They waited for fifteen anxious minutes, all eyes fixed above the mountains, hoping for another glimpse, Blake ready with the camera. Hope was lost when the F-16s began to land. The air show, what they briefly saw of it, was over.
On the drive back to Vegas, Blake had mixed thoughts about the trip. “What happens with that info the sheriff took from us?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Desmond reassured. “They’ll stick it in some file with all the other names they collect.”
Blake spent most of the drive back to Las Vegas in silence, assessing the evening, uncertain about Desmond. He knew the man wasn’t crazy, although he acted like it at times. Blake could tell Desmond was a thinking man, like himself, but wasn’t sharing all his thoughts and motives.
PART 5
FOLKS WHO DON'T GET OUT MUCH
CHAPTER 31
Chief Trace Helms, head of Air Force Security at Area 51, often had to clarify the pronunciation of his first name. “That’s Trace! Pronounced like mace. NOT, Tracey! My father didn’t name me after no woman.” After being corrected by the man’s baritone voice and feeling the grasp of his boxer’s stare, many of his subordinates refused to use his name at all, simply calling him Chief. His minimal interaction with other employees added to his daunting mystique. A lack of unbridled understanding about their boss led many to believe Chief Helms knew all about the inner-workings of Area 51, but that was far from the truth. Maybe someday, he hoped, someday sooner than his career path dictated.
Multiple layers of security guarded the Area 51 complex. The Groom Proper Patrol was the first layer: contracted security forces in white Jeep Cherokees who guarded the base’s perimeter. Their supervisor reported to Trace. The second layer, the Air Force Security Police, was also overseen by Trace. They guarded most of the buildings and hangars, and monitored base personnel.
Beyond the first two levels, security became more complicated. Some projects had their own security units. Trace had very little interaction with the higher levels, but that was fine, for he needed some privacy in his life, for his hobby, one his superiors wouldn’t condone.
Years back, when Trace started his stint at Dreamland — the codename his circle called Area 51 — he wanted to know what the strange lights were in the sky; the Unusual Things he was told he might see and was forbidden to discuss. He never came close enough to see the lights on the ground, but he heard stories, rumors about alien spacecraft, and alien bodies. The thought of such incredible technology excited Trace, but he felt like a minority with his fascination. Day in and day out he watched certain high level employees at the base pass through security stations with stoic looks on their faces: no emotion, no excitement, no morale. Near hypnotic states.
An old Frank Sinatra movie — The Manchurian Candidate — eerily provided Trace with an explanation for some of the base-workers’ stoic attitudes: mind control. He thought his mind control theory sounded too sci-fi at first, but so did descriptions of the flying lights he had seen.
Few workers displayed the stoic symptoms, but with time, Trace could pick out those who acted differently. He never pursued his hunch until sitting in a doctor’s office one day, waiting for a routine physical, when he thumbed through a medical trade journal. An article on psychopharmacology caught his attention. It mentioned various new drugs, and others still being tested, that stimulated the mind. Trace knew this was an area the military had delved into decades earlier. He also knew the military rarely revealed new information. So anything in the public sector that the military had dealt with, more specifically, the drugs mentioned in the medical journal, stood a good chance of being ten to twenty years behind current top-secret programs.
In his spare time, Trace began conducting his own research. He started with trips to the public and university libraries in Las Vegas, checking out psychology books and studying the mind. His curiosity about the flying lights at Dreamland was also growing — a curiosity he shared with two old friends, buddies from the Air Force Academy: Jimmy “the Pimp” Casper and Desmond Wyatt.
Initially, Trace helped his two friends sneak onto the public land surrounding Dreamland so they too could see the bizarre lights in the sky. He told them ideal nights to be out there and where to hide to avoid patrols. But that was in the early days when few people knew about the base, before Trace’s mind control research became a personal mission.
Into the nineties, as outside visitors became more prevalent at the base, Trace insisted his friends stop their visits. Unfortunately, what had started as an inside secret shared with friends took a serious turn. Desmond Wyatt’s interests became far greater than a passive observance and escalated until Trace could no longer risk associating with him and they had a falling out.
In 1993, Trace discovered the Internet. A discovery that to him was similar to kicking over a rock and finding a mother lode of gold underneath. He studied the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s bid request website, a listing of requests for new technology development where the military proposed general theories for new weapons or equipment, and paid private contractors to invent or develop the technologies.
He also searched the National Technical Service databases for past military studies, using search words like: psychoanalytical compound, cranial vault, mental biopsy, isotropic radiators, psycho surgery, remote viewing. The core documents were still classified, but Trace pulled enough facts to determine what the military had been doing for decades. His research guided him to specific study projects that focused on topics such as: sleep-state alteration, beta-adrenergic blockers and monoamine oxidase inhibitors.
Trace had uncovered various pictures of the government’s past projects, enough to develop a reasonable understanding of their current capabilities. He became a self-educated expert on the topics, devoting so much time he would have earned professional degrees and praise had he been working in a collegiate environment, but that was not his objective. Ultimately he formulated a specific theory about the technology and how the government was using it. Learning what the government was capable of scared Trace. That was when his hobby turned into a mission. He realigned his friendship with Desmond Wyatt, seeing him as an asset in the mission, and used Jimmy as the go-between.
Trace considered himself a patriot: a career service man who devoted his life to the country he loved and defended. However, his loyalty now rested with an unassuming and vulnerable public, not its oppressive military.
Responding to a knock on his office door, Trace said, “Come in,” with his thundering baritone voice. Not a violent thunder, more like distant thunder during a warm summer rain.
Thunder was thunder to the evening shift commander, unable to differentiate between happy, sad or mad thunder. “You working late tonight, Chief?”
“One more thing to do. Should be a quiet night for you.”
“Unlike last night. I glanced at the reports. That crazy Desmond Wyatt was up to his shenanigans again. Funny how he always shows up on nights when we’re testing. Like he’s got a friend on the inside tipping him off.”
“He’s been out here plenty of times when nothing is going on,” Trace said, quick to point out the inaccuracy of the shift commander’s remark. “You keep saying things like that and you’ll start rumors.”
The shift commander might not have recognized happy or sad thunder, but he knew violent thunder. “Sorry, sir. I was just trying to make conversation.” He left and closed the door, cursing himself for pissing off the chief.