38: Chapter 38: Unearthing a Living Eye, Emergency Evacuation

Colvin took about two seconds to force his brain to switch from "confusion" to "execution mode," then calmly took a pre-prepared lead-lined sealing case from the tool rack and placed the translucent box inside.

After closing the lid of the sealing case, he noticed that his fingertips were trembling slightly.

"Encapsulation complete." His voice returned to a steady tone. "Initiating sealing procedure for Well No. 3."

"Immediately."

Over the next four hours, Well No. 3, which had deviated from the design, was completely sealed from bottom to top using a special formula of ultra-dense cement.

The cement mixture was precisely calculated, and its hardness and density after curing were almost identical to the surrounding natural rock strata, so that even with the most advanced seismic reflection scanners, one could not tell that there had ever been a well here.

Meanwhile, the other three standard heat pump wells were completed normally, with their depths precisely within the sixty to eighty-meter range marked on the design blueprints.

Before the engineering team withdrew, the entire ground-source heat pump system underwent a full trial run; water circulation was stable, heat exchange efficiency met the standards, all environmental parameters complied with municipal requirements, and the system could genuinely function normally.

Even the engineer sent by the building property management to conduct the acceptance inspection did not notice any anomalies.

As for the lead-lined sealing case, it was transported out of Westfield Center before 4:00 AM by a white van painted with the "Western Geological Engineering" logo.

The van circled three times on the empty streets of Los Angeles in the early morning, changing its external magnetic company logo at each specific node, from "Western Geological Engineering" to "Pacific Environmental Testing," and then to "Southern California Medical Equipment Delivery"...

Then it drove deep into the industrial zone along the Los Angeles River to a gray, single-story building without any markings.

This was a backup safe house Walsh had set up in Los Angeles.

The building looked like an abandoned logistics warehouse from the outside, but its inner core was a multi-layered electromagnetic shielding room, with an anti-eavesdropping rating that met the highest standards of the Department of Homeland Security.

From the outside, the only entrance was a rusted corrugated iron rolling door, and behind the iron door was a steel passage controlled by three independent verification systems.

At this moment, in the central shielding room of the building, Walsh stood in front of a stainless steel workbench.

His chief of staff, Trent Molloy, stood to his right.

Around the building's perimeter, thirteen well-trained intelligence veterans were scattered at their respective posts: four on the roof, three at the high points of surrounding abandoned factory buildings, and six at three sets of crossfire positions at the ground entrance.

Everyone was present, and everyone was vigilant against the last traces of darkness in the early morning of Los Angeles.

Walsh placed the lead-lined sealing case on the workbench and pressed the lid open.

The small, translucent box lay quietly at the bottom of the case.

The pale LED tubes in the shielding room cast their light evenly across the surface of the box.

The eyeball was suspended in a liquid preservation medium; the layer of eerie blue iridescence on the black base flowed slowly under the light, like a small piece of the night sky imprisoned in a glass cage.

Walsh looked down at it, remaining silent for nearly half a minute.

His mouth opened slightly, then closed.

His hands—the hands that had gripped ship railings during his time as a naval intelligence officer, held the shoulders of interrogation subjects during his time at the CIA, and held that untouchable list during his time at the Department of Homeland Security—were now subconsciously gripping the rubber mat on the edge of the console, his knuckles trembling slightly.

"This is it... this is really it."

His voice was very low, so low that Trent had to lean forward slightly to hear it clearly.

"Ever since I received that note three years ago, I had always thought the warning I received was just some shady power arrangement."

"I didn't know what the Deep State was hiding... I thought it was just ordinary corruption, an undisclosed military project, or some sort of gray political agenda."

"Later, Edward came to test me and said that the breach at Hoover Dam had started as early as 1947, so I began a secret investigation..."

"Gore died, Kramer died, and that reporter vanished into thin air; that was when I slowly began to confirm... what was hidden inside was an Aliens research project."

He stopped suddenly and swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing much more than usual.

He raised his right hand and pointed at the eyeball in the box, his index finger separated from the liquid surface by a thin, almost invisible polymer shell.

"And now... I see this."

"At first, I thought the secret Hoover Dam news series that Kramer was going to expose was just a series of investigative articles about the dam, but now I know."

"I don't know how many layers of smoke screens Kramer intended to insert into this news series, nor do I know what sensational headline he would have chosen to grab attention, but I know what he would have presented in the final, climactic chapter."

He curled his knuckles and tapped them lightly against the lid of the box.

"He would have put a living Grey Alien eyeball, along with this translucent box, out on every newsstand in the Lighthouse Country."

"This is the evidence that the person who was silenced handed to him."

Trent's gaze was firmly fixed on the translucent box.

He had spent nearly twenty years in the intelligence system, doing archive analysis, technical reconnaissance, and covert operations.

He had seen no fewer corpses than Walsh, and had seen so many classified documents that they would require trucks to transport.

But as he looked at the huge black eyeball suspended in the liquid, the muscles in his face tightened involuntarily.

"That staff member who escaped from the base... he must have used this to find the newspaper owner."

