Dulce Base (The Dulce Files Book 1) Read online

  The men looked at one another quickly, their eyes saying it all – that was just two hours from now.

  ~~~

  The men were walking down the hallway, heading to their respective team stations, ready to embark. Turn was taking up the rear – something he liked, since in combat he was always charging ahead – when Paul sidled up to him.

  “Listen,” Paul said, pulling Turn aside as they walked down the hallway, “don’t buy into all of that back there.”

  Turn’s eyes narrowed and he smiled and shook his head. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about what they’re telling the newbies, and what they’re not telling us.”

  Turn narrowed his eyes further – he wasn’t used to hearing Paul say so much. “What do you mean?”

  Paul shook his own head and turned around, put his hands on his hips, and swore under his breath. Something was definitely bothering him.

  “Shit, Turn – they’re not gonna be ready, and if they’re not, what’s gonna happen to us, huh?”

  “You’re worried about the fear, is that it?” Turn said, moving forward and putting his hand on Paul’s shoulder.

  Turn and every other of the super soldiers knew full-well that the Grays had a…field of some sort around their body, one different from humans to the point where the merging of the two fields ended up creating physical symptoms, like the ‘body terror’ so many abductees and other contactees reported.

  Paul nodded at Turn’s words, and turned back to face him.

  “The field around them is in direct opposition to ours,” he said. “It’s an anti-life field, one that comes directly from the Grays being on that devolutionary spiral. They’re akin to soldiers of fortune, you know that, Turn, and ’offer’ their advanced technology in trade for things they require.” He shook his head. “Eisenhower should have been smarter than to get involved with them.”

  “But he wasn’t.”

  Paul nodded. “But he wasn’t.”

  “What do you want me to say?” Turn laughed. “I’ve heard it all before, seen it all before.” He moved his arm around Paul’s shoulder and started them both back down the hall. “How many missions have we been on, anyways? How many missions against these damn things from another world?”

  “Oh, about five or six, I’d say, but–”

  “Exactly – five or six. What are you worried about!”

  “Turn, they’re experts at manipulating both the human body and mind, and by using those fields to their advantage.”

  “And they require blood and other biological fluids to survive!” Turn said. “You heard Stan explaining it all this week, you know all about it…what’s the big concern all of a sudden?”

  Paul shook his head. “Maybe it’s what happened back there to you in Montana, how you almost met those same helicopter blades. I just have a funny feeling about this one, Turn, just a funny feeling is all.”

  Turn looked at him and smiled. “Good, it wouldn’t be right if you didn’t.”

  20 – In a Flash

  Outside the main Blue Lake hangar the X-22 was warming-up on the tarmac, the night as black as can be in that part of New Mexico. All twenty-nine of the men were assembled, including the three that would stay back and command the mission from afar, Ellis, Carl and General Anderholt. In just a few minutes the group would break apart in to their individual teams, and it’d be the last they’d see of one another until the planned-forty-minute mission was complete…if they were lucky. Ellis looked around at the men and tried not to play out in his mind which would be skilled enough to come back and which wouldn’t, but he couldn’t help it – three wars had taught him the importance of weighing the future, even if a good-deal of luck always seemed to throw the calculations off.

  “Listen up,” Ellis said loudly and in a no-nonsense voice, “I’m only going to say this once, so listen good.”

  The joking and carousing continued for a few more moments, then generally died down. The Dutchman began.

  “Everything was going according to plan with these bases until May 1, 1975. On that day all hell broke loose.”

  Tommy cracked a laugh, expecting a good story.

  “The plan was rubbish, right from the get go, the treaties nothing – the aliens never kept their end of the bargain. That technology we were promised? Nope, only allowed in the bases and then under intense supervision. And those men and women that we’d allowed the aliens to take and then return, the original abductees? Some you heard about the Betty and Barney Hill case and you might have seen the old black and white videos of the two. But they were the exception – more and more were never seen or heard from again. Later we learned out what’d become of them, and it wasn’t a pretty picture, not in the least.

  Ellis took in a deep breath and you could have heard a pin drop, the room was so quiet.

  “It was when they began to manipulate our thoughts,” he continued with a shake of his head, “that we really knew we’d gotten the short end of the stick. The aliens had never wanted to give us anything in the first place, it’d all been smoke and mirrors, a way for them to gain access to our minds and then our bodies and then eventually our society. High-level members of our government and military were brainwashed, had chips implanted in their brains, and sometimes were even cloned and replaced outright. The worst was when they had their very souls taken, God knows where. And the army of clones and half-human hybrids, things that would make the task of taking over the world a lot easier for the aliens?” Ellis sighed. “We knew we had to fight back, but in the end it wasn’t us that fired the first shot.

  “It happened in the tunnels below us, when two Ret Four Grays demanded that an entire group of armed military personnel unload their weapons and then drop them. When the commander asked why the entire squad was killed, each with a shot to the head, although the aliens had no guns and from what we could tell from the cameras and the bodies we recovered later, these were nothing more than psychic shots, some kind of mind blast that killed.

