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Cutt dropped his pistol and bear-hugged Marsh. For a split-second he wasn’t sure he could budge him. Cutt’s bulk pulled his arms taut and his fingers kept their grip, but under his fat Marsh was solid and strong as a bull. Finally, though, Marsh stumbled. That junker’s ignition caught and the thing made a turn that seemed to take forever back onto the road, and then the two remaining reporters sped away, rear door flapping. The Nationalist’s body lay on its face.

He waited for the ringing in his ears to stop. “I don’t think he was lying,” he said at last.

“He was going for his gun,” Marsh said. He turned away and ordered two men to drag the body into the brush, then walked toward the line of SUVs.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Shecker brayed at him. “We needed them.”

“You’re welcome,” Marsh said.

Shecker made a face like he’d swallowed a bug.

The two men bent, gripped the body under its arms, and tried to lift it. But the Nationalist had been a tall, heavy man and the vinyl shell of his windbreaker was slippery with blood; they got the shoulders off the ground and couldn’t get the leverage to do more. They gave up, each grabbed a wrist, and dragged the body out of the way with a scraping noise that hushed as they moved from roadtop to soft dirt. Halfway along they turned to pass between two bushes, and when they were done he lay bent thirty degrees at the waist, chest and neck pressed into the twiggy base of a saltbush plant.

This was bad. Cutt had known they’d see death today, but not this kind, pointless and thoroughly avoidable. Even if the Nationalist had called the Feds, and helicopters and A-10s sat on the ground waiting for his men, what good did it do to kill him? On another day it might have made some sense—a year ago, for example, they’d discovered a traitor in the Posse, and to scare some of his men out of going wobbly and satisfy the vengeance of the rest he’d ordered the man dragged for a quarter-mile. Marsh had driven the pickup and then left the guy on a mountaintop to die. But today, one way or another, was Cutt’s last as Sheriff. He didn’t need to stoke Marsh’s fanaticism and he didn’t need to shock his men into continued loyalty. He’d wanted to end his leadership doing good.

He got back in the Bronco and stared at Marsh, riding in the shotgun seat.

“Wipe off that puss,” Marsh said. “I said he was going for his gun.”

“Bullshit,” Cutt muttered.

“What’s that?”

Cutt put the truck in gear and started them moving again. The hard part hadn’t even yet begun.  

Their road cut across a washand headed up an alluvial fan. They were miles from the highway when four different notices on two poles warned them to turn back. Cutt couldn’t read the specifics in smaller letters, but as they blew past he did notice a slightly larger line in red at the bottom of one sign: Use of deadly force authorized.

Shecker’s information claimed pressure sensors lay beneath the road surface just outside those trespass warnings, meaning they could expect special-ops mercenaries to intercept them any moment. Cutt tapped the brake pedal twice, flashing a signal through his wake dust to the driver behind him to slow down. The initial guard response was supposed to be light, one or two Ford pickups, each carrying a couple of men prepared for UFO seekers. Unless everything had gotten loused up already, Cutt’s men would take this first rank of guards fast and keep moving. In the back, one man got onto his knees on the seat, another on the floor on the same side. They wore earplugs so as not to deafen each other. The third unlatched the sunroof, slid it open, and crouched on the rubber mat just behind the gear stick, holding the front seats for balance.

The road made a tight 180-degree arc to the left, around the base of a foothill, followed by a shallower curve to the right. Already they were in the lower creases of the mountain range, with more and more Joshua trees dotting the hills. They came in sight of a prefab steel building beside a boom gate. A pair of chain-link fences hemmed the road for a hundred feet past that gate, forming a sort of corridor that ended in a second boom gate. A five-strand barbed-wire fence stretched into the desert on either side of the near one.

Cutt braked and turned hard left, skidding the Bronco broadside to the gate and letting his front wheels roll off the road. The two men on the back seat put their rifles out the right rear window, Marsh aimed out the right front, and the third man in back popped through the sunroof. Cutt put the truck in park and jackknifed his body, twisting his head and torso past the steering wheel and out of sight.

He heard the next truck in the convoy stop alongside, then the four others behind them. He heard doors opening and his men’s boots on the ground, scuffing into position.

Then silence.

“See anyone?” he hissed.

“No,” Marsh said.

Cutt thought. “Send four boys to check that shed.”

Marsh didn’t say anything, but the creak of his seat springs revealed he’d leaned out the window to gesture. He settled again. More silence.

“Well?” Cutt demanded.

“They’re waving all clear,” Marsh said.

