“You want some coffee, Private?”
“Sir, this is priority.” He lowered his voice when he realized that there was activity behind the counter. “And it’s supposed to be top secret.”
“Sit down for a second, friend. Let me finish my coffee here. Let me tell you something. How long you been in the forces?”
“Just a year, sir.” Private Marousek sat down, looking antsy and uncomfortable, as though wondering which orders to obey, the ones from Fort Worth or the one from his superior here.
“I heard about these flying saucers in last Sunday’s papers,” said Lieutenant Jenkins. “That guy Kenneth Arnold, private pilot up in Washington State. You hear about it?”
“Yes, sir. It was the talk of the barracks. We were wondering if it’s the Russians. Walnard—he reads a lot of pulp fiction magazines like Weird Tales and Amazing—talks a lot about stuff like the Shaver Mystery, and has an autographed picture of this dwarf named Raymond Palmer. Anyway, he says that they’re either beings from another planet ... or maybe even people from a civilization from the center of the earth.”
Jenkins snorted. “Yeah, sure. My brother used to read Edgar Rice Burroughs’s shit. Let me clue you in, Marousek, before you bust a vein or anything. When I was a copilot dumping metal over Strasbourg and Hamburg, I seen these ‘flying saucers.’ Lots of pilots seen ‘em. Bit startling at first ... but you get used to it.”
Marousek’s big, nervous eyes suddenly got bigger. “You did?”
“Hell, yeah! We used to call them ‘Foo-fighters.’ Big globs of lights, used to buzz around the wings and fuselage like flies around cow pies! Those and gremlins would drive a superstitious twerp nuts if you let it get to you—but hell, you realize pretty quick that what you gotta worry about are Spandaus and Zeros, not fairies. Anyway, a good talk with an army meteorologist set me straight. Ever hear of ball lightning? Yeah, well, lots of weird electrical stuff goes on in the sky.”
“But this isn’t in the sky, sir. And it’s not electrical. It’s on the ground! Corporal Tankerslee’s getting the trucks and he sent me over to get you. Really, sir, we gotta go!”
“Oh, sure, Private. We’re gonna go, but let me finish my coffee first, huh? And I don’t want you to be having no goddamned heart attack, that’s all. Fuckin’ credulous dipshit. You live through a war, you learn to take it easy, don’t jump in quick or you’ll get your goddamned tail shot off. Am I understood, Private Marousek?”
Private Marousek stared down glumly at the pile of crumbs on the table. “Yes, sir.”
Jenkins sipped at his coffee. You had to show these young guys who was in control. Couldn’t have one of them telling you what to do, or you’d lose their respect. So, even though Jenkins wasn’t particularly enjoying this condensed milk and mud concoction in his mug, he was damned sight gonna finish it, just to spite everyone.
Moments of awkward silence passed.
“Anyway, Private,” Jenkins said finally, relenting. “You know we send up weather balloons all the time. That’s probably what it is. Popped weather balloon. You don’t think this farmer didn’t read this Sunday’s paper, just like I did? You mark my words, that’s what got this flying saucer nonsense in his bonnet!” The lieutenant put his mug down, stood up and put his jacket and cap on slowly. Then he grinned down at Marousek. “So what are we waiting for, Private! We gotta go check out these fuckin’ Martians!”
It was a bright, clear day in Roswell, New Mexico. The air was clean and pure, excellent stuff for Lieutenant Jenkins’s sinuses, which had been acting up ever since those years of poor pressurization in B-25 bombers. He sat shotgun in a beat-up old truck, Private Marousek driving. Three more privates were sitting in the covered back. They were following another truck—a Mack flatbed. Behind them was the requisitioned tow truck, with three more soldiers making a party of ten from the army field. Just to make sure, Lieutenant Jenkins had called up the Chavez County sheriff’s office. Sure enough, the sheriff wasn’t there, according to a deputy. He was out in some fanner’s field, looking at some kind of wreckage. And yes, they’d contacted the Air Force.
The road was dirt, but it wasn’t dusty since it had just rained the other day, and it had packed down some. The sun was up toward the middle of the sky, inching toward noon. The landscape was flat and filled with scrub brush for miles, with Haystack Mountain poking up among a stretch of fellow mountains in the distance.
