But he liked the changes.
His face was still thin, his hair brown and thinning. His eyes were dark and there were lines around them that hadn’t been there a year ago; before the Nightstalkers blasted their way into the lab he was working in at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Colonel Orlando might have stood tall once upon a time, but the years of working in the covert world had accumulated on his shoulders, much like the way the gray crept into Moms’s and Nada’s hair.
Instead of answering, Orlando turned toward an old battered jeep, indicating for Ivar to follow.
“I wasn’t done with my training,” Ivar said.
“Ms. Jones believes you are and when she says you’re done, you’re done.”
“Who is Ms. Jones?” Ivar read more into Orlando’s statement than the obvious, which he had a feeling was intended.
“I’m taking you to her.” Orlando got behind the wheel. “Coming? It’s a long walk to anywhere from here.”
Despite being the subject of numerous documentaries, blogs, newspaper reports, movies, and so on, very little of the truth of Area 51 is known to the outside world. It’s in the Middle of Nowhere, Nevada, and you have to want to get to it to even take any road close to it. And you couldn’t get to it, unless you were invited, which few people were.
Ivar was now one of those.
To the west of Area 51 is the Nevada Test Site where 739 nuclear weapons had been exploded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
And another one, just last year, by the Nightstalkers. That one wasn’t listed on Wikipedia.
Nobody wanted to get to the Test Site. And even if someone got to it, they wouldn’t last long, given the lingering radiation.
Going back to its origins, the location received its name when a large chunk of Nevada was bought (appropriated) by the government during World War II because the military at Nellis Air Force Base needed some place for its pilots to practice dropping bombs and strafing targets before shipping them overseas to do the same against the Japanese and Germans.
Traditionally, the military took training posts and divided them into training areas. It was easier to do numbers, and sometimes, surprisingly, even the military took the easy way. So the portion on the map surrounding Groom Lake had received the number 51. It might have easily been 50 or 52, but 51 it was.
The conspiracy theorists do have one thing right. Majestic-12 did begin at Area 51 and from there on out the place became the hub for a lot of super-secret activity, including mundane things such as testing beyond-state-of-the-art aircraft.
As far as the aliens from Roswell being brought there?
No such luck.
There were no aliens from Roswell.
It really was a weather balloon.
But the best cover-up is a cover-up of something that never happened to cover up something that happened. Anyone in covert ops knows that, and if one can wrap their brain around that concept, they might have a chance of surviving in the Black World. Roswell was leaked to the press and appeared to be a cover-up for recovery of an alien artifact and bodies, because one state away, at super-secret Area 51, they were dealing with another problem altogether: a Rift.
Over the following decades, enough weird stuff happened around Area 51 that couldn’t be completely covered up, and UFO enthusiasts began to focus on it. Every day a flight from McCarren Airport in Las Vegas took off and landed at Groom Lake, on the aforementioned third-longest runway in the world, depositing workers. It returned to Vegas each evening, taking them back home.
While the stuff they worked on was classified, the real work happened farther underground, at levels none of those on the plane would ever get access to. Nor did any of them particularly want access to those levels. Sort of like you might find the Mines of Moria interesting to traverse if you absolutely had to, but you don’t want to know what’s way down there in the darkness.
Speaking of which, Ivar asked Orlando as he got in the passenger seat, “I thought I’d be taking Janet in?”
Orlando laughed. “Been checking Wikipedia?” He threw the jeep into gear. “Nightstalkers don’t take Janet. Hell, son, they aren’t even stationed in Area 51 proper. You’ll see.” The jeep moved forward with a lurch.
“The government actually got some stuff right there at Groom Lake,” Orlando said as he spun the wheel and they rolled onto a paved road, heading south. “They been flying worker bees in and out of Area 51 since ’72. The planes and pilots were under several front companies for the National Security Agency, until someone got smart and said fuck it, let’s just let the air force do the flying for the government, since that is what the fucking air force is supposed to do, right? But they still paint the fuckers weird, red stripe down the side. Like they was trying to draw attention to the fact that the flights weren’t fucking normal.”
Orlando had not taken part in the Battlestar Galactica marathon.
Orlando glanced over at Ivar, who could swear he smelled alcohol wafting across the jeep from the colonel, but who also picked up the challenge. “So they’re a diversion too?”
“Don’t say it with a question mark,” Orlando said. “The Nightstalkers like statements, not questions. And the big jets, the 737s, they got the red stripe. The little ones, like the one you just flew in—”
“Had a blue stripe.”
“So you were paying attention,” Orlando said as he shifted gear, the jeep’s transmission protesting loudly. “That’s how folks like you get in and why you land out here, rather than at Groom Lake.”
“How do I get out?”
Orlando laughed. “You might be smarter than you look. You aren’t even there yet and you’re asking about leaving.” He had one hand on the wheel, the other on the gear shifter, and he slammed it into the best the old jeep could do. “It’s easy. You just say no.”
“No?”
“Did I stutter?” Orlando said. “When Ms. Jones asks you, you just say no and you get to leave, go home, go back to whatever fucking rock you crawled out from under.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” Orlando then reached into his pocket and pulled out a flask. He expertly unscrewed the top with the same hand holding it and took a deep drink. He held it out to Ivar.
“No thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” Orlando screwed the top back on and slid it into his pocket. “Funny thing is, no one has ever said no to Ms. Jones. That I know of. Now, of course, I do think some should have. But she’s got a way of putting things.”
“So she’s going to ask me what?”
“To be a Nightstalker, son,” Orlando muttered, then in a low voice, “Maybe.”
Ivar leaned closer. “What was that?”
“You met some of the Nightstalkers in North Carolina,” Orlando said. “That’s what they’re called now, but they’ve had a lot of names over the years.”
“It’s a cover name,” Ivar said.
“So you listened in some of your classes,” Orlando said.
“The army’s elite Special Operations helicopter unit is called the Nightstalkers,” Ivar said. “Task Force 160 is its official designation. They flew us on some of the training missions. I assume these Nightstalkers aren’t helicopter pilots.”
“Yeah,” Orlando said, clearly not impressed. “The team has had some dumb-ass names over the years, but we all kinda like the current one: Nightstalkers. Go after things that go bump in the night. Catch ’em and destroy ’em.”
“What about study them?” Ivar asked.
“Spoken like a true fucking dumb-ass scientist,” Orlando said. “Anyway, the team was first based at Area 51, because some dumb-ass scientists opened the first Rift there, way back when. Most of those idiots ended up getting snarked through, never seen again. The ones that weren’t sucked through the Rift ended up dead.” He glanced across at Ivar. “Ms. Jones must have seen something in you, boy, because if she just wanted you to be a scientist, she’d have made you an Acme, one of the Support people. Maybe even an on-call Acme. But she sent you to Spec-Ops training so that you’ll know which end of the rifle the bullet comes out of. So she wants you to be a Nightstalker. There’s a big difference.”