That wasn’t right. Shecker had insisted that the guards never let anyone come even this far. It was possible they were scattered in open country, chasing or shooting at Posses who’d tripped other sensors during the night. But if the reporters had informed on them, or if Possemen on foot had been captured, then the half-dozen regular guards on this approach might have pulled back, gotten reinforcements, and set an ambush somewhere on the pass ahead. Or simply pulled back, called Nellis, and had air support put on alert. Groom Lake’s own helicopters could be here in five minutes, planes from Nellis not five minutes more.

He sat up. “Tell them to open the gate already,” he growled.

Marsh relayed the instruction and one of the four men on the ground fiddled with the controls on the gate housing.

“It’s not working,” he called.

Another man went to help him and in a moment reported the same: the power had been severed or the controls locked. In any case the gate arm wouldn’t move.

Cutt swore and thought again. Then he told them to snip the barbed wire on the far side of the guard shack. He had all six trucks lock their rims, and when they’d pulled the wire aside the convoy inched across the desert in bottom gear, climbing and falling over hummocks of brush. One big fall bounced Cutt’s hands off the wheel; he snatched for it as the truck slued under the sudden pitch of its own weight, and for a moment feared he might break an axle. It cost them long minutes to cut the fence, drive one by one over the soft desert, and regain the road on the far side of the gates, and the whole time he was straining his ears for the far-off sound of a chopper blade or jet engine. There wasn’t anything they could do if he did hear one, of course, except abandon the trucks and scatter on foot. But he couldn’t stop himself listening.

The mountain rose sharply behind the gatehouse. While they waited for the last few trucks of the convoy to catch up, he sent a man from his Bronco scrambling upslope with a pair of binoculars. When the man returned he said he thought he’d seen people a mile ahead, but not set up for an ambush. They were on a hill above the road, about ten of them on foot. Probably Possemen still on the hike in.

On the one hand, at least they weren’t mercenaries lying in wait. On the other, if those guys hadn’t even crossed the mountains yet they’d be no help at all. The satellite images Shecker had shown them had six or seven miles of desert between the mountains and Groom Lake with no cover to speak of. A line of Possemen would be picked off easily if they straggled across in broad daylight. He just had to hope at least some of the Posses had covered that ground already, as planned.

They climbed a few easy hairpins and crested the mountain in a saddleback. The road made one last right turn and pointed them directly at a giant field of white, the alkali flat that was Groom Lake proper. No planes or helicopters in the sky. Marsh, trying to hold his binoculars steady against the truck’s shivers, called out no warnings.

Four or five miles from here to the edge of the dry lake. Five minutes lined up in a row, in direct sight of the base. He was scared, as always heading into a fight, but free of the hopelessness he’d felt for so long. The sun was up and bright but the ground hadn’t yet baked enough to shimmer the air; he could see crisply for miles, all the way to the giant white hangars in the distance. It reminded him of early mornings following a night of drinking, coffee tightening his senses and his eyes glad for the light after hours of fighting the dark. Times when it was best neither to look back to that first drink he shouldn’t have had nor forward to the deputies who might sniff out his drunkenness when he arrived at work; times he savored because as long as he was already drunk he might as well. On such mornings the inevitable Colorado sun spotlit one detail after another in the landscapes he passed—a gray fan of sage, a rock outcrop, sprinklers on a lawn—so that his mind could assemble no sense of space and he merely swam from one image to the next. Now, underneath his battlenerves, he felt that same calm and sense of immersion. No time to look back in guilt on the Nationalist’s murder, or to look forward in fear. It was the closest he’d been to high since he’d gone sober.

They reached the edge of the dry lake. The road curved around its far bank but he didn’t stay with it; instead he jolted downhill the fifteen feet of scrub to the playa, and when all four wheels were on the hardpan sped up again, drifting right as he went. The other trucks followed him but no longer in a straight line. The playa gave them room to spread out, become a scattered target.

They were hundreds of feet apart when Cutt, still leading, hit the runway. Smooth asphalt, edged with reflectors and unlit beacons, it stretched for what had to be miles from the middle of the lakebed to the buildings no longer quite so far away.

Now he was on a high, a better one even than alcohol. No one could stop them before they reached that little city ahead. Still no plane or helicopter in the sky, nor any pickup or Humvee between them and their goal. Whatever else they found today—alien spaceships, kidnapped children, or just next-generation spy stuff—it would make the Feds hurt. There were half a dozen military encampments near Pike Forest and his men had hit each at least once; all they’d ever accomplished was to wing a few GIs, maybe kill one or two, and the Army could always send replacements. Despite what Shecker thought, it wasn’t actually so easy to replace aerospace engineers or sophisticated labs.

