The airport was busy, and the Hercules had to wait in the dispersal for almost thirty minutes before the pilot received permission to taxi. At the end of the runway, the pilot pushed the four throttles forward and the C130 swiftly gathered speed down the concrete, then lifted slowly into the air before making a climbing turn to the west towards the setting sun, turning northwest for Groom Lake.
In the rear compartment, the lid of one of the caskets was vibrating rhythmically as the occupant did his best to force it off, despite the restraining straps. A moment’s rational thought would have been enough to convince Doctor Evans that the fabric was effectively unbreakable, but he had long since passed the point at which he was thinking rationally. He was driven by sheer, stark and unreasoning terror, because he knew, absolutely and without the slightest doubt, what was in store for him at Groom Lake. He knew, because he’d seen it, and he knew that for him the nightmare was about to become a reality.
Once during the flight one of the Roland Oliver technicians came over to his casket and peered inside through the faceplate. Evans briefly stopped his attempts to force off the lid and began shouting, but the caskets were soundproofed. The technician grinned down at the doctor and waved a hand at him before returning to his seat and his book.
The first shot drilled straight through the laminated windshield of the Lincoln directly above the steering wheel, puncturing the air where Reilly had been sitting less than a second before, and shattering the glass of the rear window. The second bullet applied the same treatment to the passenger side of the car half a second later, but Hunter was long gone.
Harris and Morgan were both out of the Chevrolet, which Harris had stopped, with doors wide open and lights blazing, right in the entrance to the diner parking lot. Special Forces’ training is thorough, and even before Harris had seen Reilly and Hunter bail out of the Lincoln, he and Morgan had already abandoned their vehicle.
Only an amateur gets himself stuck in a car in a fire-fight. Cars may look strong, but the metal is invariably thin and offers almost exactly the same protection against small arms’ fire as a sheet of cardboard. So, Harris dived left, and Morgan went right.
The diner hadn’t been operated in quite a while, and the vegetation around the edge of the parking lot had sprouted out of control. When Hunter’s crouching, weaving run on the blind side of the parked Lincoln brought him to the edge of the tarmac, he vaulted over a low bush without a pause, and landed virtually on top of Reilly.
The sheriff put a finger to his lips, then pointed at his own chest, and then off to the left. Hunter nodded, and as Reilly crept away, he began moving silently through the scrubland in the opposite direction.
Morgan lay flat on the ground about fifteen feet clear of the Chevrolet, his right arm outstretched and his Smith and Wesson automatic pistol pointing in the general direction of the abandoned Lincoln. He’d seen the two perps run from the car, but they’d both dived behind it and he’d been unable to get a shot at either of them. Then he’d glimpsed them vanishing into the undergrowth at the back of the parking lot, and he’d seen no movement at all since then.
He glanced to his left, saw Harris crouched down behind a low wall, and whistled softly. Harris looked across, nodded and pointed, and then the two men moved as one but in different directions, crouching low and burrowing silently through the undergrowth around the perimeter of the lot towards where Hunter and Reilly had to be hiding.
Hunter had watched, amazed, as Reilly moved away from him. Despite his considerable size, he moved like a snake, swift and silent, and Hunter thanked his stars, and not for the first time, for putting the two of them on the same side.
When Reilly had vanished into the gloom, Hunter sat for a few moments on his haunches, looking cautiously across the parking lot, but preserving his night sight in the gathering dusk by taking care not to look anywhere near the lights of the Chevrolet. He saw nothing, no sign of movement, but knew that the two men would even then be working their way towards him.
Hunter smiled grimly, pulled the magazine out of his Glock and checked that it was fully loaded – he knew that it was, but checking twice never hurts – and then melted backwards into the darkness, away from the edge of the lot and deeper into the undergrowth. Their two attackers, he judged, would probably follow the perimeter, so that was the one place he wasn’t going to stay.
