Greg had brought four cameras with him and two laptop computers. An optical lens was supported with two infra-red cameras and one ultra-violet. Each was capable of recording hours of high-resolution imagery at high magnifications thanks to the telephoto lenses that Kyle carried, all of which were being mounted upon tripod stands to record super-stable film. The two laptops controlled electrical motors affixed to each tripod, allowing the cameras to both turn smoothly and also to track objects in the sky using dedicated software coded by Kyle.

  With the cameras set up and ready to record, Kyle turned his gaze to the west. In the far-off distance were a string of glistening lights that betrayed the presence of a super-secret U. S. Army facility known as the Dugway Proving Ground. Although most people had heard of places like Area 51 at Groom Lake, what they didn’t realise was that the public fascination with such locations was in fact the perfect cover. Area 51 had not been used for ultra-classified operations for at least two decades, the press attention ensuring that it was simply too well known to be a secure location. Instead, the American military had moved its most sensitive operations to Dugway in the early 90s, a place perhaps even more remote and inaccessible than Groom Lake.

  ‘Now what?’ Greg asked as he started the cameras recording.

  Kyle smiled as he observed the site through a pair of powerful binoculars. ‘We wait.’

  ‘Great,’ Greg mumbled, ‘endless hours on top of a cold mountain looking at nothing but stars and blackness.’

  Kyle turned to one of the laptop computers, and he accessed a small program. The little application ran in the blink of an eye. Upon it, he could see a map of the continental United States, and upon that map were thousands of constantly flickering and moving red spots. Probability graphs and charts recorded information at a tremendous rate while algorithms that he had lovingly crafted hummed in digital symphony. Once again, just as the program consistently had for the entire week, a flashing gold star appeared on the map located directly over where they were standing.

  ‘Oh, ye of little faith,’ he said to Greg. ‘We’ll be waiting for precisely eight minutes, and then it’ll be here.’

  ***

  XII

  Even as Kyle spoke, so he saw headlights appear on the distant base. It looked as though a small convoy of trucks had begun moving parallel to the runway. Although he could not see it in the darkness, Kyle knew that out there was an entire airbase and massive bombing ranges.

  ‘Look,’ he said triumphantly. ‘They’re on the move.’

  Greg could see the convoy from where he stood, but he seemed unimpressed.

  ‘It’s just some trucks and stuff, what’s the big deal?’

  ‘The big deal,’ Kyle replied, ‘is not the fact that they’re on the move, but why. It’s half past two in the morning and they’re out on manoeuvres? They only get out of bed at this time in the morning for a damned good reason, trust me.’

  The convoy moved across the base, apparently driving down the main runway toward the south eastern corner of the airfield. Kyle could see that they were aiming for the general direction of where he and Greg were standing, but he knew that he had nothing to fear: as long as they stayed low and out of sight of infra-red sensors, they would remain concealed. His excitement was driven not by the trucks but by what he might see in the next couple of minutes.

  ‘Any time now,’ he said. ‘Check the cameras are all running.’

  ‘They’re all running,’ Greg said without glancing at any of them.

  ‘Check them again,’ Kyle snapped. ‘I didn’t come all the way out here for you to leave a lens cap on!’

  Greg grumbled again but he strolled to the cameras one by one and made sure that they were operating normally.

  ‘There, they’re working fine. Can I go now?’

  Kyle shook his head, his eyes fixed upon the skies above them. ‘You go now, you’ll miss a once in a lifetime event.’

  ‘Sure,’ Greg nodded and patted Kyle’s back. ‘You have a great night out here, and make sure you don’t leave any of these cameras behind. They cost thousands and my ass is on the line if you…’

  ‘There it is.’

  Greg paused and looked up into the night sky. The vast blackness was sprinkled with dozens of pin-prick stars glistening in the heavens, but he could see nothing out of the ordinary. He chuckled.

  ‘There’s nothing there, Kyle.’

  Kyle shook his head.

  ‘Not up there,’ he said, and pointed at one of the laptop screens. ‘There.’

  Greg looked at the screen and Kyle felt his friend tense up.

  The laptop screen was displaying the view through one of the infra-red cameras that they had set up. The camera was overlooking the airbase, tilted upward slightly to see a bit more sky than ground. The airbase glowed with vivid reds and oranges against the cold blue and black of the surrounding deserts, and there, hovering above it, was an angular shape that was showing clearly on the IR camera despite being utterly invisible in the night sky.

  ‘Jesus!’ Greg uttered, his throat suddenly hoarse.

  ‘Nope,’ Kyle replied as he moved almost reverentially toward the laptop, trying to look both at it and the night sky before them. ‘Not quite, anyway.’

  Kyle had seen this before several times now and he knew precisely what to do. The craft, whatever the hell they were, generated large electro-magnetic fields, which appeared to be something to do with their propulsion. As far as he could tell, there was no engine as such at all aboard these craft, no exhaust emissions like a normal aircraft. These objects typically radiated energy at frequencies on the spectrum that were beyond human senses, only occasionally becoming visible in certain light and temperature conditions. Kyle was convinced that these things were whizzing about over the heads of humanity all of the time, and only occasionally did people get lucky enough to catch a glimpse of them. Kyle had made it his mission to remove luck from the equation, and had succeeded in spectacular style.

