Free Attack on Area 51 by Mack Maloney Page A

understood, but he replied, “What happens to the next bunch of civilians the AMC kidnaps? And what is the AMC doing to them? Those people might be down on their luck, but they’re still Americans. We’ve got to protect them too.”
    Because of this unexpected twist, Hunter knew they’d have to stay at Area 51 longer than he’d planned.
    “I just hope all we find down there is a little clubhouse with a few AMC freaks who are into killing bums.”
    They entered the empty building and spotted an open door in the far corner. Inside was a small closet, not two feet square. Its floor was missing. Below was a vertical shaft with a ladder that went down one hundred feet to a metal floor. It looked like the entrance to a missile silo.
    They switched on their night-vision goggles and down they went. Reaching the bottom, they found themselves in a dark tunnel that went in only one direction. They started walking … and walking … and walking. Finally, after what seemed like miles, they came to a massive sliding door. It was at least thirty feet in diameter and made of thick steel. It was connected to a huge bank of motors and chains, the mechanism by which the giant door opened and closed.
    But at the moment it was slightly ajar.
    “They don’t lock their front door?” JT asked.
    They approached the opening carefully, hoping not to meet any real AMC soldiers coming the other way.
    Reaching it, Hunter slowly slid the door all the way open … and that’s when everything turned fantastic.
    There was no other way to describe it.
    They found themselves on a gantry, fifty feet long, ten feet wide, with a metal grille railing on one side and the walls of a cavern on the other.
    From there, they were looking out on an immense open chamber. It was like the biggest, grandest, most futuristic movie set imaginable. Its walls were thick with glowing white tubes, wire busses, giant fluorescent lights, and fast-moving glass elevators. At least twenty floors below, a huge ground floor contained towering banks of computers, consoles, and control panels displaying hundreds of screens, all generating bright circus-color lights, many of them blinking in unison. It was hypnotic and beautiful in a way. And definitely not military issue.
    But the most fantastic thing of all: hanging along one side of the vast chamber were a dozen platforms, almost like a vertical parking lot. Sitting on each platform was what could only be described as a UFO.
    Most were the basic flying-saucer design, maybe twenty feet across and colored bright yellow, red, or emerald. Others were shaped like spheres of pure silver. Still others were cigar shaped. In a word, they looked “otherworldly.”
    Seeing all this, the three of them could barely speak.
    Finally JT said, “There were always rumors about underground stuff out here, a place where the military kept UFOs. And we just found it …”
    “You mean the AMC found it,” Ben corrected him.
    This was true. The ground floor was crawling with AMC soldiers and white-coated technicians.
    The center of their attention was a massive apparatus that looked like a giant ray gun. Small armies of technicians were walking around it, servicing it, checking it, admiring it. Directly in front of it was an immense hole that appeared bottomless.
    “Look at the size of that thing,” JT said, meaning the giant ray gun. “What the hell does it do?”
    Lying flat on the balcony floor and looking through the metal railing, they watched as AMC technicians rolled an old US Army Hummer to a spot about fifty feet from the ray gun on the other side of the bottomless pit. Once in place, someone pushed a button and a burst of light shot out of the ray gun, hitting the Hummer. An instant later the Hummer was gone.
    “Goddamn,” Hunter breathed. “Did I just see that?”
    Another Hummer was quickly moved into place. It too was hit by a beam and disappeared.
    Then a two-ton troop truck was positioned and zapped. It vanished as well.
    It