“Brown didn’t seem to think so. Maybe I actually know what I’m doing.”
It was like a slap in his face. Davis flinched, and glared back at Eric. “Well, you did impress the right person. He made that clear to me, and my orders are to keep him happy.”
Orders from where? thought Eric, “I can have a briefing ready for you by the end of the day. All I want to do is a run up to full power, and then pull back. No maneuvers, no performance evaluation, nothing like that.”
“Keep it short. I’ll consider it. Are you done, now? Can we do what I just brought you here for? I thought it was what you wanted so badly.”
“The port, you mean. Yes! Right now, if you have the time.”
“I’m making the time. Only a handful of us are allowed in that bay. The rest are foreign personnel.”
“Foreigners in a top-secret U.S. military base? That has to be a first.”
“It isn’t,” said Davis. “There are a lot of perks for bringing over valuable technology, and a lot of trust. We get the technology. We don’t ask how they bring it over, and they don’t tell us. You’ll have to see this thing to understand what I mean.”
“When?”
Davis stood up. “Follow me.”
They left the office. Davis ordered Sergeant Nutt to return to Sparrow’s bay. At the elevator, he turned to Eric and softly said, “Where we’re going is near Sparrow’s location, but we’re taking another route. I’ll show you the connecting passage on the way back.”
They took the elevator down to the reception platform at tunnel level. Two guards stood by a jeep. Davis led Eric to the jeep, saluted, and got in the driver’s seat. The vehicle jerked as Eric sat down, backed up, turned into the tunnel and sped for a hundred yards to a turnout on the left. They parked there, opened a metal door in red rock. Hot air rushed out at them.
They were in a machine shop, a hallway separated from the shop area by a wall of transparent polymer. Several men were in the shop, watching work turning on mills and lathes. Beyond them was a wall flickering with the reflected light of an arc welder.
At the end of the hallway were three doors, all with cardkey locks, otherwise unmarked. Davis chose the center door, ran his card through the slot of the lock, and opened it. A short hallway led them to a guard in a plas-steel-enclosed booth. Another guard, armed with an M-16, stepped into the booth behind him. Both men regarded Davis and Eric somberly until Davis had swiped his cardkey and punched in a sequence of seven numbers. There was a loud click, and a door adjacent to the booth opened up.
They stepped into a room the size of a large closet. Another door was across from them, a red light blinking on a panel there. Davis closed the door behind them, turned to Eric. “Just for the record, if I’d changed one of the numbers I punched in back there, you would now be dead or dying.”
Eric smiled back at him. “Nice of you not to do that,” he said.
They waited a few seconds, and the light on the panel opposite them turned green. Davis opened the door, stepped aside for Eric to enter ahead of him.
Heads turned when he entered. Four men sat at a console looking out through glass at banks of lights hanging from a high, rock ceiling. The men were all young, with hard, chiseled features. Two turned away after only a glance, but one studied Eric for a moment with startling, blue eyes.
Eric and Davis stood behind the men and looked out on a bay half the size of the one housing Sparrow, but full of activity as they watched. Overhead cranes moved freight boxes the size of Humvees to flatcars on tracks. Men walked back and forth with smaller cargo pushed on hydraulic lifters, a large stack of boxes and crates awaiting their attention along the rock wall of the bay.
“Another shipment just came in. It’ll be a while. Want some coffee?”
“Sure,” said Eric.
“How about you guys?” asked Davis, and tapped the shoulder of one of the men sitting at the console.
“No thank you, sir,” said the man. “We must prepare here.”
Not Russian, but Slavic, thought Eric.
Davis brought Eric a foam cup of black coffee, and pointed out towards the bay. “We’re the only two Americans in here, now. We’re not allowed down on the bay floor, but you can see everything from here. Most of the people you see will be leaving soon. The portal itself is that entire wall on the other side of the floor.”
Eric looked, but saw only a rough rock wall, floor to ceiling. “Pretty well disguised,” he said. Out of the corner of his eye he saw one man at the console studying him, but the man looked away when Eric turned around.
“There’s a large tunnel beyond the wall, but I have no idea where it leads to,” said Davis. “I don’t like admitting that, but it was all part of the deal to bring Sparrow in.”
“This whole project must go far up the command chain,” said Eric.
“At least Chief of Staff,” said Davis. “And all my orders come down through the Pentagon.”
“Think it might go as far as the White House?”
Davis shrugged. “Could be.”
A line of men was now forming on the floor below them. A second line formed quickly, with men steering hydraulic lifters. The lights in the ceiling suddenly dimmed, and several red lights went on along the walls close to the floor. The cab of an overhead crane moved back to a wall, a door opened, and a man descended a ladder there to join the others.
“Should be any minute, now. They all leave together.”
The lights in the ceiling dimmed further. The men at the console were murmuring into their headsets, their hands moving over panels in front of them. If there were sounds in the bay, Eric couldn’t hear them through the thick window of the room. The floor was now in gloom, and though Eric’s eyes adjusted quickly it was now difficult to pick out individuals in the lines of men.
The far wall suddenly glowed deep red, then orange, faint but distinct. Davis pointed, said, “The glow is a kind of protective barrier. I’ve been told it would be dangerous to touch the wall right now.”
The effect only lasted seconds, the orange glow overwhelmed by a blue glare rising from floor to ceiling in rippling waves and lighting up the entire floor for one instant before disappearing in a blink, and where the wall had been was now inky blackness. The two lines of men marched straight into the blackness, the lifters rolling along with them. When they were gone, the blue glare descended again, a blinding thing. Eric blinked once, twice, and saw only rock on the far side of the floor. The ceiling lights remained dim, but he could see the floor was now empty.
“Quite a show,” said Eric.
“Sometimes I wonder if that’s all it is. Brown says it’s an electromagnetic door they’d like to develop here for their own profit if we can complete the Sparrow project with them,” said Davis.
“Capitalism is contagious,” said Eric, but looked down at a folded piece of paper that had suddenly appeared on the floor by his feet. The men at the console had finished their jobs, pushed back their chairs to stand up. The man nearest Eric, the one who’d been glancing at him from time to time, leaned over, picked up the paper and handed it to him. “You have dropped this,” he said. In the low light, his blue eyes seemed violet in color.
Eric acted by instinct. “Uh—thank you,” he said, and pocketed the paper.
They all left the console room, Brown’s people and Eric behind Davis, turning in opposite directions in a hallway. “Where do they go?” asked Eric.
“They have quarters near here. We don’t go there, either. They even have their own cooks,” said Davis.
They went through two cardkey-controlled doors and descended in an elevator to a small bay filled with crates. An unlocked door led them into a corner of Sparrow’s bay, a few techs still crawling over the craft in the center of the floor. Dillon was still there with Hendricks, studying something in the flight manual.