by Daniel Wyatt
“Get out!”
“Look for yourself.”
Hollinger took the paper from his wife. He read the notice. “Geez, you’re right.”
“What would make him commit suicide?”
Hollinger slouched in his chair. He thought about that one. What indeed? McCreedy had just married that spring. He seemed happy at his new job with the intelligence organization as a financial assistant to the new National Director. “You know, he had once said to me that it was scary to know too much.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
Hollinger rubbed his brow. “He was murdered. The idiot!”
“By whom?”
He handed her back the paper. “Honey, put on some tea.”
“I already did. It should be ready.”
“Good. My throat’s dry. I have to tell you something.”
EPILOGUE
June 24, 1947 — Chehalis, Washington
Kenneth Arnold left the runway at Chehalis in his privately-owned Piper Cub, bound for Seattle where he was to attend a meeting as a representative for his employer, Fire Control Equipment Company of Boise, Idaho.
It was a gorgeous day. The sun was shining. The sky was clear. No haze. Very little turbulence. A great day to fly. That afternoon, only a few minutes into the air, the thirty-two-year-old businessman caught a magnificent view of the jutting, high peaks of the Cascade Range. No worries, the trip did not bother Arnold, despite the fact that a Marine Corp C-46 transport had crashed against the side of Mt. Rainier the night before. He continued climbing, levelling off at nine thousand feet. Flying to one side of scenic Mt. Rainier, he saw a quick flash to his left. At first, he thought it was an explosion. He was wrong. Nine silvery objects, resembling inverted plates, skimmed across the mountain tops at incredible speed, and formed up in a chain-like line. Then he wondered if they were the new American jet fighters that were coming into service. Stretching across the sky for what he guessed was five miles, they were gleaming in the sun, hovering, darting up and down. These were not normal aircraft.
Approaching within a few miles, he determined that the machines were solid objects, metallic and circular, about a hundred feet in diameter, with no rudder or tail section. The centre of each had a shiny cupola. As Arnold drew nearer, the nine objects flew north at fantastic speeds from a standing stop, disappearing in seconds. Arnold was spellbound. He decided to work out the mathematics. When the first aircraft shot past Mt. Rainier, his panel clock read exactly one minute to three. When the last object drew even with the crest of Mt. Adams, the elapsed time was one minute and 42 seconds. Arnold dug for his area map. The peaks were 47 miles apart. Sweat began to form on his face. According to his calculations, the speed had to be about 1,600 miles per hour!
How could that be!
When Arnold landed and told his story, reporters sought him out. “They flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water,” he told the press. Many were doubtful.
Kenneth Arnold had coined a new phrase. The words “flying saucer” had come into being.
That week, at least twenty other people in widely scattered areas of the United States reported seeing similar shiny, fast-moving objects in the skies.
AFTERWORD
Many characters in this novel are fictional, such as Wesley Hollinger, Roberta Langford-Hollinger, Raymond Lampert, Wilhelm Raeder, Manfred Stoeller, Tom McCreedy, Jack Dorwin, Otto Bauer, Benito Cocapo, Johanna Erickson, Art Tooney and Karl Zeller.
Argentina...
A military junta led by Colonel Juan Peron seized power in 1945, placing General Arturo Rawson as president, although it was Peron who really ran the country. Peron, who supported Hitler earlier in the war, made himself president in 1946, and quickly fashioned his new state police after Heinrich Himmler’s Gestapo. Argentina, along with other South American countries, became a safe haven for Nazi war criminals. A bloody revolt sent Peron into exile in September 1955.
Antarctica...
It is a historical fact that German submariners used the waters and the northern edge for supply and fuelling stations. The British took permanent occupation of the peninsula in 1943 to observe enemy action. For the next decade, the British conducted aerial surveys and drew maps of the area. By 1958, several countries around the world began their own expeditions to the frozen continent.
Bilderbergers...
This “one world” secret society of over one hundred members meet behind closed doors at a different spot in the world once a year to discuss how the world can become knitted closer together politically and economically.
The Bilderbergers are influential people who are in favour of UN military forces, Free Trade Agreements, and global thinking on such issues as peace, forestry, animal rights, and common currencies. Very few details, if any, of each meeting are leaked to the mainline press. Professor Carroll Quigley stated it best in his 1,300 page book, Tragedy and Hope, published in 1966. “Their aim is nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.”
Martin Bormann...
Did he get away? No one knows for sure. A so-called positive identification was made in 1998 of a body found in Berlin, if one can believe positive identifications anymore. His wife Magda died in March, 1946, all the time under close surveillance, while she waited for her husband to materialize. Bormann had never reached her, his final telegram from Berlin reading: “Everything is lost, I will never get out of here. Take care of the children.”
Huge rewards were offered by post-war German governments and Jewish organizations for any information leading to his capture. Although the West German government officially declared him dead in 1973, author Ladislas Farago wrote the book Aftermath, published in 1974, with his proof that Martin Bormann had actually survived the war and was living out his final years in South America.