“Can you believe that Corporal Narden?” said Jenkins. “Radiation suits! Christ, a wasted half hour getting those suckers out. Where does he think we’re going, Hiroshima?”
“Los Alamos is in this state, sir.”
“Yeah? And three hundred miles away!” Jenkins snorted with disgust. “Sign of the times, I guess. Radiation madness. You mark my words; this thing in this fanner’s field is about as radioactive as my ass!”
Private Marousek had nothing more to say. He’d apparently learned his lesson—when you had a lieutenant on the other end of a conversation, you didn’t cross his opinions.
“Well, all I gotta say, Private,” said Jenkins, half-talking to himself. - “I just hope this doesn’t snowball into a rumor, like back in ‘38 in New Jersey.”
“There was a crashed flying saucer in New Jersey, sir?”
“Hell no. I was in diesel school outside Asbury that autumn.
That Orson Welles guy ... You know the one who made that film Citizen Kane? Well, he had this radio dramatization on the radio of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. He made it sound like news reports, and people tuning in during the middle thought it was the real thing! Well, half the state was up and running away. Thought Martians were invading. Jesus. People are really something, you know, Marousek?”
The private nodded. “Yes, sir.”
A tumbleweed whipped into their way and was immediately run down. This guy Brazel’s ranch was twenty-five miles out into Nowhere! Lots of sky, lots of land, lots of nothing. God’s country. Sheesh, thought Jenkins. Gimme the Jersey coast. Gimme New York. God may own this shit, sure; but dollars to donuts he lives in a penthouse above Fifth Avenue in Manhattan!
The military vehicles growled and ground along for what seemed like forever, until the promised signpost BRAZEL reared up ahead amidst the browns and brush sprawling arid land. “No fences!” said Jenkins. “How does this clown keep his livestock in?”
“Maybe he’s got too large a ranch to fence it all,” suggested Marousek.
“Yeah, maybe,” muttered Jenkins, as the flatbed up ahead turned onto the even narrower road into Brazel’s ranch, a road that was little more than two parallel cow paths, snaking up an incline. Marousek downshifted. The truck cleared its throat and whined up the road. Jenkins checked behind them. He saw the hoist of the tow truck bobbing along in back.
They climbed and rolled down two hills. About a mile in, Marousek pointed. “There’s the fence, sir.”
But Jenkins wasn’t looking at the fence. He was staring at the swath of what looked like pieces of tinfoil, lying to the right. Only it wasn’t tinfoil; there was a breeze coming from the northwest. Pieces of tinfoil would be blowing all over the place. This stuff just lay there, shiny and solid and heavy.
By the fence, a man waited. The dun-and-green military vehicles stopped, and Lieutenant Jenkins got out to talk to the man. He wore a hat, a grey uniform, and a badge. A gun peeked up from the holster around slender hips.
“Deputy Horace Brown, sir,” the young man said, extending a welcoming hand. “You must be Lieutenant Jenkins.”
“Right.” Jenkins shook the hand. He was thinking hard, frowning. He knew his weather balloons: the Rawin sonde and the Rawin target. The former consisted of a two-pound instrument package suspended from a helium-filled polyethylene plastic balloon. The latter had the same balloon but it was a radar target of foil and balsa wood. No way either could have contributed those odd pieces of whatever on this field. “What’s going on here?” he queried.
“Well, that’s why we called the Air Force,” said the y
oung man, hitching up his hat and scratching a freckled forehead. “Mebbe you can tell us. Sheriff’s up over there past the ridge along with Brazel, the rancher who owns this land. We’re gonna have to figure out the best way to get these trucks over there ... No road, ye see. But for right now, why don’t you just come on up an’ have a peek.”
“Why. What have you got?”
“Like I said, we don’t know, but mebbe you folks do. It’s some kind of flying device, all right, but it’s the damnedest thing me or the sheriff or Mr. Brazel ever seen. We figure we don’t want to touch it, till you guys come out. Might be radioactive or something.” He cleared his throat. “And, sir, there’s casualties. Ah mean, fatalities.”
“What, it landed on ranch hands?” “No sir.”
“What the hell is it, man?”
Deputy Brown’s eyes turned away, a far-off look to them. “Jest come look, huh, Lieutenant? Just come up past this ridge and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.”
