THREE MINUTES

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Chapter 12

13:06, 16 September 2002

Rachel, Nevada

Jason had all the windows down in his rental car. Even at eighty miles per hour, with the wind whipping around the passenger compartment, it was still too hot. It was like driving into the mouth of a hair dryer. He had long since turned off the radio; the few stations he could dial in were busily explaining scripture, and that lost its appeal after the first half hour.

Besides, he could barely hear it with all the windows down anyhow.

Straightening up in his seat, Jason tapped lightly on the rental car's brakes, slowing down from his high cruising speed to something approaching safe as he believed he was getting close to town. Crashing his rental car, especially considering he was paying for it completely on his own, was an idea that turned his stomach.

His time on the more obscure internet bulletin boards had been an interesting dip into a world he never knew existed. Conspiracy theorists had always been around, particularly since the Kennedy assassination; but never before in human history had they had such an easy time finding one another.

They had created little virtual worlds for themselves online, where they could meet and feed their personal passions. They could exchange ideas they had about new technologies, or new conspiracies, and how a single sentence from a recently-published article was finally the "smoking gun" in "breaking open" whatever misdeed they specialized in.

Of course, to the completely objective mind, it never was. Jason saw a kind of faith he associated more with religious zealotry, an unswerving belief in a malicious guiding hand that in one form or another had designs on eventually dominating the planet. It could only be stopped, apparently, by these minds, these theorists, who had somehow seen behind the mask of this modern-day beast -- or at least knew it existed.

The amazing thing was, Jason found it impossible to dismiss them all, because some of them had been right. They were the minority, to be sure, but they dominated the mythos of the culture.

One of the central figures in the "I-told-you-so" genre of conspiracy theory was a man named Chris Marker. Marker had been one of the original, pre-internet-boom "anomaly investigators" in the field of secret aircraft; he, along with a handful of cohorts and devotees, had spent the better part of the 1980's sitting on lawn chairs in the Nevada desert, wrapped in a camouflage blankets, and watching the skies over a mysterious airbase that everyone said didn't exist. Through high-magnification binoculars they monitored the comings and goings of aircraft and mysterious lights, then published a newsletter detailing their observations.

Marker had, albeit with some help, "broken open" the story of Area 51. While the government continued to deny it was there, he had hounded the media relentlessly, bringing them pictures, flight schedules, and even ultimately real human beings -- first-hand evidence that hundreds of soldiers, government contractors, and shady secret agent-types had been exposed to toxic fumes from the unregulated fire pits on the base. If it did not exist, he argued to great effect, where were these planes landing? Where were these people going every day? And, most successfully, the clincher question: Where did all these people get so unreasonably sick? And would they be taken care of by a government who denies they even work for them?

Ultimately, "Area 51" entered the public eye and the public lexicon because of Marker's efforts, and his success there inspired a new generation of conspiracy theorists. If Marker was right, they reasoned, they might be also, if only they worked as hard as he had. In this fashion, Marker had become the Grand Old Wizard of the conspiracy set. When the internet grew beyond a curiosity and into a phenomenon, he posted messages on their online bulletin boards. And people took notice. In this, Jason had again seen the elements of faith and religion being reflected within this community.

Marker was reclusive, and originally Jason wasn't expecting to have any contact with the man; in fact, he hadn't thought that Flight 93, what he now considered "his" particular conspiracy theory speciality, might have anything to do with those that Marker concerned himself with. So it was quite a surprise when Marker contacted him, having read Jason's article reproduced online, and had suggested a meeting in Nevada.

"Something I've been watching out here," he had said on the phone, "You'll really get a kick out of, I think."

It was a brief conversation, but thick with intrigue; Marker seemed to enjoy being intentionally oblique, and for his part Jason indulged him. After all, Marker had grown used to people throwing around terms like "legend" when describing him.

"It has to do with that C-130 people saw," he had told Jason. "I think you might enjoy a vacation in the desert this year."

