It had not been easy for Vigor and his team to identify the American as being the youth behind the photographs, but careful thinking and planning had cemented in Vigor’s mind that the person they sought was indeed an American. The photographs supplied to the American agencies had contained landmarks in some images that his team were able to pin down to certain locations. The majority of those locations were in America, and oddly when marked on a map they traced a near perfect line across the 37th Parallel, right through the centre of the United States. Only the image taken in Scotland stood out.

  Vigor’s men had followed his orders and undertaken a painstaking search through flight manifests around the time of the Scotland event, seeking a way of matching one or more travellers to the movements of another in the United States. After three days of intensive work, they had uncovered a name: Kyle Trent. The American had stayed in what was called a “bed and breakfast” in Bonnybridge for two nights, having flown in from Las Vegas. He then flew back to Vegas the morning after the event.

  Further detective work revealed Trent’s presence on various conspiracy theorist forums, cementing in Vigor’s mind that Trent was the mastermind behind the UFO photographs. He and his team had travelled from Scotland to Vegas and arrived only days previously, intent on tracking Trent down. It was during that time they had intercepted transmissions suggesting that Trent intended to strike again, this time at the ultra secretive Dugway Proving Ground. This time things had gone wrong and he was being hunted by units within the Special Operations Group, his own countrymen now his greatest foes.

  ‘Do we know who the people helping him are?’ Vigor asked.

  ‘No,’ Ivor admitted. ‘The footage isn’t clear enough to obtain an identification. They could be family friends perhaps, other conspiracy theory allies?’

  Vigor shook his head.

  ‘They’re too courageous for that, and they must have scoped out the mall before finding Trent to be able to use the roof as an escape route. That requires planning and forethought. They weren’t here by accident.’

  ‘They would have had to have known that Kyle was a fugitive,’ the agent pointed out. ‘That would mean they’re employed by a government agency of some kind or another.’

  Vigor nodded. That the various intelligence agencies of the United States had failed to work together on numerous occasions in the past was common knowledge, a fact that Russia had often used to its advantage when infiltrating them. Now, it was quite possible that one agency was warring with another to keep Kyle Trent and his abilities to themselves and were probably unaware that Russia was also on the scene with the same aim in mind.

  ‘We need to remain in the shadows for now, and so does Kyle Trent,’ he said, airing his thoughts out loud. ‘They must have gone somewhere and they must have done so very quickly. There is little point in following the vehicle: if they’re smart they will have dumped it by now and moved on. They know their pursuers will be able to identify and track the vehicle easily.’

  ‘Then how do we find them?’ asked his companion.

  Vigor thought for a moment.

  ‘Trace the registration of the vehicle they were seen in. It will most likely have been hired for cash under assumed names, but it might lead us to find out who these saviours of young Kyle Trent are. We’re following them now, not Kyle. They will have their own agenda and if we can track them down, we’ll find Kyle. I want to know everything about them; where they’ve been since they arrived, their histories, everything. And we need to pay a visit to the Army officer who has been keeping tabs on the events since Scotland. I want to send him a message that he won’t forget.’

  The agents around him got to work as Vigor climbed back into the cool of the vehicle and shut the door. He checked his watch: barely after noon. He had people he could contact in almost all of the American states. Getting to the right people would not be a problem. He had already turned Kyle against his own countrymen. Now he needed to disrupt the chain of command and ensure that when the time came, his men would be able to grab Kyle Trent and his two new friends and dispose of anyone who got in their way.

  *

  Rico Savage stood beside a pool vehicle and listened to his agents.

  ‘They made it out onto the roof, and from there off the side. Warner and the woman must have already scoped the place out for alternative exits – they were ready for us.’

  Savage nodded. Within minutes, his carefully planned capture of Kyle Trent had gone to hell and now Trent, Warner and Lopez were all in the wind. Worse, Trent was now probably more fearful for his life than ever. Warner and Lopez had successfully spirited him away from agents working for Dugway, the kind of people that Trent would see as his natural enemy after what had happened to his friend.

  ‘Scan every single traffic camera and find out what happened to them,’ he ordered.

  ‘We’re already on it, and a BOLO for a silver Tahoe is already with local law enforcement. They won’t get far if they stay on the roads.’

  ‘They won’t stay on the roads,’ Rico countered. ‘They’ll lose the vehicle as soon as they can and seek another way out of the city. Warner and Lopez have to be working for someone else. Get in touch with the Director of Operations at Dugway and have him call the CIA, DIA, FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intellligence, every damned agency you can think of and find out whether these two are working for them and why.’

  ‘Yes sir!’

  His men scattered to perform their work. Rico Savage cursed silently to himself, and was about to head back into the mall when he noticed a pair of vehicles parked across the lot. Both were non-descript SUVs, both manned by men who seemed to be watching Rico’s men from a distance.

  The vehicles were too far away for Rico to see the plates, but they didn’t look like government plates and there was nothing to suggest that the occupants of the vehicles were anything other than innocent civilians other than the tingle in Rico’s gut that said there was something amiss.

