‘I’m sure you are, Herr Wilson – since if we hadn’t met again here, you would now be a dead man.’
Reminded by that remark that his assessment of Himmler was not amiss, Wilson glanced over the lunatic’s shoulder at the men grouped behind him. As they were all wearing oily coveralls, they were either scientists or engineers.
‘Would you care to inspect our flying saucer, Herr Wilson?’
‘I don’t have to inspect it, Reichsführer,’ Wilson replied, ‘to know that it won’t fly.’
Himmler simply smiled. ‘How arrogant you are, Herr Wilson! But come,’ he added, crooking a delicate index finger and indicating the men standing nervously behind him, ‘please let me introduce you to the rest of our team. This,’ he said, indicating with a nod a young man with a lean and hungry look, ‘is Flugkapitän Rudolph Schriever, who originally designed this flying saucer, which you insist will not fly. And this,’ he continued, when Wilson had shaken the hand of the solemn young designer, ‘is the physicist Klaus Habermohl, and his associate, Otto Miethe. And this,’ he ended, when Wilson had shaken the hands of Habermohl and Miethe, both of whom were middle aged, ‘is Dr Giuseppe Belluzzo who, though Italian, has become an invaluable member of our team. Gentlemen, I give you Herr Wilson, an American genius!’
Ignoring Himmler’s quiet sarcasm and the resultant nervous chuckles, Wilson shook the hand of the small, plump, balding Belluzzo and expressed his gratitude that he would soon be working with him. When the rest of the team had crowded around him to congratulate him on his work, which they had assessed for Ernst Stoll, Wilson said to Schriever, ‘Few experiments work out the first time, and the fact that this particular saucer will not fly is of no great importance. What is important, Flugkapitän, is that you’ve already made such progress and that now, if we all work together, we can build successfully upon it. I therefore congratulate you, Flugkapitän, for building the first flying saucer prototype.’
‘Thank you, Herr Wilson.’
Schriever bowed stiffly, acknowledging Wilson’s praise, but before anything else could be said, Himmler walked away from them and Lieutenant Stoll urgently waved his hand, indicating that he and Wilson should follow. Falling in beside Stoll, Wilson left the office and found himself standing in the great hangar, beside Himmler, who was facing Rudolph Schriever’s skeletal flying saucer prototype and smiling in his mild, chilling way.
‘You do not think it will fly?’ he asked, still studying the prototype.
‘No, Reichsführer,’ Wilson replied.
‘You’re deliberately being bold in telling me this, Herr Wilson, where others would be too frightened to do so. This means you are cunning. Not too cunning, I hope.’ He then turned to Wilson, looked up through his glittering pince-nez, and said, ‘For obvious reasons, Flugkapitän Schriever is still in charge of this project, but you’re the one from whom we expect results. Once a week you will visit Wernher von Braun at the Rocket Research Institute at the other side of the firing range, and anything you’ve discovered that’s of no use to this project but may be of use to von Braun, you will pass on to him, to be used as he sees fit.’
‘I understand, Reichsführer.’
‘You understand also, I hope, that I will be kept informed of your progress, or lack thereof, by Oberleutnant Stoll here’ – he indicated the nervous Ernst Stoll with a nod of his head – ‘and that anything you wish to discuss, you must discuss with him, not with Flugkapitän Schriever.’
‘Yes, Reichsf
ü hrer, I understand.’
‘Good,’ Himmler said. ‘Now is there anything else you need to know before I take my leave?’
Wilson glanced across the hangar, saw that mostly empty, valuable space, then returned his gaze to Himmler and said, ‘My task is a large one, and apart from scientists and engineers, I’m going to need hundreds of unskilled labourers. Where will I find them?’
Himmler adjusted the pince-nez on his nose, gazed across the vast hangar at the glittering skeleton of Schriever’s saucer, then looked up at Wilson with a thin, icily controlled, deadly smile.
‘The camps,’ he said, almost whispering.
CHAPTER TEN The administration buildings at Langley Field, Virginia, had been completed when Bradley made his next visit – officially as an advisor on aeronautical law, unofficially as one of General Dwight Taylor’s intelligence agents – to attend a meeting of the recently formed National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Seated with him around the table in the main building were his old friend General Taylor, of the still too informal army air force intelligence branch, and the twelve members of the committee. Though most were Pentagon officers with technical backgrounds, also included were the aging yet still dapper Orville Wright who, in 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, with his brother Wilbur, had made the first airplane flight in history; and Charles A. Lindbergh, the handsome, aristocratic flyer who had won the nation’s heart when, in 1927, he had made the first nonstop airplane flight between two continents in his now-legendary monoplane, The Spirit of St Louis, then won the sympathy of that same nation when, four years ago, his two-year-old son had been kidnapped and murdered.