"No wonder Kramer went to interview Gore so solemnly; he already had this ironclad evidence in his hands."

"It's a pity that in the end... no one can escape."

Trent fell silent for a moment, as if he had suddenly remembered something else. His gaze returned to the eyeball, and his voice held a trace of an extremely subtle terror that he was unwilling to admit rationally but could not deny.

When he spoke, it was as if he were talking to Walsh, and also as if he were talking to himself.

"Eighty-plus years..."

"From the time Kramer buried it deep underground until now, this eyeball has been soaking in liquid for eighty years... and it's still moving."

Walsh's pupils constricted sharply at this sentence.

That contraction was not ordinary surprise; his seasoned eyes, which had been dazed just a moment ago, instantly shifted from staring to alert.

"What did you say?"

"I said..." Trent raised his finger again to point at the suspended object in the box, his speaking speed the same as before, not yet realizing what Walsh's reaction meant. "The eyeball is moving; that Grey Alien's vitality must be much stronger than ours..."

Walsh's expression changed drastically.

His face, which a second ago had been immersed in the shock of the Alien evidence, transformed in less than half a second into a different expression—one of total, absolute, spine-chilling fear.

He snatched up the operation recorder next to the box and shoved it into Trent's hand, while his other hand pressed the emergency evacuation button for the secret room.

"Evacuate immediately! Everyone!! Evacuate!!!"

His voice was squeezed out through his teeth, but the volume was by no means low.

Trent was stunned for less than a second.

Having followed Walsh for over a decade, from the Naval Intelligence Department all the way to the Department of Homeland Security, he had seen his boss face Persian gunboats on the high seas of the Persian Gulf, seen him face the challenges of the entire committee at closed-door congressional hearings, and even just a week ago, had seen his boss dig up the coffin of a newspaper owner who had been poisoned eighty years ago.

He had never seen this expression on Walsh's face before.

Trent's reaction was almost muscular; he tucked the box into a sealed document bag, pushed Walsh's shoulder with his right hand, and pressed his left hand against the Glock at his waist.

The situation outside changed in less than ten seconds.

The thirteen-man security team that had been guarding the central shielding room all entered combat mode the very instant they heard the evacuation signal.

The gun barrels at the three crossfire positions at the entrances were lowered, aiming at every possible approach direction, while a sharp female intelligence officer in the hallway already had the car keys in her palm, ready to open the car door as soon as the order was given.

No one knew what had happened, but everyone had received one signal: Evacuate, now!

And the thought in Walsh's mind at this moment—all along, he had assumed that the base hidden under Hoover Dam was "researching Alien technology."

Technology, a technique, data, some novel equipment that could be reverse-engineered; it was valuable and deadly, but ultimately something that could be shared, disseminated, and constrained.

The Deep State people had kept this secret for decades, and he had thought it was a group of power-obsessed guys wanting to monopolize superior technological crushing power.

But Trent had reminded him of something else: that eyeball was not dead.

After eighty years, it was still rotating freely in the preservation liquid.

The physical body of the Grey Alien was not something that could be so easily taken away by time.

What the Deep State was hiding was not technology, but the vitality within the Aliens.

What they wanted to understand was never some new type of weapon! It was immortality!

Technology belongs to all of humanity; even if it is monopolized, a leak is at most a technical crisis.

Immortality belongs only to the individual.

Anyone who sits in that chair of the Deep State could not! Would never! Tolerate this secret leaking out!

In the face of knowing that he might pass this secret on, the killing threshold of that group was zero.

This was why, when he had previously fabricated intelligence reports at the Department of Homeland Security to mobilize the excavation project, he felt he still had time to slowly maneuver with the Deep State.

Now he knew that the word "maneuver" did not exist at all.

From the day the breach at Hoover Dam was exposed, from the day Kramer was poisoned to look like a suicide, this iron rule had never changed: touch it and you die.

And now he was holding it.

Trent was pushing Walsh and had already reached the first corner of the inner passage.

The dim lights overhead and all around were flashing in a loop amidst the chiming echoes of the alarm.

The ground vibration sensors had already detected two unfamiliar vehicles approaching from both sides of the Los Angeles industrial zone. Walsh only had to glance at Trent's security screen to recognize that the speed was too fast, too precise; they were not ordinary people.

The outer perimeter sentries had already reported unauthorized band interference covering the area.

"They had been watching us since we started digging."

There was no trace of acting in Walsh's voice, only the dry calmness of an intelligence veteran when caught at a dead end. "Everyone, don't stop, head to the east emergency exit..."

His voice suddenly cut off.

It wasn't that he had stopped himself, but that the air itself had suddenly undergone a drastic change!

Above the concrete floor outside the passage door, white light exploded, like a silent wave before a rumble of thunder, pressing all sound into sudden silence.

The next instant, the air around them, which had previously only held the sound of low-pressure alarms, suddenly began to ripple like water.

A circle of visible, extremely high-frequency air ripples spread out from the center of the corridor, carrying a low, almost imperceptible infrasonic vibration.

The first person fell, then the second, then the third.