Callsign: King II- Underworld

She was parked at the Campaign Trailhead, in the northeast part of the Superstition Wilderness. The Land Cruiser had nimbly negotiated the eight-mile long stretch of unimproved Forest Service roads connecting to state route 88, but from here, she would have to proceed on foot to reach her goal.

She circled the parked SUV and opened the rear hatch to reveal her gear, all carefully laid out in the storage area. She shrugged into her 1.6-liter CamelBak hydration pack, taking a perfunctory sip of tepid water from the bite valve—a water supply was the single most important factor in surviving a night in the desert, even in mild conditions. She then picked up the handheld video-camera, clicking it on to verify that the batteries were fully charged. She switched it to low-light infrared mode, and the dark display screen came alive, revealing the darkened landscape in an eerie green glow. Satisfied, she turned the device off and stuffed it in one of the large pockets of her lightweight windbreaker. She performed a similar function test on the Garman GPS device, noting her location on the backlit liquid crystal display, and the distance to the waypoint she had earlier entered into the device: just over six miles in a straight line, though it was unlikely the terrain would let her travel the shortest possible route. To get where she wanted, she would have to follow a series of trails weaving along the flanks of the Pinal Mountains.

Nina had only one more piece of equipment to add, something she hoped she would never have to use. She glanced nervously at the other two four-wheel drive vehicles parked at the turnaround; their owners were nowhere to be seen and presumably already in a camp somewhere down one of the trails. Confident that she was alone, she picked up the Glock 27 9-millimeter pistol, inserted a fifteen-round magazine with a grip extender, and then actioned the slide to chamber a round. The pistol went into the nylon holster, already threaded onto her belt, partially concealed underneath the windbreaker.

She didn’t much care for guns or their potential to destroy life, but it was patently foolish to hike in the desert without a gun. That was a lesson her father had taught her very early in life, one of many, and she held his wisdom in high esteem. He was the reason she was what she was.

And what she was, at least in a professional sense, was one of the foremost scholarly researchers of everything covered by the vaguely defined term ‘paranormal phenomena.’ There were a lot of people involved in paranormal research, owing in no small part to the proliferation of reality-television programming that featured enthusiasts armed with cameras, audio recording devices and sundry other equipment, hunting for ghosts, monsters, aliens and pretty much anything that seemingly defied rational explanation and titillated the imagination. It was the “scholarly” part that Nina felt set her apart from the crowd. To be sure, many of the professional celebrity-caliber researchers—she did not think of them as colleagues—gave the appearance of applying the scientific method to their investigations, but just enough to give it a veneer of legitimacy. Most of their “findings” were a hodge-podge of mutually contradictory bits of errant data, pieced together into a mosaic that hinted at still greater wonders to be revealed and kept the ratings up.

Nina had been labeled a skeptic by her detractors, and to the extent that any scientist worth her salt tries to put aside preconceptions and think objectively, she was. Her mind was open to all the possibilities, but she had thus far seen no compelling evidence to make her a believer. Like her father before her, she earned her living writing the facts about so-called paranormal phenomena, free of sensational speculation, often exposing frauds and charlatans in the process. It wasn’t exactly lucrative; people didn’t like having their illusions exposed. But her books sold marginally well, and because she was—as one producer had told her—telegenic, she was often invited to appear on cable television programs, ostensibly as a skeptical foil to the raving pseudoscientists. Tall and slender, with long black hair and a face that seemed to have taken the best of both her father’s Irish and her mother’s Native American genetic traits, she was, as too many of her fan letters often pointed out, an exotic beauty. If not for her intractable refusal to play to the crowd, she probably could have had her own show, but her integrity to scientific principles was non-negotiable.

Deep down however, she wanted nothing more than to discover that there really was more in heaven and earth than science had thus far revealed.