Free Time Patrol (Area 51 The Nightstalkers) by Bob Mayer

Moms had no idea, because she really didn’t understand how her mother had turned out the way she had.
    Moms flipped the page to the first one, the only one that featured something other than dreams of an event and places never traveled to.
    Moms shook her head and sniffled, wondering for a moment if she were catching a cold.
    The picture was of the family. Her mother standing in the center with both hands on a five-year-old version of Moms standing in front of her and the younger brothers flanking both of them.
    The picture was blurry and, for a moment, Moms thought it was because her eyes were full of tears from the trip down a memory cul-de-sac.
    It was all wrong. Moms wiped a sleeve across her eyes and squinted, not believing what she was seeing. The Polaroid picture was faded, more faded than she remembered, but it had been years since she’d last thumbed through it. But that wasn’t the issue.
    Because now there was a man standing next to her mother where there had been no man before. A man she vaguely remembered from childhood but was certain had never been in this picture. And her mother was in a white dress, the dream wedding dress on the next page. And she was smiling.
    Moms tried to remember her mother smiling, but all she could conjure up was her mother in a drunken stupor, face slack. That was the most peaceful she’d ever looked. The rest of the time her face had been full of rage and pain and darkness.
    Moms flipped the pages.
    The rest of the book was as she remembered.
    Moms went back to the first page. The picture wasn’t as faded, as if the Polaroid film was slowly developing after more than thirty years.
    Then her phone phone began to ring, a tone she’d only heard once before when Nada had played it for the team. His personal cry for help. Keep me in your heart . . .
    Nada had never made such an appeal before.
    Moms looked at the picture, at the happy family, and then slowly closed the album with a shaking hand.

    It had changed for Foreman, closing in on seventy years of service, in February 1945 in an area called the Devil’s Sea, off the coast of Japan, in the waning days of World War II. The event was after he and his pilot were forced to ditch because of engine trouble. Minutes later, the rest of their squadron simply vanished into a strange mist in that enigmatic part of the world. No trace of the other planes or crews were ever found.
    Then it was reinforced in December of that same year, the war finally over, on the other side of the world, when he begged off a mission because of the same premonition he’d had before the Devil’s Sea flight, and watched Flight 19 disappear from the radar in an area called the Bermuda Triangle.
    He’d determined then and there that he had to know the Truth.
    So he’d gone from the Marine Corps into the short-lived precursor to the CIA, the Central Intelligence Group, in 1946, then morphed with it into the CIA, where he moved upward, and, much more importantly inward, into the darkness of the most covert parts of various branches whose letters and designations changed over the years. But their missions grew more and more obscure, to the point where he’d outlived and outserved all his contemporaries so no one in the present was quite sure who exactly he worked for anymore or what his mission was.
    If he worked for anyone at all.
    Not that anyone really cared.
    They should.
    He was now known as the Crazy Old Man in the covert bowels of the Pentagon and by some other names, associated with bowel movements.
    How crazy he was, some people were about to discover.
    Foreman had to use a cane, a concession he’d made most reluctantly a year ago. He had to give the cane up at every security checkpoint he went through at the Pentagon as he worked his way further and further into the belly of the beast. He was dressed in a suit, only a decade out of fashion and, strangely, wore a small black porkpie hat, à la Breaking Bad . He’d enjoyed that show and had taken