His curiosity sufficiently piqued, Jason had scheduled a trip over to Nevada; his thinking was, regardless of how whatever Marker had to show him weighed on the issue of Flight 93, he knew that an exclusive interview with this "legend", this "founding father of the modern conspiracy movement" would be a story he could sell in the magazine world. And it was bound to be interesting. Jason bought a round-trip ticket to Las Vegas, Nevada, and rented a car there, to make the drive to the center of the secret-aircraft (or were they flying saucers?) conspiracy, the enigmatic airbase known as Area 51.

Or, more accurately, he was headed to the nearest town where non-military folks could safely wander around, an outpost of civilization that had found new life in the tourism of conspiracy theorist and saucer-spotters: Rachel, Nevada.

On the right was the first evidence of human habitation he had seen for an hour, a series of circular plots of agricultural land, irrigated by a long pipe slowly traveling around a central axis. On the left, he unexpectedly passed by a pink Airstream trailer, and quickly pulled off the road to turn around.

There couldn't be two of those, he thought. This was the home of his expert. He pulled the rental car around to the side of the trailer that seemed to be the "front", since there was something of a door there, and shut off the engine.

Stepping out, he noticed there were no cars parked nearby, no dogs barking. The silence of the desert was deafening, to the extent that Jason actually heard a ringing in his city-trained ears. Chris Marker's trailer was well outside of the little town, several minutes from such famous landmarks as the "Little Ale'Inn". Jason planned to head there eventually; apparently the gift store at this "last outpost before Area 51" was not to be missed.

In fact, on the door of the pink trailer was a little sign Jason suspected came from the gift shop. It had a little caricature of the quintessential extraterrestrial, with the big head and almond-shaped eyes. The text read, "No Trespassing: Violators may be Probed."

Jason rapped his knuckles hesitantly on the trailer's aluminum door. As he waited, the hot, dusty air began to move, slowly, as the first of the afternoon winds taunted the promise of relief. Jason began to feel the heat from the sun on his shirt. No one came to the door, and he knocked again.

He stepped back and looked around again. There was nothing for miles in any direction, no more houses or trailers as far as the eye could see. And certainly none in this particularly gaudy shade of pink.

From a distance away, he heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. The deep, throaty growl of a large engine grew louder, and quickly Jason began to make out the shape of a vintage Thunderbird, jet black, with tinted windows that were completely opaque.

The strange vehicle seemed as out of place as the pink trailer. More remarkable, even, than the array of a half dozen antennae of various lengths and widths that sprung from the top of the car, was the fact that the frame had been raised, and much suspension doubtless added, to accommodate full-size truck tires. In the parlance of the four-wheel-drive enthusiast, this Thunderbird had been "lifted", and could now probably clear obstacles nearly a foot high. The sum effect, amusingly, was to make the vintage car look like a children's toy.

The Thunderbird slowed to stop in front of the trailer, crunching through the gravel and squeaking slightly as it came to rest. The engine stopped, pinged for a few moments, the driver's door opened, and out climbed Chris Marker.

Jason was presented with a man in his late forties, spear bald, wearing a white polo shirt and camouflage army pants. His eyes were hidden behind reflective surfer-style sunglasses. Marker finished off the unlikely ensemble with a pair of blue rubber flip-flop sandals. He pulled an expandable file folder from the front seat, slammed the door, and strode purposefully towards Jason and his rental car, waving.

"Doctor Clark, I presume," smiled the surprisingly fit recluse, bounding over and grabbing Jason's hand in a firm grip. "Welcome to Dreamland."

--

Jason sat patiently in Marker's trailer while his host grabbed pieces of paper from his collapsible file folder and jammed them into different drawers in the dozens of file cabinets that lined the Airstream's walls. The whole trailer seemed like a repository for information, and Jason could only wonder at the system that kept it all organized; files stacked in leaning piles covered nearly every square inch of flat space. On the walls were topographical maps, some dog-eared and stained, with pins stuck through them indicating areas of interest, or possibly routes taken.

There were aerial photographs of the infamous secret base, some with massive areas blacked-out; on those were overlaid flimsy sheets of tracing paper, with pencil-drawn estimations of building plans. Many of these had arcane symbols or acronyms scribbled next to them -- NROCT Building 7? Hangar? Fuel farm support... JP-8? Some of these maps had a very visible layer of dust on them.

