The Light Beyond The Mountains

Prologue: The Journey Begins

(Cover artwork © by Tristan Maduro)

(Note: The Prologue will be the only excerpt from The Light Beyond The Mountains to be posted for free. Free commentary from me will follow between chapters - book chapters for paying subscribers only will be posted fortnightly. The Prologue follows my ‘intro’ on the 27th December detailing the background and backstory to the book)

Prologue: Mount Irish Wilderness, Nevada, 1992

Even though I was aware I was dreaming, I knew, too, that this was real.

I was in a low-ceilinged room with thick concrete walls – the air close and acrid, cigarette smoke hanging between me and the only source of natural light: a glass rectangle many inches thick. Somewhere behind me I could hear low, excited whispering and a light bulb fizzing in its socket. The air was hard to breathe. Where am I? A glance behind would have told me, but I couldn’t move. I was frozen – able to hear, but unable to speak, my eyes locked on the window, beyond which something – something terrible – was about to happen.

“Ten, nine, eight …”

It was hard to make out what was beyond the glass – a flat, featureless desert, distorted and discoloured, like pictures of a Martian landscape. And something in the distance that shimmered like a mirage – desert heat perhaps.

“… seven, six, five, four …”

Something caught my attention. Even though it was several miles away, I could see it clearly. Stripped of its leaves and bent by years of struggle against the wind: a tree, twisted into the shape of a contorted human. And then a sadness, such as I’d never, ever felt, washed over me. The tree wasn’t real – this was a dream, I told myself; the tree was just a symbol of a world that in a second or two would no longer exist …

“… three, two, one …”

Everything flashed into negative – the overcast went white, the tree black-etched against it. And in that way that only happens in films and dreams, I saw it disintegrate in slow motion – the light, the heat and the shockwave stripping it of its remaining limbs before the bark delaminated, ripped away in the blink of an eye.

I opened my eyes.

A bright light shone in my face. Everything else around it was pitch black.

“Hey, wake up. I thought you should know. There are lights coming out of the base …”

Guy handed me his binoculars. It took a moment to recalibrate. I breathed in and looked at my watch. Our outcrop was at the southern end of a low line of hills. In the heat of the day, it had given us a view over a parched valley 20 miles across in which nothing had moved. Then, as the first stars appeared, the patrols had too.

For the past 30 or so years, the ‘base’ had become known by various names: ‘Watertown’, ‘Paradise Ranch’, ‘the Ranch’, ‘Dreamland’. In the pre-Internet era, Guy and I had referred to it simply as ‘Groom’. The dried-up lakebed had played host to America’s highly secret aerospace test programmes since the mid-1950s and the early days of the U-2 when whispers of its existence first began to circulate. Today it was better known as Area 51.

I followed the headlights of the vehicle along the perimeter track south of Bald Mountain, where a radar station and an observation post monitored everything that came into the valley or flew over it. They knew we were here for sure.

I handed back the binoculars.

Of all the reports of strange, unfamiliar shapes in the night skies of the Desert Southwest none was stranger than those put about a few years earlier by a geeky 30-year-old called Bob Lazar. In 1989, he’d announced on a Las Vegas TV station – behind a cod pseudonym and some shadowy disguise – that he had worked on recovered alien spacecraft at a Groom Lake sub-facility, ‘S-4’, which had supposedly been dug into the side of a mountain and was impossible to see from the air or space.

This entire area was ring-fenced from the outside world by the Nellis Air Force Range, a stretch of government land the size of Switzerland.

The perimeter was ringed by patrols, guards, tripwires, and sensors. It also bordered the Nevada Test Site, scene of more than a thousand nuclear explosions since the early 1950s.

For the Air Force and the base’s other stakeholders, Lazar’s revelations had shone an unwelcome spotlight on the hinterland of the base – a twilight world already abuzz with wild rumours and legends. Its border was delineated by a tall fence that Guy and I’d driven up to on our previous visit, six months earlier.

On it we’d found a sign informing us of the ‘lethal force’ authorised beyond that point – and, as neither of us wanted to die, we’d turned back. We’d not got more than a mile when I saw lights in my mirror – I’d no idea where they’d come from, because there was nowhere you could hide a skateboard out here, let alone a vehicle. There was no point trying to outrun them, so we’d pulled over.

What happened next became a source of amusement over the next few days, even though, at the time, we’d convinced-ourselves, as the lights drew closer, this was some kind of proto-rendition operation – the for-hire ‘Cammo-Dudes’ who were said to patrol this place were going to snatch us at gunpoint, blindfold us, and drop us into a deep hole with nothing or nobody to account for what had happened.

