Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11

by Majic Man (v5. 0)

  “The blips were just dancin’ from one end of the screen to the other,” Kaufmann said. “Now, we’d had similar blips back at Roswell, but intermittent—the thing showing up only when it was above the Capitan Mountains. We kept up watch for almost two days. Then late on the night of July Fourth, God decided to serve up His own fireworks show, by way of one incredible lightning storm.”

  At around eleven-twenty p.m., with the storm at its height, the object on the radar screen stopped flitting, began pulsating, growing larger; finally the object blossomed in “a white flash,” then shrank to its original size, dove down and winked out. The assumption was the craft—if that’s what it was—had been struck by lightning and possibly exploded, or crash-landed.

  “Two other sites—Roswell and Kirtland—were tracking the thing, so the Army techs were able to roughly triangulate the location of what we took to be a crash.”

  The consensus was that the object had fallen somewhere northwest of Roswell. By a little after two in the morning, Kaufmann had returned to the base, reporting in to Colonel Blanchard, who assembled a small military convoy—the base was undermanned, due to the long holiday weekend—of three jeeps, four trucks, one of them a flatbed, one a crane.

  “We took along some of those radiation suits,” Kaufmann said, “but we knew it couldn’t be what we call a ‘broken arrow’—a downed plane with an atom bomb aboard—’cause we had all the planes and the bombs! So radioactivity wasn’t really a major concern.”

  The convoy had headed out 285, which was exactly what Kaufmann and I in his jeep were doing; his story and our location converged, as—near Mile Marker 132—he turned west off the highway onto “an old ranch road,” a hard-dirt path, the jeep kicking up a small dust storm.

  “Hardest part was,” Kaufmann said, “not gettin’ stuck—ground was pretty soft, after the rain … but these jeeps can drive outa anything.”

  Soon Kaufmann turned again, near an abandoned ranch house, onto no road at all this time, and suddenly we were cutting across country. At this point, he halted his story to navigate, saying, “Explain the rest when we get there—be easier that way.” The jeep jostled along and at one point Kaufmann stopped, climbed out, snipped a barbed-wire fence with cutters, piled back in, and off we went again, driving over the downed fence, bouncing over some fairly rough terrain, making no attempt to avoid rocks, heavy tangled brush or cactus, crushing or burying everything in our wake.

  I held on to the side of the jeep, my teeth rattling as I said, “Are you telling me you drove this at night? Braving gullies and barbed-wire fences? How did you know where to go?”

  “We followed the glow,” he said. “It was a halo of light, beamin’ out against the sky. Closer we got, the more the glow seemed to ebb, and fade….”

  The jeep was making its way down a gentle slope that gradually became a ravine; then up ahead, perhaps one hundred yards, a forty-foot cliff rose from an arroyo, scrubby green below, thinning to clumps above in a rocky slope that became brown stony ridges.

  My guide stopped his jeep and got out.

  “Let’s walk on down there,” Kaufmann said, with a motioning wave, “and I’ll show you exactly where the craft was wedged…. Look out for snakes.”

  I was halfway out of the vehicle. “What do you mean, look out for snakes?”

  “Rattlesnakes tend to get riled when you step on ’em, is all I’m sayin’.”

  “I think the jeep could make it down this slope,” I offered.

  “Just walk careful.” Kaufmann was laughing, gently. City folks.

  I walked careful. “Had the glow died down by the time you got here?”

  “Yes, it pretty much had, but we could see the metal glistening, and we knew then and there it wasn’t a plane or a V-2 rocket…. When we got here, we actually came out up there, at the edge of the ravine—damn near went over and crashed into the damn crash! But we circled around to where we are now…. This is it.”

  Kaufmann was pointing to a gouge in the sandy ground.

  “This is where the craft was embedded—kinda slammed into the sand, got its nose crumpled in the side of the cliff, here. Right off, Colonel Blanchard sent a man in, in a protective suit, to check the craft and the area for signs of radiation. We waited around for the all clear, maybe fifteen minutes, smoking cigarettes and asking each other questions none of us could answer.”

  “What did this craft look like, Frank?”

  “Oh, six feet high maybe, twenty, twenty-five feet long, probably fifteen feet wide. It sure as hell wasn’t no damn saucer.”

