Tesla, Jason Walker [reading cloud ebooks TXT] 📗

nights out here. This thing has some luxuries, I reckon.”

Wood watched him close the rear of his Toyota.

“Yeah, those things are pretty roomy when you take out the bench seats. It’s starting to get cold. We need a fire. I brought some wood with me but we need to dig a pit.”

Darren thought that was a dumb idea and told him so, “Mate, that means you’ll have to stay up all night watching the fire. Why don’t you just set up your tent and go to bed?”

Wood pointed up to the stars above them. “Have you not been checking those out? This place is fucking amazing! It’s so crystal clear! Maybe I’ll just have a beer and a small fire but I want to stretch out and relax for an hour and check it out. C’mon, just for an hour, mate. What’s the harm?”

Darren relented and went along with him as they both pointed their eyes at the Southern Cross—the brightest star in the southern hemisphere. They marvelled at the sky for longer than an hour, both caught up in the sight of it, before going back to sleep.

The next couple of days driving toward the middle of Australia went by astonishingly quickly, and without incident, as they moved through the harsh desert climate, moving closer to their target destination. They’d been able to stop in a few towns along the way and enjoy a few chicken Parma’s and some cold beers. It was all good fun and excitement for the seasoned world venturers. At their last fuel stop, they gathered around Darren’s Troopy to look at a topographical map that showed them approximately where Pine Gap was. After a short strategy session, they decided to place their vehicles in different locations, acknowledging the need to leave the engine keys inside the tailpipe for one another’s potential quick escape. After buying extra water and a few ice creams at the refuelling station, their last stop before departing Alice Springs, they set off and began the final leg of their journey to the heartland of Australia.

By midnight, on their third night, they finally parked their vehicles far away from Pine Gap and camouflaged them with brown and beige cam nets that they had borrowed from another friend of theirs. After they were finished securing and disguising their vehicles, they began their night patrol over the desert landscape, moving toward their primary objective. It was going to mean a long march because they had to park a good distance away—perhaps twenty miles Darren estimated. The open landscape would make it easier to spot the base when they got close enough to it.

As they continued to move over the desert, the stars and the moon provided them with some spectacular views of the terrain, which lit up around them. It seemed as though the moon was three times brighter than usual. The stars were magnified and seemed to vibrate by the moon’s silver glow.

From what Darren Mathews had learned, Pine Gap was built up into a number of buildings on the base rumoured to be hangars for other non-terrestrial vehicles and was the primary satellite base for the National Reconnaissance Office. But by far, the most interesting rumour Darren had heard was about what lay below, which was what was compelling them to engage in such stealth activities. There was an airstrip that sat on the outer edges of the base, which seemed to stretch on for miles into the distance.

They couldn’t just charge their way in and cause some kind of crazy fire-fight. They had no weapons, and killing people wasn’t their intention. Darren’s guys wanted to sneak around and see what was being hidden from the Australian public. They needed to invest some time and observe the area without being detected. That was their plan.

They crept slowly through the desert terrain. When they were only a few miles from the base, the group stopped and silently established a forward observation post. It was 3 a.m., and the base would soon be alive again with all kinds of personnel moving to and fro. The soldiers set to work digging and then setting up their camouflage, which gave them good protection from the morning sun. When it finally began to rise at 5 a.m., a team of two took the morning shift while the other two slept under the camouflaged shelters. If they’d done their job right, nobody would detect them.

During the shift, Wood monitored the base through his spotting scope, moving from radome to radome, trying to catch a glimpse of anything that moved. He noticed that several large trucks had come onto the base and had been escorted into a hangar. They didn’t come out again.

As the sun finally began to emerge, casting the land in shades of pink and orange, Darren drank some water from his canteen cup. He noticed a small lizard had crawled up to his boot and was checking it out. The lizard was dark brown with a bright red crest on the underside of its throat. It was barely as long as a pencil and missing half of its tail. Darren moved his shoe to startle it, and the creature skittered away as fast as it could.

“I’m lucky that wasn’t a fuckin’ snake,” he muttered to himself as he called over to the men. “You guys ready to do a switch around?” The reply came back that they were ready to trade places, so Darren made certain that his rucksack was all packed up and ready to run with if the need should arise. He looked over at his friend who was also packing up his gear and nodded in the direction of a rocky outpost another twenty meters ahead. A few minutes later, they crawled forward and took up their positions to watch from a ledge overlooking the base, patiently waiting for some sign of life down below their scorching perch.