A little over fifty feet away, Reilly sat crouched behind a bush. Like Hunter, he’d moved deeper into the undergrowth and then stopped moving, and was content to wait for the hunters to come to him, rather than trying to find them. He was listening intently. The sound of traffic passing on the road beyond the deserted diner provided a constant background noise, and Reilly was trying to tune that out and listen for the cracking of twigs or the rustle as a body moved past a bush.
Reilly saw Morgan before he heard him. A deeper shadow moved slightly, out of synch with the shadows around it. Reilly did nothing, just aimed his Colt Commander in the direction of the shape, stopped breathing and waited. When the shadow moved again, he whistled softly.
Morgan turned quickly, his right arm raised, but he didn’t shoot because there was nothing to see, nothing to shoot at.
‘Harris?’ he said, his voice soft and questioning.
Reilly had, since his time in Vietnam, a horror of friendly fire, and that single word told him all he needed to know.
‘Nope,’ he said, and squeezed the trigger of the Colt.
Morgan reacted instantly as Reilly spoke, throwing himself backwards and on to his feet, and pulled the trigger of his Smith and Wesson as he did so. Reilly’s shot caught his left shoulder and spun him around, but Morgan’s second bullet returned the favour, ploughing a furrow across the sheriff’s chest and tearing through his pectoral muscles.
Reilly grunted in pain, but fired twice more. His first shot missed, but the second found its mark, taking Morgan square in the chest, and he toppled like a falling tree.
On the far side of the lot, Harris stopped moving at the sound of the first shot, and flattened himself on the ground. As the last echoes of the gunfire died away, silence fell. One man lay dying, and three men lay waiting.
Hunter moved first, quietly easing his head around a bush and staring out across the parking lot. He’d counted five or perhaps six shots, but he couldn’t tell whether or not they’d all been fired from the same pistol – different calibres do make different sounds, but the shots had been so close together that identifying them was virtually impossible.
On the opposite side of the parking area, Reilly was watching the lot as well, as he cautiously explored the damage to his chest with his left hand. As far as he could tell, the bullet had only grazed him, ripping open the skin of his chest and tearing the pectoral muscles apart. His chest ached and throbbed, but it was a numb, detached kind of pain that he knew would pass soon enough, to be replaced by the searing, stabbing agony that he had experienced once before, in Vietnam. He wasn’t looking forward to the next twenty-four hours.
The more immediate problem was the second killer. Morgan was out of it, either dead or dying, and could be discounted, but somewhere, probably within fifty or sixty feet of where Reilly sat, the second killer lurked, pistol in hand, waiting to finish the job.
Then Reilly grinned through the pain as an idea suddenly occurred to him. The man he’d shot had called out the name ‘Harris,’ a name which Reilly remembered from Beaver Creek. Harris was obviously the second killer, who would even then be wondering exactly who had shot whom on the other side of the parking lot. Reilly grunted, kicked the bush next to him a couple of times, and then let out a loud and somewhat theatrical groan, to be rewarded only by silence.
‘Harris,’ Reilly said, after a second or two, his voice hoarse and distorted. ‘I got them both, but I’m hurt bad. You’ve got to help me.’
Harris swivelled his head, listening intently. It didn’t sound like Morgan, but his voice would change if he’d taken a shot in the chest or stomach. He paused in indecision, then slowly rose to his feet, his eyes scanning the parking lot from side to side, and listening intently.
‘Morgan?’ Harris called, and moved towards the edge of the undergrowth.
He’d taken two steps across the tarmac when Hunter brought the butt of the Glock crashing down on the back of his head.
Roger Ketch paced his office, waiting. Harris had called over an hour earlier with the news that Reilly and Hunter had been spotted in Las Vegas and given details of the car they’d been seen driving, but since then he’d heard nothing from anybody.
When his internal telephone rang he grabbed it immediately, although he knew it couldn’t possibly be anything to do with the search for the two perps.
‘Ketch.’
‘Control Tower, sir,’ the voice said. ‘Your Hercules is fifteen minutes from the runway.’
