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.