Instead, as the truck pulled alongside and the driver’s window wound down, we’d found ourselves confronted by a sheriff’s deputy - craggy faced moustachioed and chewing a match, he was straight out of Central Casting. “Can I help you, guys?”

“We’re a bit lost,” Guy said.

The deputy looked us up and down. “Where you from?”

“England.”

He shook his head. “Man, you are lost …”

He asked where we were heading. We told him. The lost idiot approach seemed to do the trick, because within two minutes he’d driven off, leaving us to ponder the map. Thanks to Lazar, he must have heard this babbling lunacy a lot.

In the official version, there was nothing here – Area 51 wasn’t on any government map and wasn’t referred to in any official documents.

But this merely heightened the allure.

 After Lazar’s TV appearance, the first sightseers began to climb the peaks of the mountains around the ‘base that didn’t exist’ to gaze in and see what they could see. Then others came – a second wave, of which Guy and I had constituted a part.

The people in this wave weren’t so hardy – they drove with their beers and their picnic boxes – and, if they were so inclined, their recreational drugs - to a place Lazar had referred to called the ‘black mailbox’ and watched. In the small hours, in the skies above the base, those rewarded with a sighting said they’d seen UFOs; others that they’d glimpsed exotic, classified aircraft, others still that they’d found God out here.

Guy Norris and I hadn’t been nearly so lucky.

We’d been colleagues until his recent appointment as the West Coast correspondent of Flight International, like mine another trade magazine.

As well as being a senior editor of Jane’s Defence Weekly, I’d had two thrillers published and had come out here to research my third.

On that first trip, Guy and I had set off from California in a Chevrolet Blazer, driving first to Tonopah, Nevada, a remote base that was home to the recently declassified F-117A Stealth Fighter.

Then we’d cut east and south-east, until, after several more hours, flecks of snow hitting the windscreen from the low overcast, we were greeted by a sign for the ‘Little Al’e’Inn’, Rachel, a roadside trailer-bar with a couple of rooms. Its billboard, depicting the head of a grey alien with the words beneath, ‘Earthlings Welcome’, had loomed unexpectedly out of the darkness.

And suddenly we were on a different planet.

Paranoid that two Brits strolling into the only watering hole for miles would attract the wrong kind of attention, we’d kept driving, eventually pitching our two-man tent near the 25-mile-long arrow-straight dirt road that led from the highway to the base. That night had been the most uncomfortable of my life – and for what? We’d frozen half to death.

The following morning, with no hint of anything in the sky, we’d packed up and headed south-west, next stop Las Vegas, promising ourselves we’d return – an opportunity that, for me, emerged six months later on the back of an official invitation from the Department of Energy and the Air Force to tour the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Kirtland Air Force Base, both of them in New Mexico, my favourite American state. Kirtland, Los Alamos and Area 51 – not that I knew it at the time – would become central to the initial narrative – my entry points into the story to come.

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Los Alamos, 30 miles northwest of Santa Fe, was the facility where Robert Oppenheimer and his team of Manhattan Project scientists had built the first atom bombs.

Kirtland Air Force Base was also associated with nuclear weapons, but had, in recent years, branched into ‘directed energy’ – lasers and other ‘beam weapons’ associated with Ronald Reagan’s 1980s missile-killing Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed ‘Star Wars’ after the movie

Los Alamos had also got in on the directed energy act. Whilst there, I’d been briefed on research into something called electro-magnetic pulse – EMP – the burst of radiation emitted from a nuclear weapon at the instant of detonation. This radiating wave knocked out any electronics in its path – a useful capability if you were a military strategist on ‘Day 1’ of an all-out war.

For years, the only way you could generate useful amounts of EMP was by triggering a nuke, which wasn’t so good if you didn’t also want to trigger World War 3.

But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, under an initiative my colleagues and I had gradually become aware of at Jane’s, US and UK tech experts began heading into the newly minted Russian Federation to see what technology they might be able to hoover up from ex-Soviet weapons laboratories. This was reminiscent of the plunder operation that had been carried out by the Allies in Nazi Germany at the end of World War 2, when teams of scientists had raced each other to get to the Nazis’ technical secrets. In Russia, however, they’d willingly given up their knowledge – selling it on the assumption they’d get rich; that Western companies would honour their brilliance, invest in it and they’d all go off and make pots of money together.

