Thin Air

by George Simpson

  "Anybody come in?" asked Hammond. Yablonski was already heading for the stairs.

  "ROSIE?" he called out.

  "I'm okay, Cas." She appeared on the upper landing, frightened but in perfect shape. Then she saw the blood. "Your leg!" She came down the stairs fast and took him to a chair.

  Hammond explained what had happened, then asked Menninger to call a doctor. While he went to the phone, Hammond checked his arm for damage and discovered no cuts, only one large bruise. He smelled a roast cooking in the kitchen and wondered how any of them could eat after all this.

  Hammond turned at the sound of a muffled sob. Mrs. Yablonski had sunk onto her husband's chest to stifle a burst of crying. Hammond felt awkward; Yablonski eyed him darkly.

  "I hate to admit it," said Hammond, "but there's no way we can make a firm connection between what just happened and this Dr. McCarthy business. We know it, but nobody else will believe it."

  Yablonski brooded a long moment, then nodded in resignation. His wife was looking from one to the other. "What are you talking about?" she said, getting to her feet and facing Hammond. "My God, you've been playing with his life! What are you going to do about it? Write a report?!"

  "Momma—" said Cas, reaching for her hand.

  She pulled away. "No! He's perfectly willing to put you through hell, but if somebody else tries, he should be willing to stop it!"

  "Momma, he's doing his best."

  "Cas...he's trying, to tell you that they could kill you and get away with it!"

  Yablonski stared at his wife, then looked at Hammond searchingly.

  "Mrs. Yablonski," said Hammond. "They were after me" Her anger subsided and she looked confused. Yablonski got hold of her hand and this time she didn't pull away. She was close to tears again. "You're right, though," added Hammond, "they could get rid of all of us. So we have to get you out of Washington, right now."

  "Doctor's on his way," reported Menninger, returning from the phone. "How's the leg?" He bent over Yablonski and peered at the wound. He sent Mrs. Yablonski for cold water and a cloth.

  Hammond went to the phone and called Jack Pohl at home. "Jack, I want that safe house and I want it tonight! Don't give me any more crap! Whoever's out there now, you tell them to make room or clear out! I'm putting my people in there now and that's that!"

  He hung up immediately and smiled to himself. He hadn't told Jack Pohh where to reach him, which meant Pohl had no choice. He returned to the couch. Mrs. Yablonski was hovering in Menninger's way.

  "He's going to be okay," said Hammond. "And he's going to be hungry."

  She looked up from Cas and nodded. She forced herself back into the kitchen. Hammond sat down with Yablonski and watched Menninger cleanse the wound with cold water, then wrap a dry towel around it. "Didn't go too deep," he said. "Should be walking on it in a couple of days."

  Menninger finished and went to call for transport. Hammond sat in silence until Yablonski voiced the question going through both their minds:

  "Who the hell is behind all this?"

  "I have no idea," said Hammond, "but they've just raised the stakes. I'm in to the finish."

  Michaelson and Andrews came out in the NIS camouflage van with the doctor, picked up the Yablonskis and Menninger, and hauled them off to the safe house in Herndon. The last thing Yablonski said to Hammond as he was helped into the back of the van was, "Don't forget about me, buddy."

  Hammond promised he wouldn't. He knew what Yablonski meant: he wanted to be included when Hammond got McCarthy cornered. He was fully committed now.

  Hammond went home, daring the lone walk down the street to his flat, eagerly peering into empty cars and doorways, itching for another go, but no one showed. He arrived home safely, but he felt even less safe behind closed doors. The attackers must have known his address: they'd been lying in wait for him.

  The hell with it, he decided, and plowed under the covers. Tomorrow the track-down would start in earnest. If they could get his address, then by God he could get theirs. His eyes were just locking shut when he saw the little calling card Jan Fletcher had left behind. A single scarf, dropped or placed under his easy chair by the bedroom window. Hammond snaked over the side of the bed and plucked it from the carpet. He brought it to his nose. Her perfume. He wriggled back under the covers and played with the silk between his fingers. This time he let himself go, summoning up images that he had long ago forced deep into the recesses of memory: her body, her face soft and radiant, flesh warm and rippling, hair in his fingers...

