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  “Eagle, retrieve your probes. We’re wet.” She looked at the team sergeant. “Nada, how’s the Satcom link?”

  Nada went from putting the demolitions on the generator to checking the com link on Burns’s wrist. “Got banged up—nonfunctional.”

  “Eagle, get me a Satcom link to the Ranch.”

  “You’ve got it. Live now on channel four.”

  Moms switched her throat mike to the new channel.

  “Ms. Jones, we are wet here.”

  The voice that replied was old and had a vaguely Russian accent forced into speaking American for a long time. “And?”

  “Two wounded, one MIA scientist, six Fireflies destroyed.” Moms paused. “There was something different about the Rift.”

  “Tell me in debrief. Come home.”

  The channel went dead, and Moms switched back to the team freq. “Eagle, land.”

  Creating a minisandstorm, the Snake settled down on its landing gear forty meters away as the chain gun retracted into its compartment. The back ramp opened as floodlights set above it lit up the area and Eagle stepped out, surveying the battlefield, a stretcher in his hands. He was a tall black man, completely hairless, and the entire left side of his head was scrolled with burn scar tissue from an IED in Iraq eight years ago.

  Nada was helping Doc to his feet. The venom was taking its toll despite the shot, but he’d gotten Burns stable.

  “Let’s get our people on board,” Moms ordered.

  Nada half-carried Doc to the Snake, while Roland and Eagle tenderly placed Burns on the stretcher and carried him up the ramp.

  Moms’s were the last boots to step on board. Eagle climbed forward into the cockpit and was closing the back ramp as she got in the copilot’s seat. He began powering up the engines.

  “Next time,” Doc mumbled, “I think I’ll have the FireWire connected before we land.”

  “You think?” Roland said.

  “We need to coordinate our firepower more efficiently,” Nada said.

  “Idiot scientists need to stop playing with shit they don’t understand,” Eagle observed as he twisted the collective and pushed forward on the cyclic. The Snake lifted.

  Below them the generator exploded.

  “All right, enough chitchat,” Moms said. “Let’s get back to Area 51 and the Ranch.”

  Moms looked over at the team’s wounded communications man, then reached back and tapped Nada on the knee. “We’re gonna need a new commo man.”

  Nada sighed. “You know how long it takes Ms. Jones to find someone.”

  “I hate fucking Rifts,” Burns muttered, then passed out.

  Area 51 is in the middle of nowhere on the way to nowhere. Worse, in most of the nowhere it’s on the way to, no one would survive long. To the west is the Nevada Test Site where the government—in the form of the United States Department of Energy—exploded 739 of the 928 nuclear tests it conducted over the years. Uninhabitable would be kind. No living thing being able to cross and survive long is more to the point.

  To the north is the Nellis Range, where the government in the form of the US Air Force regularly drops bombs, big and small. Like most good pilots in the military, they often deliberately target anything moving out there, usually cattle or deer, since any kill is a good kill. The government pays the ranchers around the area a stipend every year for livestock that wander into the kill zone.

  The deer are out of luck.

  For most who cared, UFO enthusiasts among the most likely, the key to Area 51 is the world’s longest runway set on the dry bed of Groom Lake. Every day a plane carrying contractors from Las Vegas lands on that runway depositing workers for the facilities built into Groom Mountain and hidden from the probing eyes of satellites.

  The Nightstalkers did not take the daily flight to and from Vegas.

  Area 51 itself would have been much too public a place for the Nightstalkers to be headquartered, although the huge perimeter, the inaccessibility, and the built-in security were all certainly enticements. The forerunners of the Nightstalkers had only been based at Area 51 because the scientists who conceived most of the problems they had to deal with were based at Area 51. Along the way someone realized that if everyone knew about Area 51, then it wasn’t the best place to keep the covert team. The unit had changed names many times, always at least one step, and hopefully a lap, ahead of scrutiny. Now the Nightstalkers simply stayed in the vicinity to use that great buffer of security to the west, along with being able to tap the resources of the classified facility. And, of course, because they also had to be close enough to go in and take care of the problems that occasionally cropped up from some experiment gone awry in one of Area 51’s many labs.

