Chapter 7

Chapter 6  (13+) Jack goes to underground base and meets Colonel Lanier. #2035888 by Hyperiongate

Chapter Seven
 
Jack and Sam got their second ride in a Blackhawk helicopter shortly after Colonel Lanier had ended their meeting. The briefing had continued a bit longer after the colonel disclosed the potential dangers ahead. When he was done, Lanier turned to a guard and said “Please escort our guests back to their truck.” That was it. No Q&A. No warning about leaking secret information to the public.

He’d told them what they needed to know and expected them to do the right thing. Jack realized immediately that this implied trust was a stronger bond to secret keeping than any lip service. That he trusted Jack and the Sheriff made an impact on the two men. Both found themselves starting to trust Lanier in spite of his recent kidnapping operation.

Now, as the helicopter approached the site where they had been “abducted”, Sam and Jack could both see that the Colonel had indeed started some balls rolling. In spite of it being well past sunset, construction on a number of structures was well underway. The entire area was bathed in red light, supposedly to make it less likely to be noticed from anyone that might happen to be looking in their direction. Jack considered it a bit overly cautious as the nearest road was at least ten miles to the north.

As they exited the Blackhawk, the men saw several semi-permanent structures going up, along with several tents. Communication vehicles bristled with antenna. Two huge generators were providing power to the operation. Judging from the size of the units, Jack expected the power capacity at this hours-old site could supply all of Reno.

The sheer scale of the operation made Jack feel uneasy. “What have we stumbled upon that would cause the military to suddenly shift into boom-town mode in the middle of the night?” he thought. “How often did Lanier’s Deep Blue Operations unit get called into action?” Whatever the answers were, there could be no denying that Lanier’s people were well organized and efficient.

Bio-suits with guns “escorted” them from the helicopter to Sam’s truck. More of the same stood nearby as Jack and Sam climbed into the cab. Apparently there was to be no sight-seeing before heading back to Reno. As soon as he could see the site in his rear view mirror, Sam tried to contact his office on his radio - nothing. That figured.

The cover story, part of the debriefing they were given on the flight back, was that the radio had broken down and their cell phone batteries were dead. Engine trouble completed the scenario. As the two men were to learn, attention to detail was one of Colonel Lanier’s trademarks. The radio was in fact broken. Their cell phones were returned to them as they left the helicopter; both had dead batteries. Sam suspected that if he were to look under the hood, he would find a newly installed fuel pump meant to replace the one that “failed”. A receipt and a “failed” pump were on the seat when they climbed into the cab.

The two men didn’t talk much on the way back into town; the assumption being that the truck was bugged. After what they had been through, it would be some time before either man felt...unwatched. Sam dropped off Jack just after 4:00 a.m. While secrecy about all of the recent events was implied, the colonel had suggested that Jack discuss the situation with Dr. Marshall. A background check on her showed that she could be trusted. A preliminary psych appraisal indicated that she would be initially indignant but would go along with the secrecy and surveillance in the end.

Jack wasn’t certain he could navigate successfully asking her out to dinner much less convince her that her John Doe might be an alien and that assassins would be dropping by sometime soon. The very idea of such a conversation was far more intimidating than anything he’d been through in the last 24 hours.

Lanier assured him he’d do fine.

“Be direct. She can handle it,” he’d told Jack. “By the way, she likes Italian food.”

While Jack appreciated the advice, he wasn’t really comfortable with the way Lanier was able to know everything about anyone he chose to know things about.

“How does the military get away with such an invasion of privacy,” he’d asked at one point.

Lanier looked up from his computer and said, “I’m not part of the military, at least not the way you think of the military” and continued on with his briefing about Dr. Marshall and the situation at Renown Medical Center as if he’d just explained everything.

The last thing the colonel had said to Jack was “I have arranged for you to be on Dr. Marshall’s calendar for lunch tomorrow at 1:30 in the afternoon. That might be a good time to talk to her about all of this. Make sure to get some sleep first. This may be a tricky meeting and you will need to be at your best.”

“How does he do that?” Jack thought, not for the first time.

*****

Lise woke up late after the best night of sleep she could remember. She had fallen asleep with her mind bouncing between her patient and reluctant fantasies about Jack Barton. That John Doe #11 should take up space in her head, she understood. It was Jack that was the mystery. She couldn’t figure out what it was about that man. She had barely met him and yet he somehow had commandeered a disproportionate amount of her thoughts. Sure, he hadn’t come by yesterday like he said he would. Shouldn’t that be enough to put Jack Barton away in her “picked another bad one” file? Sure, it wasn’t like they’d had a date. He said he’d stop by, but it wasn’t really a commitment to do so. Maybe something had come up.

“Yeah, right,” she told herself. “This guy will lead you down a path you’ve already traveled enough time. Let it go.”

