Chapter Seven
It’s a base with no name, and yet it’s known to the world by many titles.
…Groom Lake…
…Dreamland…
…The Nellis-Skunk Works AATC…
…Area 51…
Regardless of what title the public chooses to give it, the general consensus is pretty much the same. It’s considered by many people to be the most infamous place on Earth. It’s a pop-culture icon featured in violent first-person shooting games and children’s television shows. It’s a place where the laws of government and mankind end and a new reality begins. A place shrouded in secrecy. A research facility used for the storage and study of flying saucers, alien technology, yada, yada…
For years conspiracy theorists and alien enthusiasts have been developing theories about its secrecy in order to learn its secrets. Writers developed best-selling novels about the base. Directors used it in their movies. David Duchovny fought to learn the truth about it.
Those with imaginations closer to earth believe it to be an advanced testing facility whose super-secrecy enables it to operate above state, federal, and international law. It’s widely accepted by aviation enthusiasts to be the birthplace of the SR-71, the F-117, the Scram Jet, and many other experimental aircraft.
And yet while everyone is busy developing grandiose and over-the-top theories about the facility, no one has ever stopped to consider the obvious… the real truth.
Area 51 is a fake… a façade.
In other words; Area 51 is the sober guy who comes stumbling out of a bar at 2:00am to distract the police away from his drunken buddy who’s driving out the back lot.
With public and media attention focused solely on the desolate facility, no one ever stopped to ask any of the obvious questions:
Why was such a top-secret facility built so close to public view, rather than right in the middle of the Nellis Bombing Range where nobody would ever see it?
Why was the private security force that guarded the base’s northeastern perimeter also tasked with guarding its southwestern perimeter, an area miles within the Air Force bombing range? Who were they trying to keep out… or in?
Why did some of the Janet flights that came into the base offload their passengers to buses, which then left the base and traveled southwest toward White Hill Springs?
And why, on an unusually hot Friday afternoon, did no one notice that one of those passengers was a very nervous looking blue-skinned super-villain?
They were all questions asked by no one, and answered in kind…
They were all questions Dr. Drakken wished someone had taken the time to ask…
---
If there was one thing that could be said about Dr. Drakken, it was that he was no stranger to the criminal justice system. When one dedicates over fifteen years of their life trying to conquer the world, they’re bound to find themselves on the wrong side of the law. And when that same person is burdened with the unwanted presence of an overly gung-ho teen crime fighter, the encounters only increase.
It seemed like every other month, the villain was sitting in some sort of interrogation room or jail cell. It had actually gotten to the point of predictability; the authorities would question him, threaten him with ‘hard-time’ if he didn’t cooperate, and eventually give up. Then they would put him in a holding cell where Shego would bust him out before dinnertime. It had become nothing more than an annoying cycle, a predictable cycle.
Until today…
After once again being thwarted by Kim Possible and her buffoon sidekick, he and Shego had been taken into custody by Air Force Security personnel and turned over to the FBI. From there, they were loaded into a government Learjet and flown to McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. Upon arrival in Las Vegas, however, the authorities did something they had never done before, something that made Drakken’s stomach tighten; they separated him and Shego.
Up until this point, they had always been kept together. And they had always escaped together. With them separated, Drakken had no idea when, or if, escape would even arrive.
While Shego and the FBI agents continued on in the Learjet, Drakken was led to a remote terminal in the corner of the airport and loaded into a waiting unmarked 737. From there it was a ninety-minute flight North to a remote desert military base - which he could have sworn looked very familiar - and then another transfer into an unmarked bus for a thirty-minute drive south.
Since his departure from Las Vegas, Drakken’s anxiety had been slowly rising. Nothing was occurring as it usually did; he should have been half-free by this point, not driving through the middle of the Nevada desert under military guard.
After a half-hour of navigating the rough dirt road, the bus turned off into a small gravel lot and came to a stop in front of an ominously ordinary-looking building. Stepping out into the hot desert wind, the mad scientist was led forcefully past a pair of camouflaged Humvees and a black government sedan and shoved into the building.
As ordinary as the outside of the facility was, the inside was just the opposite…
The lobby - if you could even call it that - was about ten-by-twenty feet with an unfamiliar military insignia painted on the cement floor. On the wall to the right of him was a hand-painted slogan that read ‘Peace through oppression since 1968’ as well as several framed black-and-white photographs that appeared to chronicle the history of the facility he now found himself in. To the left was an empty desk, the surface of which was adorned with a copy of the US Constitution impaled by a military Ka-Bar knife.
Bringing his eyes forward, Drakken saw two camouflaged soldiers waiting next to an open elevator door, above which was another slogan which read ‘Welcome to Never-Neverland’.