The runway switched to reinforced concrete and split in three. Cutt took the rightmost fork—a taxiway rather than a landing strip—checked the rearview to see how far the rest of his men lagged, and then dropped from seventy miles an hour to below thirty to let them catch up. Five hundred yards ahead and to the right, slightly upslope, three huge dish antennas pointed directly at the sky. Farther along his path but nearer the axis of the runways came an open stretch of tarmac, and beyond that the first group of hangars. He wanted the convoy tight before they reached shooting distance of those.

His men did close up, and quick, the last of them falling in just as he came to that open area and recognized where he was from the satellite photos. A portion of this tarmac, the part farthest from the hangars, provided space for three helicopter landing pads, marked with target-like boxes and giant H’s.

The satellite images, though, had showed two copters sitting right there. So where were they? They should have been in the air long ago, harassing him and his men. Even if they were chasing other Posses, they should have given that up when Cutt and his men crossed the restricted line. Whoever watched those sensors should have recognized his convoy of trucks as a greater threat than a few hikers. But he hadn’t heard them.

No one stirred in or near the hangars. No one came to stop them. He saw no vehicles at all, in motion or parked, no planes, cars, Humvees, or utility carts.

“There’s no one here,” Marsh said.

The photos had shown forty or fifty other buildings beyond the half-dozen they could see right now, but Cutt didn’t need to explore them to know, with a feeling of vertigo and nausea, that Marsh was right. This was a ghost town. The nearest hangar doors stood wide open, showing bare steel walls, a lattice of girders under the roof, and a minor edifice of scaffolds and platforms around an empty space where some billion-dollar project once sat.

Hello, Irony.

He’d dismissed a lot of fears to get here, figuring it was worth it if it justified what he’d been doing all this time. He’d thought he was taking calculated risks by going to Four Corners in the first place, by staying in Las Vegas when those reporters turned up, and finally by sticking with the plan Shecker helped create even when he learned the man believed in UFOs. In fact he’d just been duped. Shecker’s demonstration had been a fake. No brave Posseman ever captured any super-secret soap from any white bus leaving here, because there had never been anyone here at all. A man had been murdered for no reason.

“What do we do?” Marsh asked.

Cutt turned right at the edge of the tarmac onto another graded dirt road. “I don’t know,” he said. The sun pressed mercilessly on his face. The back and bottom of his seat pressed into his lumbar spine and thighs as he slumped under sudden weariness. He wanted a drink.

They passed another, even bigger pair of white hangars, then a few smaller ones in Vietnam-era military green, and finally came to a grid of long, low prefab rectangles. He turned right along their periphery and eventually stopped in a parking lot beside a big square building. The other trucks stopped too and the Posse assembled on the sun-bleached gravel, waiting for him to speak. Except he found he still had nothing to say. He didn’t care what happened to them now. He wanted to be somewhere else. He really wanted a drink.

He caught sight of Shecker at the fringe of the group, hesitated a moment, and then made straight for him, pushing and dodging past guys in the way. He didn’t have a clear intention, although beyond the first few paces he carried his hands as fists. At first Shecker watched him unconcerned, but when Cutt was about halfway to him he fled. Cutt broke into a run for a few steps until he saw he couldn’t make up the ground. In seconds Shecker crossed nearly the full width of the lot, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet, and kept running.

Cutt walked back toward the trucks. The sun’s harsh light made his men seem loathsome in their mountain-man beards, tangled hair, and fur-patched clothes. He hated them. He hated himself.

“Give me a gun,” he said. The nearest man unshouldered his rifle. “Now give me ten minutes.”

He grasped the Bronco’s door handle. The sun had heated it. He pulled open the door. Each act required a distinct application of will. He put his left foot on the high step, hoisted himself to the driver’s seat, laid the rifle on the passenger side, and dragged the door shut. He started the truck and the seat hummed against his legs.

 Probably the others thought he was about to run Shecker down. Chasing Shecker did follow logically from trying to punch him. But in fact what Cutt wanted or intended was immaterial. He knew what he had to do and Shecker didn’t figure in it at all. For years he’d told himself that his Higher Power was out to make his life a joke, but he’d never fully digested it: there was no bucking a God who hated you. You had to turn your will and your life over to that God anyway.

He could even have been grateful to Shecker for ripping away his protective delusion, except, of course…

…

**********

He drove back the way they’d come, sticking to the road this time instead of driving out the runway. It took twenty minutes to circle the lakebed and recross the pass, during which he wasn’t aware of a single thought.

He did have one at the guardhouse. He reminded himself to keep his eyes straight ahead and not glance into the brush on either side.

He couldn’t avoid seeing the bloodstains on the dirt road itself, though.

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