"I'll just be a second," said Marker, finishing his filing. "I've been out of town visiting some old radio-scanner friends."

Jason nodded, not fully understanding.

Marker seemed to realize this, and continued. "Scanners are just people who listen to the radio," he explained. "But not the regular radio. We trade information on the varying frequencies and scramble patterns the military uses. They change all the time," he sighed, shutting a file drawer. "And they know we're trying to listen. Mostly the really secret flights use frequency-agile systems, popping around the spectrum so Joe Lunchbox with a police scanner can't just dial it in and hear what they're up to."

"But," he continued, "All that jumping around usually has a pattern to it, so both ends know where to go next." He grinned broadly. "I've got some new patterns to plug into my scanner for today."

Marker opened a metal locker and pulled out a large backpack, dragging it to the door.

He waved Jason over. "Come on," he said. "Let's go see what we can see today."

--

They rode out in Marker's Thunderbird towards Tikaboo Peak, the only mountain with a clear view into the restricted base. Marker talked constantly, taking on the role of storyteller, a part that Jason quickly realized he loved to play. Marker told him that many of the locals called Area 51 "Dreamland". This was apparently a holdover pet name, from the days when you could hear more radio traffic; "Dreamland" had been the call sign from the air traffic control tower. While the secret airfield had also been known over the years as "Watertown" (a reference to its massive set of on-site fuel tanks) and "Paradise Ranch" (apparently an ironic reference to how difficult a task it was to actually work there), most people "in the know" simply called it the Area.

Back in the height of the Cold War, the first U-2 spyplane tests had been flown out of the Area. At that time it was just a bare-bones airfield, with most of its security coming from the fact that it lay in the middle of nowhere; the rest of its security, Jason learned, came from the fact that much of the land used by the Air Force was surrounded by sites highly contaminated by radiation from the earlier nuclear bomb testing. This tended to keep away what little local populace there was.

The base got its biggest facelift in the early 1960's for an aircraft called the A-12, a supersonic reconnaissance jet that would later add a second seat and be known as the SR-71. Marker had a special affinity for the "Blackbird", and was a wealth of knowledge on what he referred to as the "glory days of Dreamland".

The Central Intelligence Agency ran the program, a holdover arrangement from the U-2 days. They contracted with the Air Force for various materiel needs, but it was an Agency program in its heart. They were going to fly the Blackbird high and fast into parts of the world they weren't supposed to visit, taking "pictures" (actually infrared and radar composite images) and listening to the frequencies of surface-to-air missile launchers. The A-12 would overfly a hostile area at three times the speed of sound, sending the local air defenses into a frenzy. They would try to shoot the jet down, locking on with radar, and the Blackbird would record what frequencies they used to do it. Of course the CIA pilots flew the A-12 higher and faster than any missiles could reach, which was the best defense in the world. They weren't even armed.

To support the testing phase of this remarkable aircraft, the Air Force had extended the original runway to 8,500 feet, brought in surplus Navy hangars and barracks, and dug a new well. They improved the road to the highway to allow tanker trucks full of experimental fuel to access the newly expanded "tank farm", with a capacity of over a million gallons. They put up all kinds of buildings to house everything from machine shops to radio rooms to what would reputedly eventually become a reasonable cafeteria. And all the while, even when C-47 shuttle planes were landing and expansive monitoring devices were being erected, no one had any idea they were even out there. Waiting to test-fly the fastest airplane the world had ever seen.

Then they had to get the A-12 from it's manufacturer's assembly line in California to the top-secret test site in Nevada. This was a remarkable achievement in itself, and Marker took advantage of his captive audience to tell the story.

"The plane was packed into two enormous wooden crates 100 feet long, loaded on the back of a big truck," explained Marker, laughing to himself. "They used back roads, and drove mostly at night, all the way from Lockheed's Burbank facility to the Area, with rolling military roadblocks and police escort all the way." Marker paused to downshift as they left the dirt road and headed onto what seemed more like a cattle trail. "At some places they had to chainsaw trees and road signs to get the 'packages' through."

