The Stickmen

by Edward Lee

  “Harlan!”

  “But like I was saying, honey, I really need you to—”

  “There’s no way in hell I’m coming to your—”

  Garrett sighed over the line. “Promise you’ll come or I’ll keep calling back. You and I both know you’re not authorized to turn off your field phone.”

  Homicidal images sun in her head. “I could have you arrested for this!”

  “Promise, or I’ll ring that phone every five minutes… Pretty please?”

  Lynn grit her teeth, sputtering to herself. Myers looked at her with a raised brow, and now the Vice-President was peering at her as if to say Is there a problem?

  “All right!”

  Lynn quickly put the phone back in her purse. “I kill that kill that son of a bitch,” she breathed to Myers.

  “I’ll help you.”

  She propped up a phony smile, primped her hair, then hurriedly followed Myers into the Vice-President’s office.

  ««—»»

  What glowed on Garrett’s computer screen would be gobbledegook to most but was all in a day’s illegal work to Garrett. The prompt on the brightly lit screen read:

  Below that: FILE COMMAND ACCESS REQUEST:

  U.S.AA.S.A.C.I.C.1947-1979 AND U.S.A.D.I.S.1980-PRESENT

  de…milnet.spec.dod.gov.

  And below that:

  m__ALLOCATE: ACCESS REQUEST DENIED. CAUTION: YOU HAVE MADE AN ILLEGAL SEARCH REQUEST. INTENT TO INFILTRATE CLASSIFIED FILES IS PUNISHABLE BY A $250,000 FINE AND A MAXIMUM OF 50 YEARS IMPRISONMENT VIA THE UNITED STATES CODE, SECTION 25, PARA. 17-36.

  Next, a bright yellow a cursor blinked: “Enter Prefix Password:”

  Garrett recited aloud the words that Swenson had spoken, “‘Don’t let something as trivial as a password…hamper you, Harlan.’” Six clicks on the keyboard did it. When Garret typed the word “hamper” a second menu flashed, that read:

  “Enter Ancillary Password:”

  Sweat beading his forehead, he recited further: “’They say that if you fly too close to the sun, the heat will melt the wax that holds the feathers in your wings.’”

  Six more clicks on the keyboards, as Garrett typed ICARUS which appeared as “******”

  The screen went blank for a moment, the computer’s guts suddenly percolating. If this whole thing is a set-up, Garrett thought, then I’ll find out soon. He could see it all now: an insular counter-command virus had just been filtered back into his computer. The computer would shut down, all files destroyed, in a minute, and a few minutes after that, the door would be kicked down by a Bureau rapid-response team.

  The word “working” continued to flash on the screen. Garrett stared uneasily, then actually covered his face with his hands and watched between his fingers. If Swenson was lying…

  The computer beeped, then a bright blue-and-white screen opened up. It read:

  TOP SECRET/SPECIAL INTELLIGENCE

  File allocation command for following security designations:

  TS

  SI

  SAR

  TEKNA

  BYMAN

  ULTIMA

  DINAR

  U.S. ARMY SECURITY AGENCY

  GOODFELLOW AFB/FT. GOODFELLOW, SAN ANGELO, TEXAS

  ENTER REQUESTED DOCUMENT INDEX AT PROMPT: __

  Garrett’s hands fell away from his face in sheer bewilderment. “Un-fucking-believable,” he uttered. “Holy ever-loving Jesus Christ in a hot-dog stand. Swenson’s for real. This is the real friggin’ thing!”

  His heart pounded, and it felt like jubilation rather than blood which now ran through his veins. “Let’s see… Where to start? Uh—uh…”

  Just as he commenced to typing in a what was known as a ‘roving-loop” search index…someone began knocking on the door.

  Garrett’s nerves locked up at the terminal. Then, relieved, he thought, No, no. A rapid-response team wouldn’t knock.

  “Thank God,” he said when he answered the door to find a very-irritated Lynn standing there.

  “I ought to kill you, Harlan,” she greeted, her face dead-pan. “I ought to shoot your rag-tag ass right here and now.”

  “You can do that later,” Garrett said, yanking her inside, then paranoically closing and locking all of the apartment door’s seven deadbolt locks. “Calm down. When I told you this was important, I wasn’t joking around. You won’t believe what I’ve got going here.”