Reaching the elevator, the government agents shoved Drakken through the doors and watched contently as they slid shut behind him.
---
Forty minutes after Drakken was led into the isolated facility, the barren silence of the desert was once again broken as a single black Crown Victoria raced down the narrow dirt road and pulled into the gravel parking lot. It sat idling for several minutes before the driver finally cut the engine and the front doors swung open.
“God I hate the desert,” Agent Johansson muttered, stepping out of the air-conditioned comfort of the sedan and into the barren heat of the Nevada wasteland. “It’s no wonder we used to nuke this place in the 50’s. Why’d they even build something like this out here anyway?”
Behind him, Agent Pollard stepped out from the driver’s seat and chuckled, readjusting the semiautomatic pistol holstered to his hip. “Well it was either build it here, or downtown Berkeley,” he replied snidely. “And Berkeley’s got tougher zoning laws.”
They entered the concrete building and approached the pair of soldiers guarding the elevator. Pollard flashed his ID to the sentry on the right and nodded toward Johansson. The sentry looked from the ID to the agent a few times before snapping to attention and saluting while his partner opened the elevator and stepped aside.
For the first minute of the descent, neither agent said a word. Agent Pollard pulled a stick of gum from his pocket and placed it in his mouth while Agent Johansson stood mute, staring at his reflection in the cold steel door of the large freight elevator. Finally the younger agent turned toward his superior and opened his mouth to say something, but at the last minute he aborted his attempt.
“Something on your mind Marcus?” Agent Pollard asked casually.
“No sir,” Marcus replied meekly. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t seem fine.”
The young agent sighed and turned toward the older man. “Permission to speak freely sir?”
“Oh for God’s sake,” Pollard groaned, reaching forward and hitting the elevator stop button. Above them, they could hear the ancient gears moan as the car ground to a halt. “First of all,” he announced, turning to face his frightened colleague. “You’re not in the Army anymore, so you don’t need permission to say something. And second; don’t call me ‘sir’. It’s Sean, okay? I call you Marcus, just like I refer to Jacob and David by their first names.”
“Sorry si-Sean,” he replied, correcting himself at the last moment. “I’m just still used to regulations is all.”
“Don’t worry about it; I had the same problem when I left the Corps. Now what’s up?”
“I…” Marcus hesitated. “I don’t think I can do this Sean.”
Sean looked away from the rookie agent and Marcus cringed slightly, fearful of what was coming. He had heard a lot of rumors about the man standing next to him. Sean had a reputation amongst the other agents as being a stone-cold psychopath. With some of the stories Marcus had heard from David and Jacob, he suddenly found himself more terrified than he had ever been in the military.
“How long have you been with the Firm?” Sean asked quietly after several moments of tense silence.
“S-six weeks,” Marcus barely managed to force out.
“And how many interrogations have you participated in?”
“This would be my first sir.”
“Do you know what it means to wash-out before your first interrogation?” Sean queried.
“No,” Marcus said fearfully.
Sean turned and placed a hand on the frightened agent’s shoulder. “It means you’re a human being.”
“But what about David and Jacob?” he asked hesitantly. “They’re both-”
“A pair of mindless sociopaths who would rape their own mothers if the Firm told them to,” Sean replied sternly. Marcus cringed slightly but said nothing. “Truth be told, I knew from the moment you were assigned to me that you’d end up washing-out,” the senior agent informed him. “And that’s not a bad thing either.”
“But I was a soldier.”
“And so was I, but we differ in one major capacity.”
“What capacity is that sir?”
Sean reached forward and released the stop button. “You have a conscience,” he replied matter-of-factly as the elevator stopped and the doors slid open.
Marcus watched numbly as the older man straightened his tie, stepped out of the elevator, and began walking down the long concrete hallway. After a few seconds the rookie agent shouted, “So why do you do it?”
As the elevator doors began to slide shut once again, Sean stopped and, without turning around, replied, “Because I enjoy it…”
---
Four hours…
That’s how long Dr. Drakken had been sitting in the windowless one-table-two-chair interrogation room… for four hours. At first he had been extremely nervous about his predicament. And who wouldn’t be, having witnessed the bizarre spectacle up in the lobby of the building.
Peace through oppression since 1968…
Welcome to Never-Neverland…
Those two sentences had been gnawing at his mind like a pack of hungry wolves. It didn’t take a genius to recognize that no military or law enforcement organization would ever allow such unorthodox slogans to be put up in their facilities.
After a while though Drakken began to regain his composure and calm down. ‘Unorthodox or not,’ he told himself. ‘I’m still in their custody. They can’t actually do anything to me; all they can do is try to frighten me into cooperating.’
