Ethan’s cell phone rang as he drove and Lopez picked it up.
‘Ethan’s phone.’
‘I have a track for you,’ came the response, and although she had never met Hellerman, Lopez could guess from the digital hiss of distortion on the line that matched the one she had heard whenever she spoke to Jarvis that she was speaking to his faithful assistant.
‘Go ahead.’
‘It’s heading north on the I95 toward Tonopah, range twenty eight miles. The signal matches Amber’s cell phone.’
‘That’s toward the Crescent Dunes project,’ Lopez confirmed. ‘Amber must already know what Mary is about to do. But it could be a decoy, something to throw us off.’
‘We’ve got no choice but to follow her,’ Ethan said, raising his voice enough so that Hellerman could hear it. ‘There are no other leads right now and we can’t search the Vegas Strip, it would take weeks and we only have hours. We’ve got to take the chance that Amber’s letting us know where she’s going.’
Lopez switched the cell to speakerphone as Hellerman replied.
‘I can offer you no further assistance. The KH–12 Keyhole satellite I tasked for this is already moving on toward other regions and is out of range and Jarvis is out of the loop completely. Even General Nellis isn’t playing ball any longer. Majestic Twelve, whoever they are, must have got to him somehow. In addition, according to transmissions intercepted recently, the FBI are on your tail again with agents deployed into Vegas and a BOLO out with local law enforcement. You’re on your own now, I’m afraid. Good luck, Hellerman out.’
The line went dead and Lopez looked at Ethan.
‘On our own again. Color me surprised.’
Ethan smiled grimly as he accelerated out of the Vegas Strip onto the I95.
XXXIX
‘Bullseye, Spirit Twelve, inbound to Initial Point, request vectors.’
The cockpit of the B2 Spirit Stealth bomber was shrouded in darkness, the instruments glowing a faint green through the pilot’s visor as he glanced briefly out of the cockpit windscreen at the immense night surrounding them. Major Pete Grady heard the voice of a fighter controller in his earpiece as he concentrated on his instruments, climbing through banks of broken stratus cloud that glowed a faint blue in the starlight as he climbed toward his assigned altitude.
‘Spirit Twelve, angels three two zero, maintain climb, no traffic.’
‘Three two zero, wilco, Spirit Twelve.’
Beside him, the co — pilot was scrutinizing the displays, programming data into the aircraft’s surveillance system. Both of them knew of the immense importance of this mission, which had been recorded as a routine training flight out of Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri. It was rare for B2s to deploy operationally into theatre, and even rarer for that theatre to be the continental United States, but this was an extraordinary mission born of an extraordinary detection just days ago over Missouri.
Pete Grady had been able to analyse the data from the Spirit’s surveillance sensors before that data had been whisked away by the Defense Intelligence Agency, and although he would not have admitted it to another soul, not even his wife, what he had seen there had fairly scared the crap out of him. An energy burst of significant proportions, deep in the Missouri wilderness, that should have been worldwide news by now. At the time his first assumption had been an asteroid impact or another energetic cosmic event, but the emergence in the data of nuclear by — products including a small neutron burst in the wake of the event suggested a nuclear accident. That was quickly ruled out, as there were no nuclear sites nearby and besides, there was no smoking gun: no crater, no fires, no nothing.
Whatever he and his co — pilot had detected that evening on their way back from a training flight, it had vanished completely. Now, with sensors adapted at no small cost to specifically locate that energy burst again, they were now airborne high over the Nevada desert having deployed to Groom Lake airbase, better known as Area 51, that very day. Pete Grady’s rank was not senior enough to ask too many questions, but it was obvious that the whatever — it — was they had detected was believed to still be present, and clearly the powers that be felt it was in Nevada.
Area 51. Bright lights. High energy.
Nobody was saying UFO, but he knew damned well everybody had been thinking it.
Prior to their departure, they had been briefed on the presence of an unspecified weapon smuggled into the United States by insurgents from the Middle East. Powerful, dangerous, high technology that must be found at any cost. Lives, perhaps millions of lives, depended upon it. The orders came from the very, very top: locate and destroy.
The desert below him glowed with the light from Las Vegas, a sparkling jewel of color encrusted into the darkness. Grady looked down at it, knowing that up here at forty thousand feet he was utterly invisible to the people below, that he was the UFO sneaking around in the upper atmosphere. The gigantic, wedge — shaped B2 looked like an enormous, angular black bat haunting the troposphere.
‘Sensors are set,’ his co — pilot, Scott Reed, reported. ‘We’re ready.’
Grady checked the instruments one last time, made sure that he was ready for what could be a long night, and then nodded.
‘Activate,’ he ordered. ‘Let’s see what’s out there.’
Reed switched the Spirit’s passive sensors on and then set them to “Active”, and moments later the radar displays began displaying images from the apparently empty desert below them.
‘Good morning, America,’ Reed said.
The darkness was alive with tiny specks of light and heat detected by the immensely powerful sensors. Vehicles on roads, campers far out in the desert, asphalt roads still glowing with residual heat from the previous day’s sunshine like arteries flowing in an X — ray. But amid the countless specks of heat a single spot of bright blue — white shone like a new born star almost right in the centre of the main display on the cockpit before Grady.
‘What’s that?’
Reed studied the display, isolating the glow.
‘It’s the solar tower at Crescent Dunes,’ he reported. ‘Must still be much hotter than the surrounding area. Don’t they have melted salts or something, heated by the solar arrays?’
Grady watched the display. He knew that solar towers glowed throughout the night and were extremely bright objects when compared with the rapidly cooling deserts that so often surrounded them, but there was something about this one …
‘Can you isolate and grab a spectrographic display?’ he asked. ‘If anyone was trying to hide a weapon down there, that hot spot would be the perfect place to do it.’
Reed began altering the filters on the optical sensors until he was able to display a spectrographic read — out on Grady’s screen. The image had switched to one that portrayed the elements contained within the heat source far below them: all light had a signature that could be split and studied to determine what chemical components were contained within. Grady stared down at the read out and frowned.
‘Hydrogen, oxygen, palladium, lithium,’ Reed reported, ‘nothing unusual at all.’
Grady’s mind tried to determine what he was seeing. There was almost certainly water down there, which one might expect from the steam boiling off the turbines at the plant. As far as he could recall, most solar plants used the heated salts to boil water to turn steam — turbines, so some airborne exhaust would be expected. But palladium and lithium? He had heard of lithium salts but palladium was often used in catalytic converters and fuel cells, where hydrogen and oxygen were combined to produce heat, electricity and water.