  “No, Harlan, I probably won’t—unless it’s something illegal, in which case I probably will.”

  “Well, it’s illegal, but never mind that.” Nearly giddy, he rushed her into his work room, but then a wisp of her perfume sidetracked him. “Wow, you smell good.”

  “And you smell like cigarettes. As usual.”

  More sidetracking then, when he finally paused to look at her. This was the first time he’d seen her in months. The sweeping blond hair and curvaceous figure, the long, long legs. She seemed toned, vibrant in good health and beauty.

  “Wow, you look good too. You been working out?”

  “Yeah, Harlan, I’ve been working out, and right now I could probably kick your skinny ass with one hand tied behind my back, and you know what? That sounds like a damn good idea.”

  For a moment, Garrett’s focus snapped, and he forgot about the dynamite keg of information he was sitting on. He was looking at Lynn and could scarcely believe he’d once been married to her, could scarcely believe that this beautiful woman had once lived with him and loved.

  Boy, did I screw up…

  Her rage flared back at him. “Harlan, I didn’t come all the way over to this hellhole of an apartment just to be eyeballed by you. You said you had something important to show me, and now I’m here. This better be good, Harlan. This better not be more of your usual cockamamie conspiracy crackpot UFO bullshit.”

  “Uh…”

  “No, Harlan. Please. Not the UFO stuff again.”

  “Well, uh…” Garrett shrugged. “You tell me.” He pointed to the beat-up black suitcase lying on his unmade bed. “Check out my new luggage. It ain’t Samsonite, I can tell you that.”

  He sat back down behind his computers as Lynn peered at the case. “Harlan, if there’s a chalice in that suitcase that you claim is the Holy Grail, I really will kill you.”

  “It’s not the Holy Grail, and it’s not a piece of the Stinger A3 missile that shot down the Commerce Secretary’s flight to Bosnia. It’s something better.”

  Garrett got back to his inputting while Lynn, smirking, sat down on the bed and opened the scuffed suitcase. First, a sharp, vaguely unpleasant scent drifted up which she guess must be rotten leather. From within the case she removed a large cardboard box with no lettering, and then a fat folder of papers. Documents, photographs, she thought when she flipped open the folder.

  She flipped through a short stack of 8x10 glossy photographs. He’s at it again, he’s let somebody make a fool out of him…again. The photographs, in grainy color, seemed to depict a “crash-site” at various distances and angles. The final few showed a black cylindrical object—flat at one end and jaggedly broken at the other—in a bank of desert sand. An Air Force enlisted man stood next to it, presumably for scale. Late-50’s, early-60’s, she guessed, judging the style of the airman’s field fatigues. On the object’s side was a trapezoidal inlay that appeared to be a window.

  Lynn actually paused, as if considering the potential credibility of the photographs, but then she dismissively shook her head. And she shook her head again when she leafed through a number of Air Force and D-O-D documents that followed the photos.

  “Harlan, this is easily explained,” she finally responded. “The photographs are mockups, and these documents are forgeries. Sure, they all look good, but the truth is, these days, any practiced computer nerd with a good desktop publishing program and a good color ODE printer could make these documents.”

  Garrett popped a brow at her from his work desk. “You think so. Come on, Lynn. Look closely. Look at the paper. The ciphe
rs are on that old tractor-feed stuff. And the documents? The paper’s an old, out-of-service semi-fabric bond. They don’t even make stuff like that anymore; they haven’t for decades. And look at the watermark. That’s genuine Air Force Security Service paper.”

  Lynn held one of the documents up to the light. The watermark lurked in the paper like a crisp ghost.

  “You can’t forge that watermark, Lynn. The mark pattern alone is classified TS/SI with a FARGO-plus suffix. Come on, Lynn.”

  Lynn put the document down. “Maybe,” she conceded.

  “And the photographs? I’m an expert on phony photographs. Believe me, I’ve seen ’em all—but I don’t think these are mockups.”

  Lynn gave the photos second, closer glance, then the documents. Her lips pursed. She glanced over at Garrett.

  “I think you better tell me what’s going on,” she said.

  ««—»»

  She wants me to tell her? Garrett thought. I’ll tell her, all right…

  He indicated particular documents and particular photographs as he explained.

