But, now clear of the engine noise in the tunnels below, he began to pick up the noise of other engines, on the land, converging on them, and he knew security must know where they were and already be on their way.
He pulled up on to his haunches, reached for the hatch and ripped it open completely, the earth that had been resting on top now flung to the side. He reached further in and grasped Lynn by her arms, pulling her up and out of the tunnel in one smooth motion until her feet hit solid ground next to him.
He gestured to the noise of engines to their right, and Lynn followed his gaze. There was a high chain-link fence just twenty feet from them, and they could see the brightly lit runways just beyond the fence line. The noise was coming from the runway, and they quickly realized that armoured vehicles were approaching at speed, using the runway as a fast road. To their left, a narrow empty road ran far into the distance. Other than that, the area resembled the barren scrub of the Chilean and Peruvian deserts from which they had so recently escaped.
‘They’re on their way,’ Adams said to her. ‘We need to leave. Now!’
25
Barnes emerged from the hatch as the headlights of four large off-road vehicles headed across the bumpy terrain towards him, body-mounted .50 calibre machine guns trained directly at him.
‘Stand down!’ he shouted into his tactical mic, tuned to the wavelength used by all the different elements of Area 51 security. He raised his arms as the lead vehicle’s searchlight hit him straight on, illuminating him perfectly.
The rest of his men poured up and out of the tunnel behind him as the four 4x4s steered to a stop around them.
‘They’re out here somewhere,’ Barnes announced, ‘and they’ve only got a few minutes’ head start.’
‘Do we have monitors out here?’ came a question from the interior of the second vehicle.
‘Affirmative,’ Colonel Caines announced from his station inside the MSB. ‘We have sensors all the way out to the main gate.’
Because it was so large, the actual perimeter of the Groom Lake base was not fenced in; rather, the sole approach road — Groom Lake Road, just fourteen miles from Highway 375, known affectionately by locals as the Extraterrestrial Highway — was marked with a variety of vivid signs warning people not to go any further. Anyone who did was instantly caught by the private security guards — the ‘camo dudes’ — who then handed them over to the County Sheriff’s Department. The land between the outer perimeter and the base itself was monitored by an array of heat sensors and motion cameras, as well as by the men who kept a visual lookout from the high hills that surrounded the approach road.
‘Barnes, you and your men will continue the search on foot,’ the colonel continued, ‘and I want the jeeps to extend the search area, right up to the main perimeter. We’ve got two hundred more men coming into the search zone within the next ten minutes, along with dogs and thermal imagers. Helicopters are being made ready and will be airborne soon, extending the zone further. Now let’s get going!’
‘Yes, sir!’ Barnes responded. ‘You heard the man!’ he said, turning to his team. ‘Let’s move out!’
Four long, terrible, migraine-inducing hours later, Colonel Briscoe Caines sat rooted to the monitors. The entire security apparatus of the world’s most secure military facility had been mobilized to find just two lightly armed escapees, in an open desert, without success. Three hundred men, two dozen off-road vehicles and fourteen helicopters had searched five hundred square miles of desert and had still found nothing.
So what in the hell was going on? Even though a lot of base staff had recently transferred to Europe on the orders of Stephen Jacobs, Caines was hardly without resources. But no trace was found anywhere, save for a pair of tracks that led from the tunnel exit across the desert sand on to Groom Lake Road.
Where could they have gone once on the road? There had been no sign of any vehicle. Perhaps someone had turned up in a car and whisked them away. Or maybe a couple of motorbikes had been left by the tunnel for them. But how on earth would that have been arranged? And the helicopters would certainly have found them anyway, if the sensors had not.
Caines was at a loss to explain it.
Lynn shifted her weight, struggling to get comfortable, but it was impossible.
After leaving the tunnel, Adams had dragged her to the left, out towards the paved road, where he had rolled himself along the tarmac, encouraging Lynn to do the same. ‘To confuse the dogs,’ he had told her, before taking her hand and pulling her back, retracing their steps to the tunnel exit. Adams had made sure they stepped into their previous footprints, covering up the fact that they had returned.
He had then gone to work, digging earth from next to the hatch until, with Lynn’s help, a small hollow had been cleared. Then he had pulled her down into the small pit and started to cover their bodies with the loose soil.
‘How are we going to breathe?’ she whispered breathlessly shortly before they were completely covered.
Adams pulled out his pistol, ejected the magazine and slipped it into his pocket before racking the slide to eject the round in the chamber. He gathered it up and put this in his pocket also, as Lynn started to do the same with her own gun.
Putting the butts of the guns in their mouths, they continued to cover themselves until they were completely buried, the barrels of their pistols sticking out of the dirt very slightly, allowing the cold night air to filter down to them.
And they had been like that ever since, lying immobile, hardly daring to breathe when the team had come up from the tunnel and the 4x4s had arrived on the scene, terrified that their pistol barrels would be found or their body heat would register on the guards’ hi-tech monitors.
But the barrels had been missed in the excitement — with two escapees on the loose, a mound of earth disturbed by the hatch being opened wasn’t of prime consideration; and their body heat wasn’t picked up by the sensors, thanks to the cold earth covering them.
They were still in place when the dogs had come and the sound of dozens — perhaps hundreds — of more feet had descended on the area; but again, the sounds came and went, and the mound of earth remained undisturbed.
But they had been in the same position now for far too long, and Lynn was starting to suffer from an intense claustrophobia that she had never before experienced. Even though there were only a few inches of topsoil separating her from the outside world, there might as well have been a thousand. She felt as if she had been truly buried alive, like one of those people who were declared dead a little too prematurely and then woke up buried in a coffin under tons of earth. Some of them had clawed their way out, Lynn knew, and now she felt that same desire, the intense need to just start digging.
She felt movement next to her, and realized Adams was doing exactly that; he was escaping from their earthy prison. Had it been too much for him?
Lynn started to dig her own way out instantly, and she was almost there when Adams reached in and helped pull her out, the heavy soil tumbling down her hair and off her skin as she removed the jaw-achingly wide gun butt from her mouth, eager to breathe in a full lungful of real air. As she took those first few precious, wonderful mouthfuls of clean air, Adams scanned the immediate area.
‘They’re not here, for now at least,’ he said with some satisfaction. ‘They’re probably scouring every inch of land around the base.’
‘So what do we do now?’ she asked him, her composure returning slowly.
‘Now we escape,’ he replied with confidence.
‘Which way?’