  He groaned and shoved the scarf under his pillow. He closed his eyes and forced himself to sleep, cursing her.

  When he saw the envelope sitting on his desk, with Paul Mallory's return address, he knew immediately what it was: the list of government vendor companies insured by Tri-State. He skimmed the prestigious names while sipping black coffee. He was familiar with most, and there was no reason to assume any of them were illegitimate or fronts. Was he reaching? Maybe. Somebody from one of these companies could have written Paul Mallory an anonymous letter, somebody who knew Mallory and Fletcher—but the writer would have to have known of Hammond's involvement. McCarthy? There was no reason to assume McCarthy knew enough about the insurance business to feed on its hidden fears of rumor and innuendo. No, McCarthy must have gone to someone who knew the business—whom to write to and what to say. One of Tri-State's clients? An employee?

  Hammond swore. It could be anyone. It was another goddamned blind alley. Just the same, he intended to hang onto this list. He stuffed it into his briefcase, which by now was bulging with papers on the whole Fletcher-McCarthy-Yablonski debacle. It was getting to be a pain to lug it around.

  He called Slater at the lab and was not surprised to hear him weary and snappish. "We're not really making progress with any of these tapes, Hammond. We're going in circles. Why don't you come over and sniff around for a while?"

  "Maybe I will."

  The Naval Research Laboratory was in the southernmost corner of the District of Columbia. To get there, Hammond had to plow through a herd of traffic. But the worst part of the journey was the arrival. The Navy Lab buildings were situated right next to a huge sewage disposal plant at the edge of the Potomac. The aroma was all-pervading.

  Hammond clumped through miles of corridor until he found Cohen and Slater in the electronics workshop, a wide room littered with movable equipment. Cohen rose and stretched as Hammond slouched over.

  "Sonofabitch, this place stinks," said Hammond.

  "Goodness, he noticed," Cohen grinned. "We're recommending this site for the new opera house."

  Slater was in a foul humor. His beard was sticky with the soup he was gulping from a can. He was hunched over a large piece of equipment, listening to an agonizingly slowed-down replay of their session with Yablonski. It was the voice-print analyzer, and Slater kept scanning reams of computer graph paper spilling out on the floor, looking for telltale signs of—

  "What the hell are you looking for?" asked Hammond.

  Slowly, Slater looked up and exchanged glances with Cohen. Both men shrugged in unison. "Damned if we know," they said.

  "But we'll find something," added Cohen.

  "Very funny. What part are you listening to now?"

  "Oh, a good part. Real good." Slater stopped the machine, switched off the graph run, changed speed and ran the tape.

  Hammond listened to his own voice asking Yablonski, "Martin, Cas. Tell me what happened. Why does he scare you? Did he hurt you? Come on..."

  Hammond let them run the tape until they got to Yablonski's outburst of screaming: "Zero...Gone!...Rinehart warned us...don't get locked out!...Terkel suicide...Olively and Butler...walking through walls...Rinehart...those bastards!...They knew—"

  Hammond reached over and shut it off. Cohen held up a sheet of paper. "Zero. Don't get locked out. For the life of me, I can't figure what he's talking about. Sounds like some sort of code...." Cohen shook his head.

  "Well, maybe it is," suggeste
d Hammond. "Code for an action or a part of the experiment, whatever that was."

  "Maybe," agreed Cohen, grinning at him. "But that's just another guess, isn't it?"

  "Run it back," said Hammond. Slater replayed the section and Hammond slammed down the pause button after Yablonski's line, "Walking through walls..."

  "Yablonski's wife said something about walking through walls. She thought she saw her husband do that."

  Slater and Cohen stared at him—their silence loud in its intensity, "She thought she saw what?" asked Cohen.

  Hammond didn't answer. He knew how strange it sounded, how impossible. He changed the subject "Any more word from BUPERS on the name Rinehart?"

  "No," said Cohen, still aghast. "That's the only one that doesn't check through."

  "Maybe he wasn't in the Navy," suggested Slater offhandedly.

  Hammond's eyes widened. "Of course!" he shouted. "Even if it was a Navy operation, they could have had a civilian running it!"

