Joe Halsey adjusted his backpack to a more comfortable position and listened intently for any sign he might be discovered. A few feet away, his partner Chuck Luskin did the same. No sounds interrupted the quiet save for the howl of a distant coyote and the chirping of a nocturnal bird somewhere off to the left. The night was pitch black, the moon a mere sliver in a clear sky dotted with stars. A lone meteor streaked across the heavens above the desert where the men crept towards the barbed wire fence. They were dressed entirely in black. Night vision goggles adorned their faces and afforded a daylight view of their surroundings.

The men made their way closer to the fence, now only yards away. Joe had reconnoitered the facility earlier and determined there were no sensors, no cameras, no visible means of detecting a breach. Of course, he realized there could be a hundred different ways to protect the perimeter of this place but so far no precautions seemed to have been taken, extraordinary or otherwise. Perhaps the owners had become a little too self-confidant, a little too comfortable in their supposition that they were bulletproof.

Well, Joe thought, we’ll see about that.

Something was wrong, had been wrong for quite awhile, and nothing had been done about it. As far as he could tell, nothing would ever be done about it. Just more lies spewing from the mouths of fat cat politicians while more people got sick. He had tried normal channels: writing to his Congressman, letters to the editor. It had done no good. Poisons were still being sprayed in the sky above homes in towns all over the country and passed off as contrails. The latticework patterns in the sky weren’t like any contrails he’d ever seen or heard of. Unlike the vapor left by jets passing overhead, which dissipated within minutes, these hung in the sky for hours.

No one knew he and Chuck were here or what they were about. Hopefully no one would know until it was too late and the story was made public. Let the authorities try to brand them as the lunatic fringe then. Let them try to deny scientific proof. They could try but they wouldn’t succeed and finally the country, no, the entire world, would know what was going on. The why of it would be for others to discern. The how would be splashed all over the front pages of every newspaper in the country. Tonight was the culmination of months of planning towards that end.