Alternative 3, p.28
Alternative 3, page 28
‘Outside?’ he said. Curtis dropped his Priscilla look, and went with him out the door and round the side of the garage. He stood with his arms and legs splayed out as far as he could go, as the Dweeb sprayed the tinfoil black. It didn’t appear like normal paint to Curtis, because it dried almost instantly and stuck well to the foil. When he had finished, Curtis held a towel up to his face as the Dweeb did his head. By the time he was back inside, Al was ready to buckle him in. Curtis carefully climbed into the canvas frame, and the Dweeb put a radio microphone on a tiny headset around his head, positioning the little microphone in front of his mouth. When he tried to test it though, the Dweeb nearly blew one of Curtis’s eardrums clean in two. The look Curtis shot him helped him understand the problem.
When he was buckled in, Maggie handed him the night-vision goggles which he put on, but left sitting up on his forehead. Rita handed him Sam’s digital camera as Al duct-taped a cellphone to Curtis’s arm. It was a back-up. The calls would be traceable, so it was for emergency use only. As Curtis was familiarising himself with the camera, Al began taping something else to his leg.
‘What’s that, a splint?’ It was a long black plastic rod.
‘Not quite,’ said Al. ‘It’s a high-intensity cattle prod. Just think of it as insurance.’ Curtis looked at Al accusingly. This guy was seriously weird.
‘Hey! It’s nothing to do with me!’ he said, holding his hands up in mock defence. ‘That one was Rita’s idea.’ Al finished taping the long black device to his leg, and stood back admiring his handiwork.
‘Now you’re sure both these batteries have been totally charged?’ asked Curtis, patting the battery pack under the cart.
The Dweeb nodded. ‘Checked and triple checked.’ He held up a small sac, like a hot-water bottle with straps. ‘And this is a mountain biker’s drinkpac — just suck on the straw.’ He put the harness on backwards, so the sac rested on Curtis’s chest.
‘Make sure you take different routes back to the room. I’ll wait for the signal . . . just make it look good.’
Al put his hand out to him. ‘Good luck, Curtis. You’re a brave American.’ It was embarrassing. Al seemed to think he was going to be doing something significant. Something almost patriotic. He didn’t have a clue.
‘Yeah, dude! Sock it to ‘em!’ said the Dweeb. Yeah right.
‘Play it smart, Curtis,’ said Maggie. Rita didn’t say anything at all. That said plenty.
‘Hardest part’s to come, so keep focused,’ said Curtis. ‘You know what to do.’
‘We’ll be fine. Godspeed Curtis.’ said Al, turning off the light and opening the garage doors as the others left. Curtis hadn’t realised Al had such a hidden penchant for dramatics. He was good at it too.
Once they were gone, Curtis sat in the Dweebmobile and waited in the dark. After a few moments he pulled his goggles down and switched them on. He practised using his hands and feet on the controls, getting used to the way goggles made his body seem further away than it really was. They were amazing things. His ability to see in the dark — at least the bit he could see through the open garage door — had increased 20-fold. Now he just had to wait. He gently slid the lever backwards and brought the cart up close to where he had hung his robe. He pulled his MP3 player from the pocket and unplugged the radio phones and put them into the player. He needed a song for the moment. One to help get him in the zone, and forget about his nerves. ‘Zoo Station’ — the song fitted the bizarre sight through the goggles perfectly. He waited. He was ready for the shuffle, and he was ready for the deal. Yes, indeed, he was ready for the crush.
After what seemed an age of waiting, Curtis finally saw the signal. Brilliant flashes of white, red and yellow lit up the foreground outside the garage door. Fireworks. It must have taken a while for Maggie to convince the regulars to join her in a fireworks party in the parking lot. But it was the perfect diversion. Bright enough to obscure Curtis’s departure from the satellites and spectacular but harmless enough to get the Cammos out and keep them watching for a while. That was the plan, anyway. He was sure they’d send out whoever was on duty to check it out. Being so close to a secret military installation and all.
