being a brothel in Pahrump, which they deem too far to drive tonight).

Harold knows James should sleep, but is increasingly alarmed by his rapid loss of energy.  Intuitively, he feels a need to keep James talking, to prevent him from passing out.  He maintains a steady, low-grade chatter intended to draw out responses at the rate of one every couple of minutes.

“So no problems with the suit, man?”

James is lying tilted back in his seat, with his eyes closed and his hands clasped in his lap.  He shakes his head.  Harold makes a mental note of an idea for an enhancement:  telemetry, or at least some kind of data-logging scheme.  They could embed a microcontroller somewhere in the pump circuitry and keep track of the suit’s operational parameters while in use.

A minute later:  “Nobody saw you onsite, right?”

James shakes his head again.

Another minute:  “So, your, uh, upstairs party.  Did you get any good infrared?”

James nods.

Another minute later, just as James starts to snore:  “No leaks?  Hotspots?  Cold spots?”

James startles, choking on the snore, then shakes his head.  “’S all good, man.”

Harold leans over a bit, adding physical emphasis to the concern in his voice.  “Man, you all right?  You didn’t get snake bit out there, did you?”

James opens his eyes wide.  This is a new thought, and a concerning one.  Any pit viper to be found in the Nevada desert capable of inflicting serious harm would have a painful (and therefore immediately noticeable) bite, with the possible exception of the Mojave rattlesnake (whose range extends just about to the environs of Groom Lake).  He struggles to remember whether the Type A (neurotoxic) or the type B (haemotoxic) population was predominant in southern Nevada.  A serious bite from a heavily-neurotoxic rattlesnake might numb the affected area immediately, and it might go entirely unnoticed in the excitement of an escape from Area 51.  The symptoms of serious neurotoxic envenomation—blurred vision, muscle weakness—were consistent with his current condition.  “Pull over,” he says.

He removes his boots and his clothing and checks all his extremities.  Harold looks over his neck and back with a flashlight.

No bites.  No stings.  Just a few minor abrasions and a rash on his right forearm.  The skin feels irritated, like windburn, and there are some light blisters breaking out in a roughly rectangular pattern.

“What is that?” asks Harold.  “Poison ivy?”

James shakes his head.  “Sunburn.”

07:32  They arrive at the motel.  Harold checks in and leaves a coded message at the front desk, which the manager will forward to regional support.  Compartmentalization will ensure that it doesn’t reach Group headquarters, at least not this morning.  Harold’s paranoia has never been as pronounced as James’, but he’s taking no chances now.  Under normal circumstances, the Pahrump crew would receive his “arrival” message, drive over today in the “original van,” the A.I. I, and drive out in the A.I. II with the dune buggy still loaded, to be taken to a secure underground garage for repainting and holding for a later date.  However, the cousins cannot risk transferring their new cargo, nor revealing it to Group personnel just yet.  They have to assess the situation and figure out what’s going on and whom to tell.  And the assessment must wait until they’ve rested up.  The message’s contents, therefore, translate to “Stay put.  Proceeding solo as per Plan C.”

Harold has to walk James to the room as if he were a stumbling, muttering drunkard, a not unlikely scenario for a small-town motel just south of Sin City.  James collapses on one of the beds, then manages to unlace his boots and pull them off.  He’s already dreaming, or maybe hallucinating.  He hears, or rather feels, a slow shuffle rhythm…or maybe it’s just the grinding of his teeth.  As he floats on the bed, feeling himself rising into Heaven, he passes through clouds on which some of his favorite bluesmen are standing and playing.  He comes abreast of a cloud on which sits Muddy Waters, a guitar strapped across his back and a harmonica in his mouth.  Of course he does, because angels play—

“Harp,” he says, and loses consciousness.

13 Mar 97

They cannot bring in one of their field doctors, for fear of alerting the Group hierarchy, and are suitably paranoid about seeing a professional within James’ insurance network.  The manager of the safe house, sympathetic to their needs, and having more than one set of shady connections, has gone underground to find a criminal doctor.  Some spare Group medical equipment, and what Harold suspects is recently-stolen supply from a hospital (a few IV saline solution bags, needles and catheters), is brought to their room.

13:21  The doctor puzzles over the symptoms; he’s seen gunshot wounds and knife wounds, dehydration and drug overdoses, attempted murder by asphyxiation and blunt force trauma, but this is outside his normal purview.  After an hour or so of interviewing James and examining the weird burn on his wrist, he offers a tentative diagnosis:  radiation poisoning.  Alerted to the clandestine nature of this visit--the Washingtons provide convincing government ID cards and hint strongly that the exposure occurred during law-enforcement activities--he assures them that he must, by law, observe confidentiality, and will do what he can to avoid involving other medical personnel without their consent.  He has to perform some additional research to come up with figures for a suspected dose, for which he leaves and heads to the nearest library, there to use the public computers for Internet access.