  The new location, when they moved out of Area 51 proper, had been initially dubbed the Ranch, and that stuck.

  So the Ranch was across the road. Right across Extraterrestrial Highway, a.k.a. Nevada Route 375. The curious who came out there always looked west, where the base was. No one ever looked east, toward the Ranch. On private land. Registered in county records to the actual current owner: Ms. Jones.

  This made the location even more secure than the government facility across the way, because Nevada’s Stand Your Ground Law, dating back to the Wild West of 1871, allowed Ranch security to gun down anyone who crossed its boundaries into the private property and represented what they considered a threat. The big, spray-painted plywood NO TRESPASS: WE WILL SHOOT YOUR ASS signs around the Ranch carried a lot more weight than the fancy red-and-white metal warning signs posted around Area 51, where the occasional interloper got a six-hundred-dollar fine.

  The main part of the Ranch was, of course, hidden underground. Inside the complex—inside the Den—Eagle and Roland were needling MacGyver, a.k.a. Mac, about missing out in the “Fun Outside Tucson,” as the latest mission had been labeled on the flight home. Mac had been off getting trained up in some other secret facility on the latest in demolitions, and Eagle told him they could have used the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch on the killer rabbit, which drew blank stares from Roland and Mac and a sigh from the older man.

  In reality, the two men were on edge and Mac was humoring them, while they all pretended not to listen to what was going on in Ms. Jones’s office next door and stared aimlessly around their dreary surroundings. The central room they were in had originally been called the Bunker. It certainly fit the moniker. Depressing, gray, steel-reinforced concrete walls, curving to a popcorn ceiling that had another twenty feet of concrete pressing down on it. The Den was the center of the facility, the team room. Besides Ms. Jones’s office, Moms and Nada’s Command Post (CP) was adjacent to it along with the weapons room and the team living quarters.

  Unfortunately “bunker” had sounded too last-days-of-Hitler and someone had started calling the room the Zoo. As in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, when the Cold War was still chilly. But then that era passed and the allusion faded.

  So it had morphed from Zoo to Lions’ Den, in a time when perhaps a fiercer leader than Ms. Jones reigned, but that was too much work to sustain, so now it was just the Den.

  It was a heavily fortified Den, though, surrounded by layers of security that would make Fort Knox weep with envy, so it always struck each new man as weird that the door to Ms. Jones’s office was a flimsy, hollow-core affair, poorly hinged, leaving an inch opening above the floor. The reality, though, was that the office was more a sanctum. At least that’s the way every team member thought of it. It was Ms. Jones’s sanctum, one from which she had never come out. Each member had only been in once, to meet her when they had been in-processed.

  Only Moms, occasionally with Nada, got to go behind the door more than once. This was one of those times.

  The weird thing was that the flimsy door and the inch gap let every person in the Den hear every word spoken in the office. But only the conversations with Moms, occasionally Nada, and the in-briefs of new personnel, from which the existing team members could generate the newcomer’s team name. Because
other than when someone from the team was in the office with Ms. Jones, there was never a sound. One would think Ms. Jones talked on a phone, or radio, or to herself occasionally, but such utterances were never heard. There was never the creak of a desk chair, or even Ms. Jones breaking wind.

  Some even speculated Ms. Jones wasn’t real. She was a holographic image with a voice. After all, they could agree that during in-processing all they had seen was someone—or something—sitting in a darkened chair on the other side of a massive aircraft-carrier-sized wooden desk that had absolutely nothing on top of it. Forced to squint into lights aimed forward from above and behind the desk, lights that made one long for the days of the Gestapo and bootjacks, it was impossible to determine who or what was in that big chair.

  So, for someone so secretive, one wondered why she would allow every word she spoke to every guest to be heard by every team member in the Den.

