“Great,” Maldek said. “I assume you can update your equipment so we won’t have this issue every time the security programs are updated?”
“Yeah, it should be a simple fix,” he said, his ego stung by her aspersions. “I’ll update the code in the morning, and then I’ll have a few hours to run diagnostics and test it against changes to the other programs the equipment communicates with.”
“Excellent. My medical staff will be glad to have everything back up and running,” she said. She dabbed the corner of her mouth with her napkin and then, without looking up from her plate, added, “I hate to bother you with this, but my personal laptop is giving me fits, running really slowly — any chance I could get you to stop by my apartment before you go back to your quarters?”
He swallowed the last bite of his steak and chased it down with a sip of wine. “Absolutely.”
The next morning, Ben sat in his tiny work lab, seventeen stories below the surface of the earth, wearing the same clothes he had worn the day before. The MP stationed outside the lab’s door had looked at Ben with a raised eyebrow when he and Maldek had arrived just before seven a.m.
After Maldek left him, Ben dove into the cyber-brain of the base and picked up where he left off the day before, exploring Area 51 from the backside.
The U.S. Government claimed that it let the rumors of alien UFO research ferment in the public consciousness in order to deflect attention from the “true” purpose of Area 51: top secret, experimental military aircraft and weaponry. His descent into the installation’s digital nervous system, like a diver passing through multiple thermoclines, bore this out.
First were collections of documents on media reports of Area 51-related UFO sightings and whistleblower “interviews.” Apparently all were staged by the Air Force and the DoD. Next were analyses of the national security implications of these reported sightings and interviews with an emphasis on how these red herrings diverted the public’s attention from the official activities of Area 51. Beyond that level of records Ben hit a wall of security that took him a full hour to circumvent. He could have simply disabled the security firewall, but that would have set off alarms at the highest levels at the Pentagon. Better to slip around until he found an unlocked window than to kick in the front door.
When he made it past the security wall, he had access to all types of documentation on Top Secret aircraft dating back to the early days of the Cold War. But unless the Air Force had an airplane named Hannah Witter, Ben didn’t give two shits about covert aircraft development. He rubbed his forehead red and slammed his fist on the desk. Where the hell is my sister?! he thought.
In searching for Hannah, Ben had long used Tor to surf the dark net. It was during one of these sessions that Ben had first come across a message board in which a handful of ghost-sources claimed that there was a deeper, darker secret hidden below the Nevada desert. Referred to on the dark net as JOMA Secret, the name sounded much more mundane than extraterrestrial autopsies and reverse-engineering UFOs, but, if the rumors were true, the desert held a darker and more sinister secret than the American people could ever accept — that Area 51 was a U.S. Government human research facility, and not the kind with institutional review board oversight. More like Mengele-Auschwitz-twins. For years Ben found the paranoid ramblings of these schizophrenic conspiracy theorists entertaining. He particularly enjoyed the shit-house-rat ramblings of a self-labeled ghost-source calling himself invisiblepatriot92, who often talked about doing contract work at Area 51.
In one lengthy post that was more manifesto than narrative account, invisiblepatriot92 claimed he caught a glimpse of a thrashing pregnant woman being held down by three men in scrubs who strapped her into an obstetrical examination chair. The whole scene sounded like sensational fiction until invisiblepatriot92 quoted the last words he heard the poor woman scream as the heavy, soundproof door sealed shut: “No, NO! Help me Bonk-Bonk!”
When he read those words, Ben’s heart nearly exploded from the adrenaline spiking his bloodstream, and fuzzy images from the CPS hearing of Hannah and the beady-eyed mole-man swirled in his head.
People on the dark net don’t want to be found, and that was true of invisiblepatriot92. Ben posted in response to his message, and invisiblepatriot92 followed up with a lot more crazy rambling and very few additional facts. When Ben tried to direct-message him with pleas for help finding his sister, invisiblepatriot92 made good on his name — he vanished.
There, in the lab two hundred feet underground, Ben reached the bottom of the experimental aircraft documents and slammed into a digital wall. Beyond this wall resided the true nature of Area 51: the human research program that invisiblepatriot92 and his ilk called JOMA Secret. Ben’s fingers flew over the keyboard as he tried to get around this second, more complex security wall, but the clock was melting like a candle. As the clock ticked past one p.m., Ben’s armpits grew increasingly damp.
“Son of a BITCH!” he growled after another failed attempt to get into the JOMA files. He stood and flung his chair, sending it skidding across the shiny, black floor. It slammed into the far wall with an explosion that reverberated in the clinical shell of the lab. He paced and chewed his fingernails and barked the occasional “piece of monkey shit” at his computer station. He eyed the clock; Maldek would be back in just over three hours.
Ben resigned to break straight through the firewall. He knew it would set off red alerts in Seattle and Washington, DC, and every military installation in between. As soon as he infiltrated the database, he would have to search quickly to locate Hannah. With any luck, he could find her records quickly. He prayed she was still alive, that he could get to her, that they could get topside before the entire installation went to DEFCON status Round House and seal him in this subterranean tomb. Of course, best-case scenario, he and Hannah would still be in the middle of the Nevada desert, but he would deal with that situation if he was lucky enough to get there.
This was a mess of his own doing. He had told Maldek he would have his work completed today; there would be no coming back to try again tomorrow. He hadn’t counted on running face-first into an impenetrable database. He had overestimated his hacking abilities and put himself in a box. Time to kick down that door, he thought.
He fetched his chair, hunched over the keyboard, and started clacking keys. When he had typed out the last crash code to punch through the security wall and into JOMA, he paused. His pointer finger hovered over the ‘enter’ key. It shook uncontrollably as he weighed the shitstorm that was about to be unleashed with his next keystroke.
“Please God…,” he whispered as he closed his eyes and slowly lowered his finger toward the little button that would end life as he knew it.
Bam, bam, bam! The three sharp raps on the lab door made him stop and open his eyes. He looked at the clock; it wasn’t yet two p.m. Maldek shouldn’t be back yet, he thought. Besides, she wouldn’t knock; she would swipe her card and walk in.
Ben exited the lab and snapped his head to his left then right. There was nobody around except the MP.
“Airman, did you knock?”
“Yes sir,” he replied with military brevity.
After an expectant pause, Ben realized the kid wasn’t going to elaborate and asked, “Do you need something?”
“No, but I think maybe you do.”
“Really? Please explain, Airman.”
“Please call me DeShaun,” the MP said. “What I mean is, you’re still in that room, and I know you’re here to do something else besides work on that computer. Plus, I heard you slamming stuff around, and I figure that means you’re jammed up.”