Attack on Area 51 (13 page)

St. Louis couldn’t believe it. “So you mean in some other universe, there’s a bunch of homeless people and a bunch of old army trucks?”

Pott nodded. “That’s seems to be the case.”

St. Louis groaned. “Damn—and we just made a grilled cheese out of that thing.”

JT piped up, “Does it say in there anywhere why we would see that guy in black jump into the bottomless pit with a parachute? Who was he? And where does that hole go anyhow? We saw them blowing embers down there. Maybe they weren’t embers at all.”

Pott just shook his head. “I haven’t found anything on that yet,” he said. “I’ll keep looking. But, hold on tight, because I’ve got more bombshells to lay on you …”

Pott said he’d found some of the last reports written by the AII team before the project folded. As it turned out, they’d stayed out at Groom Lake for at least several years after the Big War, continuing their research until they themselves suddenly vanished.

“It also turns out they had a lot of data on our friend, Major Hunter,” Pott told them, looking through one of the last boxes he’d recovered. “They followed his exploits through a number of different universes even though Hunter himself isn’t aware of these adventures, as evidenced by his confusion and memory loss when he arrived here.

“But the strange thing is, no matter where he wound up, he was always on hand to help save the day for the forces of good against the forces of evil.”

“Why does that not surprise me?” JT asked.

Pott went on, “But here’s the scary part: while we know there might be an infinite number of you and me and everyone on this plane in an infinite number of universes, the AII team came to believe there was only one Hawk Hunter and that he was continually bouncing back and forth between universes, always showing up in times of need and saving the day.

“In other words, there’s
not
an infinite number of Hawk Hunters. There’s only one, in an infinite number of universes.”

St. Louis and JT just shook their heads upon hearing this. It seemed very way-out, yet Pott seemed deadly serious.

He continued, “My AII colleagues looked into this further and discovered that the odds of having just one person falling from universe to universe by chance and always saving the day were astronomically incalculable, or better put, literally ‘inconceivable.’ ”

At that point, he stopped to reread a note that had been included at the bottom of the last AII report he could find on Hunter’s exploits. It said his colleagues had concluded that in the scope of all human science and history, only two words could describe why Hunter was doing what he was doing.

But their conclusion was so mind-blowing, Pott couldn’t even read it aloud. So he handed the report to St. Louis instead.

Hastily scrawled at the bottom, it read: “Only conclusion possible: Divine Intervention.”

At that moment, they finally saw Football City on the horizon.

They were back home.

They saw the F-16XL pull out in front of them and do a series of eye-popping spins. Then Hunter boosted the plane’s power plants to full throttle and was off, heading east at full afterburner.

“He’s going to look for her,” JT said simply. “I hope he finds her.”

As the F-16XL climbed into the sky, St. Louis, still awed by what he’d just read, managed to say, “I just hope he doesn’t wait another ten years before he comes back again.”

Mack Maloney is the author of numerous fiction series, including Wingman, Chopper Ops, Starhawk, and Pirate Hunters, as well as
UFOs in Wartime: What They Didn’t Want You to Know
. A native Bostonian, Maloney received a bachelor of science degree in journalism at Suffolk University and a master of arts degree in film at Emerson College. He is the host of a national radio show,
Mack Maloney’s Military X-Files
.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Mack Maloney

Cover design by Michel Vrana

978-1-4804-1100-5

Published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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