by Ian Douglas
“Yes,” Truman said. “But I don’t like it. Who are these things, these creatures anyway? What are they doing in our airspace? Why the hell are they here? Is it an invasion?”
“Mr. President, I just wish to hell I knew.”
The wreckage from the desert crash site had been gathered up and shipped to Wright Field outside of Dayton, Ohio. Wright Field was the location of the Air Force’s T-2 Intelligence Department—formerly the Technical Data Laboratory created in 1942—the place where captured German aircraft had been shipped after the war to see what made them tick. Now they were being tasked with the same for whatever this thing was. Whether they would be able to make anything out of the debris remained to be seen.
They also had several bodies from the crash on ice. Hillenkoetter shuddered at the memory. He’d seen them. Those creatures had not been human.
A number of reports had come out of T-2 since July of that year, including the one Truman had just mentioned. The crash wreckage did not incorporate technology known to any nation or group on Earth, and was therefore almost certainly extraterrestrial in origin. Mars was the popularly assumed origin of the craft and its diminutive crew, though the planet Venus was sometimes bandied about as an alternative. In fact, nothing was known about the craft’s origins or capability, and that single, simple statement was terrifying in its implications. Somebody, no one knew who, was able to travel to Earth from God knew where, enter US airspace with impunity, and outrun or outmaneuver the best combat aircraft in the US inventory.
What was even worse was the fact that these extraterrestrials had been here for years before 1947. The US government had even recovered wreckage from one after the so-called Battle of Los Angeles in early 1942, and from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the year before that.
And there were rumors, originating with the German scientists of Operation Paperclip, that a ship had crashed in Germany back in 1936 or 1939—the stories differed—and that some of the amazing technology coming out of the Third Reich during the war had been due to back-engineering technology from recovered vehicles. Alien vehicles.
“Okay, Roscoe,” Truman said. “According to this report you’ve just submitted, you want to create a kind of scientific committee to study these crashed saucers. That right?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Who do you suggest we approach?”
“There’s a list appended at the end, sir. Vannevar Bush, certainly. And the new secretary of defense.”
“James Forrestal? Okay.”
“General Vandenberg, of course.” Hoyt Vandenberg had been the second director of central intelligence before Hillenkoetter, and had been the duputy commander in chief for the US Army Air Forces.
Truman leafed ahead to the list of suggested names. “Okay. I’ve got it. And the upshot of all this is to create a group to recover crashed saucers?”
“In part, yes, sir. We know that these . . . people aren’t perfect. Sometimes their aircraft crash. One, maybe two in Germany before the war. One in New Mexico. One in Missouri. The one we shot down over Los Angeles in ’42. When they crash, we need to be able to dispatch teams to cordon off the area, and keep civilians out. We need to recover the wreckage, as we did at Roswell, and move it to a safe location. We need to have engineers and scientists, good engineers and scientists, who can learn all they can from the debris, and see how we can use it.”
“You mean build our own flying saucers. . . .”
Hillenkoetter shrugged. “Maybe. We know the Germans were working on that.” He’d seen the drawings and schematics for the Nazi Haunebu I, II, and III. The Allies had come so damned close to losing, closer than any man on the street was aware.
Some things simply had to be kept secret from the public.
“We also need,” he continued, “to keep a lid on this whole thing. If we fail to maintain control over what the public knows about this, there could be real panic.”
Truman grunted. “That damned radio show.”
Hillenkoetter nodded. The War of the Worlds had panicked a good many people who’d heard it. In fact, the degree of panic had been grossly overstated by the newspapers—they were keen on pointing out the deficiencies of radio, their new competitor, as opposed to print media—but war jitters certainly had contributed to some small degree of panic, at the very least, especially in New Jersey where the Martians were supposed to have landed.
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t mind telling you, Roscoe, that I don’t like the idea of deliberately deceiving the American public.”
“Neither do I, Mr. President. But it’ll be necessary, at least for a time. And we don’t want the Soviets getting wind of this.”
“No, we do not.” Truman considered the problem for a moment. “Okay. I’ll draw up an executive order.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me. As director of Central Intelligence and director of the CIA, you’ve got yourself a spot on this committee, whether you like it or not. And I’ll expect you to keep me in the loop.”
“Absolutely, Mr. President.”
“I know the scientists think they got a wrecked spaceship out of the Pacific near LA, but I’ve always thought that whole incident was just war jitters, okay? That, or some kind of long-range Jap reconnaissance aircraft. We just don’t know. We can’t know.”
“We know the Japanese didn’t have anything that could reach us at the time.”
“Floatplanes off a submarine?”
He shook his head. “They didn’t have anything like that in ’42. The I-400 class wasn’t in operation until ’44.”
“Well, this whole thing sounds pretty damned iffy to me. But if we’re being invaded from out there, we need to know about it. And we need to be able to fight back if push comes to shove.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Now get the hell out of here and let me get to some nice, safe, normal world problems. Like what Stalin is doing in Europe, and what we’ll do if he gets the bomb!”
The bomb.
