Deep Fire Rising Read online

The truth of it all was that wealth generated greed in some and jealousy in others and eventually the two sides would fight for dominance. The banners they rallied behind, the causes they claimed, were contrived disguises to hide the ugly truth of this most basic of human conflicts.

  Mercer’s career had embroiled him in all of it: the terror, the massacres, the unbelievable savagery. He’d been in the middle of a half dozen low-grade wars, ethnic conflicts, and revolutionary coups. It wasn’t in his nature to remain passive in situations like that, or to turn tail as many foreign workers tended to do. Often, Mercer stayed behind and through his direct involvement had been instrumental in saving countless lives.

  Because of Mercer’s record for success, he had come to the attention of military and intelligence circles as someone with unique professional credentials and terror-related experience. Ira Lasko had approached Mercer last year with an offer to join his staff. He wanted to create a post specifically for him as special science advisor. The job went far beyond the purview of the chief executive’s regular scientific personnel. They focused on forming national policy. Mercer was to be a consultant and sometime field agent for when the worlds of science and terror collided, a fresh perspective on problems that no one else could solve.

  Mercer spiraled down the stairs and crossed the foyer. The easy banter from the past hour had evaporated, and his anticipation for his first vacation in a year was gone. Ira wouldn’t send two agents unless he absolutely had to. Something was up. Something big. “Why don’t you gentlemen come in,” he said. “Harry, take your time walking Drag.”

  “Right you are.” The octogenarian smiled at the agents. “Sorry about my little joke. No hard feelings.”

  The shorter agent flashed his Secret Service credentials to Mercer. He was Special Agent Michael Thayer. “Who was that man?”

  “A friend who knows about my position with Ira Lasko. Relax.”

  Thayer remained terse. “Admiral Lasko sent us to deliver you to Andrews Air Force Base, where an aircraft is standing by. He said you should pack for a week.”

  At least Ira’s expecting me to return, Mercer thought. He asked one of the more practical questions swirling in his head. “Do you know where I’m going? I need to know what to bring.”

  “We weren’t told,” the second agent said.

  “All right, give me a few minutes.” He went back to the stairs. At the balcony, Mercer saw neither of the agents had moved from near the front door. “The old man and his dog will be back in a few minutes. Tell him I’m in my bedroom packing.”

  Mercer hadn’t unpacked from Canada, so he dumped the dirty clothes from his suitcases into the hamper and tossed the empty luggage on his bed. An aircraft waiting at Andrews could mean a thirty-minute helicopter ride or a C-5 Galaxy cargo jet that could take him to the other side of the planet. No sense trying to guess what he’d need. He stuffed a week’s worth of socks and underwear into a bag along with his toiletry kit. A pair of jeans went next, a couple of casual shirts, a pair of slacks and a sports jacket. He added one dress shirt, one tie and a pair of heavy-duty miner’s coveralls with reinforced patches at the knees and elbows.

  Before throwing a metal hard hat on top of the pile, he grabbed the Beretta 92 semiautomatic from his nightstand. The weapon was coolly familiar in his hands. There was no need to check if the magazine was full; he could tell by its weight. He slid it into the helmet’s liner and zipped it into the leather bag. Work boots and loafers went into outside pockets.

  He checked his watch. Three minutes and forty seconds from the time the bag hit the bed until he was done. Not bad.

  He heard Harry’s voice from downstairs and peered over the balcony. “Don’t bother coming up. I’m leaving.”

  “You think I care what you do?” Harry retorted. “I left a full drink on the bar.”

  They met at the library landing, and Mercer followed Harry into the dark oak-and-brass barroom. He downed the last of his gimlet. “I’ll be gone a week, or so they tell me. Who knows.” Mercer peeled two hundred-dollar bills from his wallet. “For your party.”

  “Thanks.” Harry left the money untouched.

  “Hire someone to clean up when you’re done. Last time there were enough pizza boxes lying around to corner the world cardboard market.” Mercer smiled. “See you, Harry.”

  “Yeah, see you.” Harry shot him a good-natured scowl, trying not to show his disappointment.

