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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
     
    K nowing his 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