The history of the Area went a bit fuzzy after the Blackbirds left to become part of the regular Air Force, and eventually NASA; it was generally understood that the radar-evading "stealth fighters", the F-117A Nighthawks, had been tested there in the 70's and 80's, as had presumably the B-2 Spirit "stealth bombers". But security had been enhanced by then; signs authorizing deadly force became ubiquitous in the no-man's-land of rolling desert that surrounded the base. The eventual addition of a formidable private security force that patrolled the scrub-oak studded hillsides complicated observation matters, and ingenious surveillance devices had sprung up. Marker had determined many of them worked autonomously, with solar panels for power, and would come to life and record your movements if you passed near them.

"It's impossible to get too close these days," said Marker, wheeling the Thunderbird around clusters of boulders. "There are a few places like Tikaboo Peak where you can see most of the base from a distance, but I expect they'll expand the boundaries soon to take care of that."

Jason was beginning to get a little concerned. "Are we breaking any laws?" he asked.

"No, not really," answered Marker. "We're going to be staying on public land today. I've been up here a ton over the years, skirting the boundary flags, more or less staying on the public side of things. Once or twice they've sent the sheriff out to check on me, he's a hoot. Maybe you'll get a chance to meet him. But as long as we're not taking pictures, or speaking in a Russian accent, they'll leave us alone."

The Thunderbird suddenly leaned precipitously to the right, and Jason found himself staring straight down into a ravine filled with menacing-looking bushes and cacti. Marker downshifted, and the engine groaned loudly to lift them back onto what passed for level ground.

"Your piece for the newspaper was reproduced all over the internet." Marker grinned, obviously enjoying Jason's discomfort. "Conspiracy sites loved it." In front of them, a cliff seemed to fill the entirety of the windscreen, and at the last possible second, Marker slammed on the brakes and the car jerked to a stop. "Well, now we walk."

Jason climbed down out of the strange vehicle, and unloaded a small daypack he had brought that held water, a rain jacket, a few energy bars, and his notebook. Hefting it to his shoulder, he looked back to watch Marker fiddle with the contents of his own pack. Partially open, Jason could now see it was loaded with electronic equipment, headphones, telescopes, something that looked like three mobile telephones strapped together with black electrical tape, and (to Jason's unease) a rather large and sinister-looking handgun.

"Armed for bear," was Marker's only comment on the last.

Following his guide up the dirt track, Jason was surprised to see little stone cairns marking the way. Clearly this was a trip Marker and his companions made often. The climb up Tikaboo was a series of narrow switchback trails, eroded in places from flash flooding. They stopped only once before the top, Jason to drink from his canteen, and Marker to adjust some sort of cobbled-together piece of electronic equipment. Jason suspected it was his scanner radio.

Near the top, the view across the valley below was hazy, from the developing heat, as well as dust and sand stirred up by the light wind. Just before they reached the peak, Jason was beginning to wonder if indeed there was anything out there to see. Other than the two of them, it looked like pure desert wilderness in every direction.

Then they took a final few steps, and reached a flat sheltered area on top of Tikaboo. Marker unshouldered his backpack, and pointed. "Voila," he said. "I give you an airport in the middle of nowhere."

There, in the hazy distance below them, was the "secret" base.

From where they stood, Jason could make out dozens of metal structures, a control tower, and even a paved parking lot full of parked cars. An airstrip stretched past the cluster of buildings and off into the surrounding desert.

"You know," said Marker, appreciating the scene, "Only a few years ago, anyone in the Air Force who stood here, next to you, would have had to say with a straight face he couldn't see anything." He smirked. "Could've gone to Leavenworth for hard time if he said otherwise."

"Quite a view," admitted Jason. "What now?"

"Now we wait."

--

Time moved slowly on the mountaintop. While Marker had his various devices to adjust, Jason could only doodle idly in his notebook, and scan the horizon, wondering what he was looking for.

Quite unexpectedly he saw a dot in the far-off blue sky. He turned to tell Marker, but his host was already pointing a pair of binoculars at it.

