The general took the remote and turned it around in his hands, almost caressing it.
“Be careful, sir,” Captain Henson said.
Gullick reached down and pulled out his pistol. He pushed the barrel into the underside of Henson’s jaw.
“Don’t you ever dare speak to me like that, mister. Do you understand?” His thumb cocked the hammer back, the sound very loud in the clear night air. “Yes, sir,” Henson managed to get out.
Gullick’s voice rose. “I have had to take shit from civilian pukes for thirty years! I’ll be goddamned if I will accept even the slightest disrespect from a man in uniform. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir!”
Quinn froze, stunned at the outburst.
“You fucking people.” Gullick’s voice had dropped to a mutter, and although the gun was still pressing into Henson’s skin, his eyes had become unfocused. “I’ve given my life for you people,” Gullick whispered. “I’ve done all…” The general’s eyes refocused.
He quickly bolstered the gun and turned to the mountainside, behind which the mothership rested. “Show me the charges,” he said in a normal voice.
A voice yelled out shrilly. “They’re here! They’re here!”
Turcotte had his gun out, hammer cocked, as he kicked open the driver’s door of the van and went down into squat, peering around in the dark for a target. The screaming continued and Turcotte slowly relaxed and stood up he recognized the voice. He walked around to the right side and opened the door.
Kelly held Johnny, gripping him tightly around the shoulders. “It’s not real Johnny. It’s not real.”
Simmons was pressed up in the left rear corner, staring wide-eyed straight ahead. “I can see them! I can see them? I’m not going to let them take me again! I won’t go back!”
“It’s Kelly, Johnny! It’s Kelly! I’m here.”
For the first time since they’d picked him up, Johnny showed some awareness of his surroundings. “Kelly.” He blinked, trying to focus on her. “Kelly.”
“It’s okay, Johnny. I came and got you like you wanted. I came and got you.” “Kelly — they’re real. I saw them. They took me. They did things to me.” “It’s okay, Johnny. You’re safe now. You’re safe.”
Johnny turned away and curled into a ball and Kelly held on to him. Turcotte looked at Von Seeckt and Nabinger.
“Get some sleep. We’ll be leaving shortly.” He turned and walked back outside, sliding the door shut behind him.
Turcotte walked out into the darkness. The stars glistened above the mountains that surrounded him on all sides. It would be dawn soon. He could sense it in the slightest change in the sky to the east. Most people would have not been able to tell, but Turcotte had spent many dark nights waiting for the dawn to come.
He thought of the people in the van. Von Seeckt with his demons from the past and fears for the future. Johnny Simmons and the demons that had been forced on him. Nabinger with his questions from the past and his quest for answers. Kelly— Turcotte paused — Kelly had her own ghosts, it seemed.
He turned as the van door opened. Kelly slipped out and walked over. “Johnny’s asleep. Or passed out. I can’t tell which it is.”
“What do you think they did to him?”
“Screwed with his brain,” Kelly said bitterly. “Made him think he got picked up by aliens and taken aboard a spaceship and had all sorts of experiments run on him.”
“Think he’ll get over it?” Turcotte asked.
“Why should he? He did get picked up by aliens,” Kelly said.
“What?”
“Whatever they did to his brain is real. So for him it’s all real. So, no, I don’t think he’ll ever get over it. You never get over reality. You just get on with your life.”
“What reality happened to you?”
Kelly just looked at him.
“You said that you’d tell me, first chance you got,” Turcotte said. He waited.
After a minute Kelly spoke. “I was working for an independent film company. Actually, I was part of an independent film company. I owned a piece. We were doing well. We did documentaries and freelance work. National Geographic in its early TV days had us work a couple of their pieces. It was before all these cable channels — Discovery and the like. Hell, we were before our time. We were on the right path.
“Then I got a letter. I still have the damn thing. Eight years ago. From a captain in the Air Force at Nellis Air Force Base. The letter stated that the Air Force was interested in making a series of documentaries. Some on the space program, some on their work in high-altitude medicine and other things.
“It sounded interesting, so I went to Nellis and met this captain. We talked about the various subjects he had mentioned in the letter, then, almost as an aside, he mentioned that they had some interesting footage in the public affairs office there.
“So I say, ‘Of what?’ And he says, ‘Of a UFO landing at the air base here.’”
“I about choked on my coffee. He said it like you would mention the sun came up this morning. Very calm and almost uninterested. I should have known from that, that it was a setup. But like I said, I was hungry. We were still struggling and this was the biggest thing ever thrown our way.
“Then, of course, he showed me the film. That removed all doubt. It was shot in black and white. He told me it had been taken in 1970. They had picked up a bogey on radar at Nellis. At first they thought it might be a stray civilian aircraft. They scrambled a pair of F-16’s to check it out. The first half of the film they showed me was from the aircraft’s gun cameras. It starts out with blank sky, then you catch a glimpse of something moving fast across the sky. The camera centers in and there’s a saucer-shaped object. It’s hard to tell the size because there’s no reference scale. But I could see the desert and mountains in the background, moving. The disk cut across a lot of terrain. If it had just been against sky I might have questioned it more. The disk looked to be about thirty feet in diameter and silvery. It moved in abrupt jerks back and forth.
“If it was a fake, it was a very good fake — not someone hanging a hubcap out the window of their car and taping it with a video camera as they drove. Believe me, I’ve actually seen a couple of those.” She walked a little farther along the edge of the overlook and Turcotte followed.
“So the camera tracks this saucer and it descends. I can see an airstrip at the base of some mountains come into view. At the time I thought it was Nellis Air Force Base, but now I know it must have been the airstrip at Groom Lake. The saucer goes down, almost to the ground, and the F-16 goes by and that’s it for the gun camera. There’s a splice in the film and then I get it in color from the ground. Shot from the control tower, Prague tells me.”
“Wait a second,” Turcotte interrupted. “Give me that name again.”
“Prague. That was the Air Force captain who I met and who sent me the letter. Why?”
“I tell you when you’re done,” Turcotte said. “Go on.”
“So the saucer comes to a hover over the runway and stays there for a few minutes. I could see emergency vehicles being deployed — fire trucks with their lights on. I could see the reflection of the lights off the skin of the saucer — a very difficult effect to fake. Pretty much impossible to do, given the technology of the time. Then Air Force police vehicles being deployed. Then the saucer starts to go straight up and it just outraces the ability of the camera operator to track it and it’s gone.