Nuclear weapons were nothing compared to this. And as Hillenkoetter walked out of the Oval Office, he wondered how much the President knew about the Nazi Haunebu saucers, their atom bomb experiments, or their other secret, almost magical weapons . . . and how close the Allies had been to total annihilation.
Hunter walked up the sidewalk of the apartment complex on Witherspoon Way, located in the small and quiet Californian community of El Cajon just seventeen miles from downtown San Diego. At the door to the lobby, he stopped and looked up and down the street.
Nothing. Damn, he thought. You’re getting way too paranoid.
Of course, he remembered the old dictum: just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you!
His debriefing at Yokosuka had been a lot less exciting than the interview with Walters on board the Illinois, at least to start with. They’d put him in a room with a bunk, desk and chairs, and its own head. He presumed the other SEALs in the squad had been sequestered this way as well, but he never saw them while he was on the base and so didn’t know for sure.
The next day, a couple of suits with badges identifying them as DIA—the Defense Intelligence Agency—had received him in a small and dingy office and questioned him about the mission. They’d asked him about what he and the others had seen, but when he told them truthfully they’d just nodded and jotted down something in their notebooks.
As he’d stood up to leave, however, one of them had stopped him. “I would keep your, ah, sighting quiet, if I were you, Lieutenant,” he’d said. “There are folks here who really, really don’t want you spreading wild stories about spaceships, y’know? Especially if you’ve been ordered to keep your mouth shut.”
“I saw what I saw,” Hunter said, his voice almost a growl. “I have video to prove it!”
The other DIA man had given him a tight-lipped grin. “Not anymore, you don’t.”
Of course. Everything they’d brought back from the mission
—video, seismic and radiation readings, isotope sample—it all had been taken off the submarine at Yokosuka. Hunter was positive he wouldn’t see or hear of those recordings again.
“So—are you certain of what you saw?” the other agent said.
“Of course I am! Are you calling me a liar?”
“Absolutely not. But . . . well . . . your eyes could have been playing tricks. Or . . . just maybe . . . what you saw was some sort of very secret US aircraft. You know we have massive black projects going. Maybe someone way up the chain of command decided to send one in to have a look around.”
Hunter did know about black budgets and black projects. As a Navy SEAL, he operated in and around those shadows himself.
“What I saw,” he said, angry and stubborn, “was technology that must have been centuries ahead of anything we have now! Okay?”
“But how do you know that, Lieutenant? I understand they have some really spooky things going down back in Nevada. Real Star Wars stuff! Hey, you told us yourself you saw a human through that porthole, right? What would a human be doing on a spaceship if it was from another planet?”
The other agent nodded. “And you know . . . if you’re so certain it wasn’t an American secret aircraft . . . I don’t know. Maybe it was Chinese! Beijing was extremely concerned about the possibility of radiation leakage from that test site. And they could have some supersecret black-ops assets as well, stuff we don’t even know about.”
“Then God help us all,” Hunter had told them. “That thing we saw would fly rings around the Lightning II or anything else in our inventory!”
“Well . . . so you believe.” The agent opened a briefcase and handed Hunter several documents.
“What are these?”
“An oath of secrecy. You’ll swear not to tell anyone about what you saw.”
“But I’m already under oath. When I got my security clearance. I never de-oathed!”
“I know. But if you would, please.”
“Wasn’t my promise to Walters enough?”
“Who is Walters?”
“The CIA man—”
“There is no Walters.”
Hunter had looked at the two agents warily. They were serious about this fiction they were making him participate in. Serious enough to go to all this trouble.
The agent seemed to pretend the last part of their conversation hadn’t even happened, pulling out more papers. “And these are documents informing you of the national security aspects of this mission, and of the penalties you face if you divulge any information to anyone. We need you to read and sign them.”
With a sigh, Hunter had glanced through the papers . . . then signed.
“And initial here, please. And here. And here. . . .”
Hunter had done as he’d been told, grumbling to himself a bit ungraciously, but obviously he would get nowhere with these people. They were nicer than Walters had been, certainly, but just as determined to enforce his cooperation.
The SEALs were reunited again when they were given orders to return by first-available military transport. Twelve and a half hours later, they’d touched down at Naval Air Station North Island and the complex of naval bases at Coronado, the Silver Strand just across the bay from San Diego.
And once again, he and his men had been separated, given solitary quartering, and interviewed by both military and civilian personnel. No one had even alluded to the UFO this time, and he just played ball to get it all over with. He read and signed more nondisclosure papers, and was reminded again both of the importance of national security interests, and of the severity of the penalties should any service member violate his oaths.
By this time, Hunter knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that whatever he and his men had seen out there at Mantapsan, it had been real—real as in a genuine spacecraft from some other world. Everyone who questioned him insisted that it might have been something out of some secret American program, something so secret it would be devastating to national security if he revealed it.
“Everyone knows,” one guy with FBI credentials had told him, “that the military has cooked up some pretty strange stuff. You know . . . Area 51, and all that.”