  The idea was that the Grays used their minds to do it, somehow through the bio-chemical circuit board that’s up in those big heads with huge black eyes. They figured out how to channel electromagnetic energy via specific neural patterns and pathways. It makes them virtually unstoppable.

  “So how the hell do we kill ‘em?” Charlie asked.

  Carl nodded at the six men that’d stepped forward. “That’s what we got the super soldiers for.”

  “It was made clear to us after that initial massacre,” Ellis continued, “that the Grays were not our allies as they’d originally claimed, but conquerors come in disguise. Just because one officer questioned the need for our human forces to disarm themselves, the faux treaty was realized. It was clear that they Grays had to maintain discipline at all costs, even if that meant we knew they had no regard for us at all.”

  There were murmurings of discontent, for it truly was a depressing tale.

  “Not everyone was killed, though,” Ellis continued, to the raised eyebrows of some of the men. He glanced over at someone that others couldn’t see, then nodded before continuing. “I’m going to say some things we haven’t told the groups before, because this time it’s different. Those guns the humans had been told to disarm weren’t regular guns, they were the flash guns that were just then coming into use by our forces, something that’d been a gift from the Nordics, another alien race, more enlightened and advanced than the Grays, and one that actually has our interests at heart. It wasn’t forty-four that were killed that day, but sixty-eight. Of those that died, twenty-two were completely vaporized as the flash guns of the Grays were turned upon us. But more than just a single survivor managed to get away. In all, nineteen escaped back into the tunnels, and since the attack occurred on Level 2, it meant they had a good change of getting out, and twelve managed to do so. To this day they’re in hiding, crashing in motels and surfing couches, but alive, and safe…and ready to fight in any way they can.”

  Tommy laughe
d. “Well, then where the hell are they?”

  “Their time will come,” Walter said, and from the tone of his voice, it was almost as if he’d been one of the men himself.

  “Just one Gray was killed in that massacre, a lucky shot from one of our soldiers,” Ellis said, picking up the story and bringing it to its end. “The thing wasn’t vaporized, but it died a slow and agonizing death, you can be assured of that.”

  “How many of you men have seen a flash gun?” Stu asked, stepping forward from the front of the group, his voice echoing off the far hangar wall. The men grew silent in just a moment, so tense and on edge and just ready to go were they.

  “How many of you have seen this?” Stu asked, holding up a small metal rod.

  “Colonel…I’ve already got a pen,” Major Jake Zates said in that dead-humored voice of his.

  “They’re flash guns,” Stu said above the few chuckles as he picked one up and weighed it in his hand, “although they were originally called the Armorlux weapon. It’s an advanced beam weapon that can operate on three different phases: stun, levitate and paralyze.”

  Stu held it up for the others to see. It resembled a flashlight, with a black glass conical inverted lens. On the side were three recessed knobs in three curved grooves and each knob was a different size.

  “Although we all know that ‘paralyze’ is just short for ‘kill,’ don’t we, Stu?”

  Stu looked at Lieutenant Colonel Eddie Okamata. “That’s not quite accurate. On the higher position on the same mode it can create a temporary kind of death, one that I assure you any doctor would certify as clinically dead. What he wouldn’t know, however, is that the person’s – or thing’s in some cases – that the person’s life essence is actually lingering in some strange limbo, some kind of terrible state of non-death. In one to five hours the person will begin to wake up, or revive if you will, slowly at first, as the bodily functions start up once again, and then a few minutes onward, consciousness returns, followed by full awareness.”

  “God, sounds awful!”

  Stu smiled as he looked at Lewie. “What the Grays use it for might be worse. It’s in that mode that the alien scientists use to re-program the human brain and plant false information. When the person awakens, they ‘recall’ this false and implanted information as knowledge they’ve gained through real-life experiences. There is no way for a person to learn the truth after that, they’re simply too far gone. They’ll never believe you, will always resist. They’re lost to us.”

  There were murmurings to that, and Stu gave an inward smile, knowing he’d made each and everyone of the men aware of the dangers of this weapon, and the need to obliterate anything holding one.

  “Tell them about the highest position,” Mark pressed.

  Stu frowned, but shrugged and pointed at the smallest button on the flash gun, and also the one closest to the top.

  “This is the kill button, or more aptly, the vaporize button. It’ll leave nothing more than a small, barely discernable pile of black dust and ash where the person or thing was just standing.”

  No one said anything to that, just gulped a bit and hoped they’d never be on the receiving end.

  Part III

  21 – The X-22

  Blue Lake

  Thursday, May 24, 1979

  The X-22 was quite the bird, if you wanted to call it that. The first thing anyone noticed were the huge tilting ducted fans, two on the forward 22-foot wings and two on the rear 39-foot wings. Together the four three-bladed propellers gave the plane vertical and/or short take-off and landing capability, or V/STOL as it was called. The X-22 achieved that by synchronizing a wave-interconnection system with four gas turbines that were also located on the rear wings. When the turbines fired the plane could lift off, and steering was achieved by tilting the propeller blades in conjunction with the elevators and ailerons of the thrust system. Each of the turbines could produce 1,267 hp, allowing the X-22 to travel at 254 mph, or just over 400 km/h…a lot less than the 326 mph she was supposed to get by design.