  “You said it was.”

  Kaufmann made a face, waved a dismissive hand. “That was just to get your attention—it’s the common usage…. This thing was shaped more like a wedge, somewhere between a V and a delta. It had this wraparound window at the front, and the whole thing was split in half, along its side, horizontally, maybe where it got blown open … maybe that was where that scattered junk Brazel found come from. Of course, I always thought there was a possibility the Air Force mighta loaded up some of the wreckage here, and carted it over to the Foster ranch, to scatter it around and confuse things, draw the attention away, onto a bogus site.”

  I wiped the back of my hand across my sweaty forehead under the brim of my straw fedora. “Wouldn’t you have known about that?”

  “Hell no. I wasn’t in charge! Blanchard was. Now, I could see inside the craft—there was control panels and some hieroglyphic-type writing. As for how the thing flew, I didn’t see any propulsion system, just a series of cells on the underbelly, quartz-type cells, octagon-shaped, like a beehive. I didn’t get that good a look—it was still before dawn, we musta got out here about three a.m.—and we had searchlights from jeeps shinin’ down from on top of the cliff. The colonel wanted us to get that craft onto the flatbed and back to the base before dawn, muy pronto; daylight, somebody else could stumble onto this mess. Then, of course, we had casualties to deal with.”

  I was cleaning my sunglasses on my shirt. “The craft’s crew, you mean? The ‘little bodies’?”

  Kaufmann nodded, shook his head, his eyes distant. “There were five of these beings…. You know, you see somethin’ out of this world, it shakes you up; we were just kind of stunned, kinda stupefied, not saying a word, just staring. Then finally we snapped out of it.” He pointed. “One body was tossed up against the wall of the arroyo, flung there; another was half in, half out of the craft. I saw one sitting inside, slumped over in his seat, dead as hell. They found another one inside there, later, the men that loaded the bodies in those lead-lined body bags.”

  “That’s four—you said there were five.”

  “Sorry, I’m … I mean, I haven’t been out here since that night. It’s all kinda … rushin’ back. I didn’t mention the one that was still breathing?”

  “There was a survivor?”

  “Yup. Wasn’t in bad shape, neither. He was just sittin’ on a rock … right over there, that boulder by the cliff, there. At first he was kinda cowering, then—when he saw we were trying to help, he got the god-damnedest look on his mug … almost serene. Like he didn’t have a care in the world.”

  “This world, anyway. What did they look like, Frank?”

  The wild eyebrows lifted. “Not like you see in the funnies or the movies. No horns or spiny fingers, and they sure weren’t green.”

  So Mac Brazel had said.

  “… They were slim, pale, smooth-looking individuals, hairless, fine skin, silver-type uniforms. Five four, five six … fine features, small nose, heads kinda too big for their bodies.”

  “Big eyes?”

  “Bigger than yours or mine—kinda slanty, Oriental type….” Kaufmann, hands on his hips, was slowly scanning the landscape; his expression was somewhere between sickened and haunted. “Tell ya what, Nate my friend, I think I had enough of this place. Let’s head out. I’ll tell you the rest of it on the way back.”

  That was a good suggestion; the afternoon was fading, shadows starting to le
ngthen, and on the highway I got treated to one of New Mexico’s glorious yellow-red-orange-blue sunsets.

  Kaufmann told me that there was concern about the condition of the bodies—one was showing signs of deterioration—and Blanchard’s first stop had been the base hospital. A second team had already been dispatched to further clean up and cordon off the crash site. At the base, each of the eight men who—with Blanchard—had been involved close-up with the operation were ushered into the briefing room, one at a time; Kaufmann assumed his instructions from the colonel—that the “retrieval” was “classified at the highest levels”—mirrored that of the others.

  Though his participation had come to an end, Kaufmann understood that Hangar 84 at the airfield became the base of operations, housing both the corpses—and the survivor—and the captured crashed craft. Then the craft went on the back of a truck under a tarp to Wright Airfield in Ohio; the bodies—and presumably the survivor—on a flight, first to Andrews Air Force Base at Washington, D.C., then to Wright.

  “Why the stop in D.C.?” I asked. Roswell was up ahead.

  “Rumor has it, top-ranking Army and Air Force personnel requested a look at the bodies. Also, Truman and Army Chief of Staff Eisenhower … oh, and the Defense Secretary.”