  He watched the occupants for a moment longer, staring at them directly, and both men in both vehicles averted their gazes, started their engines and drove away slowly through the parking lot.

  Savage watched them go for a long time before he finally turned away and headed into the mall, pursued by the sense that he was not alone in his search for Kyle Trent.

  ***

  XXIV

  ‘You’ve got film of the Dugway event?’ Ethan asked in amazement.

  ‘I managed to download the footage that Greg and I shot before I ran away from the hills. Greg died up there helping me, and I was damned if I was going to let them kill him for nothing.’

  Lopez glanced at Ethan with a raised eyebrow, apparently impressed by Trent’s courage. The jet was slipping through the high altitude atmosphere without even the slightest hint of turbulence, Kyle Trent eating ravenously from the generously stocked mini-galley.

  Ethan watched as Garrett produced a laptop computer and switched it on. Within moments, Kyle had the device on a fold-out table between them with the Flash RAM plugged in. His fingers fluttered across the keyboard with a sound like falling rain as he spoke around mouthfuls of meatballs and potato chips.

  ‘The data compiled by my software showed trends in UFO sightings like you wouldn’t believe,’ he said. ‘You could actually watch them appearing and fading away again, which falls right in with what we observe in the historical record, that UFO sightings come in waves, which researchers refer to as “flaps”.’

  He turned the laptop screen toward them, and Ethan saw a map of the world before him. Upon the map were flashing red spots, which he assumed represented individual UFO sightings. At once he could see them flickering into and out of existence, and he could see clear patterns emerging from the chaos. Like bands of weather marching across the skies, they swept from west to east.

  ‘There are patterns,’ Kyle said, almost in awe. ‘UFO sightings are not random.’

  The waves swept across the globe, rippling lines of red spots drifting like clouds across the United States, Russia, Europe, Malaysia and even Africa, but at once he could see differences.

  ‘There are less sightings in Africa.’

  ‘Ah, but are there?’ Kyle replied. ‘There are less people connected to the Internet in Africa, and hardly any connections to MUFON. That limits the data that comes out of remote regions, and also those with closed borders such as North Korea. But where people live with the benefit of freedom of speech and a free press, we get a lot of reports.’

  ‘Maybe the waves are caused by people getting on the bandwagon after a genuine sighting, or a media report,’ Lopez suggested, ‘and suddenly everyone’s seeing UFOs in their backyard.’

  ‘A very astute observation,’ Kyle said, smiling at her in open admiration now, ‘but I wrote in a sub-code that eliminated hearsay reports in the wake of multiple or radar-confirmed sightings that were featured on the news. I basically looked at the natural frequency of copy-cat reports of misidentified aerial objects and filtered out anything that had no corroborating evidence. It isn’t perfect, but it helps to reduce the chances of so-called mass hallucinations or copy-cat reports. Even then, the wave signals remained strong. Once I had the data in place, I then ran it through PredPol to see if the program could make predictions on where and when further waves would take place.’

  Lopez, to Ethan’s surprise, smiled back at Kyle. ‘That’s genius.’

  Kyle stared back at her as though she’d just offered to take off her clothes for him. Then Ethan realised why. Trent was somewhat like Joseph Hellerman, the courageous IT expert whom they had worked with for several years, before he had died at the hands of Russian mercenaries in Indonesia in one of their last DIA sponsored expeditions. Lopez had been fond of Hellerman in a motherly sort of way, and his passing had hit her hard.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Trent chortled in delight, mesmerised by Lopez but also by his own handiwork. ‘But look at this data first, just check out where the sightings in the USA most often take place.

  Ethan looked at the screen and was shocked by what he saw. The country was split almost perfectly in half, with relatively few sightings on the east coast rising to large numbers of sightings on the west coast.

  ‘This was the result of collating almost forty thousand sightings,’ Kyle explained. ‘While there are undoubtedly many more that are never reported that could sway this result, it does seem likely that the vast majority of UFO sightings are occurring in the western United States.’

  ‘Why should that be?’ Garrett asked. ‘Isn’t the east coast more densely populated?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Kyle said, ‘mainly due to the large and sparsely populated desert regions like Nevada and Utah in the west of the country. You’d think that with more people in the east of the country there would be more sightings and more reports as there are more eyes to do the looking, but there aren’t and that sort of reinforces the fact that people seem to see more UFOs in the west.’

  ‘Sort of?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘You can’t take even data like this at face value,’ Kyle said. ‘It took me a bit of thinking, but I realised that one explanation for the extra sightings was the fact that the climate in the western United States is hotter than that in the east, and as a result there are generally more clear sky days in the west. It’s much harder to see a UFO if there’s ten thousand feet of cloud between you and the craft. Not only that, but per capita the most sightings came from California and Arizona, both of which are close to seismic fault lines, part of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Strange lights in the sky are often attributed to the release of energy in seismic events in these sorts of areas. The same thing happens in Scotland, where an ancient fault line runs through the country and produces the most UFO reports in the United Kingdom. So, to some extent those factors might explain the discrepancy.’

  ‘But not entirely,’ Ethan guessed.

