Alien Secrets. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ paycheck didn’t normally stretch to include fine dining—not this fine—but he figured he owed a really special night to the girl he was about to dump.

      For some reason, the food didn’t taste quite as good as he’d expected.

      He’d left his cell phone at home, and made a point of asking her to do so, as well. He wasn’t going to spill any secrets, but, just in case, he didn’t want their dinner interrupted by unpleasant threats or bombast.

      He didn’t think They could have bugged every damned table in every restaurant in San Diego.

      “Can’t tell you, babe. Because they haven’t told me.”

      They’d finished their dinner and were talking over the last of their wine—a good ’08 Merlot recommended by the waiter. Hunter had always thought you ordered white wine with fish, but apparently a red wine with their seared tuna was the exception to the rule.

      “Isn’t that kind of strange?” Gerri asked. “I mean, is it usual to send people off and not tell them where they’re being sent?”

      “Not really. But, well, in my line of work, it does happen. Look, you knew this could happen when you hooked up with me, right?”

      “That doesn’t make this easy, Mark,” she said, irritated at his trying to turn this on her.

      “I know. I’m sorry.”

      “And you don’t know how long you’ll be gone?”

      “Uh-uh. But it might be a long time. Gerri …” He took a deep breath. “I guess what I’m trying to say … this evening is kind of a good-bye.”

      “I got that. But you make it sound like good-bye forever!”

      He swallowed. “It is. I’m sorry … but I’m not going to string you along. I don’t know when I’ll come back. I don’t know if I’ll be back.” He shrugged. “That’s just the way it is. I’m … sorry.”

      Her lip quivered, and her eyes were luminous with tears, but she didn’t cry, not yet. She dabbed at one eye with her napkin. “I thought …”

      “What? What did you think?”

      “That we had something really special together, you and me.”

      “We do.” He’d almost said “we did,” but he changed the tense from past to present at the last moment because he thought the same thing. “Gerr … you’ll just have to trust me. I really do care for you and—”

      “I love you.”

      For two months they’d been dancing around the concept of being in love like, well, like the way Gerri danced around her pole. This was the first time she’d said those words, and it hit Mark like a blow to the sternum.

      “And I love you.” And he meant it, staggered by both that revelation and by what he was truly giving up by saying good-bye. “But I do not want you waiting for me.”

      “Why not? You’re worth waiting for!”

      He smiled. “I’m glad you think so. But, well … you deserve the best, the very best. Remember, my wife dumped me because I kept getting deployed overseas. I spent Christmas of ’09 sitting on top of a mountain in Afghanistan. The Christmas after that I was helping to train Kurds to kill ISIS bastards in Iraq. You deserve a hell of a lot better than that!”

      “So you’re afraid I’ll treat you like your bitch of an ex?” The almost-tears were fading, replaced by anger.

      “I’m afraid I won’t be around enough to treat you the way you should be treated.”

      He didn’t add, “And I don’t want to be around if that means you might be killed.”

      But he also didn’t tell her that he had a choice. He could tell Kelsey tomorrow that he didn’t want to go. But the outcome, he knew, would be the same so far as he and Gerri were concerned. He would be shipped off to the equivalent of Adak. There was some secret stuff going on in Uzbekistan right now, and there were SEALs over there taking part in the fun and games. And even if he just went back to Virginia, he would be gone.

      He could imagine her asking to come along. She would be willing to pull up stakes and move across the country to stay with him; he could sense that in her now.

      But he suspected that both of them would be looking over their shoulders all the time, half expecting a sniper’s bullet … or a mysterious brake failure … something that would take them both out of the way.

      Hunter had been thinking about Kelsey’s Star Trek analogy. The bad guys, it seemed, both human and alien, played for keeps.

      There was more to it than simple self-preservation, too, or protecting Gerri. Kelsey hadn’t been able to say much, but what he had said opened up some startling doors.

      Hunter had seen a spaceship. His debriefing interviews, the way they’d treated him, convinced him that there was not a nice, simple, and purely terrestrial answer to the puzzle. He couldn’t prove it, but he’d seen a real spaceship, aliens were here, and they meant business.

      And now, Kelsey’s talk about Star Trek politics suggested that the aliens were not friendly, did not come in peace, that they were interfering in human activities in a big way, and they were ruthless in how they were going about their business. This was no bunch of interstellar tourists stopping by to point and look at the funny humans. They meant to take over.

       An invasion …

      “Well … I don’t care what you say,” she told him. “When you come back Stateside, you look me up, okay? We can pick up where we left off.”

      He bit back his first answer, then gave a reluctant nod. “Okay. But when I look you up, I’ll expect to find you with a husband and six kids, okay?”

      “Stripping and cocktailing with six kids? That’ll be the day!”

      “Not a stripper, remember? An ecdysiast.”

      “Bastard. When do you ship out?”

      “Tomorrow afternoon.”

      “Damn! So soon? Who the hell did you fuck over to catch this shit?”

      “Only you, I think.”

      And then she cried.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      We should think of the craft in the New Mexico desert as more of a time machine than a spacecraft.

      DR. HERMANN J. OBERTH [ATTRIBUTED], 1974

       9 December 1965

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