Many of the characters within this story, and the universe they inhabit, are the intellectual property of Jason Katims Productions.

Roswell: Re-Imagined

Written by Horatio Jaxx

Chapter 59: Thursday Morning

When Agent Devon Plank told Phillip and Diane that they were being taken to a detention location, they anticipated going to the tiny FBI field office there in Roswell, or the local Sheriff Station. The last thing he expected to see was Roswell falling away out the rear window of the vehicle they were in.

"You can't do this," Phillip complained to the back of Agents Plank's and Gummersall's heads.

To no surprise to Phillip or Diane, he received no response to his complaint. They had both noted that Agents Plank and Gummersall had lost all interest in communicating with them once they were secured inside the vehicle. Their communication from that moment on was limited to necessary instructions couched in polite verbiage. Their requests for information about where they were going were repeatedly ignored. Shortly Phillip concluded that they had to be on their way to the much larger Albuquerque Office of the FBI. That theory was dispelled nearly an hour later when they turned off Route 380 and started southwest towards Alamogordo.

"Where are we going?" Diane questioned Phillip in an alarmed tone.

"I think we're going to Holloman," Phillip nearly whispered back as he continued to study their course.

Nearly an hour later, that suspicion was confirmed when their vehicle pulled up to a security check point for Holloman Air Force Base. Agents Plank and Gummersall displayed their identifications which the guard checked against a list. Shortly after that, the guard opened the gate and they drove through. There was no surprise in that. Their suspicion was being reinforced the closer they got to the base. What did surprise them was the sight of Jeff and Nancy Parker in the vehicle just in front of them.

Both vehicles steered through the base, one behind the other, and came to a stop in front of a long three storied rectangular building. It was unspectacular in appearance, and it looked designed to be functional and not decorative. The windows on the second and third floors were uniformly spaced. Agents Plank and Gummersall promptly got out of the vehicle and took up stances just outside of it. Phillip and Diane noted that they were still locked in. With nothing else that they could do, they sat and watched as two uniformed members of the bases Military Police, complete with side arms, went to the car in front of them and took possession of Jeff and Nancy Parker. The two MP's lead them into the building while Jeff voiced his displeasure in a continuous stream of profanity. Shortly after they disappeared into the building, two MPs did the same for them.

"Where are you taking us?" Phillip demanded angrily.

"We're taking you to your quarters," the first MP reported directly.

"We don't want quarters," Diane complained. "We want to know what's going on."

"I'm sorry, ma'am," the first MP responded in a polite monotone voice. "I don't have that information."

"Then who does?" Phillip roared back as he continued to follow the two MP's.

"I'm sorry, sir," the first MP responded in his usual delivery. "I don't know that either."

Phillip and Diane followed the two MPs up the main stairs in the middle of the building to the third floor. From there they were lead down a long hall that had a series of doors evenly spaced down either side. Each door was numbered between 201 and 230. Each end of the hall was being guarded by two MPs. Phillip and Diane took all of this in as they followed the two MPs to door 211. The first MP opened the door, stepped just inside the room and ushered them both in. Phillip and Diane hesitantly stepped inside the room and then turned back around to face the first MP.

"This will be your temporary quarters during your stay here," the first MP reported stoically. "If you need anything just knock on the door."

Phillip and Diane noted the last part of that statement with curiosity. However, before they could question why they should knock for anything, the first MP stepped out of the room and shut the door. A second after that, they heard the click of the door being locked. Phillip quickly noted that the doorknobs had been switched around so that a key was needed to get out.

"They locked us in," Phillip exclaimed as he tried to turn the knob to open the door.

Shortly, Phillip gave up on trying to open the door and turned about to examine the room. It was easy to see that they were in a bunkroom configured to house six people. There were three bunk beds situated inside. There was a chest cabinet at the foot of each bunk bed and one to the left at the head. On the right side of the room was a row of six wardrobe cabinets. Windows to the outside world were above the chest cabinets at the head of the beds. On the opposite wall was a long desk, with four stations, built into the wall. Phillip and Diane perused all of this for a few minutes and then settled in for the wait.

Over the next hour, they heard the footfalls of people coming and going on a semi-regular basis. They heard some talk as well, but the words were often too faint to comprehend. Shortly into the next hour this pattern of traffic came to a stop. Over the next three hours, they heard an occasional knock on the door to another room. This was routinely followed by the sound of the footfalls of one of the MPs and a faint garble of talk between him and the person on the other side of the door. This process, on two occasions, preceded a bathroom run by someone in another room. It was nearly a quarter past ten o'clock in the morning when Phillip and Diane heard someone knocking on their door.

"Come in," Phillip called out after he and Diane got up onto their feet.

Almost immediately after saying that, an MP, complete with sidearm, opened the door stepped into the room and stood to one side, smartly. As soon as he did that a young and inoffensive looking Airman First Class walked into the room and stopped in front of Phillip. He wore an expression that suggested he was a little confused by what was happening.

"Hi," the young airman greeted with a nervous smile.

Phillip and Diane gave no response to this other than to examine him detestably.

"I need your menu selections," the airman announced as he extended two menus.

That statement instantly brought Phillip's feeling of annoyance beyond his ability to keep it checked.

"I don't give a damn about eating lunch in this place," Phillip roared at the young man. "I want to know who's in charge here. I want to know what the hell is going on."

The young airman was visibly shocked by the outburst. He hesitated for a moment to recover his wits before responding to Phillip.

"I'm sorry, sir," the young airman answered back with a wide-eyed expression. "I don't know that."

"Then get someone in here who does," Phillip insisted with a stern expression.

"I can't," the airman softly countered. "I'm just here to get your meal selections."

"Do you know anything about our children?" Diane implored "Are they here?"

"I'm sorry; I don't know anything about any children," the airman responded with a shake of his head.