  ‘How have you done this?’ Greg asked in amazement, his eyes fixed to the object on the screen.

  ‘Make sure we’re running at the highest resolution and frame rates,’ Kyle snapped. ‘This one’s about to light up.’

  ‘It’s what?’ Greg uttered. ‘How do you know th…’

  Greg’s sentence was abruptly cut off as from out of the darkness across the wilderness a brilliant, shimmering orange and yellow orb of incandescent light flared into life. Kyle cursed as he jerked his head away from the light, keen to preserve some level of night vision. The orb bathed the desert in light a few miles from where they stood on the hills.

  ‘Resolution!’ he snapped to Greg in a harsh whisper. ‘Frame rates!’

  Greg performed the necessary tasks, staring in wonderment across the night sky as the object shimmered. To Kyle it looked as though it were made from a liquid sunset, the colours as vivid as those seen every night across the deserts of Utah when distant storms kicked up dust and debris that tinted the evening sky with shimmering hues of colour. Kyle slipped on a pair of sunglasses, to help him see the object that he knew was veiled by the brilliant lights.

  He did not know why they chose to conceal themselves so carefully and then promptly light up the desert for miles around. It was as though they liked trying to sneak up on people and then were disappointed that they hadn’t been noticed. The only solution he had ever come up with was that they were doing something important, and had to de-cloak in the manner of a Star Trek Klingon warship in order do whatever mysterious functions they came here for. One thing that Kyle was certain of was that they did this most often when close to military and nuclear facilities, and that was one reason why he knew in advance where they would appear.

  ‘What is it?’ Greg whispered.

  Despite the brilliant light the desert was utterly silent, the air still. Kyle shook his head as he looked at the bizarre shape concealed behind the light.

  ‘I don’t know, but it sure as hell isn’t one of ours.’

  Kyle could see the triangular form of the craft, which had one light on each corner that blazed white and another larger light beneath the centre that cast an orange light, the powerful flare that was illuminating the desert. Kyle could see that the craft was absolutely a solid object, and that its lower hull faintly reflected the glow of the lights as though made of metal. Everything about the object screamed that it was man-made, but only one thing assured Kyle that it was not: the triangular craft was the size of half a football field and was hovering in absolute silence.

  ‘The air’s charged,’ Greg said, finally coming to his senses. ‘You can feel it.’

  As soon as he said it, Kyle realised that his friend was right. There was a faint electrical charge around them, teasing fine hairs on their necks.

  ‘Stay focussed on the object, it might move at any time.’

  Greg nodded, the motors in the tripods whirring softly as they tracked the object. Slowly, Kyle reached into his pocket and produced a theodolite and a laser range-finder. The two objects were essential in measuring angles and distances respectively and would allow him to assess the precise size of the craft. The more data that he could gather, the more he would be able to say to the public when the time came, and it was data after all that had got him this far.

  Kyle used the theolodite and measured the angles, recording them in the device with the press of a button, and then he used the range-finder. He fired a single beam directly at the object and got an instant reading of just over eight kilometres.

  ‘Wow,’ Greg whispered as the data fed automatically into the cameras to sharpen their focus on the central object within the lights. ‘It’s massive!’

  Kyle was about to reply when he saw a thin red beam of light extend slowly from within the craft toward the ground below. His skin tingled as he witnessed the incredible sight of a beam of light advancing at a controlled velocity, not zipping into existence like the light of a laser beam. The beam of light touched the ground and moved slowly back and forth as though searching for something. Almost at the same time, Kyle removed his sunglasses and saw thin red beams sweeping the sky around the object on the IR monitor, coming from the rapidly advancing column of vehicles.

  ‘They’re using night-vision goggles,’ he identified the beams. ‘The infra-red signals can be seen on our cameras.’

  ‘They’re coming this way.’

  ‘Don’t worry, they’re not going to be interested in us.’

  Suddenly, the object in the sky vanished as rapidly as it had appeared. The desert was plunged into a deep blackness as the convoy of lights came to a halt several kilometres out into the deserts.

  ‘Unlucky boys,’ Kyle grinned. ‘Close, but not as close as me.’

  Kyle was about to start packing up the cameras when he saw the red beams of the soldiers down in the desert suddenly snap around and point straight at them. Kyle froze in motion, staring at the laptop screen as Greg grabbed one of the cameras and held it up to him.

  ‘I don’t believe this! This is going to change the world! We need to get this out to as many people as we can!’

  ‘Greg, get down,’ Kyle snapped.

  ‘What?’

  Kyle opened his mouth to repeat his command when he heard what sounded like someone walking on an eggshell. Greg’s head snapped to one side and he dropped vertically, his legs collapsing beneath him. Kyle glimpsed a faint splatter of dark blood spill onto the dusty ground at Greg’s feet, and only then did he hear the report of a sniper’s rifle.