  And eventually each new team member silently realized what the others had already figured out: there were no secrets inside the Nightstalkers. Anything discussed in there with anyone was information the entire team was privy to. Ms. Jones might have her own secrets, but she made sure the team had none among its members.

  As Ms. Jones got the debrief going, Roland and Eagle stopped needling Mac for being away updating his demolitions expertise—“Doc and Burns coulda used some help in the Fun Outside Tucson” was the last thing Roland said before silence descended and they listened in.

  Ms. Jones: “You said the Rift was different. How?”

  Moms went into a succinct, efficient description of how the iris had expanded beyond any recorded in the history of the unit; and she gave her best recollection, better than anyone else there, of the thing that had been growing inside the Rift and appeared ready to come out.

  Ms. Jones: “An intelligent being?”

  Moms had no idea. Nada had yet to weigh in, because no one weighed in unless Ms. Jones invited them.

  Ms. Jones: “So the Rift was becoming something else?”

  A long pause caused the three men in the Den to exchange glances. Mac raised an eyebrow at Roland and Eagle. Both shrugged.

  Ms. Jones: “Ms. Moms?”

  Moms: “I believe so.”

  Ms. Jones: “Mister Nada?”

  The team sergeant hefted his weight: “Yes, ma’am.”

  Another long silence drifted through the Den.

  Ms. Jones: “A portal, perhaps.”

  There was no question mark in the tone, so there was no answer to the statement.

  Ms. Jones: “This is not good. We must have that computer’s hard drive analyzed.”

  Nada dared speak up: “Doc is laid up for a while, ma’am. Snakebit.”

  Ms. Jones let out the rarest of nondialogue cues. A sigh.

  Ms. Jones: “We’ll have to outsource it to someone on the Acme list. I’ll have it taken care of by Support. Now proceed with the mission from drop to completion.”

  Moms proceeded in full detail, without hesitating, glossing over nothing, as if she were reading from a teleprompter. Moms was like that. She could pull together the chaos of a firefight into a coherent story better than anyone.

  Ms. Jones interrupted four times, with specific questions, but it didn’t break Moms’s narrative. That is until she got to Burns getting wounded. Nada jumped into the breach.

  Nada: “He got a load of cactus spikes in his ass, ma’am.”

  Ms. Jones: “Thank you, Mister Nada.”

  As if it was the most normal thing in the world to be attacked by a fourteen-foot-high cactus.

  Moms picked up the fumble and continued onward until the team had landed back here. She fell silent, and all three men in the Den leaned forward to hear what Ms. Jones would have to say about the whole mess.

  Ms. Jones: “The priority, of course, is the change in the Rift. Twenty-seven Rifts and they’ve all been exactly the same. As far as we know.”

  Mac looked at Roland and Eagle and he could tell by the looks on their faces that they agreed completely.

  Ms. Jones had not been idle while the team flew back. “I checked on the graduate student who ran the Rift program. A Mister Henry Craegen. Working on his PhD in physics. Nothing stands out in his background, but I’m having our Support field agents run a detailed background check to find where he might have found the bootleg copy and how he might have altered it, but I believe the hard drive will yield the most useful information.”

  A short pause. Then Ms. Jones: “Now about Mister Burns.”

  Everyone on the team was Ms. or Mister to Ms. Jones. Perhaps, somewhere in the distant past, that was how she had gotten her own moniker. It made the whole nickname thing seem kind of stupid, but it was as stupid as a lot of the other weird stuff they did. They did know part of her story, as it was integral to the lore of the team: she’d been a nuclear engineer in the control room the day Chernobyl blew. That explained the accent. Whatever else had happened to her was a matter of speculation. She’d gotten hit by some bad shit, there was no doubt of that. So bad no one got to see her.

  Doc had been the one to float the hologram idea, speculating her voice was piped in while her real body was lying in some intensive care place surrounded by machines and kept alive by tubes, because Doc liked to imagine shit like that was real, and he swore the thing in the chair had flickered for a moment during his in-briefing. Most speculated she was some disfigured, shriveled remains of a human being whose mind could still cut like a knife, while the body was confined to a chair or bed.

