Book of Souls

The baby was fresh and powdered, and Nancy was in comfortable jeans and a sweatshirt. Will tightly held Phillip to his chest and peered out the window while she rummaged in the kitchen. They exchanged banal domestic talk, a pretense the last two days hadn’t happened, but it seemed all right to give each other a break. He waited until she was ready to start the baby’s feeding, then placed Phillip, wiggling, into his chair.

Then he hugged her for a long time and only broke the clench to wipe away two streaks of tears on her red face, one with each thumb.

“I will call you every step of the way,” he said.

“You’d better. I’m your partner, remember?”

“I remember. Just like the old days, back on a case.”

“We’ve got a good plan. It should work,” she said emphatically.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

“Yes, and no.” Then her confidence broke. “I’m scared.”

“They won’t find you here.”

“Not for me, for you.”

“I can take care of myself.”

She gave him a squeeze. “You used to. You’re an old retired guy now.”

He shrugged. “Experience versus youth. You choose.”

She kissed him full on the lips, then gently pushed him away. “I choose you.”

It was semidark when Dane took off. He banked over the lake, then made a graceful turn westward. When his course was set and the plane was leveled off at a cruising altitude of eighteen thousand feet, he turned to Will, who was shoehorned into the copilot seat, and he began to talk. It had taxed him to keep quiet for so long. They didn’t come more talkative or gregarious than Dane Bentley, and for the next eighteen hours, he had a captive audience.

Their first leg was going to take them to Cleveland, a distance of some 650 miles. By the time they landed about four and a half hours later to gas up, stretch their legs, get a bite from vending machines, and use the facilities, Will knew a great deal about his pilot.

Once Dane had decided in high school he was going military, it was a foregone conclusion he’d enlist in the navy. He grew up on the water in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where his family ran a charter fishing company, and his father and grandfather were ex-navy. Unlike most of his classmates, the Vietnam draft wasn’t hanging over his head because he was a gung ho volunteer, itching to use his pent-up energy to steam up the Gulf of Tonkin and fire off some big ordnance.

On his second tour in ’Nam, he volunteered for naval intelligence, got trained up in covert ops and communications, and spent that tour and one more motoring up and down the Mekong, tagging along with Swift-boat crews to scope out Viet Cong positions. When the war ended, he was persuaded to stay in with a plum assignment to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Maryland where he was made petty officer at the Maritime Operations Center.

He was a good-looking ladies’ man, ill suited to a suburban military community that catered to married guys and their families. He toyed with throwing himself into a commissioning program to make the officer corps or chucking it in and going back to the family business. What he didn’t know was that the Maritime Operations Center was ground zero for Area 51 recruiting. Over half the watchers at Groom Lake passed through Maryland at one point in their careers.

Like everyone who got corralled into Area 51, Dane was seduced by the mystery of an ultrasecret naval base land-locked in the Nevada desert. When he passed through final security clearance and the base mission was revealed, he thought it was about the coolest thing he’d ever heard. Still, he was an action, reaction guy. He’d never had a deep thought in his head, and he wasn’t about to start contemplating his navel or the mysteries of the universe. The lush fringe benefits and a Vegas lifestyle were all he needed to convince himself he’d made the right choice.

Will was taken aback that the man who was helping him thwart the watchers had been one. He was initially suspicious, but he had to trust his own ability to read people, and Dane’s earnestness and lack of guile satisfied him he was not a threat. What was he going to do anyway? Jump out without a parachute?

Dane provided an insight into the mind-set of the watchers. He’d done just about every job within their ranks during his three-decade career, from manning the metal detectors for the daily strip and scans to conducting field operations against employees who were suspected of obtaining unauthorized DODs for relatives or friends or otherwise compromising the integrity of the operation. They were a buttoned-down cadre, encouraged to be detached and humorless, interacting with staff in much the same menacing way that corrections officers deal with prisoners.

But Dane was too affable at the core to make management rank, and in his annual reviews, he was consistently advised to remain more aloof and warned not to fraternize. He and Henry Spence first met outside work when a chance Saturday encounter at a filling station led to a drink at the Sands Casino.