The flaming debris now began to fall like bombs all around as Corrie recovered and continued speeding down the arroyo, weaving and slaloming among the flaming meteors. A few terrifying minutes later, they were out of range.
She brought the jeep to a halt. Everyone, exhausted beyond speech, looked back at the boiling fire-mushroom in the sky, half a mile tall and climbing, shot through with purple and green, the atmosphere reverberating with the thunder of secondary explosions.
“Armageddon,” murmured Skip at last.
But Corrie was most shocked by the expression on Tappan’s face. Tears were streaming down his cheeks, glistening in the reflected light.
“We’ll never know,” he said. “Now we’ll never know.”
66
3 months later
THE SLEEK BOEING 737, its only marking a red cheatline running horizontally along the windows, banked over the desert and began its final approach. The jet’s configuration was unusual: it was not divided into first and coach classes, but rather had twenty rows of seats, two on each side, positioned to face each other in groups of four, with an aisle down the center. There was a single flight attendant: a young man who wordlessly brought the passengers flavored seltzer shortly after takeoff from Alamogordo, then disappeared. Nora sat next to Skip, with Corrie by the window on the other side. Tappan sat across from Nora, beside a general who had identified himself only as Greyburn. He was dressed in field camo, two black stars embroidered on the front of his uniform.
Lying curled up on the carpeted floor at Skip’s feet was Mitty, the hair of his tail still singed. Somehow, he had escaped the inferno at the camp, to be found later by first responders, cowering in a nearby arroyo. When the general had arrived at their house, with almost no advance notice, to take them on this mysterious outing, Skip had refused to leave Mitty, who he claimed was suffering from PTSD. He raised all kinds of arguments and crazy pleadings, finally getting the two-star to cave.
The general had told them nothing. Not even where they were going, or what was to take place. It had been made clear that no questions would be answered or explanations proffered until they arrived at their destination.
Nevertheless, Skip—with his vast knowledge of conspiracy theories and urban legends, recently enhanced by browsing through Noam Bitan’s library—was smug.
“We’re on Janet,” he murmured sotto voce to his sister.
“Excuse me?”
“Janet airlines. A top-secret shuttle the air force uses to ferry spooks from their local airports to classified locations and back again. Apparently, it stands for ‘Just Another Non-Existent Terminal.’” He cackled. “The only airline where the flight attendants need SSBI clearances.”
Nora didn’t reply. If this was true, she wondered why he wasn’t just a little more nervous.
A minute later, the wheels touched down on an endless runway laid out along a perfectly level salt flat. “Welcome to Groom Lake,” said the general, nodding out the window.
“Otherwise known as Area Fifty-One,” Skip said. “I knew it!”
The general merely smiled. In the seat beside her, she could almost feel Skip puff up with braggadocio.
The plane taxied and came to rest. Two jeeps were waiting for them on the edge of the tarmac. The late-July sun burned down from an empty sky as they climbed in and were whisked away, past row after row of hangars and giant Quonset huts, to a small, nondescript building without windows. The general, entirely silent, led them through several sets of guards and into the building, which proved to be no more than the housing for a giant freight elevator. Mitty’s leash was passed off to a soldier at the entrance, to await their return. “No canines allowed,” was the only explanation given. Nora could hear the dog barking piteously as Skip vanished inside.
They got on the elevator, its massive doors boomed shut, and they descended for a disconcerting length of time before it halted. The doors opened to reveal a vast underground hangar. Nora, for whom all this had an unpleasant feeling of déjà vu, stared in shock. There, directly before them, was the alien probe, resting on a graphite cradle.
“We are now free to talk,” said the general.
“What’s this?” Tappan exclaimed. “Another one?”
The general gave a small, dry smile. “Do you really think an object that had spent ten million years crossing the galaxy would be so easily destroyed? We found it quite intact amid the smoking wreckage of Pershing.”
Tappan almost staggered. “Thank God. I thought we’d lost it!” He took a step forward—then turned around, face shining. “Have you had a chance to study it?”