  ‘It’s still too one sided. So I analised a little deeper and uncovered another trait in the sightings, one that was much more sinister. The data revealed that even in the east of the country, people were much more likely to see UFOs if they lived within sight of a nuclear powerplant or missile silo.’

  Ethan raised his eyebrows. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Definitely,’ Trent confirmed. ‘These things routinely appear over and close to military establishments and nuclear facilities. In fact, it’s happened so many times that military personnel are forbidden to discuss it. Did you know that in March 1967, UFOs twice deactivated the nuclear ICBM missile silos at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana?’

  When Garrett, Lopez and Ethan all shook their heads, Kyle tutted.

  ‘Why is it that people just don’t hear about these things? The entire base was in meltdown. A UFO appeared overhead in a clear sky and moments later every system malfunctioned. Malmstrom was part of Strategic Air Command and the silo was live, meaning that in the event of a Russian nuclear strike they would fire in retaliation. There probably wasn’t a more secure, classified and sensitive site in the entire United States military arsenal at that time, and yet a single UFO wanders into the middle of it and shuts down every Minuteman Missile’s launch and guidance systems for an entire day. It was decades before retiring officers and other staff went public with what happened, and their reports were verified by documents from other witnesses both inside and outside the base. A later sighting, this time of another UFO hovering over another part of the base, was reported in to the officer manning the Command Post, who replied that such incidents “were no longer investigated”, a standard-issue response of denial. In short, nobody wanted anything to do with the sightings. Our own most sensitive military bases and defence systems, and the official response is “it ain’t happenin’, don’t tell us about it”.’

  Ethan looked at the laptop. ‘You said you ran this data through PredPol.’

  ‘Yup,’ Trent agreed. ‘So, the only way I could figure out if this data was valid was to run it through PredPol and see what popped. Then, I could head out to whatever nuclear facility was most likely to have a sighting and wait it out. I only have a menial job and no bills other than food and drink, so I figured I could spend a few months running with this and see what I could uncover. It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  ‘It was a good idea,’ Lopez assured him, ‘right up to the point where you started sending pictures to the CIA. What did you do next?’

  ‘I ran the data through PredPol, but I introduced another routine within it that I called the Hydra.’

  ‘The what?’ Garrett asked.

  ‘The Hydra,’ Kyle replied, ‘named after the Greek sea monster that could regrow lost heads. It could only be killed by striking at its heart, and so I decided to see if I could use the common trait of nuclear facilities with UFO sightings that would allow me to get up close and personal with them. Basically, I wanted to use PredPol to analyse the data and predict when and where a UFO would appear within the restrictions of doing so within ten miles of sensitive military sites within the USA. To be honest I didn’t think I’d get any hits as the data was going to be so confined, but I was wrong. I got hits all over the place from Texas to California.’

  Ethan saw little red specks appearing across the American west.

  ‘Each of these potential sightings is assigned a probability,’ Kyle explained. The closer to the present that you run the data, the more accurate the prediction is likely to be. The best predictions are those made for within six hours, and those made at night. The further out you go into the future, the more fluid and less accurate the predictions get.’

  Kyle switched to another screen, and there Ethan saw the image of a UFO hovering in the darkness, captured in strange hues of light that might have been ultra violet.

  ‘This was what we recorded at Dugway, after the Hydra predicted a sighting with a high probability of occurrence.’

  Ethan could see clearly the UFO, which was emanating a strange glow that seemed to obscure some of the details of the craft. Kyle set the screen to show imagery from several of the cameras at once, and on the Infra Red image they could all see that the object was solid and radiating heat. What they could not see was any evidence of propulsion at all.

  ‘This is sensational,’ Garrett murmured. ‘This footage will set the world on fire if it ever gets out.’

  ‘I agree,’ Kyle said, ‘that’s why I sent the images to the government agencies, to show them that I was serious. But it turned out that the images were not the biggest discovery the Hydra helped me make.’

  ***

  XXV

  ‘Seriously?’ Lopez asked. ‘You’ve got something bigger up your sleeve?’

  Kyle nodded. ‘I’ll get to that. Watch the video.’

  Ethan leaned back in his seat as he watched the footage of the UFO hovering over the deserts of Dugway, and then he saw the trail of headlights rushing out towards it from the base in the distance. It was obvious that the base had scrambled troops out toward the UFO, the vehicle convoy heading straight toward it.

  Then, quite suddenly, it blinked out and vanished. On the IR camera, Ethan saw a wispy ring of smoke drift away on the desert wind and cool until it faded from sight, the only sign that the object had ever been there at all.

  ‘Man, did you see that?’ Lopez gasped. ‘It didn’t even go straight up or anything, it just plain vanished.’

  ‘I don’t get it either,’ Kyle agreed. ‘How that’s even possible I can’t imagine. Well, I can imagine but I can’t quite get my head around it. This thing was there in plain sight on our cameras, and then it was gone. I used a laser range-finder on it to get a distance, and from field-of-view calculations I’m confident that this thing was half as long as a football field. It must have weighed hundreds of tons and yet it just hung there for several minutes making not a sound.’

 

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