  First a rare photo of the inclusionary-perimeter sign which read “Nellis Military Reservation: Unauthorized Personnel and Trespassers Will Be Detained Or Killed.” Then some variable-range radar charts, and another charts that read: “NASA Telemetric Survey, 198N-2012W/18-4-62/1345ZULU.”

  Next, a black-and-white photo of a large flatbed truck driving out into the desert, followed by jeeps and vans.

  “You want the scoop?” Garrett asked her as Lynn scrutinized each photo and document in turn. “Here’s the scoop.”

  He passed her another doc, which read:

  TOP SECRET

  SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED/EYES ONLY

  TEKNA/BYMAN/UMBRA/SI

  DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE

  WASHINGTON DC 20330-100

  OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY20 April 1962

  SAF/AAIQ

  1610 Air Force Pentagon

  TO: THE COMMANDER AND CHIEF

  SUBJECT: CLASSIFIED REQUEST PER MEMORANDUM (GAO Code 701034); AFR 12-50 (CLASSIFIED) Volume II, Disposition of Air Force Records and Material

  (a) Identify pertinent directive concerning crashes of air vehicles not of terrestrial origin, investigations, wreckage/debris/dead bodies - retention, recovery, and evaluation.

  Dear Mr. President:

  Per your request relative to the above memorandum, i.e., the incident concerning the Low Frequency Radar Array (LFRA) detection on 18 April 1962 and disposition thereof. The most notable debris and, of particular sensitivity, all anatomical and post-autopsied remains, have been properly redepositioned amongst selected sites within protected districts of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Federal Reservations, via recent amendments to AFR-200-1, and so ordered by the MJ-12 Directorate.

  Attachment (TO): -U.S. Air Force Joint Recovery Command

  -NSA (Classified Control Office)

  Signed,

  Norton T. Swenson, Brigadier General O-6

  Commander, Air Force Aerial Intelligence Group

  Fort Belvior, Virginia, MJ-12/Detachment 4

  “Jesus,” Lynn muttered. “This looks awfully—”

  “Yeah, I know, and it is… Real.” Garrett looked at her, then began:

  “April 18th, 1962. Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. For two days NORAD, the VLA Radar Laboratory, and multiple other radar posts tracked an object moving in erratic straight lines across North America. Every AFB in the country was put on Defcon Three alert. From Oneida, New York, to Eureka, Utah, over a hundred witnesses reported very similar observations. An elongated, low-flying object with a bright light glowing at its base. Sometimes the object hovered, and other times it moved very swiftly. Then, according to witnesses, it disappeared over Ohio. Minutes later, it stopped again in Eureka, Utah. NORAD calculated the object’s forward velocity at 18,000 miles per hour.”

  He showed her several of the grainy photos of an elongated, glowing object in the sky. Then he showed her the aeronautical charts showing zigzag lines over a map of the United States. A closer map, labeled Eureka, Utah, had an X on it. After that, he unreeled the two-foot-long ribbon of paper, like a ticker tape—a print cipher from the early ’60s.

  …BEGIN CIPHER…18/04/62…13:45[Z]…OP STAT ALERT STATE WHITE…VIA MAJESTIC TWELVE PROTOCOL GUIDELINES & USAF REG 200-0-A OF 25/05/54…DECRYPT AND WAIT… … … …WAITING… … … … WAITING… … … …DECRYPTION SUCCESSFUL…READ, DESTROY & REPORT FOLLOWING MESSAGE…MESSAGE BODY… … … “TARGET PERIMETER POSITIVE”…”CRASH VERIFICATION- - - - PARA-ORBITAL AIRCRAFT NOT OF TERRESTRIAL DESIGN”… … …FURTHER STATUS FORTHCOMING… … … END CIPHER… STOP

  “This ‘aircraft not of terrestrial design,’” Garrett continued with no hesitance, “landed very briefly in Eureka. Witnesses reported a loud humming and banging sound. When it took off again, it seemed to falter in mid-air, sort of sputtering ahead.”

  Lynn brought a finger to her chin. “Almost as if—”

  “As if it were experiencing some sort of propulsion malfunction,” Garrett finished for her. “Project Moondust recovery operatives were dispatched to the alleged landing site and discovered an eight-inch-deep indentation along the surface of a soybean field. The indentation measured 197 feet.”

