Time Patrol (Area 51 The Nightstalkers) Read Online Free PDF Page A

he’d been on the last one in South America. This was a mutually approved operation, Moms slapping Roland on the shoulder as he headed out for the airstrip at Area 51, wishing him good hunting. Nightstalker and Cellar operative working side by side.
    What was the world coming to? Cats and dogs . . .
    Even though he liked (perhaps not exactly the right word) Neeley, he missed his team. Most of all, he missed Moms, to whom he owed the deep and abiding allegiance of a blood debt since she saved his life in Iraq years ago.
    For a man like Roland, there was no greater bond.
    His left cheek rested lightly on the stock of the sniper rifle, but that eye was closed as he used his open right to scan the trail. He had that sixty-two meters’ line of fire to the intersection, which made the sniper rifle seem like overkill, but Roland never minded stacking the odds in his favor. Better to over-, rather than underkill. Roland never understood those movies where the bad guy walked away from the supposedly mortally wounded good guy only to end up on the wrong end of the good guy’s gun by the end of the movie. Bad guy deserved to die then, not particularly for being bad, but for being stupid.
    Roland’s training had kept him alive this long and he’d learned early in combat that there were no rules, no sporting, gentlemanly code of honor. There was alive or dead. An “honorable” death was still dead and Roland considered any dead a sucky dead.
    The receiver in his right ear crackled, volume set so low not a sound escaped the inner ear.
    “Beta on schedule, on Jane Eyre, heading to Wuthering Heights. On pace. Over.” Neeley’s voice was subdued, matter-of-fact.
    “Roger. Over.” Roland’s whisper was transmitted by the electronics wrapped around his throat.
    Wuthering Heights. It occurred to him that he’d never read the book. Of course, Roland had never read any novel. He’d tried one, a Conan the Barbarian novel someone had passed around on a deployment, but it had hurt his head. He’d read lots of weapons manuals, but those had pictures and, for him, a practical purpose. He only knew Wuthering Heights was a book because Neeley had remarked on it as they studied the map and satellite imagery of the woods.
    “How’s it end? Over.”
    Neeley had been with him long enough that she knew what he was referring to.
    “Badly. Guy doesn’t get girl. Girl doesn’t get guy. No happily ever after. Over.”
    There never was , Roland thought, which was a very profound thought for Roland.

    Teri Stevens wasn’t a big believer in happy endings either. The psychiatrist in Coronado had suggested running as a stress reliever, failing to see the irony, which might have made a less desperate person doubt his perception, but Teri had faithfully taken up the regime, and it did seem to take the edge off a little bit. She’d started on the beach, the same beach where he’d earned his “Budweiser” insignia when he’d graduated from SEAL training.
    He’d made her memorize all the trivia about the insignia, and at first it had been exciting, to be part of this special group. A golden eagle clutching a trident and a flintlock pistol across an anchor. The informal “Budweiser” designation came from the fact current SEAL training had developed out of BUD/S, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. The anchor represented, of course, the Navy, parent service of the SEALs. The trident represented the ancient god of the sea, Neptune, or Poseidon, depending on which mythology flavor whetted the appetite, Roman or Greek. The pistol, if one looked closely, and she’d been forced to, was cocked, representing the SEAL’s ability to always be ready.
    To go off, she remembered ironically. To go off. She should have paid more attention to that bit. And the eagle, lastly, represented the ability to parachute in from the air. The last bit of trivia she also found ironic in that the eagle, usually portrayed on flags looking upward, was looking