“Got it.”
“Keep your GPS tracker on at all times.”
Banks shrugged into his day pack, which contained water and lunch. As he trudged up the hill, his mind drifted to Bitan and his eccentricities. He’d been suspicious of the bugger from the start. He wasn’t sure why, but he always had the feeling Bitan had some sort of hidden agenda. Also, there was a certain aloofness, or possibly a feeling of arrogance, about the astronomer that put him off.
He arrived at the top of the first hill and scanned the landscape ahead with binoculars. A thousand yards to his right, he could see somebody else doing the same. Somehow it felt even more like an alien landscape here: all these little hills crowded together, carpeted with tall grass waving in the wind, dotted with oaks as twisted as bonsai. The hills were separated by small ravines. This was the kind of a place where, if you had an accident and your body was lying at the bottom of one of those ravines, you might never be found.
He caught movement out of the corner of his eye and quickly trained his binocs in that direction. A small herd of horses was cresting a hill and disappearing down the other side, moving fast, disturbed by the invasion of their domain. Horse Heaven Hills—an apt name, he thought as he made his way down the far side and continued on.
He hiked northward, up and down the hills, sometimes following narrow horse trails. But he saw nothing except occasional horses, shy as deer, fleeing as soon as they spied him. After a few miles, the hills petered out into a broad valley dotted with red sandstone buttes. This, he thought, must be Los Gigantes: the giant ones. Beyond that stood a range of foothills rising into mountains, purple in the late-morning light.
Banks took a break in the shade of an oak to drink water and eat a granola bar. It was a little crazy, he mused, the way he’d ended up in this place. It was all very sudden. He’d gotten the call just three weeks before, in his South Kensington flat—some woman on the phone saying that Lucas Tappan was on the line. At first he thought it was a joke, one of his friends taking the piss, but when Tappan got on the phone he quickly realized it was real. And then came the offer, the unbelievable compensation, and the demand that he drop everything. A week later he was here, at the ends of the earth, preparing to excavate an alleged UAP crash site. Although he had long believed UAPs were real, he had serious doubts about the Roswell site. All those doubts, however, vanished when the mass spectra had come in, revealing an unknown superheavy element present in trace amounts. That floored him like nothing else had in his life. He’d gone over it a hundred times and there was no way of getting around the evidence. It was a smoking gun, proof that an intelligently engineered, extraterrestrial object made of exotic compounds had indeed crashed at the site. The full significance was still sinking in. Clearly, this discovery was going to change his life—but exactly how, he couldn’t yet predict.
Other implications, too, were inescapable: that the U.S. government had indeed found a UAP at Roswell and covered it up. What had happened in the seventy years since? Had the bloody government been reverse engineering the technology? Had they been in contact with the ETs? How would they react to having their long deception uncovered? He felt himself sailing into uncharted waters.
And then there was Tappan, who insisted they keep the superheavy-element discovery under wraps. He wondered why.
His radio crackled, Tappan again. “Greg, any signs?”
“Nothing.”
“Let’s continue into the valley with the buttes and reconnoiter there.” Tappan sent a GPS coordinate specifying where they should meet.
“Got it.”
He finished the granola bar, took another gulp of water, and continued hiking into the valley. He wondered again what could have happened to Bitan. The man had grown up in the Negev, so it wasn’t as if he was ignorant of a desert environment. It would be hard to get lost. Even if his GPS had died, all he’d had to do was climb a hill and look around to determine which direction to go. While he might have had a fall or been bitten by a snake, Banks thought it more likely Bitan had engineered his own disappearance. The lights Skip had seen hinted that someone might have met him out here and picked him up. Although if that was the case, why hadn’t they seen any tire tracks?
The valley he was hiking in was a dramatic place, with the great buttes of sandstone rising hundreds of feet. There was no shade anywhere.
Three hours later, they were back at their jeeps, having found no trace of Bitan beyond the lake bed—no footprints or other evidence of human presence. At 1 PM, after seven hours of fruitless searching, to Banks’s relief Tappan called it a day and they headed back to camp.