With “Jack thoughts” safely relegated to her mental recycle bin, Lise took her time getting ready for work. There had been no midnight calls from the hospital so everything must be doing fine. Ordinarily, she would have called just to make sure. However, this morning, she could just feel it. Her patient was doing just fine. She didn’t think to question how she “knew” with such certainty.

Lise felt a sense of well-being as she listened to the morning news and sipped at her coffee. One story after another filled with politicians arguing with other politicians while religions were arguing with other religions. There seemed to be no shortage of people pointing out what was wrong with the world. All had their own brand of snake oil to set everything right. She turned off the radio; refusing to be drawn into the contrived frays that dominated most news shows these days.

Lise let her day unfolded in her mind’s eye. It would clearly be one filled with excitement. There was the patient who presented endless opportunities to learn. Streams of valuable date were being collected on everything from DNA densities to pulse and respiratory rates. How fast was he absorbing the nutrients? How was the donor process going should their patient make it that far into his recovery? Had any of this been leaked to the press just yet? What had the Sheriff found out about who JD11 really was? Would Jack Barton come by today?

“Damn it, Lise. Get a grip,” she chided herself for allowing Jack back into the game.

Lise finished her coffee then, unable to hold back her excitement any longer, dressed quickly; anxious to get to the hospital and see how her patient was doing.

As she drove into work, Colonel Wes Lanier climbed out of a helicopter. It was time to make his first inspection of what had come to be known as Artifact Camp. The progress was impressive. A dozen tents were set up for his troops. Excavation around the artifact was well under way.

Colonel Lanier had barely gotten off the helicopter when a wild-haired beanpole in a wrinkled lab coat came running towards him waiving his hand.

“Szokoly seems to be up early,” thought Lanier.

Dr. Szokoly was the senior scientist on the colonel’s staff; a position he’d held for more than ten years. It was a dream job for a physicist. Nowhere else could one be exposed to so many impossibilities than when working for the mysterious Colonel Wes Lanier. This artifact was just the latest in a long series of events where Lanier brought him something completely improbably and said, “I need you to figure out what this is?”

Dr. Szokoly had been brought in late last night to supervise the unearthing of the artifact. He’d paced back and forth chiding the excavators; soldiers who were much more comfortable wielding guns than shovels. They attacked the desert holding onto the artifact in a way that could only be described as “blunt force trauma”. Eventually, he got them to gentle-down a bit. There was no way to tell how fragile his latest little “precious” was.

The plan was to excavate his new play-toy and then, depending on its size, find a way to move it to the laboratory at the Colonel’s secure facility at Nellis. That was the plan…initially.

At first, they were expecting a disk about five yards across with some reasonable thickness. After a few hours of digging, they had finally got the entire thing uncovered. It turned out to not be a disk, but a cylinder. It had the expected five yard diameter but it was buried in the sand down to a depth of fifteen feet.

“Colonel Lanier, you are not going to believe this,” said Szokoly running up to the colonel as he disembarked from his helicopter.

Lanier raise an eyebrow and waited. He had known the odd but brilliant physicist long enough to know that he got excited rather easily. He also knew that one had to let the doctor tell whatever he had to tell in his own way. Pressing him to get quickly to the point only seemed to increase the doctor’s joy of stretching things out. Wes knew Szokoly was a savant; brilliant in all things to do with physics - hopelessly underdeveloped when it came to interacting with people.

The doctor paused wide-eyes as he waited for the colonel to ask for more information. He was like a child with a really, really fun secret. When it became clear that Lanier was going to wait him out, Szokoly had no other choice than to proceed.

“Well, as you know, we have a rather large cylinder out there. Up until a few minutes ago, it was being held up by a significant amount of lumber that we were using for support as we uncovered more and more. We didn’t want it to fall over and become damaged. Anyway, as we were maneuvering the crane into place to pull it up out of the hole, one of the supports was accidentally struck. It broke, causing a cascading failure of the total support system.”

Wes interrupted, “So are you going to tell me that you broke our artifact?”

Szokoly was so excited he had to jam his hands into his lab coat pockets to keep from jumping up and down and clapping his hands. He had Wes right where he wanted him. It was time for the surprise. “No. What I am telling you is that the artifact didn’t fall over. As a matter of fact, it never moved an inch, even as everything around it collapsed.”

“So it’s okay then; sounds like we got lucky. Is there anything else?”

“Well, yes, there is one small detail.” Szokoly paused before continuing, “It seems, Colonel that our artifact has at least one special talent that we know of so far. You see, it’s down there, in the pit, not supported by anything, including the ground. Right now its hovering about two feet above the bottom of the pit.”

He watched at the colonel’s eyebrows lifted slightly. Lanier had been caught off guard; a rarity for the man whose career dealt in oddities.

Mission accomplished for Dr. Szokoly, who turned and scampered off to check on the artifact.

“God I love my job,” he thought as he approached the edge of the giant hole where the artifact hung, perfectly motionless.

Chapter 8  (13+) Jack tells Lise she is in trouble from some unknown threat #2036687 by Hyperiongate