"I see it," said Marker flatly. "Hold on."

Jason dug into his pack for binoculars. Looking through them, he had to admit a mild disappointment that the dot wasn't saucer-shaped. It had wings, a tail fin, and a cockpit that probably wasn't hiding an extraterrestrial.

Keeping his own pair of binoculars trained at the dot on the horizon, Marker pulled a second radio scanner out of his vest pocket. Jason thought it astonishingly small, with three digital displays reading what he assumed were frequencies. This device was quickly attached to the cell phone apparatus he had noticed before, and suddenly there were voices, presumably from the approaching aircraft and the distant Dreamland control tower.

"Cowboy 61...tower....rog 18....ident...."

Marker beamed. "Got 'em!"

Jason put down his binoculars and squinted as the dot grew in size to a clearly visible jet aircraft, barreling towards the secret airfield. Suddenly it pulled up, rolled, and wound up speeding off in the direction from which it came.

Marker held binoculars to his eyes with one hand, and scribbled something on a note pad attached to his knee with the other. "F-16," he said. He scanned the horizon. "Wonder if that's it?"

BOOOOM!!!

The words had barely left his mouth before they were overflown by another jet, this one larger, louder, and at most 500 feet above their heads. It had come from behind and taken them completely by surprise. The roar lessened as the new plane made its way off in the direction of the first.

"MiG!" shouted Marker, scrambling over to his pack and upturning it, causing a half dozen small breadboard-type electronic devices to scatter in the sand. "We've got a few here, I've seen them before. I think this is what you're looking for, Mr. Clark," he said, waving Jason over and handing him a second pair of binoculars. "This is the show I wanted you to see. Hoo hoo, this is going to be good!"

Jason put his binoculars back to his eyes, and followed the second plane. It seemed bigger, almost clunkier, a more robust looking version. It slowed down, and settled in to fly a long, racetrack oval pattern, with the base seemingly the anchor point.

From the east, another jet appeared. This one was different, an all-white civilian jet, much quieter than the warplanes.

"Watch that Gulfstream," Marker said in his ear. "They'll fly that in the daytime. Watch that one."

The civilian business jet dropped into formation with the MiG, and the two continued their long, lazy oval, practically wingtip to wingtip. As the odd pair looped closer to Tikaboo, Jason noticed a protruding bump on the bottom of the Gulfstream's fuselage.

He was about to ask Marker about it when, suddenly, the MiG went silent and began to drop. The glow from its twin jet turbines went out, as if it had cut its engines in mid-air. The blinking light on its belly had also gone out, and it began to descend quickly downwards, out of formation with the Gulfstream.

"Whoa," said Marker. "This is new."

The MiG was completely without power, and as it lost airspeed the pilot nosed the jet down fiercely, avoiding a stall. Seemingly moments before it struck the ground, it suddenly sprung back to life, both turbines igniting, and with a roar that shook the valley it leapt straight up into the sky.

Jason had no idea what to make of the scene. Marker pointed to the horizon again, and they watched as the F-16 returned, and fell into formation where the MiG had been before, right alongside the Gulfstream as it continued its long racetrack course.

They waited, and watched. Voices over the scanner spoke their solemn instructions back and forth. Jason couldn't interpret the pilot jargon, although he strongly suspected Marker could. The pair of aircraft continued their dance for two or three more oval circuits, uneventfully, then abruptly both jets split off and headed in different directions - the F-16 to the west, out of sight, and the Gulfstream towards the strip at Dreamland. They watched it land, and taxi into a hangar at the far end. The aircraft entered the hangar, and a massive door closed quickly behind.

There was no more activity in the air, and the secret base itself was still. Again, the silence of the desert crept back.

A long moment passed. Finally Jason broke the silence.

"So what did I just see?"

Marker sat down in front of him, eying him carefully. "What you saw," he began, "was something a little different from what I've been watching. But," he continued, drawing a large oval in the sand with his finger, "It makes sense."

"Go on."