16:04  The doctor returns, having had to spend more time than anticipated performing this research.  James’ symptoms—including his nausea, which has intensified in the time since he’s been awake—do indeed suggest radiation poisoning, but they’re an odd mishmash which don’t fall neatly into any of the dosage regimes the doctor has identified.  As near as he can tell, James has received, some time within the past 12 hours, a dose of ionizing radiation between 1 and 2 Grays, but possibly more.  His advice is to seek hospitalization in case the dose is greater than that; failing this, to simply rest, force fluids and electrolytes, keep as well-fed as possible, and take antioxidant vitamins and iodine tablets.

The safehouse manager pays the doctor out of petty cash, and he leaves.  James and Harold discuss the diagnosis.  James reviews the previous evening in greater detail.  They review the video recordings, in visible and infrared light.  Harold interfaces James’ damaged palmtop with his laptop, and offloads and studied the data it recorded, including the spike in ambient radiation.

The scenario they hash out, from James’ recollections, the data, and the videotapes is as follows.  James arrived at an overlook just as a flight test was in progress.  The craft in question was capable of maneuvers and vertical movement not typical of aerodynamic craft.  In their opinion, it was either a spacecraft, possibly of extraterrestrial origin, or an aircraft with spacecraft capability.  While he was recording the proceedings, another, larger craft arrived and docked with the first, or, possibly, retrieved it using a tractor beam.  This was, from the point of view of the Dreamland personnel, an unexpected development, one that merited an immediate alert response.  Aircraft were dispatched to intercept the larger craft.  Although James didn’t observe any chase planes, the infrared tape shows the lights of jet engines, at least two, moving toward the Craft right at the end of the recording:  two F-16s or similar one-seater planes angling in on it.  The recording ends well before the time the helicopters have begun to follow, though.

As the Craft made its escape, it passed directly over James, as if it knew he were there.  This was unfortunate, because it drew the response in his direction, and because he’d stopped recording before it passed overhead, during which time a recording would provide irrefutable evidence of its existence.  Also, evidently, because in passing, it dosed him with ionizing radiation of a kind that was confounding to a diagnosis.  Even more odd, however, was the way the dose was confined.  If the burn on his wrist is any indication, he was given a very precise, specific dose, which gives him hope that it’s not going to be a long-term health problem.  Whatever had happened, the Craft seemed interested in getting James’ attention—and in helping him and Harold escape—and he surmised that the skin burn was some kind of message.

They discuss the diagnosis further.

James spurns the iodine advice.  “That’s for fallout,” he says.  “It’s supposed to keep you from absorbing radioactive strontium.  I haven’t been bombed.  Iodine won’t do a damn thing.”  Vitamins, on the other hand, are a good idea.

14 Mar 97

10:15  After bringing breakfast back to the room and sternly watching James eat until satisfied at the consumption, Harold sets out for the library to bone up on particle physics.  James rests, cycling between napping and watching television news.  Something interesting has taken place the night before, a UFO sighting in the desert outside Phoenix, and James is captivated by the description of a black, triangle-shaped craft with a row of regularly-spaced lights along the side.  The UFO was sighted slowly making its way past the city, headed roughly south…roughly in the direction they were heading, in other words, and on a line tracing their expected route from here to southern Arizona.

14:30  Based on their combined understanding of physics, radiation exposure, and the events of the previous night, they hash out an estimate of the situation.  A focused, directed beam of electromagnetic and / or particle radiation had struck him briefly in an area of exposed skin as he was standing inert, watching the Craft pass.  Some combination of photodisintegration, photofission, and particle / antiparticle pair production caused burns in his skin, and, presumably, the release of radioisotopes into his bloodstream.  Gamma radiation would be the only kind of EM capable of causing either effect, unless particle radiation (of a kind they could only guess at) were also involved.  Only a combination of direct, but brief, exposure to high-frequency EM and secondary effects such as photodisintegration can account for his range of symptoms; his initial exposure was quite low, barely enough to sicken him, but the radioactive fragments of atoms in his skin, cracked open by the hard gamma rays, are now compounding that exposure.  His blood might be full of fission byproducts by now, for all he knows.  He regrets having scorned the advice to take iodine, and asks Harold to retrieve some from the van’s survival kits.

Harold does this, returning also with their homebrew Geiger counter.  They run this over James and the clothing he was wearing at check-in.  James registers nothing unusual, within the limits of the machine’s precision, except around his wrist, which provokes a slightly more energetic response.  As a control, they also gauge Harold and the motel room.  Everything in here is of course slightly radioactive, this being southern Nevada, and there is nothing to distinguish James from the background other than the slightly higher click rate around his wrist.  What they need is a precision instrument, not one cobbled together from hobbyist parts, but like what they might find at Group headquarters or any of its secondary command stations.

James doesn’t appear, at any rate, to be highly radioactive.  If photofission or photodisintegration has occurred within his skin, it was a trivial amount.  The exposure had been--presumably carefully--metered and calibrated, presumably to create just the burn on his skin and little more.  James' illness may be due to nothing more than a slight error on the part of the irradiator.

This is something they desperately need a Group doctor to confirm, though, and they decide, finally, that they will have to come in.

Rough draft, excerpt 1: Prologue

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.