  Not that that mattered to any of the men standing there in awe of the craft, which looked like something most had never seen.

  “The X-22 program was cancelled in 1966,” a voice said from behind them, and the men turned to see Captain Mark Richards approaching, “although that was just the official version, of course.”

  “So that’s what we’ll by flying into the port in, huh?” Turn asked.

  “Aye, and flying out in too…if you’re lucky.”

  Mark gave the flight engineer and mission commander a hard stare, then nodded. “We can manage.”

  22 – Before the Attack

  Ellis looked on as the men got into the X-22, his son leading the way. At least with Charlie, Walter and Donlon leading the three land-force CATs the men knew what to expect, the Dutchman thought to himself. Each of the men had been tested in battle and they knew their teammates well – they’d often been beside them there in the thick of it, and some had even fought as a team in Montana. The third CAT team, however, the one that his son would be leading and which the entire success of the mission depended upon, would be blazing the trail for the larger Fast Action Team and Clean Up Team coming in on their tail, would be attacking under the command of a man most had never fought beside, but whom most had heard about.

  Mark Richards was nearly as much a legend as his old man, and some said more so. The Dutchman's son was well-known in black ops circle and two things were beyond question: the younger Richards had proven himself in combat, and he’d never asked his men to do anything he wasn't ready to do. More importantly, he’d never left a man behind.

  While his missions had almost always been so top secret that nobody knew details, the rumors and trail of evidence was more than clear to any in the know. What’s more, it was rumored that he’d been off-world, perhaps even to a distant alien planet. When it came to the Richards’, anything was possible.

  The only problem for the command chain was Richards’ reputation for being something of a loose cannon when it came to following orders that he didn't think were in the best interest of his men or the mission - a fact that just made him more popular with his men.

  Few of those things were going through the younger Richards’ mind as he climbed into the X-22 cockpit and settled behind the controls. Turn was beside him and Andy and Billy just over his shoulder. It seem the appropriate time for a prayer.

  “I am a Commando,” he began, “as my brother Commandos before me, I am proud to step into history as a member of the Air Force Special Operations Command.”

  “I will walk with pride with my head held high, my heart and attitude will show my allegiance to God, country and comrades,” the other men joined in from behind. “When unable to walk another step, I will walk another mile. With freedom my goal, I will step into destiny with pride and the Air Force Special Operations Command.”

  Mark glanced over at Turn out of the corner of his eye and smiled, then powered up the X-22, gave the order for the helicopter to follow, then pushed the strange tilt-rotor aircraft to its flight limits in a wild high speed bank over the runway that impressed the hell out of the troops still on the ground…not to mention set the tone for the mission.

  “Woo-hoo!” Billy shouted from the back seats as they shot into the air, already going 180 mph according to the instruments just past Mark’s fingertips.

  Over the earphones and speakers came first his voice, then the voice of the team members with him in the X-22, singing the Air Force hymn. In the Puma helicopter on the ground, Moses and the rest of the men of the CUT team started into the song as well.

  “Up and away, into the wild blue yonder!” the men shouted as they saw the X-22 shoot forth into the dark night, toward the Archuleta Mesa and the secret underground Dulce base.

  “We can’t very well let that bunch smash open the Gates of Hell without the rest of us being right behind them,” shouted Moses as he lifted the helicopter off the ground, the X-22 nearly out
of sight already.

  “Damn right we can’t,” Aaron said beside him. “Fire this bird up – we’ve got some aliens to kill.”

  23 – Down in the Tunnels

  Down in the lower levels of Blue Lake base Combat Assault Teams (CAT) 1, 2 and 4 stood outside the double-side platform where the tube train was set to arrive.

  “Looks like a damn subway station in New York!” Second Lieutenant David Tish grumbled, something the other men had come to expect was all that was possible from him (they’d yet to see him in combat, after all).

  “It’ll take you to New York,” Donlon said as he checked his M16 assault rifle for the tenth or so time.

  “So don’t tell me–”

  Jake’s words were cutoff as ‘wooshing’ sound could suddenly be heard in the distance, coming from behind them. Everyone turned to see the light of a train coming, and then a moment later they turned around to see one coming on the opposite side of the platform.

  “Tube 1 is you guys, Walter,” Donlon said to Captain Walter Leathers with a nod, then raised his arm toward Tube 2 across the way and looked to his own men, “and we’ll go this way.”

  Everyone nodded and gathered their things and started to board the trains.

  “There’s no one driving!” Bobbie said with a laugh of surprise when the train finally stopped and he was able to see into the main engineer’s compartment.

  “They’ve been fully-automated since they were installed,” Walter said, ushering him onto the train, which was really nothing more than two cars pulled by the main engine, if you even wanted to call it that.

  “Thing looks more like a bumper car to me,” David grumbled as he got onto Tube Train 2.

  “Won’t feel that way when it starts moving,” Robbie said, “not if they go Mach 2 like Colonel Donlon said in the briefing.”