Winston Churchill...
Despite his strong leadership of the British Empire through the war, the British voted him out of office in 1945, with the belief that he was great in war but would be lousy in peace time. Six years later, in 1951, the voters had a change of heart by returning him to office at age 76. He was knighted two years later, and died in 1965.
CIA...
The Central Intelligence Agency replaced the OSS two years after the war ended.
Bill Donovan...
The OSS disbanded, he bowed out of official intelligence work and returned to his New York law office. He died in 1959.
Allen Dulles...
Returned to his law practice in New York until 1950, when he joined the CIA as Deputy Director for Plans, and Deputy Director of the CIA a year later. From 1953 to 1961, he was appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower as the Director of Central Intelligence, holding the top post until the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs fiasco, for which he was blamed, and was subsequently fired by President John F. Kennedy. He later served on the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. It was this same committee that fostered the outlandish Magic Bullet Theory that today is considered a joke.
He died January 28, 1969, at the age of seventy-five.
Hermann Goering...
Goering was found guilty of war crimes at Nuremberg in 1946 for his knowledge of the concentration camps and his association to the secret police. But he beat the hangman by taking poison before he was put to death.
Heinrich Himmler...
While escaping to Switzerland in May 1945, he was rounded up with other suspects at an Allied checkpoint at Bremervorde, Germany. Taken to an interrogation centre nearby, he was identified by an American Army officer and immediately searched. However, Himmler swallowed a capsule of cyanide he had placed between his teeth, and although his captors tried to save his life by pumping his stomach, he died fifteen minutes later. It was not recorded if he had any files or papers on him.
Operation Paperclip...
This was the clandestine Army-OSS-CIA intellig
ence operation used to bring Wernher von Braun and his talented group of scientists to the United States as “resident aliens.” They immigrated without visas, but with the knowledge of President Truman. The files of those individuals who had been selected to come to the States from Germany were distinguished by paperclips.
George Patton...
Patton constantly complained about General Eisenhower’s war leadership. Once Germany was defeated, Patton wanted to take on the Russians. For such insubordination, he was relieved of his Third Army Command in late 1945, with the idea that he was losing his mind. He died from complications following a traffic accident a few months later. It has been speculated since that Patton was actually assassinated by his own people. Some say he was considered a threat to European peace and Dwight Eisenhower’s long-range plans for the presidency.
Trading with the enemy...
With the weakening of the Freedom of Information Act in the late 1970s, files have been open to the public to show that American corporations such as Standard Oil, ITT, Ford, and Chase Bank, participated in financing the enemy during the Second World War, as mentioned in this novel. Scores of books have been published since to support these findings, with details on how the transactions were completed.
Wernher von Braun...
Upon his arrival in the United States, he devoted his energies to space exploration, his first love, and was the founding father of NASA and the Apollo moon landings.
United States Air Force...
The USAF came into being in 1947 as its own service, breaking away from the Army. They quickly took charge of evaluating all the thousands of UFO and Flying Saucer sightings, under Project Blue Book.
Flying Saucers...
There were thousands more of these Unidentified Flying Object sightings in the United States, as well as around the world, between the years 1947-1952. The USAF made an intensive study of nearly 5,000 reports in 1955. They concluded that most sightings were common mistakes, such as weather balloons, solar reflections, and meteors. Only a small percentage could not be explained.
What was Washington’s reaction to the UFOs? “Flying Saucers exist only in the imaginations of the viewers,” stated President Dwight D. Eisenhower, December 16, 1954.
Daniel Wyatt
Historical fiction author Daniel Wyatt is Canadian, born and raised on the prairies of Saskatchewan. He now resides with his wife and two children in Burlington, Ontario, thirty miles outside Toronto.
His first published work was a set of first-person stories from World War II allied air force veterans called Two Wings and a Prayer by Boston Mills Press, Erin, Ontario, Canada in 1984. This was followed up in 1986 by Maximum Effort with the same publisher. In 1990, Wyatt made the switch to historical fiction with The Last Flight of the Arrow, a techno-thriller set during the Cold War years of the late 1950s. Originally published by Random House of Canada, it sold 20,000 copies in paperback. The Mary Jane Mission came out two years later, also by Random House. “The Falcon File” series, consisting of The Fuehrermaster, The Filberg Consortium and Foo Fighters was published as an eBook original by Mushroom eBooks, and in paperback as The Falcon File by Bladud Books in 2007. Wyatt’s other published works include aviation magazine articles in Canada and the United States.
A big baseball fan, Wyatt enjoys collecting Detroit Tigers memorabilia.
Books by Daniel Wyatt
Two Wings and a Prayer
Maximum Effort
The Last Flight of the Arrow
The Mary Jane Mission
The Cotton Run
Pennant Man
Route 66
“The Falcon File” series:
The Fuehrermaster
The Filberg Consortium
Foo Fighters
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