That secret base in the Nevada desert was notorious as the place where alien spacecraft were reverse engineered and tested, but it was also well-known as the site of flight tests of top secret human aircraft. The SR-71 Blackbird and the F-117 Nighthawk, the so-called Stealth Fighter, had been tested there, and scuttlebutt had it that there were other, newer, even more radically advanced aircraft there now.
“Maybe,” said the man who’d flashed a DIA card at him, “you saw a SAD/SOG op.”
Hunter scowled at that. The Special Activities Division/Special Operations Group was a highly secret organization working under CIA direction responsible for covert ops in which the US government wanted to maintain plausible deniability.
His interviewers had done their best to plant seeds of doubt in his mind. Had he really seen an alien spaceship? He couldn’t know . . . not for certain.
But although he said nothing, Hunter was by now certain that what he’d seen had not been built or deployed by any nation on Earth. Why would the government, which had deployed the SEALs in the first place—and deployed numerous high-value assets in support, including a USAF SpecOps transport and a Virginia-class submarine—turn around and send in that whatever-it-was to yank the rug out from under the people they already had on the ground? It made no sense!
Of course, Hunter was always more than ready to accept the fact that the government was a misnomer. The term implied a monolithic whole that always knew what it was doing. Bullshit! Hunter knew well that all too often, not only did the left hand not know what the right was doing, but the head didn’t know what either was doing, and the hands were wrestling with each other over interservice and interdepartmental turf wars.
Maybe . . .
No. He didn’t buy it. With technology like that, people very high up the ladder within the government would damn well know what it was doing . . . and who else was on the ground at the time.
So . . . aliens. By the time he left Naval Base Coronado on liberty, he was feeling distinctly paranoid. Renting a car, he drove east to El Cajon, frequently checking the rearview mirror for signs of a tail. Gerri lived in an apartment complex on Witherspoon. He parked on Chatham Street two blocks south from the place and walked, just so he could check and see if he was being followed.
Now he was there, and though he still hadn’t seen anyone out of the ordinary, he was almost certain he was being followed. But with no proof, there was nothing to do but go in.
Gerri Galanis lived on the second floor, Apartment 2D, and she was waiting for him when he buzzed from the lobby. “Mark!” she cried, opening the door. She was tall, brunette, and stunning in a microscopic bikini. “I thought you’d never get here!”
“Had to work late at the office, hon,” he replied, keeping his voice nonchalant. He’d phoned her when he’d arrived at Coronado two days ago, but had not been able to wrangle liberty until this afternoon. He’d called her again a couple of hours ago, and they’d made plans to go to the beach—hence the bikini.
Hunter was just glad they’d seen fit to issue him a pass. He’d seriously questioned whether they would ever allow him off base after the multiple grillings he’d received. His relief was palpable as he looked at the gorgeous woman before him, and he took Gerri in his arms and gave her a deep and thorough kiss.
Hunter had been divorced by his wife a year ago, and he was still wrestling with that. Eve had said it was because he was never home . . . though, damn it, she’d known he was in the Navy when she’d married him, and knew what it meant to be a Navy wife. Privately, he still wondered if she’d found someone else, but he also could admit that the role of Navy spouse was not for everyone. And the deployment schedules for the SEALs were worse than most, and DEVGRU—what used to be called SEAL Team Six—was the worst of all. You never knew when the phone would ring in the midd
le of the night, and twenty-four hours later you would be squelching through the mud in a swamp somewhere in Venezuela, or freezing your ass off on top of a mountain in Afghanistan.
Or dodging flying saucers in North Korea.
He’d picked Gerri up at a bar just two months ago. She was cute and she was fun and she didn’t ask too many questions. She cocktailed at the Kitten Klub downtown, with occasional gigs working the pole onstage. Hunter didn’t mind at all the idea of her displaying her body in front of noisy men; she actually liked what she did and she was good at it.
Just like Hunter.
“Ready for the beach?” he asked her.
“Well . . .” Her hand wandered on his torso and she kissed him again. “Maybe in a minute . . . or two.” Her grin was infectious.
Sex with Gerri was always fantastic, but even better was the relaxation, the decompression that Hunter had learned most to appreciate. Though he wouldn’t admit it even to himself, he was sore as hell from the brutal hike up and down those North Korean mountain slopes, and still felt washed out and rag-doll limp inside.
She made him feel alive once more.
After a long and pleasant interlude, they lay together in her bed, bare legs entangled, thoroughly wrapped in one another’s arms. “So, Mr. SEAL,” she said, playfully stroking him. “Can you tell me anything about where you’ve been this past week?”
“Uh-uh,” he said. With one finger, he stroked the curve of hair and skin just behind her left ear. She shivered, and cuddled closer.
“Mmmm. Not even where you’ve been?”
“Sorry, babe. You know I can’t.”
Especially this time!
He pushed the urgent thought away. He’d been trying not to think about . . . that.
Normally, the secrecy imposed on members of the SEAL teams wasn’t that big a deal. You simply didn’t talk about what you did at all—just said you were in the Navy. She’d seen him in uniform months before, though, and noticed the huge and clunky “Budweiser” badge that declared him to be a Navy SEAL. So she knew that much, at least.
