“Well done,” Frank said. “All right. We take this from the shadows and approach the hangar from behind. Once we’re there, we’ll do some spot recon. Ellis, you’re up.”
With a grin, Ellis put his hand to the ground at the edge of the fence. Slowly, the ground gave way, turning to water and immediately filtering through the dust. He moved his hands left and right, making more water, until there was enough of an opening beneath the fence for someone to roll under and up the other side.
“They should’ve fixed the sightline problem,” General Davis muttered in Frank’s head. Frank ignored him as he rolled under and out, then stood to help Maggie up. The woman ignored his outstretched hand, though, and practically leapt to her feet.
Everyone handed Ellis a large article of clothing or bedding — a sweater, a spare pillow, a blanket. Ellis shoved them under the hole and then laid his hands on them, turning them back to desert dirt. It wasn’t perfect, but it’d do.
“What about footprints?” Cal whispered.
Frank pointed toward a small ridge about four hundred yards off. “We get there, we can travel over rock to cover our tracks. It’s been breezy these past few days — let’s hope it keeps up tonight. Let’s move.”
Ellis nodded and took off through the darkened desert in a crouch-run, still exploiting the failed sightline of the guard tower, followed by Maggie and Cal. Frank looked ahead and then behind them to ensure their little trick didn’t capture any attention, before sprinting forward to catch up with the group.
A half-hour later, they were approaching the rear of Area 51’s main base. To Frank’s surprise, nobody had raised an alarm yet, but the two airmen were the only ones on night duty, and it seemed Maggie and Cal’s combined Enhancements had put them out of commission for a while. Maybe luck really was on their side.
Frank led them toward the very back of the massive mystery hangar, which was very close to the ridge they had traveled to get there. He dashed across a dangerously well-lit stretch of rock and collapsed into a shadowy pocket between a huge, noisy air conditioning unit and some other machinery sticking out from the side of the building. The smell of ozone filled the dry night air. One by one, the rest of the team joined him. Ellis looked to Frank as he approached; Frank nodded to give him the green light.
Ellis placed his thumb against the metal prefab wall and screwed his eyes shut for a moment. His thumb then sank through the wall as the metal turned to water, leaving a peephole. Ellis peered through a moment, pressed his ear to the opening, then turned to the others.
“Dark,” he whispered. “Probably a machine room.”
Inadvertently, Ellis’s hand dropped to his side and came to rest on the ground — which immediately turned to pure white salt. Frank looked up at him, and the Southerner just shrugged.
“It’s never something good like gold or diamonds,” Ellis whispered as he brushed some sand over the salt to obscure it.
Frank looked out a moment, ducking his head back around the AC unit to ensure they weren’t being followed, then studied the wall carefully before pointing at a shadowed corner. “Make it small. No liquids.”
Ellis frowned; he had more control over water than solids, but after a moment’s thought, he smiled and placed both hands on the steel wall. It didn’t look like anything until he poked a finger into it and began to rip through.
“Paper,” he whispered.
Frank and Maggie traded a look and a smirk; Ellis was getting smarter about using his Enhancement. It only took him a minute to quietly rip away the paper wall, leaving a two-foot circular gap in the metal. He stood and dramatically waved his hands toward it like a magician might do to conclude a particularly clever trick; the Voila! was left unspoken.
This time, Frank took point, with Maggie close behind. As he crawled through, Frank realized she could react to potential targets far faster than he could. But he still had issues putting a girl up front — even one who regularly kicked Ellis’s and Cal’s ass in training. He scurried through quickly and allowed Maggie to slide into the building; she did so without so much as a sound, and with a grace that he’d not seen in the woman before.
Frank unhooked a flashlight from his belt — another present Maggie got from Roger the Airman — and clicked it on. Thankfully, the glass was grimy and the bulb dim, so while it was just enough light for him to get his bearings, it wasn’t bright enough that they needed to worry about it being seen a mile away. They were indeed in a machine room of some kind — a big one, too. Frank couldn’t make out the ceiling in the dim light. As for the machines around him, Frank shuffled through the memories in his head — a machinist from the Navy, a couple of guys in construction, an engineer — and came up with very little. There were vacuum tubes and more air vents, tons of electrical generation and plenty of wiring and pipes, but it was beyond his experience — beyond a lot of people’s experience, in fact. There were a number of sort of half-finished comments from the people in his head, but overall, Frank’s impression was that there was a collective shrug from his assemblage of memories.
“Where to, boss?” Cal whispered deeply, quietly, like a rumble from the desert floor itself.
Frank held the flashlight aloft so as to cast enough dim light for everyone to see. “Doors. Let’s find ’em.”
The group fanned out in pairs, Ellis joining Maggie and Cal staying with Frank; putting Ellis and Cal together on anything just seemed damn foolish, no matter how much better they seemed to behave together lately. And while Ellis was many things, he remained surprisingly gentlemanly around Maggie, in that way only Southerners could manage. Of course, the fact that Maggie could reduce a grown man to a babbling puddle in seconds likely wasn’t lost on Ellis either.
It took about thirty seconds for the team to find two exits. Ellis created floor-level peepholes near each and quickly reported that one led to a simple janitor’s closet. The other led… out. There was light on the other side of the door — harsh, fluorescent light — but they could tell nothing beyond that.
Except, of course, that there didn’t appear to be any cover to be had. They would be completely exposed.
Frank whispered out the orders, and the team wordlessly took their places. Ellis opened the door for Maggie, who quickly walked out and pressed her back to the wall to the right. She then gave a hand signal back through the empty door — all clear. The rest followed and were soon out in the open.
And it was a very big open. With a very big light inside.
Even knowing its general dimensions from the outside, the hangar seemed oddly more cavernous when you were inside it, Frank noticed. Perhaps that was because of the large, swirling white light in the middle of it — hovering in place, about four feet from the ground. It was vaguely spherical, maybe eight feet across, but it was so hard to look at that it was tough to say, really. One got the impression that its dimensions were constantly changing on a nearly imperceptible level.
Frank started walking forward, all pretense of stealth forgotten. He knew that light all too well.
“Frank!” Cal hissed. “What you doing? Dammit, Frank! Get back here!”
But he kept going. He heard Ellis and Maggie whisper-arguing whether he was in his right mind or if he’d been somehow entranced by the vortex. But he knew exactly what he was doing.
And it didn’t have a damn thing to do with the light itself but the men standing around it with their recorders and instruments. One man in particular, out of the dozen or so in the sprawling corrugated room, was firmly in his sight, and for the first time in three years, Frank wished for nothing more than a gun in hand.