“I’ll bring some of the men with me, then.”
Deputy Brown looked over at the others. He drew Jenkins aside and spoke in a low voice.
“Didn’t Major Marcel mention to you that this might be, uh, what you guys call ‘Top Secret’?”
“What, you mean ‘Classified’? Something was said to that effect, but with everybody’s noses out of joint about the Russians, that’s par for the course.” Major Marcel clearly had viewed this whole thing with the same skepticism that Jenkins had, or he would have come himself.
“Well, I would suggest that you come up with me, have yourself a gander, and then you decide exactly who you want over there, and what exactly you want done. And if you’ve got a radio, I think that maybe your major in charge of that air field’s gonna want to have a say too, so be prepared.”
The deputy’s tone of command and condescension got Jenkins’s back up. “I’m in charge here, man. The major has given me full prerogative in this matter.”
“Yeah? Okay, it’s your ball. I guess. You do what the hell you want. Take my word though, Lieutenant. You take the first look, huh?”
“Very well,” said Jenkins. “If that will make you happy, Deputy.” He turned to the others, who had gathered around, the curiosity plain on their faces, and ordered them to stay put.
Then he and Deputy Brown made the hike up the ridge. Out in the open, the air had a charcoal smell to it. Nasty and harsh, like a crash-site back in the Big One, only with no burning petroleum or oil stench.
A few pieces of the tinfoil-shiny material lay twisted amongst the desert brush. Jenkins bent down to touch one, and then decided against it. Suddenly, he was feeling a lot less sure of himself. Maybe he should get into one of those radiation suits before he got personal with one of those things. Maybe this whole business was just a little bit more serious than he had anticipated.
Past the top of the ridge, the land immediately dipped into a small valley. Over the crest of another hill, about two miles away, Jenkins could see the tops of the ranch buildings: a long house, some stables, a barn, a silo with the diminutive form of a weather vane topping it.
But that what was below caught his more immediate attention. Down one side of the valley stretched a blacked and burned furrow. Pieces of the shiny wreckage were strewn hither and yon, like some giant robot’s dandruff.
Standing by the end of this furrow was a man in bib coveralls and a grey hat. Beside him was a man with a uniform identical to Deputy Brown’s, only this guy had a light jacket. The two men were staring down into the depression at something blackened and metallic, maybe forty feet across. Threads of black smoke weaved up, dissipating.
Deputy Brown said nothing, merely gesturing for the lieutenant to continue on down. Sensing them, the sheriff turned around and waved. He looked damned pleased to see a military outfit on its way.
About twenty-five yards farther down, the path skewed in a way that brought them into a position where Jenkins would look directly down at the thing that lay at the end of the blackened furrow. He stopped for a moment and just stared at it.
“Yeah,” said Deputy Brown, realizing that the lieutenant could see it now. “That’s it all right. Ever see anything like it? The sheriff, he thinks maybe it might belong to you guys, but I don’t know.” He sidled alongside Jenkins. “Me, I think it’s one of them flying saucers that they’ve been talking about. What the hell it’s doing in Chavez County, I don’t know. But there it is!”
“Jesus Christ!” whispered the lieutenant reverently. Jenkins could only stare down at the thing and shake his head.
That thing sure as hell wasn’t no weather balloon!
That was when Jenkins saw the two blackened bodies thrown to either side of the thing.
Suddenly, he wished things could get boring again.
In his heart of hearts, however, he knew they never would be again.
Chapter 1
The two men blended in with the rest of the patrons at the diner just outside of Hastings, Nebraska. They wore faded old jeans; scuffed Sears work boots, and white undershirts beneath checked flannel shirts. Even though it was spring in the flatlands of the Midwest, the clean, clear air still had a nip of winter in it, and so the men also wore windbreakers as well, which they kept on as they ate their Trucker’s Special of orange juice, eggs, and hash browns. They looked as though they could be farmers or ranchers, or in fact truckers. American working men, Joe DrinkBuds straight from some growling Waylon Jennings song. Neither had faces you’d remember. One looked to be in his late forties, with grey touching the sides of his mussed hair—the other maybe in his late twenties with a face that was just a face, an afterthought from the bored genetic pool of America’s heartland.
