A few minutes later the tremor returned, this time followed by a brief and distant popping sound. He never heard a craft. Rumors about flying objects in the valley spoke of silent spaceships, but could they be that quiet, like a glider?
With Val gone, time seemed to pass more slowly. Then Blake heard footsteps, but the tarpaulin covering the entrance wasn’t disturbed. He listened with greater intensity. Silence. Maybe it was a passing animal, a coyote. He thought of a time in the Boy Scouts when a raccoon was clawing at his tent during the night. He had imagined an enormous monster — Bigfoot — not such a small creature. He convinced himself the sound outside wasn’t footsteps, but some insignificant noise. Then he heard it again, closer. Knowing better than to call out, or even move, he sat in utter silence. Again he heard movement. Someone poked at the tarpaulin. Feet scuffed the dirt. A man crashed inside and rolled on the ground. It was Val and he failed to rise.
Leaping to Val’s side, Blake said, “What’s wrong?”
“Help me get this suit off,” he said, in apparent pain.
Blake helped him pull the helmet off and unclasp the chest piece. Val remained speechless, gasping after every movement of his body. When Blake started removing the components attached to Val’s thighs, he felt moisture on his hands. “Your leg is soaked in blood!”
“They stumbled across my footprints.”
“How did you get away?”
Val removed the controls strapped to his left forearm and handed them to Blake. “This baby has a few tricks. Now put it on!”
“What?”
“You’ve got to go.”
“I can’t leave. You need help. And I’ll get caught.”
“The hell you will,” Val grunted. “I got the saucer craft on video. You’re putting on the suit and sneaking the data off this base.”
From Val’s tone, Blake knew it was the only option.
“Start putting the suit on,” Val insisted. “I’ll explain what you need to do.”
“How will I know where to go?”
“GPS — the suit will guide you, but you’ve got to hurry. Two guards stumbled on me. They’ll be out of commission for a bit, but soon it’ll get ugly.” Val used a knife to cut away the blood-soaked material covering his left thigh, revealing an oozing bullet wound.
While Blake slipped the various components of the Bio Suit onto his body, Val dictated a general set of instructions into the helmet’s sound recorder, then showed him how to use the navigation system. “Follow the coordinates. You need to navigate around the sensors in this valley, and the radioactive soil at the Nevada Test Site.” The last item Val showed Blake was a distress beacon. “If you think that you’re going to get caught, activate this. Just keep in mind that the other guys can track the signal too.”
Alone, stranded and bleeding through the in-and-out bullet wound in his upper left thigh, Val sat on the bunker’s floor and cursed his luck. He had navigated the surrounding terrain undetected on three separate missions, finally having recorded the evidence he sought, only to round an outcropping of rock and find himself facing two menacing soldiers. “You can’t hide your footprints,” one said.
Val had refused to surrender, yet the men training guns on him were not the enemy; they were honorable Americans doing their job as employees of the United States Air Force. For that reason, Val carried no gun, but he did have a small arsenal of non-lethal weapons stowed in his Bio Suit. Using the suit’s voice-activation feature, he whispered instructions and concentrated a low-frequency sound wave at the stomach of the closest soldier. Within seconds the muscle-bound man lost the stern look on his face and rigid grip on his gun. Nausea had overwhelmed him and before he realized what was happening, his stomach’s contents blew from his mouth in a projectile fashion. Weakened, the soldier crashed to the ground, dry heaving and rolling in the dirt.
Val continued abiding by the instructions of the first soldier, dropping to his knees, keeping his hands raised.
When the standing soldier became nauseous, he charged Val, tackling him to his back. Val responded with a stun gun blast that incapacitated the soldier. As he pushed the man off him, he noticed the other soldier struggling to point a pistol at him. Val stood and kicked the gun away, but not before two random blasts discharged from the muzzle. One bullet bored through the quadriceps in his left leg, missing the femur bone and femoral artery. Contact with either body part would have put him on the ground between the soldiers.
After taking their radios and tossing them out of sight, Val hobbled back to the bunker. The pressure from each step shot a resounding pain through his leg, reinforcing the fact that he wouldn’t be hiking off the base.
Using a flashlight, Val studied his torn flesh. Applying pressure had diminished the blood flow, but he knew by his dizziness that he had lost a significant amount. His challenge now was staying in the bunker long enough to give Blake time to distance himself, but not so long that he might pass out and bleed to death. He knew the two soldiers would have recuperated by now, but without radios they didn’t pose an immediate threat.
After twenty minutes, Val figured Blake was at least a mile and a half from the bunker. His leg had stiffened, and standing generated excruciating pain as if someone had poked a pencil in the wound. Outside, he sat on the ground, sucked up the pain caused by his movements, then reclined to a supine position. After resting for a minute, he rolled on his stomach — more pain. Although his wound was now in the dirt, protected only by a t-shirt wrapped around it, Val thought it better that he put himself face down rather than be manhandled by the soldiers when they handcuffed him.
Soon he heard helicopters approaching. When he careened his neck skyward, he saw three of the large monsters flying with equal distance between them, sweeping the desert with infrared, he presumed.
The closest chopper veered from its place in the formation and shined a spotlight on Val. The two others also banked in his direction. Blake could now continue unpursued for the time being. One chopper descended from Val’s view. He figured a cargo load of soldiers would be upon him soon.
The roar from the choppers drowned the thumps of approaching footsteps. As soon as Val realized the soldiers had surrounded him, a knee landed in his back and forced every breath of air from his lungs. They said nothing to Val and paid little attention to the blood-soaked shirt wrapped around his wound. Instead, they stretched the wound by pulling his ankles over his back and hog-tying them to his wrists. The last memory Val had was a sharp pain in his neck, an injection that put him to sleep.
The Bio Suit weighed on Blake like a novice backpacker’s overstuffed load. Hiking with the excess burden wouldn’t have been too hard on him, but running proved challenging. Yet he wasn’t tired. Spending the day snacking on MREs and protein bars had nourished his system, and fear again boosted his adrenaline, putting him in a mental zone that allowed his body to sustain a vigorous pace. A manly sound of exertion accompanied each outward breath — huh … huh … huh — as he pumped his arms and lifted his legs. He slowed his pace just once to watch the helicopters converge over Val.
Val set the functions on the suit so all Blake had to do was follow the directional arrows on the head-up display. Few thoughts passed through his mind while he traveled across the terrain except those concerned with his movements: dodging Joshua trees like they were flagpoles on a slalom course; planting his feet on sand; stepping over rocks, holes and brush.