Chapter Seven – Welcome to Never-Neverland
By: recon228
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…
…or most commonly – 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 everything from violent first-person videogames, to 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 for years to learn the truth about it.
Those with imaginations closer to earth believe it to be an advanced aircraft 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 stealth aircraft.
And yet with everyone busy developing grandiose and over-the-top theories about the facility; no one has ever stopped to consider the obvious… the real truth about the facility…
…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 Air Force Base 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 directly 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 departing the early-morning Janet flight was a very nervous looking blue-skinned super-villain in shackles?
They were all questions asked by no one, and answered in kind…
…they were all questions Dr. Drakken would come to wish someone had taken the time to ask…
---
If there was one thing that could be said about Drew Lipsky, 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 more than a few times. And when that same person is burdened with the unwanted presence of an overly gung-ho teenaged crime fighter, the encounters only tended to 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 for him – the authorities would question him, threaten him with 'hard-time' if he didn't cooperate, and eventually, they'd just give up. Then they would put him in a holding cell where Shego would bust them out before dinnertime. It had become nothing more than an annoying, yet 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 Edwards Air Force Base Security Police 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 that 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 airliner. From there it was a ninety-minute flight North to a remote desert military base––which he could have sworn looked very familiar––where he was again transferred into an unmarked bus for a thirty-minute drive south into the middle of the desert.
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 armed 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 cement 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 a lobby, was about ten-by-twenty feet and had 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 quietly 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.
Stepping out of the air-conditioned comfort of the sedan and into the barren heat of the Nevada wasteland, Agent Johansson glanced around at his desolate surroundings and frowned. "God I hate the desert," he muttered to no one in particular. "It's no wonder we used to nuke this place in the '50's. Why'd they even build it out here anyway?"
Behind him, Agent Kryker stepped out from the driver's seat and chuckled, readjusting the semiautomatic pistol holstered to his hip and buttoning his coat. "Well, we had the choice of building it here, or downtown Berkeley." He glanced over at the younger agent and grinned. "As it turned out, Berkeley had tougher zoning laws."
Agent Johansson sighed, but said nothing.
They entered the concrete building and approached the pair of soldiers guarding the elevator. Agent Kryker 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, then snapped to attention and saluted while his partner opened the elevator and stepped aside.
For the first minute of the descent, neither man said a word. Agent Kryker 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 speak, but at the last minute he aborted his attempt.
"Something on your mind, Marcus?" Agent Kryker 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," Kryker groaned, reaching forward and hitting the elevator stop button. Above them, they could hear the ancient gears moan as the elevator 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 Adam, okay? I call you Marcus, just like I refer to Jacob and David by their first names."
"Sorry si-Adam," he replied, correcting himself at the last moment, "I'm just still used to regulations, that's all."
"Don't worry about it. I had the same problem when I left the Corps. Now what's up?"
"I…" Marcus hesitated for a moment. "I don't think I can do this, Adam."
Adam looked away from Marcus and the rookie agent cringed slightly, fearful of what was coming. He had heard a lot of rumors about the man standing next to him. Adam 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 of the man standing next to him than any enemy he had ever faced in the military.
After several moments of tense silence, Adam looked up toward the faded ceiling and nodded understandingly. "How long have you been with The Firm, Marcus?"
"S-six weeks," the young man barely managed to force out.
"And how many of these interrogations have you participated in?"
"This would be my first, sir."
"Do you know what it means to wash-out before your first interrogation?" queried Adam.
"No…" Marcus replied fearfully.
Adam turned and placed a hand on the frightened agent's shoulder. "It means you're a human being."
"But… but what about David and Jacob?" he asked hesitantly. "They're both–"
"They're both a pair of mindless sociopaths who would rape and torture their own mothers if The Firm told them to," Adam 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 noted. "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?"
Adam reached forward and released the stop button. "You have a conscience," he replied matter-of-factly as the elevator reached its destination and the doors slid open, "and I don't."
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, Adam stopped and, without turning around, replied, "I do it 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, I'm still in their custody,' he repetitively told himself.'They can't actually do anything to me. All they can do is try to frighten me into cooperation.'
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 Adam Kryker, FBI," Adam 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 Adam quickly snatched it up again. "So I suppose you're here for the usual round of questioning, huh? 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 grow nervous and wonder just how much they know about me."
"You're pretty familiar with interrogations, aren't ya?" Adam asked with a mischievous grin.
"I'm practically an expert," Drakken replied, mirroring the agent's grin.
Adam nodded and took a seat across from the villain. "Well I'm not really fond of all that traditional 'good cop/bad cop' interrogative-style crap. Personally, I prefer my own 'reward system' style of questioning."
"Reward system?"
"Yeah, 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?"
The agent laughed and leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms in the process. "Actually, 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 damn 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," Adam 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 replied, reaching forward and shaking the man's hand, "I suppose I can agree to that."
"You won't regret it," Adam 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 put him a bit at-ease.
Adam crossed his arms and looked down at Drakken. "Where's Kim Possible?" he asked in a casual tone.
---
"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," announced Ron as he and Kim slowly made their way down the granite hillside toward the small lake at the bottom of the basin.
Having repacked all of their essential gear and stripped out of their dirty flight suits, the teens were taking their time getting down to the lake. Because of the high altitude, Kim was still worried about retriggering Ron's altitude sickness, so she wanted to make any change in altitude as gradual as possible.
Kim stopped walking and turned to face her partner. "If that's the case, then why are you carrying the rifle like that?" she asked, gesturing toward the survival rifle that Ron was carrying cradled in his arms like a soldier on patrol.
"What? This thing doesn't have a sling, okay," Ron explained defensively 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 cautiously. As the two of them stood in complete silence, the unmistakable sound of an approaching helicopter could be heard coming up fast from the east.
Ron turned to face his friend with an excited grin spread across his face. "Is it just me, or does that sound a lot closer than the other ones did?"
"Over there!" shouted Kim, 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…
To be continued...