Darren and his mates were shocked by what they observed on the second night. It was 2 a.m. when a large triangular craft floated down from the sky and hovered over the base for a short while. It was obvious to them that whatever it was had anti-gravity abilities. There was no sound and no air current below it either. They were too far off to tell who or what was maneuvering the strange craft, but it was surrounded by bright multi-coloured lights, and it was big—possibly a hundred meters in length. Eventually, it landed on the base just outside one of its largest hangars before a crew suddenly appeared to slide open the massive doors to allow the craft to float inside.

“What the fuck was that thing, mate?” asked Darren’s observer. Darren shook his head. “Well, if you saw what I saw, I think a giant triangle landed on the base. That tells us a lot about what’s going on here, I reckon,” Darren replied.

At 4 a.m., more of the unexpected occurred when a series of lights that were moving around in very strange patterns came down from space and came down to the base, also to be sheltered within the confines of a hangar. There were nine of them and the light that they were emitting was green.

“Wood! Holy shit! Are you guys seeing this?” Mathews called out to his buddies.

When Trooper Wood looked at the scene before him, he was amazed at what he was witnessing. “Those things are landing on the base. Those aren’t manmade! There’s no way they are! Does that mean that we’re entertaining ET guests on the base?” he asked his mates.

“I reckon so,” was the response. At the place where Darren saw the balls of light descend and land before one of the hangars, he decided that they needed to get closer. He brought it up in conversation when they changed shifts, and they decided that they would spend another night there extending their operation, but this time, they would actually sneak onto the base.

The next morning Darren was looking through his bino’s when he saw a black helicopter set down on a landing pad. As he watched it land he was careful not to lose his grip, which was sweaty from the heat. Then, a man stepped out that he immediately recognized. “Mate, take a look at this. Is that President Bush?”

This time Wood answered, as he had decided he would take the morning shift—he didn’t want to go to sleep after what they’d just seen during the night. “I reckon it is. Sure looks like him, mate.”

For two hours, both Mathews and Wood kept watching, and by 10 a.m. President Bush had returned to his helicopter.

When night fell, the four men were ready to breech the base. They began to sneak forward, heading toward the base, where they thought it may be vulnerable to stealth invaders. They zig-zagged many times as they tried to follow features in the terrain that would hide them. When they got to the fenced area, Mathews looked for areas in the fence that would allow them to enter.

“Don’t touch the fence mate,” was Wood’s suggestion. “If the President is landing here and the UFO’s are landing here, they’re bound to be watching that fence. We need to either dig under it or jump over it. One of the two. Or we don’t go onto the base at all and we go and make another observation post a bit closer but not on the base.”

Darren took his comments seriously. He looked at the fence. “I say we dig under it. We’ll take turns and dig a trench so we can crawl under. Then, we’ll cover it up so it can’t be seen from the air.”

Wood didn’t like the idea, nor did the others. “We’ll leave a huge hole. They’ll find it eventually,” Wood replied, but he could see that Darren was determined to get on the base, so he relented and started to help dig.

After an hour of digging in the warm red soil, they had a deep enough hole to slide under. They covered it over with some cam net to conceal their efforts. Then, they hiked back out to the bush and hid their rucksacks, which they would retrieve later. Going onto the base by way of a hole in the fence meant moving around quickly without cumbersome gear.

At 01:30 a.m., all four of them were on the base and observing the hangars. None of them said a thing as the warm weather disappeared and the cold set in. Over time, their bodies were starting to get cold, but they persevered. They were used to this kind of thing. But the shock of their lives came at 02:15 when the balls of light returned and they arrived again at the hangar. The four men watched in awe as the lights became portals and several larger-than-normal human men with long blonde hair stepped out of them and were quickly met by men in uniform on the ground. They were then escorted into the hanger.

Mathews looked at his friends and shook his head. “This is fucking amazing! Did you see how tall those people were? They were at least eight feet high! Where do we have people that tall on Earth that are white?”

Suddenly, drones flooded the sky and cast light down all around them, illuminating their positions. American forces seemed to charge them from all sides. Darren made a run for it, Mark at his heels, but there was nowhere to go. A soldier shot some kind of electrical weapon at Darren, causing his muscles to seize up, dropping him instantly Another soldier soon took his wrists and put them behind his back. He applied zip