  "Great!" exulted Slater. "Now if you can just figure out which of the ten zillion projects he might have been connected with in 1953, you're in clover."

  "Have you guys looked into that at all?"

  "Can't get anywhere without a name. ONR has all the records on classified as well as non-classified projects, but without the code name, you're up shit creek."

  "Couldn't we just give them an idea what it was about?"

  "Then you have to depend on memory," said Cohen, "and there's no one at ONR who goes back that far."

  Hammond asked Slater to run some more of the tape.

  "Who was Rinehart?"

  "He...ran the project..."

  "What project, Yablonski?"

  A flurry of thumping sounds, then a louder one, a body smashing against a wall.

  "THIN AIR! MARTIN JUST VANISHED! STEPPED OFF THE DECK AND WENT ZERO—!"

  Abrupt silence, then the sound of a sack of potatoes hitting the floor. Long silence...

  Hammond depressed the pause button again. Slater leaned back and let him take over the machine. Hammond replayed the section twice.

  "Who was Rinehart?"

  "He...ran the project..."

  "What project, Yablonski?"

  "THIN AIR! MARTIN JUST VANISHED—!"

  Hammond looked up with an inscrutable smile. "That's it," he said.

  "That's what?"

  "Don't you get it?"

  "Get what? He never answered the question," said Cohen.

  "The hell he didn't."

  "He changed the subject and told us how this guy Martin vanished into thin air—"

  Hammond played the tape again, and stopped at the words "THIN AIR!" He looked at Cohen and Slater triumphantly and said, "That's the name of the project!"

  He didn't give them time to recover. "Who do I see at ONR?" he asked.

  "Commander Canazaro," replied Cohen.

  Hammond barely acknowledged him with a nod—he was already marching toward the exit. "Call him. Tell him I'm on my way and I want him to be there!"

  Slater sighed and ripped off the end of the graph paper, grabbed a hunk of it, and announced he was going to the can.

  11

  Commander Hector Canazaro, head of the archive section at the Office of Naval Research, turned out to be a short, dark Latin with a pencil-thin mustache. He waved Hammond to a seat facing his desk and smiled primly.

  "Here's everything we have on Project Thin Air, Commander," he said, and presented Hammond with a bound file folder, stamped prominently with the words TOP SECRET.

  "Have you had a chance to go through it?"

  Canazaro nodded. "Briefly."

  Hammond unwound the binding. "Was the start date 1953?"

  "No, 1942."

  Hammond looked up in surprise.

  "The cover brief will give you the historical sequence of the project. Everything's listed in chronological order."

  Hammond slipped out the cover brief and examined it. It was an index of names, dates, and places. Most of them meant nothing to him, but at the very top of the list was a name he was delighted to see: Rinehart!

  He pulled a notepad from his pocket and laid it on the desk. "I'm going to make notes," he said, "but I'll want a Xerox of everything."

  "No problem." Canazaro took the papers out of the file and bunched them so their edges were straight.

  Hammond went back to the top of the brief and said, "First entry—12 March 1942. Security clearances for a Dr. Emil Kurtnauer and a Mr. Whitney Rinehart Who are they?"

  Canazaro scanned the first two memos. "Kurtnauer was a physicist—University of Chicago. Austrian citizen. Hired as chief scientist for the team. There's a note here—see letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein—"

  Hammond's eyes widened in surprise. "Let me see," he said, and took the clearances. After examining them and verifying the name he asked, "Have you got that letter?"

  Canazaro fumbled with the papers, then shook his head. "No."

  "Okay," Hammond said, and made a note. "Now what about Rinehart?"

  Canazaro read aloud: "Hired away from Sperry Corporation and assigned as administrative chief of Thin Air."

  "Anything else on that date?"

  "Yes. Orders cut for a Captain Charles A. Sartog to become Navy liaison."

  Hammond wrote down Sartog's name, then looked at the next entry. "4 May 1943?"

  "Authorization for Sartog to requisition DE-166, USS Sturman. Lieutenant Commander Leslie Warrington appointed C.O."

