Area 51 by Robert Doherty Page A

second, then walked over to where the other off-shift security men were dozing in the shade offered by several trees. He grabbed a Gore-Tex bivy sack and slid into it, zipping it up around his chin. He thought about everything he had seen so far for about five minutes, wondering what Prague had been told about him.
    He finally decided he didn't have a clue what was going on or what Prague knew, and switched his brain off.
    As he fell asleep, his mind shifted to other scenes.
    Prague's final words in German echoed through his brain and Turcotte fell into an uneasy slumber with the echo of gunfire and German voices screaming in fear and pain.

    THE HANGAR, AREA 51
    T-129 HOURS, 4O MINUTES

    Lisa Duncan had read the figures and studied the classified photos, but they had not prepared her for the sheer size of this operation. Flying into Area 51 on board one of their black helicopters, she had been impressed with the long runway and the aboveground base facilities, but that impression had been dwarfed by what was hidden out of sight.
    Taking the elevator up from the Cube, she and her scientific escorts entered a large room carved out of the rock of Groom Mountain. This was the hangar, over three quarters of a mile long and a quarter mile wide. Three of the walls, the floor, and roof--one hundred feet above their heads--were rock. The last side was a series of camouflaged sliding doors that opened up onto the north end of the runway.
    The true size of the hangar could only be seen on the rare occasions, like now, when all the dividers between the various bays were unfolded and a person could look straight through from one end to the other. Duncan wondered if they had done that to impress her. If they had, it was working.
    She was still bothered by her confrontation with General Gullick. She'd been briefed for the job by the President's national security adviser, but even he had seemed uncertain about what was going on with Majic-12. It actually wasn't that surprising to Duncan. In her work with medical companies she'd often had to deal with government bureaucracy and found it to be a formidable maze of selfpropagating, self-serving structures to negotiate. As Gullick had made very clear: Majic-12 had been around for fifty-four years. The unspoken parallel was that the President whom Duncan was working for had been around for only three.
    She knew that meant that the members of Majic-12 implicitly believed they had a greater legitimacy than the elected officials who were supposed to oversee the project.

    The CIA, NSA, the Pentagon--all were bureaucracies that had weathered numerous administrations and changes in the political winds. Majic-12 was another one, albeit much more secretive. The issue, though, was why were Gullick and the others in such a rush to fly the mothership?
    That issue and other disturbing rumors about Majic-12 operations that had sifted their way back to Washington was the reason Duncan was here. She already had some dirt on the program, as she'd indicated to Gullick; but that was past dirt, as he'd indicated in return. Most of the men involved in Paperclip were long dead. She had to find out what was presently happening. To do that she had to pay attention, so when her guide spoke up, she put away her worries.
    "This is the hangar we built in 1951," Professor Underbill, the aeronautics expert, explained. "We've added to it over the years." He pointed at the nine silvery craft parked in their cradles. "You have all the information on how and where we found the bouncers. Currently, six are operational."
    "What about the other three?" she asked.
    "Those are the ones we're working on. Taking apart the engines to see if we can reverse-engineer them. Trying to understand the control and flight system along with other technology."
    She nodded and followed as they walked along the back of the hangar. There were workers on each of the craft, doing things whose purpose was unclear. She had indeed studied the history of