He stayed hovering just long enough to snap a picture and then he sped away.
He realized it had been wishful thinking to expect the top of the Tower to be deserted. The lights meant people and he instinctively knew those people wouldn't provide him with a friendly welcoming committee.
Hunter set the airplane down at a remote location about five miles from the Tower. Using a flashlight and a small bag of chemicals he'd brought along, the pilot quickly developed the photo he'd taken. Just as he suspected, the picture revealed about 25 individuals on top of the Tower. They didn't have anything heavy — the photo showed no heat emissions indicating missiles or serious anti-aircraft guns. But Hunter had to assume they were carrying personal arms; weapons that could damage the Yak.
He had no choice. He would have to climb the Tower and recon the top up close.
He sandwiched the Yak between two trees. Then with his M-16 in hand, he set out for the strange mountain.
Hunter didn't believe in ghosts, per se. And he was aware that at night, in an unfamiliar location, the human senses reacted in such a way as to heighten the intensity of the slightest potential of strangeness going on around them. An owl's call might sound as if it were being broadcast from a loud and deep echo chamber. The wind might feel like it's whipping by at 90 MPH. The moon may appear twice as large as it really was. A simple shooting star might look like an inter-galactic starship streaking overhead. The mind plays tricks on the body, and the senses short-circuit as a result.
But as much as Hunter tried to convince himself of all this as he scrambled across the plain approaching the Devil's Tower, there was some pretty strange shit going on around him that he couldn't explain away. The wind was blowing so hard it nearly yanked his flight helmet from his head. And that was the loudest owl he'd ever heard — at least he thought it was an owl. And that Goddamn moon was so big, it was taking up half the sky!
And if that thing that flew over his head really was a meteorite — it was the first one he'd ever seen that was shaped like a cigar and carried a bunch of blinking lights underneath it.
He pressed on, the M-16 now off his shoulder and in his hands, the safety clicked off. The Tower loomed ahead, bathed in the incredibly bright light of the oversized moon. Again, he grudgingly admired General Josephs for selecting this area to hide the second black box. He vowed he would never return here without anything less than a couple of the Crazy Eights and about 100 of Dozer's best troopers.
He saw more lights in the sky — initially these looked like genuine shooting stars. First one, then another, then another. Soon they were falling in twos and threes. Then fours and fives. Inside of two minutes, they were coming down like raindrops in a summer shower. Hunter was baffled by it — sometimes the sky in August was lit up with meteorites — but this was only May.
He came to almost ignore the strange falling lights and finally reached the base of the Tower. That's when he heard the voices…
At first it seemed as if someone was standing right over his shoulder, talking into his ear. He instinctively spun around, but no one was there. Then it sounded as if the voices were farther away. Then he heard a shout — echoed like the owl's hoot. Then more voices. They were jumbled up, making no sense, and in no particular language, more like a murmuring. First in front of him, then off to his left. Then to his right, then behind him. Then from all directions at once.
"Fuck this," he muttered. He didn't have time to pay attention to all the weirdness around him. If someone — or something — approached him, he'd just empty the M-16 into them. Simple as that.
He soon located the most climbable section of the mountain and started to scramble up..
It took him nearly two hours to reach the Tower's summit. Throughout his trip, the voices got louder. The shooting stars waned, then returned. And the moon got even bigger. It all became secondary — he was concentrating on how he would deal with whoever the hell was living on top of the Godforsaken place.
Chanting. That's the noise that stuck out most. Chanting at the top of the Tower. He double-checked the M-16 magazine. There were no signs of sentries or a defense perimeter, nothing which would indicate the people at the top were snuff military types. That was fine with him.
Finally he reached the top. Looking over a mound of boulders he could see right down onto the leveled section of the mountain. It was about the size of a football field, he determined, but round, almost like it was a volcano at one time but the lava had barely reached the top when it coagulated and formed the platform.
There were people down there. Indians. Not like' the Native Americans he had come to know and admire back in Oregon. These people were dressed and painted just like Indians he'd seen in the movies. They were also armed to the teeth.
He spotted rifles, shotguns, and at least two machineguns set up on the edge of the platform.
The Indians were chanting and whooping it up in a primitive-looking war dance, step, circling a huge bonfire they'd built. The lights he'd spotted were anything but primitive — they looked to be arc lamps of some kind. Color filters — red, green, yellow — like the type used on searchlights, covered about half of them. The others were bare white.
Then he saw the box. It would have been hard to miss. Right at the edge of the Tower's platform there was what could only be described as "an altar-like stone." And, sure enough, there on top of it was the small black box, its small red light obediently blinking away.
But there was also a photograph on top of the altar. Hunter was astonished to see it was a picture of a B-1. Then he started to notice other things. One Indian had what looked like a B-1 painted his bare back. Another carried a spear that had a small B-1 shape carved out at the top. Then he saw a half dozen Indians appear, carrying crudely carved pieces of wood that resembled the distinctive shape of the B-1.
The study of primitive religions had always fascinated him, and this one would probably fill a textbook. The warriors were worshipping an idol shaped like a B-1. He had heard of a similar case reported during World War II in the South Pacific. Natives on an out-of-the-way island had never seen a white man before until the Marines landed and started hacking away at the jungle to make landing strips. The natives had never seen airplanes before either. When the landing strip was finished and the supply airplanes came, some of the barter — cigarettes, chocolate, whatever — was given to the natives as goodwill presents. The more airplanes that came, the more presents they got. Soon enough, the natives came to worship the airplanes. And why not? The big birds brought them good things from the sky. For their culture, that was as god-like as you could get. When the war moved on and the Americans moved out, the airplanes stopped coming. Confused, the natives built crude wooden airplane-shaped idols and set them up all over the island, as if displaying something that looked like an airplane would cause one to swoop down and land.
Hunter was convinced that same kind of idol worship was in force on top of the Tower. Somehow, these Indians — probably one of the more isolated tribes — knew there was a connection between the black box and the B-1. By displaying the box and carrying airplane-like shapes, the Indians were praying, chanting, almost pleading for a B-1 to come down out of the sky.
Hunter had to shake his head. With all the weird stuff flying around the skies near the Tower, the Indians chose a B-1 to pray to. He sniffed the air. Well, he thought, maybe all that peyote he smelled, had something to do with it.
The air was thick with it. He could see the warriors ceremoniously passing a pipe around, and he could tell by the distinctive yellow curling smoke that they were inhaling a form of ka-rac-hee, or smokable peyote.