The questions bugging Sly for days gained extra weight when they entered Area 71. The base was not, couldn’t be a purely academic research station, that idea was clearly bogus. The prestigious Charlton University provided a convenient false front and Area 71 might have produced academic papers, but no facility this lavish could be funded by a single academic institution, even with the support of a CIA investment fund.
It only makes sense if the CIA, not CU, was the principal partner.
The facility was sophisticated, and way larger than Sly had expected. Walking from chamber to chamber and into the substantial storerooms, he’d been astonished by the crates of tins and dried provisions, enough to last months.
Sly wanted to believe General Fox’s description of the situation but even in the conference room he’d sensed something wrong. The way Fox had subtly deferred to ‘Intelligence Officer’ Jarvis, the way the video smelled like greasepaint and bullshit, designed to persuade. The edited bodycam footage wasn’t real evidence. Gus didn’t think the images looked fake, and a CIA analyst had supposedly evaluated the video, but you could march a herd of mammoths in sparkly spandex through gaps in the edited footage.
Even at the time it had felt like a long con, not a briefing.
One thing was certain, though. General Fox wouldn’t have ordered Special Forces half-way across the world into the most extreme of environments, at substantial cost from an official budget, if the operation wasn’t somehow critical to the national interest.
Or General Fox’s interest, at least, if there’s a difference.
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If all Fox wanted was an A-Team on site, he only needed to say hey guys, here’s your shake-down exercise, and it’s a doozy! Sly would have come running, without the flummery.
Sly didn’t think this site was about the search for rare earth minerals. He didn’t expect to be told whyintruders were interested in the lowest levels of Area 71, but he knew it wasn’t for ore, however exotic.
No one spends this much money and political capital in Antarctica for minerals that can’t be extracted at scale without huge international backlash. Although, come to think of it, some politicians he knew might want to give it a go.
Sly wasn’t na?ve enough to expect the unvarnished truth. No Special Ops team was ever told more than they needed to know. Point and shoot, enough detail to shine a light on the enemies’ motives and resources, but no more. He’d not expected Fox and Jarvis to tell him what Area 71 was really for.
Sly had expected to work it out for himself, once he was here.
For now, though, Area 71’s mystery remained unsolved. He knew one thing for sure. Gus had given an initial analysis of the edited footage of Peck, Thorpe, Chopra and Allen, concluding the pictures weren’t generated by AI. Gus was still searching for the raw, unedited feed as Sly departed for the airport, but the initial conclusion was clear.
General Fox hadn’t shown him images cut from whole cloth.
But if you took the footage at face value – and Sly still had his doubts – there must be another way into the complex.
Clunk-clunk. The key turns in the padlock and the chains drop. Twenty-five minutes later Thorpe dies, shot by crossbow inside the gate, but Peck hadn’t moved from the entrance. Ergo, the perpetrators were inside before the caretakers arrived.
All known keys were accounted for and, based on the official map, there was only one way in. But what if the maps were wrong?