  Drag rewarded Mercer with a sloppy kiss when he scratched behind the basset’s ears. Then he ambled off to lie at his master’s feet.

  Mercer pulled a bomber jacket from the coat closet next to the front door and followed Thayer and his partner to a dark Chevy Suburban parked in front of his town house. Traffic to Andrews was a snarl so it took more than an hour to reach the base. No one in the SUV said a word, which suited Mercer just fine.

  These were the first moments to think about what was happening and he found he resented the unnecessary secrecy. Ira could have easily called to tell him why he was needed. Mercer would have gone. Lasko didn’t have to send two goons to virtually kidnap him and rush him off for some clandestine flight. Typical government zealotry, Mercer thought, the kind he detested.

  Once past a series of checkpoints, Thayer guided the Suburban through the sprawling air force base and onto an access road behind the flight line. A KC-135 tanker was just taking off. Its engine shriek split the air while the four black smears of exhaust looked like claw marks on the otherwise bright sky. The Suburban pulled in toward an enormous hangar and drove through its side door. Thayer braked next to the only aircraft in the cavernous space, a Gulfstream IV executive jet painted in U.S. Air Force livery. Standing next to the open hatch was a soldier in camouflage fatigues. The dark insignia on his collar showed him to be a captain

  Without preamble, the muscular African American asked Thayer, “You got my passenger?”

  Mercer unlimbered himself from the SUV holding his bag in one hand.

  The soldier eyed him. “Mercer?” Mercer nodded. “I’m Sykes. Omega ninety-nine temple.”

  “Caravan eleven solstice.”

  “Good enough for me. Get aboard.”

  Even before Mercer got to his seat, the jet’s tail-mounted engines spooled to life and the nimble plane was towed through the hangar doors facing the complex of runways. Noticing that all the shades had been pulled over the windows, he reached to open the one nearest him. Captain Sykes leaned back in the seat in front of Mercer and closed the shade again.

  “Sorry, Doc. Think of it as blackout conditions.” Sykes had a wad of tobacco in the corner of his mouth and appeared to be swallowing the juice.

  “Any idea how long the flight will be?”

  “Long enough for you and I to play a whole lot of gin.”

  This was just getting better and better. “Do you know Admiral Lasko?”

  “I know he authorized this flight,” Sykes replied, “but I’ve never met the man. Way above my pay grade.”

  “If you happen to meet him before I see him again”—Mercer settled deeper in his seat, stretching out his six-foot frame and closing his eyes—“tell him he’s a dead man.”

  “So, no cards, Doc?”

  “Try solitaire.” Mercer felt the plane leap from the tarmac a few minutes later. There was no sense speculating about their destination. The same went for trying to guess what Ira wanted him for. Instead of frustrating himself further with mental gymnastics, he allowed his mind to slip into a balance between sleep and consciousness. If this was going to be a long flight, the least he could do was tune out most of it.

  Hurtling into the unknown. It was a phrase that just popped into his head and immediately reminded him of the first time he’d been involved with a mine rescue. The visions came back to him with a dreamy quality, a kind of hyperreality where Mercer seemed to be standing still while the events rushed past him. He was twenty-seven at the time, on one of his first consulting jobs. A fire had broken out eleven hundred feet below ground at a Wes
t Virginia coal mine where he’d been plotting the best way to extract a newly discovered vein. As the only miner there who’d trained with South Africa’s famed Proto Team, the world’s best subterranean rescue group, Mercer had been the first volunteer to go down into the mine. He led four other men into the elevator cage after it had been verified that not all the men who’d gone down on their shift had returned when the mine was evacuated.

  Mounted above the cage was a crude sign: THIS MINE HAS OPERATED FOR 203 ACCIDENT-FREE DAYS. Not anymore.

  Smoke billowed up the shaft like pollution from a factory’s chimney, so thick that their lanterns were reduced to pinpricks. Smudge built up on their full-face oxygen masks and simply smeared when they tried to clean them. Fear caused Mercer’s breathing to come in sharp gulps.

