Origin, page 23
By the time he got there, however, things had gone even more wrong. Although Steinberg had been killed, Adams and Edwards had made it into the escape tunnel and had vanished towards the exit in the magneto-electric cart.
‘Converge on Groom Lake Road!’ he yelled into his radio mouthpiece, panic creeping now into his own voice. ‘All units!’
23
ADAMS HOISTED LYNN out of the cart and pointed upwards. The rail track stopped several feet from the end of the tunnel, which turned sharply upwards into a short vertical shaft. A ladder was bolted to the wall, which snaked its way up through the dark cylinder to what looked like some sort of submarine hatch.
Adams started climbing the ladder and Lynn followed him immediately, turning to look back down the long tunnel for only a second to make sure that they were still alone.
Her head had recovered from the shock of the cart’s acceleration, and the nausea had now left her completely, although her stomach still felt more than a little nervous, given that they still had to make good their escape from the most secure military base in the world; and not only was there a team of trained killers hot on their heels behind them, they had no idea whatsoever what would be on the other side of the hatch above them. Still, she stayed close behind Adams, watching as he reached the top and entwined his feet in the rungs so that he could brace himself to open the metal hatch.
He tried to twist the circular spin lock but it was too tight.
He looked down at her. ‘Damn thing’s rusted shut,’ he said sourly. ‘Probably hasn’t been opened in the last fifty years.’
Despite the seeming pointlessness of it, he turned back and twisted again, until he was red in the face and the skin on his hands started to blister. But still it wouldn’t move, the inoperable hatch teasing them cruelly with the possibility of escape just beyond.
Caines checked the monitors. Although the corridors of Level 36 were conspicuously absent of security cameras, being almost completely off the grid, the team headed up by Captain Aldo Barnes was feeding images back to him from their own helmet-mounted imagers.
He was happy to see that Barnes had had the foresight to bring some L-84 ‘Ramcarts’ down from the upper guardroom. The vehicle was basically a modified golf buggy, and although not anywhere near as fast as the device that had whisked the escapees away at such high speed, it was considerably faster than making the pursuit down the tunnels on foot.
Caines watched as half of the men managed to squeeze into the two small vehicles and then took off up the tunnel at a rapid thirty miles an hour, while the rest of the men started to jog along behind them. Then he turned away to check on the progress of his other units, who were headed for the tunnel’s surface exit.
Barnes took point in the lead buggy, the noise of the diesel engines deafening in the confines of the narrow tunnel, a savage grin on his face as he checked the magazine on his Steyr AUG assault rifle. The couple just a few miles up ahead had left two of his men unconscious on the floor back in the interrogation rooms, a professional insult to Barnes, and one that would soon be avenged.
Adams heard the noise of the engines first, even with his ears pulsing with blood from the pressure inside his head as he continued to struggle against the spinlock.
The damn guards must have brought some sort of vehicles into the tunnel and would be upon them a lot sooner than Adams had hoped. A team of armed men on foot would probably have taken close to an hour to reach them. But in motorized transport? It depended on the exact speed, of course, but it would certainly be a lot less than an hour, that was for sure. It could even be as little as a few minutes.
Adams looked down at Lynn, saw that she, too, had heard the roar of engines; could see the look of worry in her eyes, not only for themselves but also for the unborn child she now knew was growing in her belly.
Adams turned back to the cursed, rusted hatch and attacked it with renewed ferocity. The damn thing was going to open one way or another; he could not let it be otherwise.
Moments later, he felt Lynn move up beside him, feet entwined with his, her back braced against the tunnel wall opposite.
She smiled reassuringly at him, reaching up to take hold of the opposite side of the lock. She looked at him, more than simple love transmitted by her gaze; it was understanding, belief, mutual recognition of their deepest feelings for one another.
‘Let’s do it together, OK?’ she said to him, and Adams knew that she wasn’t just talking about opening the hatch.
He returned her look with one of his own, one that he hoped transmitted just as much to her, and nodded his head.
‘On the count of three, we both twist together,’ he said, as the noise of the diesel engines grew louder and louder.
‘One,’ he said, as they both tightened their hands around the stainless steel hatch seal. ‘Two,’ he continued, taking a deep breath. ‘Three!’ he shouted, and they both hauled on the ring as hard as they could, muscles contracting with such force that the veins started to pulse blue in their foreheads, threatening to burst from their skin.
At first there was nothing, not even a hint of movement, but as both of them continued to exert an almost inhuman level of force, there came the very first slip of metal on metal, a grinding sound and slight judder that they both felt through their hands.
Adams looked at Lynn, unable to talk with the effort; but his eyes said it all. We’re almost there! Harder!
24
THE RAMCART BUGGIES built up to their maximum speed of fifty miles per hour just one mile into the long tunnel, and Barnes calculated that they would reach the end within seven minutes of setting off from the disguised elevator entrance.
He checked his watch as six minutes came around, gesturing for his men to get ready. They would make the assault as soon as they arrived, hit the two escapees hard and fast.
And then he saw the end of the tunnel coming up, the cart abandoned. The man and woman were not readily apparent, which meant that they were probably stuck up the access tunnel, struggling to open the metal hatch.