Ketch spun around and looked at the schedule pinned to the wall behind him, his eyes tracing the horizontal columns. He’d almost forgotten, but the last scheduled delivery of the week was due almost immediately.
‘Thanks,’ he replied. ‘Let me know when it touches down.’
‘Affirmative.’
When he’d replaced the receiver Ketch made a call to the staff room in the building, alerting the handlers that the arrival of the Hercules was imminent. Then he pressed a button on a light grey console on the left hand side of his desk and passed on the same message. The answer was little more than a high-pitched squawk, but Ketch had become used to interpreting the sounds from the tiny speaker, and knew that his message had been understood.
Hunter had always been good at prioritizing. As soon as Harris had hit the ground like a sack of cement, Hunter kicked his pistol well out of reach and then frisked him, removing Harris’s wallet as well as a large pocket knife and two spare magazines for the Smith and Wesson. Then he’d lashed Harris’s hands together behind his back with a couple of large plastic cable ties.
Only then had Hunter called out to Reilly and made his way cautiously across the parking lot when the sheriff answered.
‘Dick?’
‘Here,’ Reilly replied, his voice racked with pain.
Hunter crouched beside the sheriff, pulled a small flashlight from his pocket and switched it on. What he saw made him catch his breath. The whole front of Reilly’s shirt was soaked with blood.
‘Jesus Christ, Dick,’ Hunter said. ‘We’ve got to get you to a hospital.’
To Hunter’s surprise, Reilly shook his head and smiled. ‘Looks a whole lot worse than it is,’ he said. ‘Bullet just creased my chest. All I need is some strapping and a bandage, and maybe a coupla pain-killers.’
‘And maybe a new shirt, too,’ Hunter added, relief in his voice.
‘Yeah, that’d be good.’
Hunter braced himself and hoisted Reilly to his feet, which caused the sheriff to call out in pain as his chest muscles pulled apart.
‘You OK?’ Hunter asked.
‘Yup. Not gonna be doin’ any aerobics for a while, that’s for sure.’
Once Reilly was on his feet, the pain from his chest eased considerably. Hunter unbuttoned Reilly’s shirt, pulled it off and dropped it on the ground, then looked closely at the wound.
‘You’re right, Dick. It is just a scratch. A deep scratch, but just a scratch,’ he said, and walked across to the Lincoln. There was no medical kit, so he selected a towel from his overnight bag and tore it into three strips. One strip he doubled up as a pad for the wound, and the other two he tied together as a rudimentary bandage, which he wrapped around Reilly’s chest and knotted at the back.
‘Not exactly Mayo Clinic stuff,’ he said, ‘but that should stop or at least slow down the bleeding. You OK to get into the car?’
‘No problem. Guess we’ll be taking the Chevy?’
‘You got it,’ Hunter said.
Reilly walked slowly over to Harris’s Chevrolet and carefully eased himself down into the passenger seat.
Hunter checked Morgan – he was dead – and frisked him as he had done with Harris. Then he pulled and rolled the body deeper into the scrubby undergrowth, well out of sight of the road.
The Lincoln wasn’t going anywhere, with the smashed windshield and rear window, so Hunter transferred his and Reilly’s bags onto the back seat of the Chevrolet, along with the contents of Morgan’s and Harris’s pockets and their pistols and ammunition, then walked across to where Harris was lying.
He was still unconscious, so Hunter hoisted him onto his shoulders using a fireman’s lift, walked over to the Chevrolet and dropped him into the trunk. Then Hunter climbed into the driver’s seat, started the engine, turned the car around and pulled out into the highway traffic, heading south and away from Vegas.
The Hercules landed nearly forty minutes late, but that didn’t matter. As usual, it taxied off the runway opposite Hangar 18, then followed the southwest taxiway to the Rolver Systems’ compound, and parked near the back of the building, adjacent to the steel gates in the boundary fence. The USAF van was already waiting when the pilot shut down the engines, and five minutes later the crew was in the van and en route to the Flight Operations Centre.
