Time Patrol (Area 51 The Nightstalkers)
Read Time Patrol (Area 51 The Nightstalkers) Online
Authors: Bob Mayer
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 by Bob Mayer
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477821879
ISBN-10: 1477821872
Cover design by Jason Blackburn
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014950613
To all the Special Operators who have paid the ultimate price. Particularly those who died on 28 June 2005 during Operation Red Wings.
Please donate to the Special Operations Warrior Foundation
www.specialops.org
, which helps fund education for the children of these departed comrades in arms.
Or donate to
www.warrior2warrior.org
, which helps Special Operations troops deal with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), founded by a widow from my former unit: 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne).
Thank you.
IN THE TIME BETWEEN: 28 JUNE 2005
The long unmeasured pulse of time moves everything. There is nothing hidden that it cannot bring to light, nothing known that may not become unknown. Nothing is impossible.
—Sophocles
Stuff happens; sometimes really bad stuff.
A Nada Yada
When it changed, Roland, stone-cold killer, otherwise nice guy, and weapons man for the Nightstalkers, had the stock of a sniper rifle tucked tight in to his shoulder with a righteous target approaching, and that made him happy. Neeley, a usually stone-cold killer from the Cellar, was in overwatch, with her own sniper rifle, and she was acting wonky. That made Roland unhappy since he liked her, and
like
for Roland was the equivalent of rabid devotion in a well-trained attack dog. However, it all balanced out and mattered little since he was in combat mode, and feelings were of no consequence to him in that mode. There was only the mission.
Roland was a man who could live and flourish in the here and now.
That’s a rare, and valuable, trait.
It was going to get a lot more valuable.
It changed for Scout—now eighteen years old and almost two years past her first encounter, run-in, kerfuffle, whatever, involving the Nightstalkers—with a whiff of bacon. She’d only smelled real bacon outside the confines of her home; never inside. Inside it was always fakon, vacon, or one of the other imposters. If you gotta fake it, Scout had always reasoned ever since she was old enough to reason, which had been pretty dang young, then isn’t imitation the sincerest form of flattery, and one should go with the original? Her rail-thin mother, who counted each calorie as if it were mortal a sin, did not see things that way.
Thus the mystery of the odor permeating the house.
For a moment Scout lay in bed wondering if perhaps it was wafting in from the old house next door, the one with the barn where she stabled her horse, Comanche. Out of the old stone chimney. People with a barn and a stone chimney had to eat bacon.
But in this relatively new house with its fake gas fireplace, with Scout’s mother ruling the kitchen, with the aroma of honest-to-goodness real bacon filling the air, Scout questioned reality.
That’s a good trait, one the Nightstalkers had found valuable in the past and would need in the future.
If there was to be one.
It changed for Nada, team sergeant of the Nightstalkers, the most experienced member of the group, a man who’d stared death in the eye and French kissed the Grim Reaper (figuratively, although stranger things have happened on Nightstalker missions), with irritating voices singing “It’s a Small World,” the whiny tune echoing in his head as his niece Zoey tried to spin their teacup faster and faster.
Definitely down a rabbit hole of dubious merit.
They’d gone from hell to a deeper hell, was Nada’s estimation, walking from It’s a Small World to The Mad Tea Party. He was not the type of person Disneyland had been designed for, and he was a bit disappointed Zoey was attacking each new ride with such zest. Of course she was just a kid, but still. He expected better of someone who shared his bloodline.
As they spun about, Nada wondered, how small was the world really?
And why did Disneyland bother him so much and on a deeper level than irritating songs?
Little did he know, he was about to find out the answers to both.
And the answers were not good.
It changed at Area 51 deep inside the sprawling complex set in the middle of Nowhere, Nevada, because many problems on the cutting edge of science, physics, and the weird and the wonderful started at Area 51. But this time it was not in the labs where scientists tested the outer boundaries of man’s knowledge, occasionally traveling from genius to stupid at lightspeed (literally sometimes) and requiring the Nightstalkers to clean up their messes. This time it was in the repository of the results of all those tests and so much more: the Archives. If the Ark of the Covenant was indeed found by some Indiana-Jones-type character, it would have been stored here, and it would have fit right in with many of the other weird and wonderful and frightening items gathered from around the world and hidden away deep under the sort-of-secret-but-definitely-most-secure facility in the continental United States.