Barnes smiled to himself; the hatch was as good as welded shut from years of neglect. It was on the ‘to do’ list but always seemed to be one of the things that never got done.
The buggies cruised to a stop and Barnes and his men spilled out into the tunnel, guns raised, sprinting towards the vertical shaft. It was going to be like shooting fish in a barrel.
Two of his men got there before him, assault rifles pointing vertically up the short exit tunnel. Barnes was momentarily confused when no shots were fired, but then he was there, looking up towards the hatch himself, and understood in an instant.
For there was nothing there to shoot at; the shaft was empty, the steel hatch open to the night sky above.
Adams and Lynn had finally managed to turn the steel rim enough to break the rusty seal, the sound of tortured metal giving way to a freer, easier movement, until the hatch had opened fully.
Dirt and soil had collapsed on their heads as Adams pushed the hatch gingerly open, and he held it open a few inches as he and Lynn moved to the side and waited for the soil to work its way down to the tunnel floor.
Adams pushed again, and although he met with resistance, he continued the effort until it was halfway open. For reasons of safety, he hadn’t wanted to open it all the way anyway, as he didn’t want to attract too much attention if there were any guards in the vicinity. He presumed that the guards from Level 36 would have issued a general alert, and that they may therefore have already reached the tunnel exit, if they could find it.
Holding it open just enough for someone to crawl through, he gestured for Lynn to come across to him. She transferred to the ladder side, bracing herself as she took the weight of the hatch. Adams pulled out his handgun, kissed Lynn quickly on the lips, and edged his way slowly out into the moonlit night.
He kept his profile low to the ground, slipping out of the semi-open hatch slowly and silently. Once his upper torso was out, he stopped and monitored the immediate area, keeping his head still while his eyes roved.
There was no movement, of that he could be pretty sure. He was an expert in tracking animals at night and was used to searching for movement even on the darkest nights; but here there were no telltale signs whatsoever. But that wasn’t to say that there wasn’t anybody further out, monitoring them electronically, or behind the hatch cover where he couldn’t see.
And so he slowly extricated himself from the hatch completely, allowing his body to turn in order to check the rear area as well. He swept the entire horizon for three hundred and sixty degrees, until he was happy that nobody was there.
But, now clear of the engine noise in the tunnels below, he began to pick up the noise of other engines, on the land, converging on them, and he knew security must know where they were and already be on their way.
He pulled up on to his haunches, reached for the hatch and ripped it open completely, the earth that had been resting on top now flung to the side. He reached further in and grasped Lynn by her arms, pulling her up and out of the tunnel in one smooth motion until her feet hit solid ground next to him.
He gestured to the noise of engines to their right, and Lynn followed his gaze. There was a high chain-link fence just twenty feet from them, and they could see the brightly lit runways just beyond the fence line. The noise was coming from the runway, and they quickly realized that armoured vehicles were approaching at speed, using the runway as a fast road. To their left, a narrow empty road ran far into the distance. Other than that, the area resembled the barren scrub of the Chilean and Peruvian deserts from which they had so recently escaped.
‘They’re on their way,’ Adams said to her. ‘We need to leave. Now!’
25
BARNES EMERGED FROM the hatch as the headlights of four large off-road vehicles headed across the bumpy terrain towards him, body-mounted .50 calibre machine guns trained directly at him.
‘Stand down!’ he shouted into his tactical mic, tuned to the wavelength used by all the different elements of Area 51 security. He raised his arms as the lead vehicle’s searchlight hit him straight on, illuminating him perfectly.
The rest of his men poured up and out of the tunnel behind him as the four 4x4s steered to a stop around them.
‘They’re out here somewhere,’ Barnes announced, ‘and they’ve only got a few minutes’ head start.’
‘Do we have monitors out here?’ came a question from the interior of the second vehicle.
‘Affirmative,’ Colonel Caines announced from his station inside the MSB. ‘We have sensors all the way out to the main gate.’
Because it was so large, the actual perimeter of the Groom Lake base was not fenced in; rather, the sole approach road – Groom Lake Road, just fourteen miles from Highway 375, known affectionately by locals as the Extraterrestrial Highway – was marked with a variety of vivid signs warning people not to go any further. Anyone who did was instantly caught by the private security guards – the ‘camo dudes’ – who then handed them over to the County Sheriff’s Department. The land between the outer perimeter and the base itself was monitored by an array of heat sensors and motion cameras, as well as by the men who kept a visual lookout from the high hills that surrounded the approach road.
‘Barnes, you and your men will continue the search on foot,’ the colonel continued, ‘and I want the jeeps to extend the search area, right up to the main perimeter. We’ve got two hundred more men coming into the search zone within the next ten minutes, along with dogs and thermal imagers. Helicopters are being made ready and will be airborne soon, extending the zone further. Now let’s get going!’
‘Yes, sir!’ Barnes responded. ‘You heard the man!’ he said, turning to his team. ‘Let’s move out!’