  The elevator dropped—hurtling into the unknown—past ten levels and deeper into the smoke. As it approached eleven the heat was brutal, radiating from the rock like an oven. But none of the men were willing to stop. Not until they knew what had happened to the twenty-six unaccounted miners caught up in the conflagration.

  The scene when the cage doors opened was worse than the most gruesome image of Hades. The walls, ceiling and floor smoldered with the residual energy of the fire’s overflash. Anything combustible was a searing pocket of flame—men mostly, horrible twisted shapes of char. Almost worse was that some of them were still alive. The rescuers used portable fire extinguishers to shoot out jets of foam to smother the flames. As the sound of the fires waned, the pitiable cries of the dying grew.

  The first explosion had exhausted most of the mine’s supply of air, but even with the industrial fans on the surface shut down, it was drawing in more like a flue. The blaze would reignite the swirling eddies of coal dust as soon as enough oxygen had been drawn down. Mercer understood that he and his team had minutes. They dragged the wounded into the skip hoist. Two of the rescue workers wanted to stay down and look for others, but Mercer wouldn’t let them. The mine was too hot. The risks they were taking already bordered on suicidal.

  The second explosion, as violent as the first, rocked the hoist when they were fifty feet from the surface. Without the protection of their retardant suits, the overpressure wave would have scalded them to death. They used their bodies as human shields to protect their fallen comrades until the hoist reached the top. Scrambling amid a hellish torrent of smoke, they carried the seven men they’d saved clear of the heat. A triage station had already been established. Topside workers carried the wounded to the building as Mercer and his men stripped out of their scorched suits. By the time Mercer staggered into the first-aid station, only one of the men was still alive, and even he didn’t survive long enough to make it to the nearest hospital. The mine continued to burn for twelve days. After the bodies were recovered, level eleven had never reopened.

  Of all the mine rescues Mercer had been involved with, that one struck the deepest in his mind. Not because it was the first, but because it was the only one where he hadn’t saved at least one miner who survived long enough to be found.

  Mercer shook his head as if to dislodge the images. His memory was so full of such horrors that he tried not to revisit them. He blamed his uncharacteristic dark mood on the fact that this whole situation had him on edge. The unknown was perhaps his most feared adversary. As soon as he knew what was happening, the mood would pass.

  A little over four hours later, the engine’s steady drone changed in pitch. They were beginning their descent. Guessing the aircraft cruised at five hundred knots, Mercer estimated they’d covered about twenty-four hundred miles. But not knowing their direction could put them anywhere in a circle large enough to touch on South America, the Azore Islands, the tip of Greenland and as far west as . . .

  It couldn’t be.

  Maybe it could. There was one easy way to find out. Sykes wasn’t exactly asleep, but he hadn’t turned the page of the book he was reading for the past fifteen minutes. Before his escort became aware the plane had left her cruising altitude, Mercer inched open his window shade. The darkness outside the aircraft was absolute. They could be over the Atlantic as far as he knew, but he doubted that very much.

  The bright moon played against the underside of the clouds above the Gulfstream, and when Mercer pressed a hand to the Plexiglas to cut the glare from the cabin lights, he caught the dark reflection of mountains running off to the horizon.

  The plane made a gentle turn and a riot of light erupted from the ground. It was a garish display, an unworldly sight like no place on earth. It was Las Vegas.

  And Mercer knew of only one place near Vegas that was secret enough to warrant the level of security he’d endured. It was a remote section of desert euphemistically called Dreamland, but known more widely by its designation on an old Department of Energy map.

  Area 51.

  AREA 51, NEVADA

  Knowinghis destination only deepened the mystery surrounding Mercer’s clandestine trip.

  What little he knew about Area 51 came from cable television. The secluded facility, along with Nellis Air Force Base and the Yucca Flats Atomic Test Range, encompassed a territory larger than Switzerland and had first been used for flight testing the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s. Since then most of America’s premier aircraft had gone through flight trials at Groom Lake, the massive dry lake bed on which Area 51 was built. The SR-71, the F-117 Stealth, the B-2 Spirit bomber and the F-22 Raptor had all first taken flight here. Rumors persisted that they were currently developing a hypersonic spy plane to replace the Blackbird, called Aurora, and that it was stationed at Dreamland. While the military continued to deny the existence of the base, these were the most acknowledged facts about Area 51.