"They're teenagers," Diane pleaded an instant behind. "They're not much younger than you."

The young airman gave the MP standing behind and to the left a nervous glance before speaking.

"I'm just here for your selections."

After that statement, Phillip and Diane gave one another knowing looks that the young man in front of them knew nothing. Phillip felt guilty about browbeating the young airman who looked to be only a few years older than Max. After giving the airman a sympathetic look, Phillip reached up and took the menu. Diane gave him a slight smile before turning her attention to the menu. The airman relaxed a little bit at the sight of there acceptance.

"You wouldn't happen to know how long they plan on keeping us waiting," Phillip questioned mildly while examining the menu in his hand.

"Ah … I don't know," the airman nervously answered.

The young airman took a second to give the MP at the door a quick visual search for disapproval. He then turned back to Phillip and Diane an added the one thing he did know about their stay.

"I need to get your dinner and breakfast selections too."

Phillip and Diane looked up from the menu sharply with newly angered expressions.

LINE BREAK

By 5:45 that morning, Ryan had a group of twenty Intelligence Analysts scouring through the surveillance videos from the night before. To accommodate the extra manpower twelve additional stations were set up throughout the house that Ryan was using as the base of operations for the surveillance of the Roswell Fourteen. Ryan paced about the house anxiously waiting for one of them to find something to explain how the fourteen teenagers slipped by them. Thirty minutes into that effort one of his analysts found something startling.

"There's a five-minute gap here," a confused analyst declared loudly.

Ryan rushed over before speaking to the analyst with a sharply worded, "what is it?"

"Five minutes and thirty-seven seconds of the surveillance is missing," the analyst explained as he pointed to the frozen time clock at the top of the video.

Ryan took a few seconds to note that the clock in the video was not counting the time before speaking again.

"How can that be?"

"It didn't transmit. The feed was frozen in place for five minutes and thirty-seven seconds," the analyst explained with an inflection of astonishment.

Ryan was taking a moment to consider that explanation when another analyst reported the same problem, but the amount of time lost was six minutes and eight seconds. The second report caused Ryan to suspect this was not an error in the equipment. The third and fourth reports had him convinced that someone had frozen the feed from the surveillance vans.

"Is that data anywhere in the system?" Ryan called to no one in particular.

"Not here," the nearest analyst reported with a shake of his head. "It was never transmitted. But the surveillance vans should have it."

By seven a.m. Ryan had all the recordings from the surveillance vans collected and distributed among the twenty analysts within his base of operations. He paced about behind the eight analysts in the front room of the house and anxiously waited for one of them to find something. It took less than two minutes for the first analyst to race forward in the surveillance video and find the missing time.

"He just walked out the front door," the first analyst reported with a shocked inflection.

Ryan rushed over to the computer station and watched a video of Michael Guerin, toting a backpack, leaving his home at a hurried pace. His first reaction to seeing this was disbelief. He thought it mind boggling that the agents in the field, who were monitoring the video as it was happening did not see this. His instinct was to be furious with the level of incompetence necessary to enable this to happen, but his mind latched on to the thought that this could not have been incompetence if all fourteen eluded their surveillance in the same way. He quickly urged the other analysts to find the missing time. Within two minutes of that request, he saw it happen again on another surveillance video recording. After watching a fifth video of a Roswell Fourteen teenager walking away from her home in the middle of the night, Ryan went to a computer station and initiated a video conference call to General Pittman.

"They walked out the front door," Ryan reported to the image of General Pittman on the computer monitor in front of him.

"What the hell does that mean," General Pittman roared back at him.

"Shortly after one o'clock last night all fourteen of the Roswell Fourteen walked out the front door unseen by any of our agents," Ryan exclaimed with an inflection of excitement.

"That's impossible," General Pittman bellowed back at him.

"We have it on video," Ryan contradicted with enthusiasm. "It was digitally recorded, but for some reason our field agents didn't see it while it was happening."

General Pittman had trouble wrapping his mind around that. He rolled the concept around in his mind with a perplexed look on his face.

"General," Ryan continued a moment later. "They not only knew that we were watching them. They knew we were coming for them, and they manipulated our field agents somehow to make their escape."

General Pittman did not share Ryan's amazement. He was not sure if he believed any of that. but the one thing he was convinced of was that these teenagers deliberately gave him the slip and embarrassed him in front of the Secretary of Defense.

"So, where the hell did they go?" General Pittman demanded after a moment of thought.

"I don't know," Ryan responded with a slight expression of surprise. "They left on foot, and they were all carrying backpacks."

Ryan did not understand General Pittman's anger about that. He thought it was fascinating. In his wildest dream he never imagined that he would be a part of an operation that was as exciting as this. He held no ill will for these teenagers, and secretly he was sympathetic towards them. Much of this regard was derived from the hundreds of hours he spent studying their lives. He saw nothing in these teenagers that he could construe as a threat to anyone. From what he saw, the Roswell Fourteen were genuinely devoted to their parents and good kids. What he was just noticing in himself was that a part of him wanted these teenagers to get away.

"Good," General Pittman acknowledged to Ryan's last statement with a glint of excitement in his eyes. "The Secretary is bringing in the FBI. If they're using any kind of public conveyance, they'll get them. But if they're still on foot that means they're somewhere in the desert and I've got them," he finished with a thrilled expression on his face.

Ryan's own mood soured at the sight of General Pittman's glee. He knew the truth of what he was saying. If they were on foot and in the desert, then General Pittman had everything he needed right there at Holloman to detect, encircle and capture the Roswell Fourteen.

"Pack up and get out of there and bring me everything you've got." General Pittman, eagerly, ordered Ryan. "I want you here at Holloman, ASAP."

"Yes sir," Ryan responded somberly.