“Yes,” Eric said. “Bring it in.”
They rolled in the gurney. Freemen helped unlock the shackles and together they lifted the unconscious man from the floor. They dumped him on the gurney, tightening the leather restraints, then used a pair of handcuffs to secure the shackles to the metal frame. A sergeant helped wheel the gurney out and load it in the back of a truck for transport back to the hangar.
“Afghanistan,” Freeman said suddenly. “That’s where I know you from. You’re Steel-Jaw. I remember now.”
Eric shrugged.
“You were Delta,” Freeman said. “How’d you wind up in the CIA?”
“The same way anybody does.”
“The CIA is better than Delta. Nicer digs, hot coffee. Three squares.”
“But you still wind up in some crummy shithole. Like Cuba….”
Freeman laughed. “Good luck with Frist. He deserves what he gets.”
Eric thought about that, then nodded his agreement. “Yes, he does.”
They were flying over the heartland when Nancy came back and plopped down in the chair across from him. Frist was motionless, the gurney chained to the floor at the back of the cabin.
“How’d the transfer go?”
Eric looked up from the paperwork. “Shouldn’t you be flying the plane?”
“Autopilot,” Nancy said. “With the updated avionics, the plane can actually land itself. Or, fly remotely like a UAV.”
He nodded. “One of the agents recognized me from Afghanistan.”
“Don’t worry,” Nancy said. “It’s bound to happen. You’re going to come across people you worked with. Your cover is airtight. I saw to it myself.”
He grunted, then waved his hand at the files. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”
“He’s a psycho and a traitor,” she said, her voice rising. “We’re going to recycle this piece of trash and make him useful.”
He shook his head. “It’s not that. I’m not saying he shouldn’t pay for his crimes, but this is inhumane. It would be better to kill him.”
“This is inhumane, but a bullet in the brain is better? Don’t overthink it, just do your job.”
He glared at her. “I understand my job.”
She glared back. “You better.”
He squinted, frowning. “What’s your story, anyway? I haven’t found a jacket for you.”
“You won’t, either,” she said. “I don’t have an official capacity. Unofficially, I speak for the Old Man when he’s not around. You’ve got as much authority over me as you can make stick. Everybody else has to follow your orders. Me, I’ll go along with it. Until I don’t.”
“That could be problematic.”
Her icy blue eyes stared back. “Yeah, but it’s not your problem. There’s only one person I answer to and that’s the Old Man. Because, unlike everybody else, he really is my old man.”
His jaw dropped. “He’s your father? Your name is Nancy Smith?”
“Yes. Now that you have some idea of who the Old Man is, you can imagine my childhood. He grew up in hard times, he’d seen a lot. He wanted me to be prepared.”
“Everybody has stories about their childhood.”
“Not like mine. Stay out of my way and we’ll get along just fine.”
“So, this is the speech?”
She raised an eyebrow. “What speech?”
“Yours is bigger than mine speech.”
She laughed, and the smile made it to her eyes.
It finally hit him. She pinged his radar.
It was eating away at him since they first met. She looked through him, not at him. The thousand yard stare, they called it. The eyes stared off, not focusing, giving a better view of an opponent’s hands and feet. She had the stare. He knew what it looked like because a lot of men in Delta had the stare.
He had it himself.
Her smiled faded. “I like you, Wise. Let’s keep it that way. Don’t get on my bad side and we’ll get along fine.” She stood and headed for the cockpit. “We’ll be landing in an hour.”
Eric watched her go, and this time noticed the bulge of the handgun in the side of her skirt. He turned to look at the unconscious form of John Frist. “Between me and you,” he said to the unconscious man, “I really don’t think I want to get on her bad side.”
It was near dusk when they landed and taxied off the runway. A truck and Humvee waited for them. Eric stepped off the plane and gasped as the heat took his breath away. The dry air sapped the moisture from his lips and tongue, and he struggled to spit, the dust tickling the back of his throat. He knew that soon the desert would cool, quickly radiating its heat, but for now it was a furnace.
A pair of soldiers helped unload Frist and place him in the back of the truck. Nancy motioned for Eric to get in the passenger seat of the Humvee, and she drove while the soldiers followed in the truck.
From the files, Eric knew that much of the history of Area 51 was deliberately crafted misinformation. The real base was buried deep within the mountains. They roared toward the mountain following a road invisible to the eye, but one that Nancy managed to negotiate. She glanced down at an LCD screen, then placed her thumb over a small square.
The thumb-reader beeped and the ground began to rise in front of them. He watched, amazed, as the desert floor blossomed open, a long tunnel sloping downward underneath the false rock. They entered the cavernous tunnel and continued down the slope.
“It’s not concrete,” Nancy said.
He stared dumbly. “What?”
“I bet you were thinking the tunnel is concrete. It’s not.” The Humvee’s headlights played across the slick tunnel walls. Eric turned to watch behind them as the false door shut, sealing them in. A long string of fluorescent lights in metal cages glowed above, stretching off into the distance.
“The original tunnel was hand cut,” she continued, “but they enlarged it later with a nuclear tunneling device. They poured concrete to level the floor, but the walls are actually melted rock.”
“Nuclear powered tunneling machine?”
“Don’t worry,” Nancy said, grinning. “It isn’t radioactive. Anymore.”
He shook his head. “That really doesn’t make me feel better.”
They continued through the tunnel until finally entering a large cavern. Eric had seen caves, large and small, and this was no cave. It was a long room, big enough for the Humvee and truck to swing completely around. A large blast door stood open, guarding another tunnel.
The soldiers lifted the gurney out of the truck and placed it on the flat bed of an electric cart, Frist still trussed up and motionless. Nancy slid behind the wheel and motioned for Eric to take the passenger seat. He was barely seated when she floored it.
The electric cart shot down the tunnel, the blast door closing behind them. She spoke to Eric as she drove. “A lot of people think we have aliens here, but trust me, it’s just us. They’d probably be a lot more freaked if they knew the truth,” she said wistfully.
They drove several hundred meters before coming to another door. It opened slowly, and was as thick as it was wide. An armed guard stopped them and Nancy handed him identification. He nodded and they passed through the door and were greeted by several white-coated technicians.
The techs wore lanyards with their faces emblazoned on plastic cards. The first, a black man named Nathan Elliot, directed two others to take the gurney with Frist. Eric recognized Elliot as the lead scientist on Project StrikeForce, a burly man in his late forties who would look more at home in a barroom brawl than in a classroom. He knew the man’s looks were deceiving; he held two doctorates and was considered the top in his field before being recruited into the OTM.
He saluted but Elliot laughed and shook his hand with an iron grip.