Roland came up to Moms with the laptop, its lid shut, a metal thermal blanket wrapped around it.
“Where’s its owner?” Moms asked.
“Saw him get snarked into the Rift like they all do, just as the Fireflies came out. I was a couple of seconds too late. So he’s on the other side, wherever that is.” He reached down and picked up a cap with the Arizona State Sun Devil mascot on the front. “This is all that’s left of him.”
“Anything else come out of the Rift?” Moms asked.
“Not since I put eyes on it,” Roland said, “and near as I could tell, the ASU kid who programmed it only got the Rift open just before it took him.”
“So just the six?” Moms pressed.
“Yes, ma’am,” Roland said.
Moms slapped Roland lightly on the shoulder. “Good job, soldier.”
Roland, all six-four, two hundred and forty pounds of trained killer, shifted his feet uncomfortably like a freshman at the senior dance, laptop in one hand, the carrying handle of the smoking machine gun in the other, the nozzle of the flamer red hot in its asbestos sheath on his hip. The livid scar that ran along the right side of his head from the temple to above and behind his ear went red.
“Eagle, retrieve your probes. We’re wet.” She looked at the team sergeant. “Nada, how’s the Satcom link?”
Nada went from putting the demolitions on the generator to checking the com link on Burns’s wrist. “Got banged up — nonfunctional.”
“Eagle, get me a Satcom link to the Ranch.”
“You’ve got it. Live now on channel four.”
Moms switched her throat mike to the new channel.
“Ms. Jones, we are wet here.”
The voice that replied was old and had a vaguely Russian accent forced into speaking American for a long time. “And?”
“Two wounded, one MIA scientist, six Fireflies destroyed.” Moms paused. “There was something different about the Rift.”
“Tell me in debrief. Come home.”
The channel went dead, and Moms switched back to the team freq. “Eagle, land.”
Creating a minisandstorm, the Snake settled down on its landing gear forty meters away as the chain gun retracted into its compartment. The back ramp opened as floodlights set above it lit up the area and Eagle stepped out, surveying the battlefield, a stretcher in his hands. He was a tall black man, completely hairless, and the entire left side of his head was scrolled with burn scar tissue from an IED in Iraq eight years ago.
Nada was helping Doc to his feet. The venom was taking its toll despite the shot, but he’d gotten Burns stable.
“Let’s get our people on board,” Moms ordered.
Nada half-carried Doc to the Snake, while Roland and Eagle tenderly placed Burns on the stretcher and carried him up the ramp.
Moms’s were the last boots to step on board. Eagle climbed forward into the cockpit and was closing the back ramp as she got in the copilot’s seat. He began powering up the engines.
“Next time,” Doc mumbled, “I think I’ll have the FireWire connected before we land.”
“You think?” Roland said.
“We need to coordinate our firepower more efficiently,” Nada said.
“Idiot scientists need to stop playing with shit they don’t understand,” Eagle observed as he twisted the collective and pushed forward on the cyclic. The Snake lifted.
Below them the generator exploded.
“All right, enough chitchat,” Moms said. “Let’s get back to Area 51 and the Ranch.”
Moms looked over at the team’s wounded communications man, then reached back and tapped Nada on the knee. “We’re gonna need a new commo man.”
Nada sighed. “You know how long it takes Ms. Jones to find someone.”
“I hate fucking Rifts,” Burns muttered, then passed out.
CHAPTER 2
Area 51 is in the middle of nowhere on the way to nowhere. Worse, in most of the nowhere it’s on the way to, no one would survive long. To the west is the Nevada Test Site where the government — in the form of the United States Department of Energy — exploded 739 of the 928 nuclear tests it conducted over the years. Uninhabitable would be kind. No living thing being able to cross and survive long is more to the point.
To the north is the Nellis Range, where the government in the form of the US Air Force regularly drops bombs, big and small. Like most good pilots in the military, they often deliberately target anything moving out there, usually cattle or deer, since any kill is a good kill. The government pays the ranchers around the area a stipend every year for livestock that wander into the kill zone.
The deer are out of luck.
For most who cared, UFO enthusiasts among the most likely, the key to Area 51 is the world’s longest runway set on the dry bed of Groom Lake. Every day a plane carrying contractors from Las Vegas lands on that runway depositing workers for the facilities built into Groom Mountain and hidden from the probing eyes of satellites.
The Nightstalkers did not take the daily flight to and from Vegas.
Area 51 itself would have been much too public a place for the Nightstalkers to be headquartered, although the huge perimeter, the inaccessibility, and the built-in security were all certainly enticements. The forerunners of the Nightstalkers had only been based at Area 51 because the scientists who conceived most of the problems they had to deal with were based at Area 51. Along the way someone realized that if everyone knew about Area 51, then it wasn’t the best place to keep the covert team. The unit had changed names many times, always at least one step, and hopefully a lap, ahead of scrutiny. Now the Nightstalkers simply stayed in the vicinity to use that great buffer of security to the west, along with being able to tap the resources of the classified facility. And, of course, because they also had to be close enough to go in and take care of the problems that occasionally cropped up from some experiment gone awry in one of Area 51’s many labs.
The new location, when they moved out of Area 51 proper, had been initially dubbed the Ranch, and that stuck.
So the Ranch was across the road. Right across Extraterrestrial Highway, a.k.a. Nevada Route 375. The curious who came out there always looked west, where the base was. No one ever looked east, toward the Ranch. On private land. Registered in county records to the actual current owner: Ms. Jones.
This made the location even more secure than the government facility across the way, because Nevada’s Stand Your Ground Law, dating back to the Wild West of 1871, allowed Ranch security to gun down anyone who crossed its boundaries into the private property and represented what they considered a threat. The big, spray-painted plywood NO TRESPASS: WE WILL SHOOT YOUR ASS signs around the Ranch carried a lot more weight than the fancy red-and-white metal warning signs posted around Area 51, where the occasional interloper got a six-hundred-dollar fine.
The main part of the Ranch was, of course, hidden underground. Inside the complex — inside the Den — Eagle and Roland were needling MacGyver, a.k.a. Mac, about missing out in the “Fun Outside Tucson,” as the latest mission had been labeled on the flight home. Mac had been off getting trained up in some other secret facility on the latest in demolitions, and Eagle told him they could have used the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch on the killer rabbit, which drew blank stares from Roland and Mac and a sigh from the older man.
In reality, the two men were on edge and Mac was humoring them, while they all pretended not to listen to what was going on in Ms. Jones’s office next door and stared aimlessly around their dreary surroundings. The central room they were in had originally been called the Bunker. It certainly fit the moniker. Depressing, gray, steel-reinforced concrete walls, curving to a popcorn ceiling that had another twenty feet of concrete pressing down on it. The Den was the center of the facility, the team room. Besides Ms. Jones’s office, Moms and Nada’s Command Post (CP) was adjacent to it along with the weapons room and the team living quarters.