Four long, terrible, migraine-inducing hours later, Colonel Briscoe Caines sat rooted to the monitors. The entire security apparatus of the world’s most secure military facility had been mobilized to find just two lightly armed escapees, in an open desert, without success. Three hundred men, two dozen off-road vehicles and fourteen helicopters had searched five hundred square miles of desert and had still found nothing.
So what in the hell was going on? Even though a lot of base staff had recently transferred to Europe on the orders of Stephen Jacobs, Caines was hardly without resources. But no trace was found anywhere, save for a pair of tracks that led from the tunnel exit across the desert sand on to Groom Lake Road.
Where could they have gone once on the road? There had been no sign of any vehicle. Perhaps someone had turned up in a car and whisked them away. Or maybe a couple of motorbikes had been left by the tunnel for them. But how on earth would that have been arranged? And the helicopters would certainly have found them anyway, if the sensors had not.
Caines was at a loss to explain it.
Lynn shifted her weight, struggling to get comfortable, but it was impossible.
After leaving the tunnel, Adams had dragged her to the left, out towards the paved road, where he had rolled himself along the tarmac, encouraging Lynn to do the same. ‘To confuse the dogs,’ he had told her, before taking her hand and pulling her back, retracing their steps to the tunnel exit. Adams had made sure they stepped into their previous footprints, covering up the fact that they had returned.
He had then gone to work, digging earth from next to the hatch until, with Lynn’s help, a small hollow had been cleared. Then he had pulled her down into the small pit and started to cover their bodies with the loose soil.
‘How are we going to breathe?’ she whispered breathlessly shortly before they were completely covered.
Adams pulled out his pistol, ejected the magazine and slipped it into his pocket before racking the slide to eject the round in the chamber. He gathered it up and put this in his pocket also, as Lynn started to do the same with her own gun.
Putting the butts of the guns in their mouths, they continued to cover themselves until they were completely buried, the barrels of their pistols sticking out of the dirt very slightly, allowing the cold night air to filter down to them.
And they had been like that ever since, lying immobile, hardly daring to breathe when the team had come up from the tunnel and the 4x4s had arrived on the scene, terrified that their pistol barrels would be found or their body heat would register on the guards’ hi-tech monitors.
But the barrels had been missed in the excitement – with two escapees on the loose, a mound of earth disturbed by the hatch being opened wasn’t of prime consideration; and their body heat wasn’t picked up by the sensors, thanks to the cold earth covering them.
They were still in place when the dogs had come and the sound of dozens – perhaps hundreds – of more feet had descended on the area; but again, the sounds came and went, and the mound of earth remained undisturbed.
But they had been in the same position now for far too long, and Lynn was starting to suffer from an intense claustrophobia that she had never before experienced. Even though there were only a few inches of topsoil separating her from the outside world, there might as well have been a thousand. She felt as if she had been truly buried alive, like one of those people who were declared dead a little too prematurely and then woke up buried in a coffin under tons of earth. Some of them had clawed their way out, Lynn knew, and now she felt that same desire, the intense need to just start digging.
She felt movement next to her, and realized Adams was doing exactly that; he was escaping from their earthy prison. Had it been too much for him?
Lynn started to dig her own way out instantly, and she was almost there when Adams reached in and helped pull her out, the heavy soil tumbling down her hair and off her skin as she removed the jaw-achingly wide gun butt from her mouth, eager to breathe in a full lungful of real air. As she took those first few precious, wonderful mouthfuls of clean air, Adams scanned the immediate area.
‘They’re not here, for now at least,’ he said with some satisfaction. ‘They’re probably scouring every inch of land around the base.’
‘So what do we do now?’ she asked him, her composure returning slowly.
‘Now we escape,’ he replied with confidence.
‘Which way?’
Adams smiled at her and pointed over her shoulder at the chain-link fence surrounding Area 51.
Lynn turned and looked, then groaned in disbelief. ‘Oh no,’ she said forlornly. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’
26
THE FENCE WAS not in fact the formidable obstacle it at first seemed. It was really a demarcation line more than anything, a way of letting base personnel know where they could and could not go. In terms of security, it was assumed that it was impossible to get past the body-heat and motion detectors placed all over the surrounding desert, and the roving patrols of guards.
Getting closer, though, Adams could see that although the fence wasn’t physically impressive – just one row of chain-link, ten feet high – its entire length was linked to both motion and body-heat sensors. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so easy.
Adams crouched in the shadows, his night vision picking out what looked like a gate some distance away, and after a moment’s observation, he could see that this was where the security vehicles must have passed through.
‘Come on,’ he whispered to Lynn, motioning towards the gate.
‘The main gate?’ she asked in disbelief.
‘It’s not the main gate,’ he whispered back, ‘it’s a minor side gate. And I think it’s still open.’
He took her by the hand, keeping low as they moved along the fence line towards the gate. Fifty metres out, they both crouched down again, straining to make out the details of the gate. Around them, far out in the desert, they heard the sound of off-road vehicles struggling over the rough terrain, helicopters circling the skies above, and voices shouting orders. Here, though, there seemed to be a complete absence of activity; Adams could only presume that the gate had been left temporarily open to aid the vehicles that would doubtlessly be streaming in and out all night.