"For the past several years," Marker explained, "I've been watching Russian jets and American jets go through this little exercise. They'll go into formation, one on the inside," he said, tracing the oval, "and they'll bring in different aircraft for the outside loop. Mostly something from our arsenal, F-15, F-18, whatever. From time to time they'll bring out something from the former Soviet stock. I figure we must pick them up at auction or something overseas, just to see how they fly against our own air defenses.

"Normally," he continued, "the Russian jets fly alongside and nothing happens." He sniffed at the air. "Usually, it's been the American jets that flame out."

"Intentionally?"

"Sort of," answered Marker. He scraped his hand across the sand, obliterating his sketch. "In that the inside aircraft is intentionally taking down the fighter. He's screwing up the electronics, the fly-by-wire, the control systems. Heck, it looks at this point like he's affecting even the basic electrics of the fuel pump."

"Some sort of interference?" offered Jason.

"Directed energy," said Marker. "Specifically a high-power microwave." He stood up, gazing wistfully back towards the base. "Or something similar. Radio frequency interference. I really couldn't say for sure if it's narrowband, or millimeter-band, or microwave. The inside aircraft fires it at the outside ones. In the past, the Russian jets haven't been affected, because their electronics suites are so tough."

"Tough? How?"

"Hardened," said Marker. He began to pack up his odd belongings. "In this great country, in this great century, our philosophy in design has always been, wherever we can put a microchip, we'll put it there. The Russians," he continued, zipping up his backpack, "have had a different philosophy. They're more concerned with robustness. We've always had the edge on microprocessor technology, so they decided early on that rather than trying to compete with their smaller military budget, they'd just choose to put the research dollars they had into technologies that might defeat the electronics we had.

"We've had it easy," Marker continued, shouldering his pack. "The Russians spent all their spare time and capital working on ways of simulating the electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion. Microwaves are like that, if they're strong and focused enough. They knew that kind of energy wave would negate our electronic advantages. But," he eyed Jason carefully, "they also didn't want their own pilots to get knocked down with the Americans. If your super-secret ray gun goes Pogo on you, it's no good as a functional weapon."

"Pogo?"

This got a huge grin from Marker. "Gets reflected back on you. It means shooting yourself in the foot." He laughed. "From Walt Kelly's 'Pogo' comic strips. 'We've met th' enemy, and he is us.'"

Marker scanned the horizon one last time before turning down the path back to the Thunderbird. He screwed up his face and spoke again, quietly. "We have met the enemy, and he is us. Did you ever hear about Victor Belenko?"

Jason thought for a second. He had. "He was the Soviet pilot that defected in the 70's."

"Yeah," said Marker. "He handed us a brand-new MiG-25, skidded it off the end of a landing strip in Japan, threw his arms up, and said 'I love American.' We stripped that plane to bits, let me tell you.

"At first," he went on, "We thought we had great news. The whole jet was essentially a ripoff of our own, except it was built with vacuum tubes where the microchips should have been." He adjusted his belt strap. "We figured they were just lagging behind. At first it made a lot of people more comfortable about things. But our intelligence community finally got together with the scientists looking at the jet, and it all began to add up."

Jason lost his footing briefly, skidding down a bank. It was much harder going down.

"The Soviets," continued Marker, barely noticing Jason's struggle, "had successfully developed what amounted to a portable electromagnetic pulse device. Only more advanced, in that high-power microwaves got around RF shielding even better than EMP. And they wanted to make sure their own toys wouldn't be as vulnerable to it."

"So what did we do?" asked Jason. "We couldn't just abandon all of our microprocessor technology."

"Nope." Marker paused on the trail, and turned to face him. "We did what we've always done, since World War Two, whenever there was a technology our enemies had and we didn't." Marker grinned. "We tried to buy it, and when that didn't work, we just out-and-out stole it."

Jason looked at him quizzically. "I still don't understand why this has anything to do with my article."

"Because," said Marker, "I've been watching this little drama play out once or twice a month for nearly a year. And until recently, the part of the inside aircraft wasn't played by a bubble-nosed Gulfstream. It was another aircraft."

He paused, meeting eyes with Jason.

"It was a C-130."

---

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