But that, of course, wasn’t in the minds of our guys at all – having acquired the tech at bargain-basement prices, they took it back home, prised it apart, and began to reverse-engineer anything that conferred advantage. The tech I’d been briefed on at Los Alamos had been an example of one such ‘recovery’ – buried away behind the Urals somewhere, Russian scientists had come up with a way of producing a burst of EMP using conventional explosives – and with making the wave directional: instead of the energy going everywhere, this ‘EMP-generator’ could be directed at a point on the map.

As one of a team of senior Jane’s editors, this kind of story was bread-and-butter for me – and I’d loved it.

With hindsight, a little too much.

I’d been so focused on the tech and getting the story out – and, like any other journalist, of delivering that exclusive before our rivals – I’d not often stopped to ponder some of the wider ramifications of my writing. This was 1992. The Cold War had just ended. During the 1980s, many of the people I’d interviewed had believed the Soviet era would end in a fight – and that the fight would be nuclear. When you’re young, you don’t give that kind of thing too much thought – I’d not, anyway.

But at the beginning of the year, my first child had been born and, without knowing it, I’d begun to look at some of the things I was being shown in a new light.

At Los Alamos, a part of me had felt a great reverence for the place – unlike most of the other parts of the military-industrial complex I’d visited, its campus-like atmosphere had belied its true purpose.

The setting was beautiful. Los Alamos was a small town on top of a mesa in the Jemez range of the Southern Rockies, surrounded by national forest, a national park and Native American land.

An inscription carved into a monument on my way in had welcomed me with the words: ‘Where Discoveries Are Made’. The story of the coming together of the physics and the engineering of the first atomic bombs had been told a thousand times. It wasn’t my place to tell it again – I was a tech-writer, not a historian. But amidst the modern and highly secure buildings that made up the lab’s infrastructure, it was impossible not to feel awe for the enormity of its original accomplishment, as Oppenheimer and his team had raced to complete their two types of weapon: the uranium bomb that would be dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6^th August 1945 and the plutonium bomb that exploded three days later over Nagasaki.

The first bomb, ‘Little Boy’, had had a yield of 15 kilotons – the blast equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT.

The second bomb, ‘Fat Man’, outstripped its predecessor’s effectiveness by a further six kilotons.

From here onwards, nuclear weapons were only ever going to get bigger. At the time of my Los Alamos visit, the biggest weapon in the US arsenal was the B53 thermonuclear gravity bomb developed to destroy deeply buried Soviet command and control bunkers. It had a yield of 9 megatons – nine million tons equivalent of TNT.

The biggest US weapon ever produced, the B41, deployed in the early 1960s and retired in 1976, had been capable of a maximum yield of 25 megatons of TNT-equivalent. Even this paled alongside the largest weapon ever built – the Soviet Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb – with a blast yield of almost 60 megatons. The Tsar Bomba was first tested in 1961 and never went into production. The atmospheric test – over the island of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic – had been designed to send a message to the US: No matter what you do, we can and will make our bombs bigger than yours.

As Guy Norris and I gazed out over Tikaboo Valley – 20 miles across, it acted as a kind of buffer between the real world and Area 51 – I felt a developing sense of unease. I thought of home and the holiday my wife and I had promised ourselves on my return. A trip to Cornwall, where we’d introduce our baby daughter to the sea and her roots: my wife’s family had originally come from there.

For the first time in all the years I’d been covering the US beat – a beat I loved more than any other (my roots were partially American) – I couldn’t wait to get home. I’d been immersed in this stuff too long – even out here, outside the Little Al’e’Inn, we’d paused by a radiation counter that still clicked to the beat of the fallout that had rained down for years from the Nevada Test Site.

I thought of the dream. It wasn’t the first time I’d had it – that had been a week earlier, the night of my Los Alamos visit. The following day, I’d driven 250 miles to the next waypoint on my tour, a place called Alamogordo, pulling on to the side of US-54 by the White Sands Missile Range, the closest point on the map that a non-cleared human could get most days of the year to Trinity Site, where the first atom bomb had detonated in July 1945. In my motel that night, I’d had the dream again and just now it had come to me a third time. I’d never had a recurring dream before.

I gazed at the distant glow emitted by Area 51. In the twelve hours Guy and I been here nothing much had moved in or out except for a handful of ‘Janet flights’ - 737 transport planes shuttling shift workers back to Vegas, 100 miles to the south.

After several more hours of eyes-on, we’d had enough.

We were preparing to strike camp when Guy nudged me again.

“What’s that?”

I turned.

From behind the hills, a ball of bright orange light – what appeared through my lenses as a dazzling miniature sun – was rising from Area 51 into the night sky.

(To be continued in Chapter 1)