They blended in well with the waning breakfast traffic in that old-fashioned diner with its starched and tired waitresses and the frowning cook straight from Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. They merged with the faces and clothes and flat speech patterns because that was what they wanted. If they’d have been on Wall Street, they would have looked like brokers; and if they’d been on Capitol Hill, they would have looked like legislators; and if they’d have been at a Shriner convention, they would have looked like Shriners.
They were here because they had followed the man in the back booth here.
The man named Doctor Everett Scarborough.
Scarborough did not realize it, but they’d been following him all the way from Las Vegas. They did not always have to tail the fugitive—they had other methods of pinpointing Scarborough’s location. They even had a pretty good idea where he was headed.
Scarborough kept to back roads, which was smart, and he didn’t go into many restaurants, which was smart, too. But his Ford Falcon clearly needed a new fan belt, and he was due for a gas stop, so he’d gotten what he needed in an Exxon station across Route 6 here; then, either from hunger or sheer tiredness, he’d decided to duck into Mort’s Good Cookin’ Diner for a quick meal and some coffee. Not smart. His face had been all over the newspapers just a couple of days ago, and even though he’d made some effort to disguise himself, things like that flesh-wound scar on his face gave him away. Trouble was Scarborough was a professional scientist and writer, not a professional fugitive.
The nondescript men in flannel and Old Spice were professionals, though. Professional killers, among other things. But they did not intend to kill Doctor Everett Scarborough ... not unless they had to.
After they had parked their black Cadillac (a joke among their superiors; nonetheless, with their considerable travel duties, it was a pleasant cruising vehicle) some distance from Scarborough’s Ford Falcon in the dusty, unpaved parking lot, they entered Mort’s and found him in a back booth of the tatty, yellowed-linoleum place. They’d taken a booth some distance away out of sight of Scarborough’s—but positioned so they would know when he left. They did not talk to one another, nor did they read papers. If anyone had taken time to notice, their bodies were remarkably relaxed but their eyes were alert as those of wolves.
As they ate their breakfast there were no peculiar eating habits employed, no scraping of toast, no dipping of yolk, no stretching or cracking of knuckles. They just ate. And waited.
Exactly sixteen minutes after they had sat down, two men entered the diner. The over-made-up waitress with MARGE lettered above a sagged breast showed them to the booth right beside the two men in windbreakers drinking black coffee. Marge handed the men menus. If she had looked at the men in the next .booth, she would have seen that they were no longer relaxed. One of the new arrivals was a man in a brown corduroy sport coat and red tie, with a smile like a salesman’s. The other was a county police officer.
The older man looked down the aisle toward where Scarborough sat in his booth. The doctor had not seen the cop, and there was no way of warning him. The younger man looked as though he wanted to do something, but the man with the grey in his hair just pinned him to the seat with a glance that said, “Stay put.”
The county cop had a beer belly that made him look pregnant; his uniform was a little rumpled, and he smelled of a night’s worth of sweat, coffee, and free convenience-store donuts. He ordered scrambled eggs and sausage and a large cold milk, rubbed his eyes, and started talking to the other man about some sort of land deal in which they were both involved. The cop called the man Ted. The man in the tie called the cop Pat. They were just two locals having a breakfast meeting. The men in windbreakers relaxed a little.
Marge brought the sausage and eggs, and the rich spice of the fried meat was heavy in the air for several minutes as Pat the cop gobbled it down. He drank his milk, belched, and then continued talking with Ted the salesman, this time just gossiping about some woman it turned out they had both slept with.
It was at this unfortunate time that Scarborough chose to leave the diner. The man looked tired and lined. Everett Scarborough was fifty years old. but he’d prided himself on the fact that he didn’t look much over a grey-touched thirty-five. Now, though, he looked every year of fifty, with maybe a few more thrown in. He walked down the diner aisle with a stiff gait that spoke of aching muscles and maybe a touch of new-found rheumatism. His eyes looked faded and bleary, and his teeth seemed gritted from too much coffee. He didn’t notice the officer until he was almost at the cop’s table. The two men in windbreakers watched his reaction. They could have been invisible as far as the doctor was concerned, which was good. However, he clearly winced at the sight of the cop, pausing for half-a-heartbeat before forging on, clutching the meal check in his hand, approaching the cash register to pay.
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 39
