Hands clasped behind his back, Cassin stepped to the shoulder of his senior
systems controller. “Anything happening, Gunny?”
“Not a thing, sir. Dead as a whorehouse on Monday morning.”
Cassin shot a look at the time hack counting down in the upper corner of the display. The scenario was scheduled to run from twenty-two to twenty-four hundred hours; right now, they were an hour and twenty-seven minutes into the run with only a little more than thirty left to go.
“Let’s not get cocky,” Cassin said. “They still have time.”
“Any more word who’s coming in on us, sir?”
“I suspect you’ll know before I do, Gunny.”
*
High atop Hidalgo Mountain, the scanner head of the air-search radar rotated silently under its fiberglass dome, its beam dominating four thousand square miles of airspace.
The system had been deliberately detuned to match the performance of a less sophisticated technology for tonight’s operation, but it was still an effective and reliable early warning system.
So effective, in fact, that the bottom lobe of the scan frequently reacted to ground vehicles moving along Highway 62, beyond the southern border of the A-GCC. The system operators had long ago adjusted the radar’s computerized ground clutter filter to erase this distracting and aggravating disturbance.
Likewise, State 62 caused problems for the sky-scanning NiteBrite cameras. Even
at a twenty-mile range, the glare of the highway headlights had a tendency to
overload the sensitive photomultiplier optics, causing them to lose sensitivity
and definition, blinding the visual coverage of the highway corridor.
California Highway 62, Eastbound
2330 Hours; Zone Time, September 24, 2008
The big curtain-side semi-truck labored up the long, gradual grade that climbed out of the Yucca Valley. Road traffic on the isolated desert highway was scant, the stars overhead were bright and the ground lights were few and very far between. There was an eeriness to the Joshua tree studded wastes, an otherworldly air that possibly prompted the topic of conversation in the semi’s cab.
“Flying saucers, Hank.”
“What about flying saucers?” the semi’s co-driver muttered back. He slouched in the cab’s passenger seat, arms crossed, eyes closed, chin on chest.
“This is good country for flying saucers,” the driver replied from behind the big rig’s wheel.
“Ervin, how in the hell can country be good for flying saucers?”
“Lots of ’em have been seen around here,” the driver insisted. “And there was that guy up at Giant Rock airport who claimed he actually talked
with some people from outer space. They had some big old conventions up there
with thousands of people from all over the country showing up to tell how they’d seen spaceships. That’s got to mean something.”
A snort prefixed the response. “Yeah, that there’s whole lot of nutcases running around loose without a keeper.”
“Oh, yeah? Well there’s just a hell of a lot of things in this world you don’t know about, Hank.” The driver glanced into his side view mirror. Three sets of headlights were coming in fast from behind the semi. Dazzlingly bright and blue-white, they were likely the mercury iodide headlamps of a pack of desert racing tuner cars.
On second consideration, maybe the lights were a little high for sports compacts. A convoy of hijacker 4X4s then.
“One thing I do know, Ervin, is that there ain’t no such thing as flying saucers and … what’s that?”
The coffee mugs in the cup holders on the dog box began to dance and chatter with a heavy, tooth-rattling vibration. From somewhere out in the night, a hard-edged vibrant growl intermingled with a piercing metallic trill began to leak into the cab.
“What the …?”
Silvery illumination spilled past the truck. The three sets of “headlights” overtook the big rig and separated in a bomb burst. One set flared to the right, another to the left.
The third set went straight up.
“Hank?”
Beyond the cab driver’s side window, a man – or something like a man – appeared, seemingly sitting in mid-air perhaps twenty feet off the ground. Visible from the waist up and illuminated in an eerie green-gray glow, the entity wore a bulbous helmet and facemask, a heavy, glassy visor covering whatever it used for eyes. That visor turned, looking casually into the truck’s cab for a moment. Facing forward again, the otherworldly figure swept on past the semi.
The truck staggered on the roadway, buffeted on all sides by a massive displacement of air. Sleek, multi-finned shapes were hinted at on the outer edges of the headlight fans. And then it was over, the three alien invaders regrouped over the centerline of the highway, skimming the pavement as they pulled swiftly away into the night.
“Hank?”
“Ervin, just drive. I ain’t saying nothing and you ain’t saying nothing. Just drive!”
The Marine Air-Ground Combat Center
2335 Hours; Zone Time, September 24, 2008
“Colonel Cassin, we have acquired a bogie approaching the hot range.”
A single air contact hack blipped into existence on the master display, creeping from the southwest. Its course would take it across the southwestern quarter of the A-GCC and through the active exercise zone.
Cassin was at the shoulder of his senior controller in an instant. “What have you got, Gunny?”
“Single target. Clear return, sir. Altitude, twenty-two thousand feet. Airspeed,
two hundred and twenty knots. Bogie is displaying a civil aviation traffic
transponder.”
“Where did he come from?”
“It looks like he’s climbing out of Palm Springs, sir. I think we’ve got a lost civilian out there.”