  “Forrestal?”

  “Yeah. Isn’t he the guy that had the nervous breakdown? I read about that in Drew Pearson.”

  “Mental problems can afflict the best of us, Frank.”

  Kaufmann grinned at me. “Is that your way of sayin’ maybe I’m nuts? Maybe I am.”

  “Maybe you’re still working intelligence and are feeding me … what’s the word? Disinformation?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You wouldn’t. But maybe Blanchard would. To throw me off the scent.”

  “The scent of what?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? You got any proof, Frank? Any pieces of indestructible tinfoil? Photo of a dead spaceman, maybe? One of their silver suits?”

  As I’d requested, he was rolling up to a stop at the parking lot where I was keeping my car. “We weren’t allowed to keep anything, Nate. Not any piece of information or evidence, not a thing. Any report we made got quickly turned over to an intelligence officer.”

  “Who, Jesse Marcel?”

  “No—those CIC guys.”

  Counterintelligence Corps.

  “Like that guy Cavitt, you mean, who went out to the Brazel spread with Marcel? What became of him?”

  Kaufmann shrugged, leaning on the wheel of the idling jeep. “Transferred. I don’t know where.”

  “So where does that leave us, Frank?”

  “Leaves you here in this parking lot. I leveled with you, Nate—and you’re free to use any of that yarn, as long as you don’t use my name. If you do, I’ll deny it on a stack of Bibles.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “It’s like Mr. Ripley says—believe it or not.”

  I stepped out of the jeep, gave him a little wave, and he gave me a big old grin and big old wave and rumbled off.

  I was about to get in the rental, to go driving in search of an interesting restaurant, when I said to hell with it, locked my spiral pad in the glove box and walked back to the hotel.

  Bone-tired, I stumbled into the hotel, found my way to the dining room, where I consumed a rare steak and all the trimmings and a couple bottles of Blatz, which seemed to be the local favorite—I wondered if the little men in silver suits liked it better out of the bottle or from the tap. My room was on the third floor, a small clean cubicle that could have been in any hotel, except for the framed print of a desert landscape over the single bed. Caked with dust, frazzled by bizarre information, I showered, standing in the tub, letting the needles try to pound sense into me.

  No smarter, but cleaner anyway, I toweled off, and strode naked from the bathroom, wondering whether I should take in the show at the Chief Theater down the street, or just collapse into bed, where I figured it would take me maybe three seconds to lose consciousness, in which case I might not wake up to take advantage of the back-door date at ten p.m. I had at Maria Selff’s place, when she got off work at the base hospital.

  Instead, a powerful arm slipped around from behind me, an uninvited guest tucked against the wall outside the bathroom door, a gloved hand settling a chloroformed cloth over my face, changing my plans for the evening.

  At least I was right about how long losing consciousness would take.

  15

  The dreams were vivid and they were strange and they were compelling but they were also comforting and I not only remembered them upon awaking, I can remember them today, so many years later, as if they were a movie I watched yesterday.

  The usual for me, as I suspect is the case for most people, is that I lose my dreams upon awakening, sometimes instantly, sometimes grasping slippery fragments that slide away even as I try to hold on to them, with only the mood of them, their ambience, hanging on, particularly the unpleasant dreams, lingering like a bad taste in the brain, though nice dreams could, on rare occasions, wake you with a smile.

  In this dream, I saw someone or something hovering over me, haloed in light, fuzzy and yet distinct, appearing from utter darkness, a small pale person with a big head and big eyes and a silver suit, his features childlike, his mouth tiny but smiling, his speech precise and strangely accented, his words soothing, though later the words were the one thing I could not recall, only that the man—I thought of him as a man, not a monster (or, for that matter, a woman)—was a kind presence, a friendly presence, an unthreatening presence, a real presence, not an imagined one, not some mortician’s dream, not my nurse’s nightmare, not a disgruntled soon-to-be-ex-employee’s wild yarn, and yet at the same time it was all of those, and when that strange thumbless hand with the suction-cup fingertips touched my brow, it was as if a cool cloth had caressed my skin….

