Origin (30 page)

‘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?’

Adams smiled at her and pointed over her shoulder at the chain-link fence surrounding Area 51.

Lynn turned and looked, then groaned in disbelief. ‘Oh no,’ she said forlornly. ‘You’ve
got
to be kidding me.’

T
HE FENCE WAS
not in fact the formidable obstacle it at first seemed. It was really a demarcation line more than anything, a way of letting base personnel know where they could and could not go. In terms of security, it was assumed that it was impossible to get past the body-heat and motion detectors placed all over the surrounding desert, and the roving patrols of guards.

Getting closer, though, Adams could see that although the fence wasn’t physically impressive – just one row of chain-link, ten feet high – its entire length was linked to both motion and body-heat sensors. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so easy.

Adams crouched in the shadows, his night vision picking out what looked like a gate some distance away, and after a moment’s observation, he could see that this was where the security vehicles must have passed through.

‘Come on,’ he whispered to Lynn, motioning towards the gate.

‘The main gate?’ she asked in disbelief.

‘It’s not the main gate,’ he whispered back, ‘it’s a minor side gate. And I think it’s still open.’

He took her by the hand, keeping low as they moved along the fence line towards the gate. Fifty metres out, they both crouched down again, straining to make out the details of the gate. Around them, far out in the desert, they heard the sound of off-road vehicles struggling over the rough terrain, helicopters circling the skies above, and voices shouting orders. Here, though, there seemed to be a complete absence of activity; Adams could only presume that the gate had been left temporarily open to aid the vehicles that would doubtlessly be streaming in and out all night.

Suddenly, engine noise from the rear caused him to grab Lynn by the arm and pull her down close to the sandy ground. Looking over their shoulders, they saw two 4x4s heading back to base. They watched closely as the off-roaders crashed along the bumpy terrain before passing through the gate, their headlights illuminating what Adams could now see was a small, deserted sentry box.

They continued to watch for several moments, until Adams turned to Lynn. ‘Other vehicles are at least a mile away,’ he said, able to pick up the sounds quite easily across the barren desert. He gestured for the gate. ‘It’s time to go.’

‘So where are we?’ Caines asked over the secure comms link, hoping for something –
anything
– that would help resolve this terrible situation.

‘Nothing so far,’ he heard Barnes report back immediately. ‘There’s nothing out here but the damn sand!’

Caines could hear the man’s frustration, and it was reflected in the answers that followed from the drivers of the 4x4 recon vehicles and the pilots of the helicopters. Nobody had found anything.

He turned back to the monitors, the bustling team that swarmed around the office all but invisible to him.

Where the hell were they?

At the same moment that Caines was asking himself that question, his prey were within less than a hundred metres of the Main Security Building, both parties unaware of the other’s presence.

Adams knew what the large brick building across the runway tarmac was, however, having been briefed on Area 51’s major structural layout by Stephenfield, and he knew to avoid it. It was to the south-west of a similar building, which he knew to be some sort of laboratory for something called Precision Measuring Equipment. To the north of that, and now directly opposite him, was the very large building that housed the base headquarters. But he still couldn’t tell where the underground building in which they had been held was. But, he supposed, he didn’t have to know; what he wanted was now within reach anyway.

Both Adams and Lynn were amazed by how big the base was, how sprawling, almost like a small township, albeit one that consumed the same amount of electricity as a large city. Dozens of buildings, from small barracks to large warehouses and vehicle hangars, were spread over a vast area, and then there were the seven brightly lit runways, each with their own command towers and support vehicles.

The inner base, however, seemed to be almost deserted, the search for them outside the base mercifully consuming almost all of the security force’s resources. They had crossed one runway after another, moving low across the terrain between them and fast across the smooth tarmac, always keeping to whatever shadows they could, until they reached the runway nearest the headquarters building.

As they crouched there, Adams pointed to the row of six Boeing 737 passenger jets, their fuselages painted white with a red stripe down each side. ‘The Janet planes,’ Adams whispered to Lynn, before pointing to one on the far side, which a crew was busy fuelling.

Adams looked up at the moon and stars in the sky. The base’s high-powered floodlights made them more difficult to read but not altogether impossible. ‘It’s just after five,’ he told Lynn, dawn still a long way off on the winter morning. ‘First flight out is at six o’clock, when the non-resident workers are flown back home after the nightshift.’

‘And what does that have to do with us?’ Lynn asked, although she suspected she already knew the answer.

‘We’re going to catch it with them,’ he whispered back.

The plane doors were closed and locked, Adams knew that even from their position across the runway, but they couldn’t afford to wait. Before long, the non-resident workers would be streaming out of headquarters and arriving in minibuses from other parts of the base, all ready for home, and the plane would be surrounded with people.

And so he and Lynn edged as close as they could, waited until all support personnel had left the area, and then ran across the tarmac to the landing gear at a near sprint, careful to keep low and within whatever shadow they could. Then Adams pushed Lynn up the massive tyre of the lead wheel, before pulling himself up behind her, continuing on up into the wheel housing, into the deep, dark bowels of the aircraft. They squeezed up past the tightly packed machinery, now out of sight of anyone outside, until they made it up to the top of the housing.

Clutching the top of the landing gear strut, Adams reached around in the dark until his hand found a lever. Pulling it, a small square access port opened into the aircraft proper, and he crawled through first, his body only just fitting. He thought at first that his shoulders wouldn’t fit but finally managed to collapse them sufficiently to edge through. He pulled Lynn in quickly after him, her lithe body proving a much easier fit.

Adams left the hatch open, the reflected light from the runway beneath providing their only source of illumination. His eyes adjusted quickly, and he saw that they were inside the cargo hold, which was half-filled with metallic containers.

The crates were secured to the floor, and Adams picked out one that nestled close up against the rear bulkhead. He closed the hatch, the darkness immediately enveloping them like a thick blanket, and took Lynn’s hand, leading her to his chosen hiding place behind the crate. They wouldn’t remain hidden if the cargo hold was checked but Adams figured that with attention focused out in the desert, the chances of a search weren’t likely.

Then they waited, and waited, for six o’clock, hoping against hope that the schedule would be adhered to.

At six o’clock the aircraft started taxiing, and within ten more minutes they felt the small Boeing accelerate off down the runway and lift into the air.

Relief flooded them both.

T
HE FLIGHT FROM
Groom Lake to Las Vegas was only a short haul.

Adams held Lynn as the aircraft touched down on what he knew would be the north-west runway of McCarran International Airport, adjacent to the Janet Terminal.

They stayed hidden behind the crate as the Boeing taxied along the runway, gradually slowing as it circled and then came to a halt at its final resting place.

‘Come on,’ Adams said, leaving the confines of their hiding place and heading straight for the wheel housing, Lynn right behind him.