LITMIR.BIZ

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You never do that. During the drive here, you kept checking behind us, like you thought we were being followed. In the parking lot you took your time checking out everything: the people on the deck over at Scripps, the other cars in the lot, even the sky. When we came down the trail, you kept looking back over your shoulder. And now you’re doing it again.”

      “Sorry. Am I that obvious?”

      “Yes! And it’s driving me nuts!”

      He scanned the deep blue and empty sky overhead. Funny how he kept looking up, just in case …

      “I just …” Damn. What could he tell her? That he was afraid government spooks were watching them, even out here?

      They were getting an eyeful right now if they were.

      “I just … I’m just having a bit of nerves,” he told her. “Where we were, what we did … it was really rugged. To get out, we hiked over thirty miles in rough terrain like you wouldn’t believe. Took us two days to do it, and that was just because we were really humping it. I’m still … I don’t know. Still getting my head together, I guess.”

      She lightly caressed his leg. “If you want to talk about it,” she said. “You know I won’t tell a soul.”

      He nodded. “I know, babe.”

      He believed her. Last month, she’d taken him to meet her parents in La Mesa, and when her father asked them what he did for a living, she’d laughed and said, “Dad! He works in San Diego and he has a short haircut! What do you think he does?” About 30 percent of the working population in San Diego worked at the Coronado bases.

      When her father pressed the issue, she’d told him, “He takes wonderfully good care of me! And that’s all that matters, right? Now quit pestering him about it!”

      And there the matter dropped. By the end of the evening, her parents were assuming that he was Navy … but the SEALs were never even mentioned. She was good.

      Yeah, Gerri could keep a secret.

      But he wasn’t going to test it.

      Instead, they lay down on the blanket and watched the sky—the blessedly empty sky—for almost an hour, as the sun slowly westered toward the horizon.

      “Tell me something, babe.”

      “Sure.”

      “What’s your take on UFOs? Life on other planets?”

      “Flying saucers?”

      “I guess.”

      She shrugged. “I don’t know. I believe there’s life out there. I mean, the universe is so big, right? There has to be other life … other intelligence. To assume anything else seems pretty damned arrogant.”

      “Yeah …”

      “But according to everything I’ve read, even the nearest stars are so awfully far away. You have to wonder how any of those races could make it all the way here. If you believe the saucer nuts, Earth must be like LAX, with thousands of UFOs zipping in from space every year. That just doesn’t sound very likely to me.”

      “Yeah. That’s what I always thought.”

      The words just slipped out. He’d intended them to mean simply that—that he’d long believed in extraterrestrial life, but not in UFOs. But the way he’d said it sounded more like, “I thought that before … but not now.”

      “So … you saw a UFO?” she asked.

      Damn. She was quick on the uptake. But one of the things Hunter liked about Gerri was how quick she was, how smart, so he wasn’t exactly surprised.

      “I don’t know.” He didn’t like the idea of lying. Perhaps misdirection was the best way to go. “Remember, all UFO means is ‘unidentified flying object.’ Doesn’t necessarily mean spaceships. Lots of stuff in the sky could be unidentified, depending on circumstances.”

      “Yes,” she pressed, “but you’re a trained observer, right? Disciplined. You know aircraft, especially military. You’re not going to mistake the planet Venus for a spacecraft.”

      “Right now, babe, I don’t know what I believe.”

      “Tell me about it?”

      “Uh-uh. Not now. Just that I saw … something. But maybe I hallucinated everything.”

      Hunter’s cell phone, tucked into a pocket of his shirt lying in the sand nearby, buzzed.

      “Now, who the hell is calling you on your day off?”

      “Don’t know,” he answered. “Unless they’re canceling liberties …”

      He fished the phone out of the shirt and held it to his ear. “Hunter.”

      “Well, well, well,” a voice said on the other end of the line. “Lieutenant Commander Hunter.”

      “Yes …?”

      “Right now, Commander, you are on thin ice. Very thin ice …”

      Now, what the hell? “Who is this?”

      “Never mind that. You should be more concerned about yourself. Or, if you’re not worried about being court-martialed, you might at least give some thought to the safety of that pretty little girl sitting next to you.”

      “What the fuck!” He sat up, looking around, both nervous and angry.

      And he was leaning toward “angry” more and more.

      “Hey,” the voice continued, “we know you like Gerri Galanis. Pretty. Smart. An amazing dancer. And we know she’s fantastic in bed! We know. It would be such a shame if anything … unpleasant happened to her. Quite a waste.”

      The threat, awful in its hackneyed melodrama, like something out of the pages of some cheap detective novel, left Hunter dumbfounded. He opened his mouth to reply—he had no idea what he was about to say—and then he realized the line had gone dead.

      He lowered the phone, then glanced up at the bluffs over the beach. A solitary figure stood up there, silhouetted against the early evening sky.

      The figure raised one hand … and waved.

       Fuck!

      “Mark!” Gerri cried with concern. “What’s the matter? You’re white as a sheet!”

      He took a deep breath. “Never mind. C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”

      “Why? Did they recall you?”

      “Yeah. Something like that.”

      He looked back up the bluff. The lone figure was gone.

      They got dressed, gathered up the blanket, and started up the long and rugged trail back to the parking lot at the top of the bluff, the mood subdued. Behind them, in the distance, several naked people were playing volleyball while others watched, and a couple of wet-suited surfers cruised a thundering wave toward the shore.

      Maybe, he thought, it would be best if he didn’t see Gerri for a while.

      Hell, maybe it would be best if he never saw her again.

       CHAPTER THREE

      Decades ago, visitors from other planets warned us about the direction we were heading and offered to help. Instead, some of us interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after … Trillions … of dollars have been spent on black projects which both Congress and the Commander-in-Chief have been kept

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