Rick Cook - The Wizardry Quested

The suit turned to look at the police captain.

"We’ve got an air unit that can follow them for a while," the cop said.

"Don’t worry about following them too far," the supervisor told the visitors.

"They’re headed into restricted airspace. If they don’t change course pretty soon the Air Force will take care of them."

"What will they do?" the suit asked.

"If they don’t break off? Then they’re going to overfly Area Fifty-One. The Air Force is real touchy about uninvited visitors there."

The suit looked apprehensive. "But what will they do about it?"

"Intercept them. Try to get them to land." The supervisor shrugged. "In the worst case they’ll blow them out of the sky."

"We are getting close," Kuznetsov yelled in Mick Gilligan’s ear.

Mick didn’t recognize the terrain, but he didn’t need the Russian to tell him where they were. They’d crossed the highway some time back, pulling up so they didn’t collide with any cars or trucks and scaring the heck out of a couple of tourists. By now they had to be inside the restricted airspace that surrounded the base and soon they’d be over the line on the base itself.

The Russian leaned over Mick’s shoulder and pointed at a nondescript building on top of a nearby mountain.

"Radar station," Kuznetzov shouted over the noise of the engine. "Normally would have been eliminated by speznatzм, but no speznatzм, so:" He shrugged. Gilligan turned in his seat to look at him closely. "What in the hell are you?" he yelled.

"I told you," Kuznetsov shouted back, "I am a businessman."

"Yeah, but what did you used to be?"

"Used to be businessmen were parasites and enemies of people. So I was good Communist like everybody else."

"Heads up!" Charlie called. "Here comes company."

It only took Mick an instant to pick up the two dots headed toward them. They quickly grew and resolved into the gray shark shapes of a pair of F-16s. This is a nightmare, Mick thought I’m going to wake up soon and find out this whole thing is just a nightmare. But the F-16s kept coming.

I should have gotten out back in 1978 when I was still a captain, Major General Paul Manley thought as he stared at the radar plot. Outwardly everyone in the command center was cool and professional, but you could feel the tension rising. Right now the tensest place in the room was the pit of General Manley’s stomach. Unusually for the Air Force, General Manley was not an experienced combat pilot. Even his tour in Vietnam had been spent pulling pilots out of the jungle with Air Rescue rather than dropping bombs. For the first time in his career as an Air Force officer he was probably going to have to kill someone.

"Break off, you damn fools," he muttered at the dot on the scope. But the point of green light kept coming straight for the smear of the mountain range and the base beyond.

One of the problems with running the most highly secret military base in the United States was the tourists. Groom Lake was so secret it was regularly written up in national magazines. So naturally it drew military buffs, peace protesters, flying saucer fanatics and assorted religious cranks, crazies and general-issue looney-toons like a magnet draws iron filings.

That in fact was one of Groom Lake’s functions. While there was some very secret work done here, the focus of developing the next-generation aircraft had shifted elsewhere. General Manley knew that the next generation was really being developed in an industrial park in Los Angeles by a weird mix of civilian engineers, "retired" military officers and science fiction fans, most of whom thought they were working for a private foundation running on a shoestring. There was also the "agricultural experiment station" up in northern Idaho where the really secret work was done. That was so highly classified the general could hardly bear to think about it. While the work went on there, all the flak came to Groom Lake, and it was part of General Manley’s job to catch it. The most dangerous of the groups were the military buffs who prided themselves on collecting every scrap of information about programs they were supposed to know nothing about. By combining everything from chance sightings to seismic records of sonic booms they had pieced together remarkably detailed pictures of several of the craft that actually existed at Area 51, as well as equally detailed pictures of several that had never existed, including one that had started out as a practical joke in the Nellis AFB officer’s club.

Those people the general could almost sympathize with. The most irritating ones, and the most persistent, were the space nuts who kept insisting that the government had a flying saucer hidden in one of the hangars. Their latest tactic had been to file a lawsuit claiming the saucer’s force fields were making people sick for miles around. Lawyers for the saucerians had been combing the sparsely populated desert around the base seeking people with illnesses, real or imaginary, that they could blame on the presence of the alien spaceship. The next step would be a class action suit against the government with all kinds of discovery motions.

Was this more saucer folk, General Manley wondered, or was it another camera crew from a tabloid TV show? Using a Russian airplane would appeal to those bozos.

Whoever it was was in for a big disappointment even if they lived to get here. The truth was there was nothing to see. The plane was so slow the base had plenty of time to get anything sensitive under cover-a well-practiced maneuver because of Russian spy satellites. Besides, nothing interesting happened outdoors in the daytime.

Off in the background a phone rang. The general gritted his teeth and wished he hadn’t quit smoking.

If he thought that plane represented a threat to his command he would have ordered it shot out of the air without hesitation. But unless there was a nuclear weapon on board there wasn’t a damn thing it could be carrying that would seriously hurt this base. He knew it, everyone in the command center knew it and the one also knew the standing orders. The fact was he’d need a damn good reason not to shoot that plane down.

"General," the lieutenant holding the phone said hesitantly. She was young, fresh-faced and buxom even through her flight suit. She reminded the general of his daughter, who was also a lieutenant training at fighter school at Luke Air Force Base.

"Sir, it’s the XO."

General Manley glared. "Sir, he says it’s urgent," the lieutenant offered. The general sighed and extended a hand for the phone. "Sir," the XO said, "I’ve got a lawyer on the phone. And I’ve got the Pentagon on the other line telling us to cooperate with him ’to the maximum extent feasible.’"

Oh Jesus, the general thought, what now?

Wiz was still wondering about it when the scenery changed again. This section of tunnel was neatly floored and walled with blocks of worked stone. Columns stood along the walls supporting groined vaulting overhead. After all the different kinds of tunnels they had seen, Wiz wasn’t particularly surprised, but he was reminded of pictures of the crypts under a Gothic cathedral.

Just to be sure he motioned to Danny. The younger programmer swept his magic detector back and forth across their path and then shook his head. No magic before them.

Wiz took three steps before Malkin grabbed his arm.

"Freeze," she commanded

"What’s wrong?"

"Your trusting nature, for a start," the tall thief said.

"But there’s no magic here."