Once the crew had left, the two Rolver Systems’ employees who’d flown in the cargo compartment of the Hercules opened the rear cargo door to allow unloading to start. The steel gates were swung wide and two small forklifts were driven out of the compound and up the C-130’s loading ramp. In the Hercules, the caskets were detached from the central monitoring system, and transfer of them to the Rolver Systems’ building began. Nobody took the slightest notice of the casket containing Evans, who was still trying to punch and kick his way out.
Three quarters of an hour later, once the last casket had been removed from the aircraft and a consignment of empty caskets loaded aboard, the compound gates and the doors to the building were locked. Seventy minutes after that, the flight crew returned to the Hercules, and within twenty minutes the aircraft was on its way back to McCarran Air Base. The next planned delivery was Monday afternoon.
From the moment the Chevrolet had appeared at the entrance to the parking lot to the time when Hunter accelerated away, a little under eleven minutes had elapsed. Templeton and Grant pulled their Lincoln into the diner parking lot exactly eight minutes later, and got out cautiously. They looked all round the parking lot, using their flashlights sparingly, just in case Hunter or Reilly were lurking in the bushes aiming pistols at them, but found nothing. Then they checked the abandoned Lincoln, and looked at the bullet holes in the glass.
‘Maybe Harris and Morgan got them,’ Grant murmured.
‘Not in the car, they didn’t,’ Templeton said. ‘Not a trace of blood anywhere. Keep looking.’
Grant found two empty shell cases near the parking lot entrance, and the two men examined them.
‘This one’s a hand-load, by the looks of it,’ Templeton said, peering at it closely in the light of Grant’s flashlight. ‘Could be Morgan’s – he rolls his own.’ He paused and looked around the lot, mentally figuring angles. ‘My guess is, they pulled up here at the entrance, surprised the perps who were still sitting in the Lincoln, and got two or three shots off. Then all four of them rolled out of the cars and shot it out somewhere in the lot.’
‘So what happened then, and where are they now?’ Grant asked.
‘Search me,’ Templeton said. ‘The only place I know they’re not is here. Whatever happened in this parking lot, they’re long gone.’
‘We can try the two-way radio,’ Grant said, heading back towards their Lincoln, ‘and if there’s no response we can call Groom Lake and see if Ketch has heard from them.’
‘OK,’ Reilly said, as the Chevrolet barrelled south at exactly sixty miles an hour. ‘So now what do we do?’
‘Good question,’ Hunter said, changing lanes to overtake a slow-moving Dodge. ‘We’ve still got to get into Area 51, and quickly, before Christy-Lee gets fed into the system.’
‘I know you’re real good at this kind o’ thing,’ Reilly said, ‘but you can’t just steal another plane and fly in. The whole place is under radar surveillance, and any unknowns get intercepted. If they don’t get the hell out of the airspace, they get shot down. These guys is real serious about security.’
‘I know it won’t be a walk in the park, Dick, but one way or the other I’m going to get in there. How’s your chest?’ Hunter added.
‘Stingin’ like a bitch,’ Reilly said, ‘but I can live with it.’
Hunter was silent for a few minutes, then nodded, as if a decision had been made. Reilly looked at him speculatively as the Chevrolet speeded up, but didn’t say anything. Hunter waited for a stretch of road that was clear of traffic, swung the car around in a wide U-turn, and powered back up the road towards Las Vegas.
‘So the plan is what?’ Reilly asked.
‘Simple,’ Hunter said. ‘You said they’ll intercept and shoot down any unknown aircraft that enters the restricted airspace?’
‘Yup.’
‘So how about getting in on a known aircraft, then? Or maybe a known vehicle?’
‘Yes?’ Ketch snapped as he pressed a button on his mobile phone. ‘Who is it?’
‘Templeton.’ The voice sounded tinny and distant.
‘Where’s Harris?’ Ketch demanded.
‘Ah,’ Templeton said. ‘We were kind of hoping you could tell us. We’ve heard nothing from him since he and Morgan went to intercept the Lincoln down to the south of Vegas.’