Since its formation, the committee had been meeting once a month to discuss national and international aeronautical developments. This day should have been no different from any other... but most of those present were looking shocked.
‘Eighteen years ago,’ a radio announcer was saying, ‘dejected German soldiers retreated from France across the Hohenzollern Bridge spanning the Rhine. Twenty-two days ago, at eleven-thirty a.m. on March 7, 1936, three of Adolf Hitler’s battalions crossed that bridge again, this time marching back into the Rhineland. Within hours twenty-five thousand German troops had occupied the Rhineland, with no retaliation from the French. Today, March 29, 1936, again without benefit of guns, ninety-eight point eight percent of the electorate voted for Adolf Hitler, thus making him the Führer of all Germany. War in Europe is now virtually guaranteed...’
General Taylor turned the radio off, stared thoughtfully at it for a moment, then returned to take his seat at the head of the long committee table.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘there it is. Adolf Hitler’s now the absolute dictator of the Third Reich – and he’s not going to be satisfied with the Rhineland. As the man said, this clearly means war in Europe.’
‘War in Europe is not our concern,’ said a silvery-haired gentleman from a cloud of cigar smoke at the end of the table.
‘I think it is,’ Taylor replied, ‘to the degree that it affects Germany’s interest in aeronautical research, which already is alarmingly advanced. Mike,’ he added, turning to Bradley, ‘what do you think?’
‘I’m seriously worried,’ Bradley said. ‘The Nazis are, as you say, already dangerously advanced in aeronautical research – and I think it’s safe to say that most of that research will now be turned toward its potential for warfare.’
‘It still doesn’t affect us,’ the dapper Orville Wright said, ‘since America is taking an isolationist stance – and Europe’s a long way away.’
‘I don’t believe we can cling to isolationism for too long,’ Bradley said, ‘and as long as there’s even the faintest possibility that we’ll be involved in war, sooner or later, we should be seriously concerned about technological advances anywhere in the world – but particularly in Nazi Germany.’
‘Your concern seems extreme,’ a technical advisor said, puffing on his pipe and pursing his lips to blow the smoke out. ‘Have you sound reasons for this?’
‘For the past couple of years,’ General Taylor said, ‘Bradley, in an unofficial intelligence capacity, has been trying to track down someone for us – a mysterious physicist and aeronautical engineer called John Wilson, who once worked with Robert Goddard…’ here the general glanced at Goddard's friend, Charles Lindbergh… ‘before reportedly travelling on to Germany to work for the Nazis, possibly under a false passport.’
‘Bradley’s already asked me about this John Wilson,’ Lindbergh po
inted out, ‘and I had to tell him, honestly, that I’d never heard of him in connection with Goddard until Bradley himself mentioned him. Obviously, as Bradley had already done, I then checked with Goddard and received confirmation that Wilson had indeed worked with him in 1930 for approximately six months.’
‘So what’s so worrying about this fellow?’ Orville Wright asked impatiently.
‘What worries me,’ Bradley said, ‘is that according to Goddard, this Wilson was a scientific genius with a particular interest in rocketry and space flight. He also appears to have been a completely unemotional, ruthless son of a bitch who didn’t give a damn about anything other than his own work.’
‘Sounds like your average scientist or politician,’ someone said, thus encouraging a spasm of cynical laughter around the smokewreathed table.
When the laughter died down, Bradley said patiently: ‘What I’m trying to get across is that this mysterious Wilson, who’s possibly a scientific genius and utterly ruthless, had reason enough, and is certainly fanatical enough, to contribute his genius to a foreign power, irrespective of its nature or motives. And it seems clear from the evidence that the country he’s chosen is Nazi Germany.’
There was a long, uncomfortable pause until Charles Lindbergh said thoughtfully, ‘Are you suggesting that this Wilson was actually more advanced in his thinking than Goddard?’
‘Yes,’ Bradley said without pause.
‘I find that hard to credit,’ Lindbergh said.
‘So did I,’ Bradley replied, ‘but not any longer.’ He pushed his chair back, stood up, and walked around the table, distributing to all the members of the committee typed copies of Wilson’s curriculum vitae. While they were reading it, he lit a cigarette, smoked it, and gazed out the window, thinking of how far aeronautics had advanced since Samuel Pierpont Langley, American astronomer, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and aeronautical theorist (ironically also born, like Goddard and Wilson’s father, in Massachusetts, where Wilson himself had attended MIT), had sent his quarter-scale, steam-powered ‘aerodrome’ into a flight over the Potomac River and these very fields, which had since been named in his honour. From those innocent beginnings, nearly forty years ago, a dark new age was dawning...
‘Has everyone finished reading?’ General Taylor asked, obviously impatient to continue.
