“If it can turn into that, so much the better,” Mark says.
“Whoa, rescue mission?” Heather says. “How are we gonna rescue 109 people — if that many are even still alive — in this dinky little ship?”
Mark laughs. “Remember how I said I could fly anything, even a bathtub with wings?” There are some groans from the back to that. “Well, the same holds true for these Gray motherships.”
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding!” Heather says. “A mothership?”
“Where the hell would you even land something that size,” Turn says. “What is it, about the size of a football field?”
“More like the size of New Hampshire.”
“New Hampshire!” Heather says.
“Oh, c’mon, Mark… it’s not that big,” Bennewitz says, shrugging. “Rhode Island, maybe.”
“Where the hell you gonna land a spaceship the size of a state?” Turn says, his eyes wide and incredulous.
“Yeah, the White House lawn won’t exactly do, Mark,” Bennewitz says. “What exactly did you have in mind?”
Mark glances back to look at Bennewitz. “You’ve been keeping up on the news in 1979… where are those SALT II talks happening?”
“Vienna, but… Mark, no… no, Mark, just no.”
Mark smiles as he looks back at the controls and the wide window looking out into space, but says nothing. There, far off in the distance, is the moon. The dark side is waiting for them, and Mark considers punching the ship to take them there all the faster. Instead he looks to his left, out the window and then back down at the radar.
The Black Knight satellite is there. Without telling anyone, Mark slowly begins to steer them toward it.
35 — Back in the USSR
After leaving the Montana base, Walter had tracked-down both Stan and Eddie. It wasn’t hard to do — both of the MAT Team astronauts were in their usual lab, going over some of the hardware they’d recovered from Dulce. What was hard to do was convincing the two of them that he wasn’t dead. Mentioning Trifecta finally did it, and after that they were all ears. All told it took 17 minutes for Walter to track them down, convince them of what was going on, and then have the two of them commandeer the same ship that Eddie had flown out of Dulce the night before. After that they were off.
Eddie simply called the craft they were in “the triangle.” The thing looked like a triangle with a small, glass-enclosed cockpit area nestled down into its body, although it wasn’t glass, but something else. Eddie wasn’t real clear on that, only that he’d seen the same at Los Alamos and knew the secret military teams were working on creating something similar using the same alien technology. They weren’t quite there yet, but that didn’t preclude test flying the one they’d captured. Eddie had been such a pilot, and that’s why flying the thing from Dulce had been so easy.
The triangle was now racing over the snowy mountains of northern China and southern Russia. Eddie wasn’t sure which country they belonged to, and he didn’t much care. There was no way either a Russian MiG-29 travelling at its top speed of 1,367 miles per hour, or a Chinese Xian JH-7 travelling at its top speed of 1,092 miles per hour was going to catch him. Currently he was cruising at 4,600 miles per hour, or Mach 6. Eddie was still surprised at how well the craft handled at that speed, and he wondered what kinds of speeds the Grays usually got these machines up to. Of course, he knew, it could be a Reptilian craft as well. Either way, Eddie had been having one helluva good time trying the craft out. Nothing could compare to that initial flight out of Dulce Base, however, when Eddie had taken the craft off the landing port’s floor. Now here he was, 7,200 miles from Dulce and 12 years as well. Time travel, he thought with a chuckle, and took a moment to glance over his shoulder.
Behind him in the UFO were Walter and Stan. It’d been Walter that’d come into their Blue Lake hangar a few hours earlier to tell them that Trifecta had started up. Walter hadn’t needed to say anymore — both Stan and Eddie had known about the plan for years, ever since the first attempts to take Dulce back had started. So after getting over their initial shock they’d listened to Walter, nodded a lot, and then got down to business. Now here they were, racing to a UFO crash site… one that wasn’t set to see a UFO crash there for another 13 minutes.
Stan glances down at his watch. “It’s coming up soon, about ten minutes now.”
“I can’t believe we know of a crash before it happens,” Walter says.
“There’s a lot we know,” Eddie says from his spot at the controls, “and a lot the public doesn’t… even people like you, Walter, people on the inside but not totally in-the-know.”
“So…” Walter says, narrowing his eyes and taking on a conspiratorial look, “how’d this all get started? I’ve heard a lot, but I haven’t heard this one. We’ve got ten minutes — fill me in.”
Eddie looks to Stan, back at Walter, and then down to the floor.
“That tale’s not for everyone,” Stan says.
“Well, I’m not everyone,” Walter replies.
“Alright,” Eddie says, looking back up from the floor, “if you want to hear it, then here it goes.” He pauses, looks off for a moment as if trying to find the best place to begin, and then launches into it.
“It started in Russia, in 1991… though maybe ahead would be a better term to use.”
“Just tell the story,” Stan says, rolling his eyes.
“Alright, it starts in Russia. Just around the time people are startin’ to get off work for the day an extremely large object suddenly appears over the Caspian Sea. It measures 600 meters in length and another 110 in diameter. Radar shows it moving at a fast clip, 6,300 miles per hour.”
Walter whistles, and Eddie nods.
“At that point it was at 21,000 feet. An alert goes out and two MIG 29 fighters start heading for the Mangyshlak Peninsula where this thing’s been spotted. The two pilots are ordered to force the craft down” — Eddie scoffs here — “can you imagine two 52x35-foot planes tryin’ to force down somethin’ that’s nearly 2,000 feet long and another 360 feet across?” He chuckles. “Anyways, they try that over the Aral Sea and — surprise, surprise — that doesn’t work so the order comes through for them to shoot the thing down.” He laughs outright now. “First the two fighters close from 2,600 feet to 1,600, the better to fire a couple warning shots across the thing’s flight path. Well, when they get set to fire, guess what? No response from their controls. On top of it their electrical systems stop working. Everything in their cockpits are suddenly dead! With engines sputtering, the order is given for the fighters to nurse their way home, which they manage to do.”
“And the UFO?” Walter says. “That’s what it was… wasn’t it?”
Eddie nods. “About forty-five minutes after they broke off their engagement with the thing it vanishes from radar. That actually sent a wave of relief through the military men that were tracking the thing, for it was clear this was something beyond their capabilities to understand. That sense of relief didn’t last for long, however. It took a bit of time, but a day or two later word began to filter out of the small villages around Karakol that an immense object had crashed. A private expedition was organized to go in and check it out. For two weeks they trekked up to the area, a desolate and isolated spot in the mountains of Shaitan Mazar.”