‘Nor have I.’ Ketch wasn’t in the best of tempers. ‘So what the fuck happened when they intercepted this goddamn Lincoln. I presume you have checked the scene?’
‘Yes,’ Templeton replied. ‘The Lincoln’s been abandoned, with a couple of bullet holes in it, and there’s evidence of a fire-fight in the vicinity. But there’s no sign of blood and no indications of what happened. Or at least, no indications we can see in this light. Harris isn’t responding to calls on the two-way radio, and his Chevrolet is missing.’
‘Absolutely incredible,’ Ketch almost shouted. ‘So these two guys have slipped away again, and maybe killed Harris and Morgan? Jesus, I thought you were supposed to be Special Forces?’
‘Ex-Special Forces, Mr. Ketch,’ Templeton said smoothly, ‘and we don’t know that anything’s happened to Harris or Morgan. There could be other explanations.’
‘Like what?’ Ketch snapped. ‘Oh, don’t bother. Just find Reilly and Hunter and for fuck’s sake kill them.’
‘I mean,’ Hunter said, ‘Groom Lake is a big base, right? Not everybody lives out there all the time, so there must be some kind of transportation system, some way of getting shift workers to and from the place.’
‘Right,’ Reilly said. ‘I’ve read a bit about Area 51. Supposed to be about a dozen flights a day out there from McCarran, using Boeing 737s.’
‘That,’ said Hunter, ‘is a lot of people. Do you know anything else about the aircraft?’
‘Not a lot. Nobody does, outside the guys who work out at Groom Lake. Believe the Boeings are white with a red stripe along the side, an’ I do know they’re called “Janet” flights.’
‘Janet?’ Hunter almost laughed. ‘You’re putting me on.’
‘Nope. Even got a Janet Terminal over at McCarran.’
‘Who the hell dreamed up that name?’
‘Dunno. The flights is supposed to be run by some classified outfit called somethin’ or other Special Projects, as I recall.’
Hunter was silent for a few moments. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘what about road access? Any other way of getting in there?’
‘Not so’s you’d notice. The cammo dudes in their Cherokees keep out anybody who tries to get inside the base from the hills. Lots of guys have tried it, but far as I know none of ’em ever made it. Some outfit runs buses into Groom Lake to carry other base workers, but I dunno where from.’
‘Well,’ Hunter said, ‘there’s always a first time.’
‘Don’t much like the sound of that. What d’you mean?’
‘You said lots of people have tried to get inside but these cammo dudes or whatever the hell you call them have stopped them. I reckon that between us we could take on a couple of these guys no problem. We just drive to some part of the boundary of Area 51, hang about there for a while and wait for these cammo dudes to show up. Then we take them out.’
Reilly grunted. ‘May not be one of your better ideas, that. So, assumin’ we don’t get our asses shot off in the process, what do we do then?’
‘Easy. We put on their uniforms, take their Cherokee and just drive right over to Groom Lake. Don’t forget, cops are invisible – people see the uniform, not the man inside it – and they can go anywhere.’
Reilly was silent for a minute. ‘Figure there are three things you haven’t thought of, Mr. Hunter. First, I’m still bleedin’ like a stuck pig here, and I’m not gonna be much help to you in a fire-fight. Second, I’m a big guy. Suppose one o’ these cammo dudes ain’t obligin’ enough to weigh two hundred and twenty five pounds?’
‘Details,’ Hunter said. ‘If you just act like an intruder, I’ll take out the two guys who come to arrest you. If the uniform doesn’t fit you, just take off your shirt and I’ll pretend I’m taking you to the base hospital or medical centre. What’s the third?’
‘You’re right,’ Reilly said. ‘Those two are just details, but the third’s the biggie. You got any idea how long it’ll take us to drive over to Area 51? By the time we get up there and find ourselves a Cherokee Jeep an’ a coupla you-can’t-see-me suits, and get our asses over to Groom Lake, your lady will be sliced and diced.’