  When I awoke with a smile, in a bed, in cool sheets, in a cool, dark room, my first thoughts were of this dream, of the strange kind creature and its comforting presence, and I lay staring at the ceiling, fully awake and yet not really aware, luxuriating in the dream’s afterglow, like the moments after sex, or a junkie coming slowly down.

  And when the thought, the memory, finally broke through—they fucking kidnapped me!—I bolted upright, sheets falling to my waist—I was naked but for boxer shorts—the dream still with me but shoved back now, the smile reversing itself, and I sat there for long moments, eyes searching the darkness.

  Head clear, body sluggish, my mouth thick with sleep and a brackish medicinal aftertaste—from the chloroform?—I made my way to a window where a fan was whirring … not just a fan, but the boxy structure of an evaporation-type air cooler taking up the lower half of the bedroom’s only window. Above it were blinds, which I drew open, and the night sky revealed itself. Stars and a full moon, too, the latter joining with outdoor electric lighting to illuminate the landscape of what was obviously a part of Walker Air Force Base.

  My bare feet were on pile carpeting, and the moonlight revealed the shape of furnishings, a dresser, a few chairs, the bed, of course—and night-stand, with phone and lamp….

  I switched the lamp on; its blue parchment shade suffused the room with a gentle pastel glow. As for the phone, it was deader than Roosevelt. Despite that ominous note, I seemed to be in a nicely if modestly appointed bedroom, and the man in the mirror over the dresser seemed to be me, in shorts, looking confused but none the worse for wear. The walls were pale plaster, decorated here and there with framed prints of Southwestern vistas—not unlike the one in the hotel room I’d been snatched from.

  This bedroom was, in fact, like a hotel or motel room; if I was a captive, this was an oddly benign prison cell, with any number of objects presenting themselves as the makings of makeshift weapons—mirror-shard knives, chair-leg billy clubs, phone-receiver sap, torn-bedsheet garrotes …

  Was I in a deluxe jail cell? The window above the air-conditioner unit was fixed in place
, unopenable; but that might have been a function of the unit’s installation, not an attempt to keep me in. This left me with the room’s three doors to try….

  The first one led to an empty closet; the second to a bathroom, which had a ventilation fan in the ceiling but no window, and no sign of toiletries on the sink, the cabinet over which was empty. But I did suddenly realize I had to pee, so I took the time to do that, and ponder my situation.

  How long had I been here? Since I’d been grabbed virtually stepping out of the shower, I hadn’t been wearing a watch; and the one common household item not present in that bedroom was a clock. Rubbing my face with one hand, I felt what I guessed was a day’s growth of beard; this indicated I’d been here at least several hours, but—unless they’d taken the time to shave me—the night out that window was the same night I’d been snatched.

  How long had I been unconscious, and dreaming that pleasant, weird, possibly drug-induced dream? Did that space creature in the dream represent someone who’d been questioning me, perhaps under sodium pentothal or some other truth-inducing drug?

  I flushed the toilet, washed my hands—soap was provided, and a terry towel—and examined my arms and legs and between fingers and toes for needle marks; didn’t see anything. The angle was wrong to check my ass out in the mirror, but there was no soreness in either cheek, from an intrusive needle.

  Back out in the almost chilly bedroom—the desert air the window unit was churning up was already cool—I went to that final door, put my ear to it, heard nothing, and with a what-the-hell shrug tried the knob, expecting it to be locked.

  It wasn’t. I entered another darkened room, but light spilling in from the bedroom led me to a standing lamp that I switched on, imbuing a modest living-room-cum-kitchenette with a golden glow. Next to the lamp was an easy chair and, man of the house that I was, I sat down, my legs a little rubbery, the alertness of my mind still outdistancing my body, as if below the neck I hadn’t quite woken up all the way.

  My easy chair matched the frayed blue cotton cushions of the davenport; the furnishings were maple-finish Early American, very homey in a spare modern way, scuffed and nicked from use, maybe even secondhand. Over the davenport, which had the look of a daybed, was a bigger Southwestern landscape, this print depicting a sunset almost as beautiful as the one I’d witnessed from Kaufmann’s jeep. A coffee table, scarred with cigarette burns, was littered with a few dog-eared magazines—Field & Stream, Skyways, Popular Mechanics; also an ashtray with some spent cigarettes. Since I didn’t smoke, I’d obviously had some company.