He edged the cart forward tentatively this time. It jerked into life. He guided it out of the garage and pointed it at the darkness at the end of the street. He tested out the gas on the asphalt. It actually worked, and Curtis was surprised at how quick it was. He slowed as he hit the rough terrain of the desert where the asphalt ended, and concentrated on dodging the tufts of wild vegetation and Joshua trees that seemed to spring out of nowhere. By the time the next few songs had ended and Curtis had plugged his phones back into the radio again, Al was calling him.
‘Bart, you there?’ he said. He sounded panicky. The nicknames were Al’s idea, so no one could work out who they were if they were listening in. It was a sobering thought, and no one had argued. Curtis got to choose them.
‘I’m here, Homer,’ said Curtis softly.
‘You OK?’
‘We’re out of the blocks,’ said Curtis. That was what Al had been waiting to hear. The transmission ended. They had to keep any talking to an absolute minimum. Even though they were using some obscure channel, and scrambling their transmissions with one of Jim’s toys, there was a high chance they were going to be eavesdropped on.
Curtis checked his bearings again. Maggie had given him detailed instructions on what route to take to the base. She had obviously put the goggles to good use on her ‘walks’. As he slowly got the knack of steering with his feet, and his eyes adjusted to the terrain, he began to speed up. It was just like a computer game. Except real. He knew he’d be in the saddle a while, so he sipped on the drinkpac, which was filled with iced water. He needed to keep his body cool. A couple of times he got stuck, running into small outcroppings of vegetation. But with the reverse gear he was able to back away and keep going.
Curtis was surprised at how easily the tricycle handled the desert floor. In complete silence. Soon he was lost in concentration, focusing all his attention on negotiating the terrain, keeping on course and gradually increasing his speed. He would be there way ahead of schedule. He wound his way through two large valleys, and over a small ridge. Eventually he could see the lights of the base making a silhouette along the top of the next rise. He was close. He reduced his approach speed, found a large tussock outcrop and parked behind it. He slowly looked around. There was no movement he could see.
‘I’m at the gate,’ he said into his microphone.
‘You’re early. System check’s not for another 30. Sit tight,’ said Al.
Shit. Sitting out here dressed like this in a moonbuggy wasn’t Curtis’s idea of fun. He hadn’t realised how fast the thing was. There was nothing he could do except wait.
‘Call me in 25,’ said Curtis. The line went silent. He lay back and tried to lie as still as he could, lifting the hood of the wetsuit back past his ears. He needed to be able to hear now as well. His ears were more useful than his eyes out here, and he hoped his heat signature would be mistaken for a cougar’s butt. But after a few nervous stares into the dark, he got used to the sounds of the desert at night and started to relax a little. He gazed up at the stars. They appeared in unfamiliar shades of green through the goggles, but in the crystal clarity of the lenses and the night-time desert air, they stopped being stars and became planets. Suns and moons and planets. They lost some of their mystique.
Curtis indulged in a little daydreaming. He had plenty of time to kill, his mind was racing, and he sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere. As he looked up at the night sky, he wondered if it was possible. Alternative 3. If it was, then that meant that out there, not too far away, humanity had sprouted a colony. Perhaps. The moon sure seemed close enough. Mars was not far beyond that, though he couldn’t pick it out of the hundreds of dazzling dots in the sky. Curtis shook his head in wonder. Because if it was true, then it had all been done in secret. He still had trouble with that. He knew how quickly a secret could travel, and how far. That was how they’d been busted all those years ago. Because Roly couldn’t keep a secret. He’d started bragging about their exploits on the net, trying to impress the chicks.
Curtis needed to make sense of it all. He took a deep breath and chilled. He needed to start from the beginning. To put things into some kind of order, and to piece them together to see if they stacked up.