He was determined not to give them the satisfaction…
Finally, after waiting for hours, he heard footsteps approach and the heavy steel door swung open. The villain watched with an annoyed glare as a man in his late-twenties strolled casually into the room and swung the door shut behind him.
“Drew Lipsky,” the man announced cheerfully, unbuttoning his sport coat and bracing his arms against the back of the empty chair across the table from Drakken. “Just the man we’ve wanted to talk to.”
“I’m thrilled,” Drakken replied snidely. “Do you realize I’ve been waiting in this room for over four hours?”
The man glanced up at the clock on the wall and laughed. “Four hours? More like forty minutes!” He reached his arm across the table and displayed his wristwatch as proof. “We just rigged that clock to run fast; confuses the hell out of whoever’s waiting in here.”
“No wonder I never got thirsty,” Drakken muttered under his breath. “Okay, so who are you supposed to be?”
“Special Agent Sean Pollard, FBI,” Sean announced, withdrawing his badge and placing it on the metal table between them.
“I see,” Drakken replied casually. He reached forward to pick-up and examine the badge in front of him, but Sean quickly snatched it back. “So I suppose you’re here for the usual round of questioning? Where’s your file?”
“My what?”
“Your file,” he reiterated. “Usually the person doing the interrogating brings a file with them. That way they have something they can pretend to read when they run out of things to say. They usually claim it’s my ‘rap-sheet’ or something, that way I’m supposed to wonder what exactly they’re reading.”
“You’re pretty familiar with interrogations aren’t ya?” Sean asked with a mischievous grin.
“I’m practically an expert,” Drakken replied, mirroring the agent’s grin.
“Well I’m not really fond of all that traditional ‘good cop/bad cop’ interrogative-style crap,” the agent explained, taking a seat across from the villain. “Personally, I prefer my own ‘reward system’ style of questioning.”
“Reward system?”
“Y’know; you help me out by telling me what I want to know, and I reward you for it.”
“With what, a dog biscuit?”
“Actually,” Sean said, leaning back in his chair. “I was thinking more along the lines of a five-pound steak dinner.”
Drakken blinked several times in confusion. “A steak dinner?”
“Yup,” the agent replied. “There’s a town about an hour and a half north of here called Tonopah. They’ve got this great little steak house that serves the best steak you’ll ever eat.” He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. “So here’s the deal; you tell me what I need to know, and I’ll take you up there for a steak dinner. No handcuffs, no questions, just two guys, two steaks, and a lot of beer.”
“Is this some type of joke?” Drakken asked warily.
“I told you I don’t favor that Law and Order bullshit,” Sean stated as he stood up and reached his arm across the table, offering his hand to the prisoner. “You give me the info I need, and I buy you dinner, deal?”
“Okay,” Drakken said, reaching forward and shaking the man’s hand. “I suppose I can agree to that.”
“You won’t regret it,” Sean announced cheerfully. “Best damn steak you’ll ever eat.”
“So what do you want to know?” Drakken asked. He was still a bit on-edge, but the agent’s non-confrontational attitude had eased his mind a bit.
“Where’s Kim Possible?” Sean asked matter-of-factly.
---
“Just because I suggested the option of using a rifle instead of fishing gear doesn’t mean I’m some sort of gun-nut y’know,” Ron announced as he and Kim slowly made their way down the rocky hillside toward the small lake at the bottom of the basin.
Having repacked all of their essential survival gear and stripped out of their dirty orange flight suits, the teens were taking their time getting down to the lake. Because of the high altitude, Kim was still worried about re-triggering Ron’s altitude sickness.
“If that’s the case, then why are you carrying the rifle like that?” Kim asked, gesturing toward the survival rifle that her partner was carrying cradled in his arms like a soldier.
“What? This thing doesn’t have a sling okay,” Ron shot back as they continued their descent. “I’m only carrying it like this because it’s the safest way to do so. I’m not-”
“Ron,” Kim interrupted.
“I’m serious,” he insisted. “I’m not a gun-nut!”
“Ron,” Kim repeated with a bit more force.
“I’m in favor of all those machine gun bans and stuff,” the blond continued unabated. “I’m even-”
“RON!”
“What?”
Kim held her finger to her lips and looked around, as if she was trying to hear something. As the two of them stood in complete silence, the unmistakable sound of an approaching helicopter could be heard coming up from the East.
“Is it just me,” Ron asked excitedly. “Or does that sound a lot closer than the last three?”
“Over there!” Kim practically cheered, pointing to the eastern opening of the basin.
Looking in the direction Kim was pointing, Ron saw the most beautiful sight he had ever laid eyes on; a small red helicopter was entering the basin and flying directly toward them.
Help had arrived…
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