  Hammond reached for the two pieces of paper. Mimeographed orders, brittle with age—more connecting links. The skeleton was starting to grow flesh right before his eyes.

  "27 October 1943 What's that about?"

  ''Seems to be a report on Warrington. He had a nervous breakdown and was relieved of command."

  Hammond took the paper and scanned it. It was nearly as brief and cryptic as the covering entry, which simply gave the date and title of the document. There was no explanation for the C.O.'s breakdown.

  "4 September 1944," said Hammond.

  "Back up. You skipped something."

  Hammond checked the cover brief. "That's the next entry."

  Canazaro shook his head. "There's a set of orders here for a Captain Richard Steinaker to succeed Sartog as Navy liaison."

  "Effective when?"

  "10 April 1944."

  Hammond tapped the cover brief and frowned. "What happened to Sartog?" he asked.

  "Not covered in here."

  Hammond felt the first twinges of annoyance. "Is there any other mention of him?"

  Canazaro riffed through the diminishing pile of papers and finally said, "Nothing at all."

  "Don't you find that a little strange? They bring in a new man; there should be some indication of what happened to the old one."

  "Well, there isn't."

  "Seems like we have a few gaps in the chronology. What about September of '44?"

  Canazaro scanned the next sheet of paper. "Pursuant to the directive of Presidential Order number..." He read on silently, then handed the paper to Hammond. "You'd better read this one yourself."

  Hammond took it, conscious of Canazaro's agitation. Beneath the official jargon, the letter was ordering a drastic cutback on funding for Thin Air. It mentioned in clear language the importance of another top-secret effort called "The Manhattan Project" and how that was to take precedence over anything else.

  Hammond looked up slowly and met Canazaro's grim stare. "In other words," Hammond said hoarsely, "Thin Air was in the same class as the building of the atomic bomb." He paused, incredulous. Today everybody knew what the Manhattan Project was. But who ever heard of Thin Air?

  "How many inquiries have you processed on this?" he asked.

  "I think yours is the first." Canazaro's brow furrowed. Two fingers curled one side of his mustache. "But there were hundreds of these wartime projects. If they were successful, fine. If not, no one over heard about them. I would guess Thin Air must have been one of the flops." />
  Hammond was not convinced. "I show four more entries," he said, resuming the work, "the last one in 1955."

  Canazaro reacHErom the remaining papers, summing up each of them in a sentence: "3 March 1945, Dr. Kurtnauer resigns and Dr. Edmond Traben is put in charge of the scientific team. 1 April 1948, a group of six Navy pilots are assigned to the project. No names given. 24 July 1949, Captain Steinaker dies in an air accident."

  Hammond glanced over each document to be sure Canazaro was right. It was frustrating. Everything was so skimpy.

  "Last entry?" said Canazaro.

  "29 August 1955."

  "Right. Dr. Traben recommends that the Navy drop Thin Air. The Navy agrees to do so."

  Hammond read the documents. The way they were phrased made one thing clear to him: a high security project that had been in development for thirteen years had abruptly been consigned to the graveyard of scientific abortions.

  Then why was it still haunting Yablonski?

  Canazaro scooped up the papers as Hammond closed his notepad and said, "There are holes in this file you could float a carrier through. In fact, if I were looking at this cold, I couldn't begin to tell you what Thin Air was all about. Yet I find it right up there in importance with the Manhattan Project. How do you explain that?"

  Canazaro shrugged and reached for the cover brief. "I can't."

  Hammond sprang to his feet and paced the small office. "And what the hell happened to those six years between 1949 and 1955? According to the official record, nothing! But I'm almost positive experiments were conducted in 1953 at the Philadelphia Navy Yard onboard the USS Sturman! The same ship Sartog requisitioned ten years earlier, yet there's not a single mention of it! Why is that, Commander?!"

  Canazaro fumbled to retie the string around the file.

  "It's as if everything pertinent has been systematically left out," said Hammond. "Or removed."

  "Look, Hammond," Canazaro said quietly, "I've seen this happen before. Some Navy projects are still so sensitive that the files have been doctored just for guys like you. You come in, examine this, and after a minute you don't know what you're looking at or for."