First, if the hypothesis was right, the Nazis had invented an aircraft so radically advanced, even for them, that they kept it secret after the war. It was so superior to conventional technology that they knew they’d be able to turn World War II into a sideshow. They used it to escape from the Allies, and hid out in a base they’d constructed during the war down in Antarctica. At the end of the war, the Allies somehow found out about the base, and went down there with guns blazing but instead they got their own asses kicked by aircraft so advanced they could fly from pole to pole in less than 30 minutes. The Nazis must have realised they’d end up getting nuked, especially going on Truman’s track record. They obviously came up with some way to ensure their survival long enough to make a whole airforce out of these things. Maybe Jim was right and they cut a deal. That’s what he’d have done under the circumstances. Technology in return for survival. Drip-feed the know-how to the Allies in return for them turning a blind eye.
But something else must have happened. They’d discovered the planet they’d been fighting over was dying. Suddenly the goal posts were moved. To space. And the clock was ticking. Maybe they overcame their differences and decided they needed to cooperate to succeed. Alternative 3 would have required the most advanced technology ever developed to make it a reality. Flying-disc technology. But it must have been expensive, even by the scales of the richest banking dynasties. It would have soaked up the equivalent of the GDP of a medium-sized country every year. A public space programme would have been the perfect cover. While most of mankind were celebrating what they thought were our first few tentative steps into space, flying discs were probably ferrying people and equipment to the growing colony on Mars.
Curtis took another long slow breath. He pictured in his mind the huge craft they’d seen from the Hummer. They were flying discs all right. No wonder there were so many reports of sightings in recent decades. And not just by drunk sheriff’s deputies. They’d been seen by pilots and air traffic controllers, policemen and astronauts. Even US presidents had gone public that they’d seen what they thought were UFOs. And all along they were man-made. Curtis wondered if the President really thought they might be alien visitors, or whether he was part of the charade. Part of the most preposterous PR campaign ever, involving aliens, Men in Black, abductions, Blue Book, and maybe even ET. He lay there trying to work out some of the outrageous implications of all this, when Al interrupted with his five-minute warning signal.
‘Five, Bart, good luck.’
‘Thanks, Homer,’ said Curtis. That got him hyped again. He could feel his pulse start to quicken. He wheeled the cart out from the tussock and headed up towards the lights. He could hear the soft gentle hum of machinery over the rise. It wouldn’t be long now. As soon as the system check had ended, it would register on the programme he’d shown to Rita, who was monitoring Sam’s lappie. Then she’d follow the instructions Curtis had given her over dinner. First, she’d kill the main topside lighting, flicking it on and off a couple of times to make it appear like a malfunction. Then she’d block the automatic computer-controlled back-up lighting. That would mean the supervisor would have to make the walk from his workstation to the emergency power system’s control shed, the substation with its own generating system. Curtis figured he had about eight minutes.
As the cart crawled slowly up the rise, he got a strong whiff of something bad. It grew stronger, like the hot stench of freshly decaying meat. Like roadkill. As he neared the top of the rise, he had to catch himself from gagging. He spotted through his goggles what looked like a small dog lying in front of him. That was the smell all right. But as he started to move around the dead animal, he noticed a thin wire stretching across the ground directly in front of him. He stopped and looked at it for a second. It must have been some kind of sensor. But for what? Then Curtis realised what it was . . . and how the dog had been killed. There was a series of wires. And they must have been electrified, to keep wild animals and other unwelcome visitors out of the base. They were spaced out low to the ground, low enough for him ride over with the cart’s rubber tyres. He tried not to think about how much current they might be firing. Enough to stop a stray dog in its tracks, though, that was for sure.
He negotiated the cart over the wires, hoping they flexed low enough for the wheels to clear. Soon he was through the barrier and almost at the top of the ridge. He stopped the cart and as quietly as he could began unbuckling the straps holding him in. Then he slid down to his belly and crawled up to the lip of the ridge, and as he carefully peered over the top, the base came into view ahead of him. It was enormous. Big just didn’t come anywhere near it. Some of the buildings were bigger than anything he’d seen at Cape Canaveral. There was no sign of movement. No people, no vehicles and no flying discs. The outside lighting was limited to door entries and what looked like some security lighting. The whole complex was formidable.