  Now Lynn was examining a drawing of an elongated cylinder in the sky, and the typed words ARTIST’S RENDITION OF OBJECT AS RELATED BY WITNESS #6. A stack of eerily similar sketches followed, all the way up to Witness #154.

  Another grainy B&W photo of the desert came next, a large area of space littered by debris. Lynn shuddered.

  “The object falteringly left the Eureka area,” Garrett went on, “and, according to the charts from the VLA Radar Laboratory, exploded over the Nellis Reservation. A starburst radar configuration was recorded on the VLA scopes.”

  “This,” Lynn assumed, finding several 9x12 negative sheets of radar marks. Another cryptogram read:

  The vehicle exploded violently over the Nellis perimeter, then crashed. A second explosion blew the vehicle into thousands of pieces. All of the vehicular debris was recovered. So were the remains of what we presume to be four of the vehicle’s crew.

  “The vehicle’s…crew,” Lynn whispered and shuddered again.

  “Yeah,” Garrett said. “Check out the next photo.”

  She was looking at a photograph of a long thin shape: two arms, two legs, a spinal column but no ribcage, and a head about a foot long but only three-inches thick. It appeared blackened with char.

  “Just the bone structure?” she queried. “This looks like some kind of bizarre skeleton.”

  “Yep. Four bodies were recovered by cleared SPs with Nellis’ 1109th Bomb Group. Skeletons. They’d all been thoroughly burned by the explosion, no flesh remaining on any of them. Three of the skeletons were intact. The fourth was found in pieces. Now look at the initial examination pix.”

  A series of more photos showed the elongated skeletons lying on morgue platforms. The fourth platform lay scattered with blackened jags and pieces.

  Garret explained, “On the morning of April 20th, 1962, a B-36 Convair flew the charred skeletons and the debris from Nellis to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. Government officials, including the President, viewed the skeletons and the debris. After that, it’s not clear what happened. One Air Force security policeman claimed that the debris was then flown to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. As for the remains of the alien crew, there’s no record of where they were relocated to. One AFSS pilot claims that the skeletons were later flown to Edwards Air Force Base in California. Another AFSS pilot claims they were flown to Carswell Air Force Base in Texas in May of the same year. But both of these “witnesses,” according to MJ-12 documentation, were actually ordered to report conflicting testimony. In other words, these men were actually disinformation officers.”

  As she listened, Lynn kept string at the photographs of the skeletons. Garret creaked back in his garage-sale work chair, lighting a cigarette. “The Nellis Case i
s the most atypical incident reported. In the past, regarding, for instance, the Roswell Case, the Kingman Case, the Del Rio Case, and dozens of others, witnesses have reported extraordinarily similar observations with regard to crashed vehicles and recovered bodies.”

  “What do you mean?” Lynn asked, shivering as she set the photos down.

  “You know. The vehicles have always been reported to be ‘heel- or crescent-shaped,’ or the old cliché of ‘saucer’ shapes, ‘flying disks,’ and all that. They’re also typically described as being about the same diameter: twenty-five to forty feet. And even before Roswell, the bodies have always been reported with the same extraordinary similarities: delicate, humanoid figures, four to four-and-half feet tall, with large, pyriformed heads, tiny mouths and improminent noses.”

  “The traditional description of science-fiction…”

  “Yes,” Garrett enthused, wreathed in smoke. “But the Nellis vehicle, and those bodies…completely different.” He got up and showed her several more artistic renditions based on witness accounts. “And the vehicle too. Does that look like a flying saucer to you?”

  Lynn’s eyes perused the sketches: the long black cylinder in the sky with some sort of engine vent at the end and a glowing line running underneath the fuselage. Windows like dark trapezoids forward and aft.

  “A ten-foot-wide cylinder, nearly two hundred feet long,” Garrett emphasized. “No other sighting or crash has ever reported a vehicle of this configuration. Running from front to back, on its dorsal side, there was some kind of illumination element. Every town this thing flew over that night was lit up like broad daylight. The burned skeletons indicate bodies—just as atypical. Seven-feet tall, not four, and a hip/shoulder width about eight-inches.” Garrett felt entranced for a moment, trying to picture them. “Can you imagine? Can you imagine what these things looked like when they were alive?”