Mounted above the cage was a crude sign: THIS MINE HAS OPERATED FOR 203 ACCIDENT-FREE DAYS. Not anymore.
Smoke billowed up the shaft like pollution from a factory’s chimney, so thick that their lanterns were reduced to pinpricks. Smudge built up on their full-face oxygen masks and simply smeared when they tried to clean them. Fear caused Mercer’s breathing to come in sharp gulps.
The elevator dropped — hurtling into the unknown — past ten levels and deeper into the smoke. As it approached eleven the heat was brutal, radiating from the rock like an oven. But none of the men were willing to stop. Not until they knew what had happened to the twenty-six unaccounted miners caught up in the conflagration.
The scene when the cage doors opened was worse than the most gruesome image of Hades. The walls, ceiling and floor smoldered with the residual energy of the fire’s overflash. Anything combustible was a searing pocket of flame — men mostly, horrible twisted shapes of char. Almost worse was that some of them were still alive. The rescuers used portable fire extinguishers to shoot out jets of foam to smother the flames. As the sound of the fires waned, the pitiable cries of the dying grew.
The first explosion had exhausted most of the mine’s supply of air, but even with the industrial fans on the surface shut down, it was drawing in more like a flue. The blaze would reignite the swirling eddies of coal dust as soon as enough oxygen had been drawn down. Mercer understood that he and his team had minutes. They dragged the wounded into the skip hoist. Two of the rescue workers wanted to stay down and look for others, but Mercer wouldn’t let them. The mine was too hot. The risks they were taking already bordered on suicidal.
The second explosion, as violent as the first, rocked the hoist when they were fifty feet from the surface. Without the protection of their retardant suits, the overpressure wave would have scalded them to death. They used their bodies as human shields to protect their fallen comrades until the hoist reached the top. Scrambling amid a hellish torrent of smoke, they carried the seven men they’d saved clear of the heat. A triage station had already been established. Topside workers carried the wounded to the building as Mercer and his men stripped out of their scorched suits. By the time Mercer staggered into the first-aid station, only one of the men was still alive, and even he didn’t survive long enough to make it to the nearest hospital. The mine continued to burn for twelve days. After the bodies were recovered, level eleven had never reopened.
Of all the mine rescues Mercer had been involved with, that one struck the deepest in his mind. Not because it was the first, but because it was the only one where he hadn’t saved at least one miner who survived long enough to be found.
Mercer shook his head as if to dislodge the images. His memory was so full of such horrors that he tried not to revisit them. He blamed his uncharacteristic dark mood on the fact that this whole situation had him on edge. The unknown was perhaps his most feared adversary. As soon as he knew what was happening, the mood would pass.
A little over four hours later, the engine’s steady drone changed in pitch. They were beginning their descent. Guessing the aircraft cruised at five hundred knots, Mercer estimated they’d covered about twenty-four hundred miles. But not knowing their direction could put them anywhere in a circle large enough to touch on South America, the Azore Islands, the tip of Greenland and as far west as…
It couldn’t be.
Maybe it could. There was one easy way to find out. Sykes wasn’t exactly asleep, but he hadn’t turned the page of the book he was reading for the past fifteen minutes. Before his escort became aware the plane had left her cruising altitude, Mercer inched open his window shade. The darkness outside the aircraft was absolute. They could be over the Atlantic as far as he knew, but he doubted that very much.
The bright moon played against the underside of the clouds above the Gulfstream, and when Mercer pressed a hand to the Plexiglas to cut the glare from the cabin lights, he caught the dark reflection of mountains running off to the horizon.
The plane made a gentle turn and a riot of light erupted from the ground. It was a garish display, an unworldly sight like no place on earth. It was Las Vegas.
And Mercer knew of only one place near Vegas that was secret enough to warrant the level of security he’d endured. It was a remote section of desert euphemistically called Dreamland, but known more widely by its designation on an old Department of Energy map.
Area 51.
AREA 51, NEVADA
Knowing his destination only deepened the mystery surrounding Mercer’s clandestine trip.
What little he knew about Area 51 came from cable television. The secluded facility, along with Nellis Air Force Base and the Yucca Flats Atomic Test Range, encompassed a territory larger than Switzerland and had first been used for flight testing the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s. Since then most of America’s premier aircraft had gone through flight trials at Groom Lake, the massive dry lake bed on which Area 51 was built. The SR-71, the F-117 Stealth, the B-2 Spirit bomber and the F-22 Raptor had all first taken flight here. Rumors persisted that they were currently developing a hypersonic spy plane to replace the Blackbird, called Aurora, and that it was stationed at Dreamland. While the military continued to deny the existence of the base, these were the most acknowledged facts about Area 51.
Mostly, however, the legend of Area 51 grew from the myth that a flying saucer, which reportedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, had been transported to this isolated desert facility for study. Conspiracy theorists took the government’s denial as proof it really had happened. They strung together reports of strange lights, the testimony of charlatans and crackpots, and their own paranoia into a fantastic story of reverse engineering on the ships and bizarre medical experiments on the crew.
Mercer didn’t believe a word of it. Area 51 was simply the place where the military developed our next-generation aircraft in secret. Disregarding the absurdity that an advanced civilization was clumsy enough to crash on earth, the idea that the military could keep such a secret for half a century defied belief.
The one part of the story he did believe, however, was that the security forces at Area 51 were authorized to use deadly force. He had no idea if this directive had ever been needed, but he’d heard of cases where backpackers and aircraft watchers were escorted from the region by hard-looking well-armed men they’d derisively dubbed Cammo Dudes.
The window shade snapped closed like a guillotine. When Mercer looked up, Captain Sykes’s eyes held equal measures of displeasure and resignation. “You shouldn’t have done that, Doc.”
Before Sykes could say anything further, the copilot emerged from the cockpit. “Captain, a word.”
Sykes joined him at the front of the cabin and listened for several seconds. He nodded once then returned to his seat. The copilot closed the cockpit door behind himself.
Before sitting, Sykes reached into an overhead storage bin. He retrieved a helmet and tossed it onto Mercer’s lap. It resembled a welder’s helmet, but the face shield was completely opaque. With it on Mercer wouldn’t be able to see a thing. “You’re going to have to put that on when we land,” Sykes said.
“Captain, I know where we are. Is this really necessary?”
“If you pretend you don’t know where we’re landing, I don’t have to pretend to fill out a ton of useless reports. Call it a favor. Seems we’ve hit a bit of head-wind on our way here. Usually we’d land and you’d be transferred to a blacked-out van. But we’ve missed our schedule, and in about ten minutes a Russian spy satellite will be passing overhead. We’re going to be landing normally, but we’ll taxi straight into one of the hangars.” Sykes’s voice took on an earnest tone. “Security at this installation is the tightest in the world, Doc. Standing orders are to shoot first and don’t worry about the questions afterward. You reading me?”