  How someone from Chernobyl’s control room ended up being in charge of the Nightstalkers was a mystery, but Eagle had commented it was about as likely as a muscle-bound weight lifter from Austria ending up governor of California.

  In other words, who the hell knew?

  Ms. Jones: “Ms. Moms?”

  Moms explained Burns’s wounds, which was Moms being nice, since it wasn’t what Ms. Jones wanted to hear. “Burns suffered severe lacerations of the face, arm, and leg. Basically everywhere on that side where he wasn’t protected by body armor. He was fortunate not to have lost his right eye. A spike missed it by a quarter inch, went into his skull, and medical says they’re going to have to leave part of it in place as it’s touching the optic nerve and pulling it might cause more problems than leaving it alone. His body will just have to heal around it.”

  “Does he still have vision in the eye?” Ms. Jones asked.

  “Yes.”

  Ms. Jones: “Mister Nada?”

  Nada went into a long (more than two sentences) explanation of combat fatigue and how it happened occasionally that a guy lost it on a mission. And might even want out.

  The last part caused each of the listening men to look into their own psyche for a moment. They had all been special before coming to Nightstalkers: Green Berets, Rangers, CIA, Black Ops—it ran the gamut. The fact that Ms. Jones picked them meant they had something that went beyond special, into unique. The thing was, none of them were exactly sure what made each one unique.

  Ms. Jones: “You believe Mister Burns should be separated, Mister Nada?”

  Nada: “I never really trusted him.”

  Mac snickered because they all knew Nada wouldn’t trust a Girl Scout leading a nun across the road. He’d figure there was an angle to it, and it wasn’t a good one. In Nada’s world, the Girl Scout would throw the nun under the bus, then steal her rosary beads and hock them, using that—along with the money from her cookie sales—to feed her gambling addiction. But Roland frowned at both the snicker and the comment. He knew Nada meant something deeper, something real. Because the funny thing was, no one on the team had ever really trusted Burns. Well, they had at first. You had to. But something had been brewing between Burns and the rest of the team for a while.

  Ms. Jones: “Mister Burns was an experiment on my part. I was trying something different and I take responsibility for the decision and the result.”

  Mac choked down another snicker because Ms. Jones always took respon
sibility for everything on the team and even Mac couldn’t laugh at that. They all knew she had their backs.

  A record-setting second sigh came from Ms. Jones.

  Ms. Jones: “Mister Burns will be out-processed.”

  Moms and Nada were silent; the decision had been made.

  Ms. Jones: “It could have been worse.”

  All three men in the outer room—even Mac, who hadn’t been there—were nodding, because they all implicitly knew Ms. Jones knew what “worse” was.

  Then Ms. Jones began speaking, almost like Moms, except she wasn’t detailing a mission, she was talking about the Mission. It was pretty close to what she’d told each of them individually when they in-processed and it was similar to what they’d all heard when they’d volunteered and made it into whatever high-speed unit they’d come from. It had a catch phrase in those elite organizations: Why We Are Here.

  That’s why Roland and Eagle and Nada, and even Moms—though she wouldn’t admit it—had known Burns was done when he’d been screaming with an ass full of spikes: “Why am I here? Why the hell am I doing this crazy shit?”

  They all knew why they were here and they all knew Ms. Jones was repeating it as much to them as to Nada and Moms.

  Ms. Jones: “We are here because the best of intentions can go horribly awry and the worst of intentions can achieve exactly what it sets out to do. It is often the noblest scientific inquiry that can produce the end of us all. We are here because we are the last line of defense when the desire to do right turns into a wrong. We are here because mankind advances through trial and error. Because nothing man does is ever perfect. And we are ultimately here because there are things out there, beyond mankind’s current knowledge level, that man must be guarded against until man can understand those things. We must remember this.”