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"Halt!" the sentry screamed at the small figure that had gotten up and was trying desperately to climb over the hill. "Halt!" the sentry yelled again and brought his MI to bear. Other soldiers ran toward the hill as the figure slipped in the sand, started to slide down, caught his footing, and climbed again. The sound of soldiers locking and loading rounds in their chambers carried loud across the desert through the predawn darkness. There was a rolling volley of shots from the nervous soldiers, and as the small figure tried to stand, he was flung over like a rag doll and then down the hill by the rounds that tore into him. He lay motionless on the sand as the first three soldiers to reach him stood over the body, chambered new rounds, and pointed their weapons at his chest. "Fuck, " the officer spit again. "Arnold. " Steve Arnold snapped to attention. "You and your men get out there and stop those civilians from crossing this perimeter. "He motioned to the small convoy of emergency vehicles approaching them from the east. He knew they had to be police or county sheriff. Then he called out, "Medics. " Arnold jumped to at once, and by the time the medics were loading the little creature on a stretcher, he was already setting up a perimeter of CIC personnel and sentries to block the site from the flashing lights and churning sand far in the distance to the south of them. He heard the officer order the medics to load the bodies on stretchers, pack them in the back of whatever two-and-a-half-ton CMC he could pull off the line, and drive them back to the base immediately. up everything that can be loaded on these deuce-and-a-halfs and sway that damn . . . whatever it is" - he was pointing to the delta shaped object - "on this low-boy and get it out of here. The rest of you, " he called out. "! want this place spotless. Nothing ever happened here, you understand? Just a nothing piece of scrub brush like the rest of this desert. " As the soldiers formed an arm in arm "search and rescue" grid, some on their hands and knees, to clean the area of any pieces of debris, devices, or chunks of wreckage, the huge retrieval crane that had been deployed from the air base hoisted the surprisingly light flying object out of its impact crater in the arroyo and swayed it above the long flatbed Ford that accompanied the convoy of army trucks. A small squad of MPs were deployed to face the civilian convoy of emergency vehicles quickly approaching the site. They fixed bayonets and lowered their MI barrels at the whirlwind of sand directly in front of them. On the other side of the skirmish line, Roswell firefighter Dan Dwyer, the radioman riding shotgun on the red Ward LaFrance pumper the company rolled that night along with the tanker, could see very little at first except for an oasis of white light in the center of darkness. His small convoy had been running lights but no sirens as they pulled out of the firehouse in the center of Roswell, rendez voused with the police car north of town, and headed out to the site to rescue what he had been told was a downed aircraft. As he approached the brightly lit area of floodlights off in the distance - it looked more like a small traveling amusement park than a crash site - he could already see the soldiers in a rough circle around an object that was swinging from the arm of a crane. As the LaFrance got closer, Dwyer could just make the strange deltoid shape of the thing as it hung, very precariously, from the arm, almost dropping once or twice under the very inexperienced control of the equipment operator. Even at this distance, the sound of shouting and cursing was carrying across the sand as the crane was raised, then lowered, then raised as the object finally sat over the Ford flatbed trailer. The police unit ahead of the fire truck suddenly shot out toward the brightly lit area as soon as the driver saw the activity, and immediately the area was obscured from Dwyer's vision by clouds of sand that diffused the light. All he could see through the thicket of sand were the reflections of his own flashing lights. When the sand cleared, they were almost on top of the site, swinging off to one side to avoid the army trucks that had already started hack down the road toward them. Dwyer looked over his shoulder to see if any more military vehicles were headed his way, but all he saw were the first pink lines of sunlight over the horizon. It was almost morning. By the time Dwyer's field truck pulled around to the area the soldiers had pointed out, whatever it was that had crashed was sitting on the flatbed, still clamped to the hovering crane. Three or four soldiers were working on the coupling and securing the object to the truck with chains and cable. But for something that had dropped out of the sky in a fireball, which was how the police described it, Dwyer noted that the object looked almost unscathed. He couldn't see any cracks in the object's skin and there were no pieces that had broken off. Then the soldiers dropped an olive tarp over the flatbed and the object was completely camouflaged. An army captain walked over to one of the police units parked directly in front of the fire truck. And behind the officer stood a line of bayonet wielding soldiers sporting MP armbands. "You guys can head on back, " Dwyer heard the captain tell one of the Roswell police officers on the scene. "We've got the area secured." "No!" one of the officers shouted. Arnold couldn't see which one, but it was too late. "Sergeant, " the officer called out again. "| want your men to load