He switched on Sam’s camera and got some good footage. The ‘before’ shot. He’d just finished filming when without warning, the whole base fell into darkness. Curtis watched closely through his goggles for any movement. The lights flickered briefly a couple of times, and then died altogether. It was time to move.
16
Curtis jogged silently across the sloping hill towards the base. There were no perimeter barriers he could see, but he kept a close watch on the ground in front of him just in case. As he neared the outer ring of the base, he gently lowered himself to the ground. He was still in the shadows, but through the night goggles he felt like a fairy on a Christmas tree, so he flattened his body as hard as he could against the ground, just as a door opened. A man in uniform had left the large building on Curtis’s left, and was walking out towards him, to a small building separated from the others. The supervisor. It had to be.
Curtis pulled his goggles up to reassure himself he was hidden in the blackness. The night took on a completely different reality without them. It made him feel safer. There had been no sirens or warning beacons, and the way the supervisor was walking suggested it wasn’t the first time they’d had a power cut out here. But Curtis still felt himself starting to sweat, despite the cold air and remembering he’d left the drinkpac with the cart, he picked up a handful of cold, sandy dirt and rubbed it over his face, just to be sure. As soon as the supervisor had reached the substation and closed the door, Curtis got up and readjusted the goggles. Once he had his bearings again, he moved in a slow jog across a large expanse of asphalt towards the building the supervisor had just come from. He stopped and crouched down beside the door and listened. There was no sound of movement, so he chanced a quick examination of the door security. It was a single card swipe with a keypad. That meant a PIN. Shit. He crouched back down again and thought furiously. He had to come up with something. He couldn’t stop now, not after getting this far. But he was way out of his depth. It was the sort of moment where the heroes in thriller novels suddenly drew on their SAS or CIA training. Fat chance. Curtis had to do it the old-fashioned way, with brains.
He realised he was running out of time. The supervisor would probably be finishing up soon and returning from the substation, and the lights would be back on. He needed a swipe card and PIN number, since Rita wouldn’t be able to hack into the base security systems with the limited remote access she was using. He was on his own.
The only thing he could think of was the supervisor. He’d be back any moment, with his swipe card, and he’d have to use his PIN to get back in. Curtis felt for the cattle prod Al had taped to his leg, and pulled the tape off. It was as long as his forearm, thin and black, with two contacts at one end. Curtis figured that was the business end. He looked for a trigger, and found a button under the grip. There was also a dial sitting flush with the handle. He flicked it round to MAX, and looked for somewhere to hide. But there was nowhere close enough to the door he could find to wait. He was still searching when the emergency lighting came on. It was incredibly bright through his goggles and totally freaked him. He quickly lifted them up and readjusted his eyes to the light. He was surprised to find that the lighting was actually still quite dim. Only the door lights had come on, but he was right under one of them.
He ran back to the substation building and hunched next to the door. He could only think of one way out of this. He banged quickly on the door with his fist, and then darted around to the perimeter side of the building, away from the lights. He turned on Sam’s camera again, flipping the LCD screen around so he could watch it from a 90-degree angle, and carefully placed it down at the corner of the building, facing back towards the substation door. It wasn’t recording, but he could see along the side of the building through the screen, and just hoped it was small enough not to be noticed. A few seconds later the door opened, and the supervisor’s head peered out. When he didn’t see anyone outside the door, he walked outside and looked around. Curtis crouched into a sprinter’s position, grasping the cattle prod firmly in one hand. He’d only have one attempt at this.
He pulled off the goggles and placed them against the wall in the dirt. The door swung shut behind the supervisor, who was now talking into a radio. Curtis couldn’t hear his voice, but after a few seconds he nodded his head and hooked the radio back onto his belt. He looked about him again, and then walked back to the substation door. This was it. Curtis tensed as he watched the supervisor swipe his card and begin punching his PIN into the keypad. He had only seconds before the door swung shut behind him.