  ***

  XIII

  Kyle had never really thought about what he would do if someone was shooting at him. As a teenager he’d had fantasies of tackling some deranged shooter at his high school, valiantly disarming him and winning the affection of the hot girls and the admiration and respect of the jocks.

  Now, his guts convulsed inside him as he ducked down, his legs turning to jelly beneath him. Through gaps in the rocks he could see the approaching convoy of vehicles now tearing across the desert toward the hillside on which he crouched and he knew that they had been spotted. He stared wide-eyed at Greg, who was lying in silence with blood glistening in his hair where the sniper’s bullet had taken off the side of his skull and scattered it across the hill top.

  ‘Jesus,’ he uttered, not in anger but in nauseating fear.

  He could hear the car engines approaching and he knew that he had to act. Greg had been standing on the edge of the hillside and probably in plain view of the soldiers with their night-vision goggles. Even at two or three miles, his heat signature would have stood out vividly against the cold black rocks and night sky.

  Kyle scrambled across to the cameras and took them down, yanking their hard-drive memories from them and stuffing them into his pockets. He turned and grabbed a flash-RAM drive from his pocket before using it to download the film and data they had captured from each laptop, careful to leave the computers in place. He could not help but look again at Greg, his lifeless face illuminated by the glow from the screens, one eye wide open and staring at the desert, the other missing entirely along with his skull and half of his cheek.

  Kyle rolled alongside his friend, trying not to look at his ruined face or think about the horror of what had just occurred. Quickly, he rummaged in Greg’s pockets and pulled out his cell phone and his wallet, stuffing them into his own pockets before he rolled away again. He could hear the sound of the approaching convoy now, growling engines echoing through the cold night air as he got to his feet and ran in a low crouch off the hillside toward the track that led back down to the main roads.

  He knew that he could not hope to outrun the troops that would be deployed onto the hillside in search of him. They had just shot an unarmed civilian at a range of over a mile and he knew that they would not hesitate to kill him if they found him. The cover-up would be underway the moment they discovered Greg’s body, and Kyle knew that he had only one chance to escape; make them think that there was only one person up on the hillside.

  Kyle scrambled down the slope, his eyes adjusting to the darkness as he stumbled around boulders and rocks, following the trail back down to the desert floor. He could see the distant lights of Vernon to the east, seeming so close and yet so terribly far. He would be easy prey for that sniper once the troops crested the ridgeline, their night vision goggles marking him out easily against the cold desert darkness.

  Kyle stumbled to the bottom of the hill, his breathing ragged as he staggered to the right and hunted around the mountainside until he found what he was looking for. Greg’s battered old Ford pick-up was parked where they had left it at the base of the hills. Kyle, tears streaming down his face and his heart battering at the walls of his chest, staggered across to it and yanked open the driver’s door. He climbed in and started the engine in one smooth motion, but he kept the lights off as he stamped down on the accelerator and drove away from the hills.

  The troops would be supremely fit, but they would take time to crest the hill. If he could only make the main road before they did so, he could turn either north or south and appear to be just an ordinary vehicle making its way along the freeway. Kyle could only guess at how quickly those soldiers would reach their camera site: maybe four minutes from reaching the foot of the hills? The troops would be Special Forces or something most probably, able to ascend even steep terrain at a ridiculous speed. Three minutes?

  He realised that he might be hit by a sniper even as he drove, and the thought of a high-velocity round ploughing through his back and out of his chest made him think of Greg’s blood splattered remains again and he promptly vomited into the foot well. The truck careered left and right on the dusty trail but he managed to keep the vehicle from running off the road.

  He saw the main road appear ahead of him, barely visible, and he bounced up off the track and onto the asphalt. Kyle yanked the wheel to the left and straightened out, then turned his headlights on and drove slowly north. He forced himself not to accelerate, and knew that the only way for him to survive now was to appear completely innocuous.

  The tyres whispered on the asphalt and he wondered whether he would see the brilliant red speck of a sniper’s scope flickering on his window. He forced himself not to look over his shoulder at the mountains, and as he drove he heard a terrific noise and flinched as over his head thundered a helicopter. The chopper was jet black and carried no navigation lights as it roared overhead and flew into the night, heading into the darkness toward the mountains.

  Kyle kept on driving, focussing ahead on the twinkling lights of Vernon and hoping, praying, that he could make it there and skip town before the military realised that he had ever been on that hillside.

  *

  The troops made it onto the crest of the ridge within a few minutes of the sniper’s shot being fired. They had little doubt that the individual they had seen on the hills to the east of the base had been a civilian that had somehow managed to sneak through the perimeter. What they could not believe was the lousy timing of their appearance.

  Lieutenant Rico Savage surveyed the hilltop as he joined his men, who had cleared the area and confirmed one dead at the scene. Savage was a robustly built man who had served in the Green Berets before being posted to security at Dugway. Stern, wide-jawed and unforgiving, he was used to handling breaches like this but not used to seeing civilians shot dead right in front of him on U.S. soil.

 

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