  Mostly, however, the legend of Area 51 grew from the myth that a flying saucer, which reportedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, had been transported to this isolated desert facility for study. Conspiracy theorists took the government’s denial as proof it really had happened. They strung together reports of strange lights, the testimony of charlatans and crackpots, and their own paranoia into a fantastic story of reverse engineering on the ships and bizarre medical experiments on the crew.

  Mercer didn’t believe a word of it. Area 51 was simply the place where the military developed our next-generation aircraft in secret. Disregarding the absurdity that an advanced civilization was clumsy enough to crash on earth, the idea that the military could keep such a secret for half a century defied belief.

  The one part of the story he did believe, however, was that the security forces at Area 51 were authorized to use deadly force. He had no idea if this directive had ever been needed, but he’d heard of cases where backpackers and aircraft watchers were escorted from the region by hard-looking well-armed men they’d derisively dubbed Cammo Dudes.

  The window shade snapped closed like a guillotine. When Mercer looked up, Captain Sykes’s eyes held equal measures of displeasure and resignation. “You shouldn’t have done that, Doc.”

  Before Sykes could say anything further, the copilot emerged from the cockpit. “Captain, a word.”

  Sykes joined him at the front of the cabin and listened for several seconds. He nodded once then returned to his seat. The copilot closed the cockpit door behind himself.

  Before sitting, Sykes reached into an overhead storage bin. He retrieved a helmet and tossed it onto Mercer’s lap. It resembled a welder’s helmet, but the face shield was completely opaque. With it on Mercer wouldn’t be able to see a thing. “You’re going to have to put that on when we land,” Sykes said.

  “Captain, I know where we are. Is this really necessary?”

  “If you pretend you don’t know where we’re landing, I don’t have to pretend to fill out a ton of useless reports. Call it a favor. Seems we’ve hit a bit of head-wind on our way here. Usually we’d land and you’d be transferred to a blacked-out van. But we’ve missed our schedule, and in about ten minutes a Russian spy satellite will be passing overhead. We’re going to be landing normally, b
ut we’ll taxi straight into one of the hangars.” Sykes’s voice took on an earnest tone. “Security at this installation is the tightest in the world, Doc. Standing orders are to shoot first and don’t worry about the questions afterward. You reading me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m telling you this to save your life. When we get off this aircraft, I’ll guide you along. Do not remove that helmet. You do and they won’t just pull a gun on you. They’ll drop you where you stand.”

  Mercer let a sarcastic retort die on his lips. Sykes was telling him this for his own good. He twisted the clumsy-looking helmet on his lap. “Just tell me when to put it on.”

  The plane continued its descent, leaving the glare of Las Vegas a hundred miles astern, and made its approach on the longest runway in the world, a strip of reinforced concrete more than twice the length needed to accommodate the space shuttle. The Gulfstream touched down more gently than any commercial flight Mercer had ever been on. In a race to hide from the spy satellite coming over the horizon, her engines barely seemed to slow as the pilot looped them across the apron for a distant hangar.

  The sudden deceleration when the aircraft reached its destination chirped rubber from the tires and jolted Mercer in his seat. The executive jet seesawed on its landing gear as the engines wound to silence.

  “Okay, Doc, might as well get that face shield on,” Sykes suggested. “I’ll take care of your bag.”

  Mercer slipped into his jacket and settled the helmet on his head. His world went gray. The lack of vision was momentarily disorienting. Not until he tipped his head back could he see the tops of his shoes and the plush carpet. “Feels like we’re going to play a bizarre game of pin the tail on the donkey.”

  Sykes laughed. “So long as the guards don’t play pin the nine millimeter on the geologist. Okay, come toward my voice. There’s enough headroom so you don’t need to duck. That’s good. All right, turn here. You’re almost at the boarding stairs. There’s four of them to the tarmac.”