Most of the heads, hazed in smoke, nodded affirmatively.
‘It’s certainly impressive,’ Orville Wright said, ‘but it doesn’t prove that this man created anything out of the ordinary, in secret or otherwise.’
Aware of Wright’s illustrious position in the history of aviation, that Charles Lindbergh had been forthright in his support of Robert H. Goddard, and that both men might therefore be more sceptical than most, Bradley said, ‘While I can’t confirm that Wilson worked on airships more advanced than those built officially, I think it’s worth pointing out that during the period 1896 to 1897 – when Wilson had left Cornell University and disappeared completely to work, as we now know, on airship design and construction – America suffered what is now known as the Great Airship Scare.’
‘I remember it well,' Orville Wright said. ‘It lasted for months. There was a great wave of sightings of mysterious airships that were actually carrying passengers, or crew members, who reportedly spoke to the locals when they landed. At the time I put it down to mass hysteria.’
‘Well,’ Bradley said, ‘maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t – but certainly most of the reports of contact between the airship crews and the witnesses mentioned a crew member who called himself Wilson. Please, gentlemen, bear with me.’
Bradley withdrew from his briefcase the press clippings that Gladys Kinder had sent him, spread them out on the table before him, and talked while reading from them, one by one.
‘As you all probably know,’ he began, ‘the first major UFO flap was indeed in 1896, beginning about November of that year and continuing until May 1897. That was five years before the first experiments of Orville, here, and his brother, Wilbur; but there were, by that time, various airship designs on the drawing boards or in the Patent Office. For instance, according to my clippings here, on August 11, 1896, patent number 565805 was given to Charles Abbot Smith of San Francisco for an airship he intended having ready by the following year. And another patent, number 580941, was issued to Henry Heintz of Elkton, South Dakota, on April 20, 1897.’
‘In all fairness,’ Lindbergh said, ‘you should perhaps point out that while many of the UFOs sighted were shaped roughly like the patented designs, there’s no record of those airships having been built.’
‘Okay,’ Bradley said, ‘I concede that – but the fact that there’s no record of them doesn’t necessarily mean they weren’t built.’
‘But the reported UFOs resembled the airships on the patented designs?’ a disembodied voice asked from farther along the table.
‘Yes,’ Orville Wright said. ‘At that time the general belief was that aerial navigation would be solved through an airship, rather than a heavier-than-air flying machine, so most of the earlier designs looked like dirigibles with a passenger car on the bottom.’
‘Cigar-shaped.’
‘Correct.’
‘Okay, Bradley,’ General Taylor said, ‘please continue.’
‘What stands out in the 1896-97 sightings,’ Bradley continued, ‘is that the unidentified flying objects were mostly cigar-shaped, that they frequently landed, and that their occupants often talked to the witnesses, usually asking for water for their machines.’
‘I remember that,’ Orville Wright said, still proud of his memory.
‘Now, the most intriguing of the numerous contactee stories,’ Bradley went on doggedly, ‘involved a man who called himself Wilson. He never gave his first name.’
Bradley’s throat felt dry, so he swallowed, coughed into his fist, then started reading again from his notes and clippings.
‘The first incident occurred in Beaumont, Texas, on April 19, 1897, when one J. B. Ligon, the local agent for Magnolia Brewery, and his son, Charles, noticed lights in a pasture a few hundred yards away and went to investigate. They came upon four men standing beside a large, dark object that neither of the witnesses could see clearly. One of those men asked Ligon for a bucket of water, Ligon let him have it, and then the man introduced himself as Mr Wilson. He then told Ligon that he and his friends were travelling in a flying machine, that they had taken a trip out to the gulf – presumably the Gulf of Galveston, though no name was given – and that they were returning to the quiet Iowa town where the airship and four others like it had been constructed. When asked, Wilson explained that electricity powered the propellers and wings of his airship. Then he and his fellow crew member got back into the basket of the airship and Ligon watched it ascending.’
‘I get your drift,’ Orville Wright said. ‘That particular Wilson said he was returning to the quiet Iowa town where the airship and four others like it had been constructed – and your Wilson, the one in these notes, originally came lrom Iowa.’
Bradley just raised his hands in a questioning manner, then started reading again.
‘The next day, April 20, Sheriff H. W. Bayer of Uvalde, also in Texas, went to investigate a strange light and voices in back of his house. He encountered an airship and three men – and one of the men introduced himself as Wilson, from Goshen, New York. Wilson then enquired about one C. C. Akers, former sheriff of Zavalia County, saying he’d met him in Fort Worth in 1877 and now wanted to see him again. Surprised, Sheriff Baylor replied that Captain Akers was now at Eagle Pass, and Wilson, apparently disappointed, asked to be remembered to him the next time Baylor visited him. Baylor reported that the men from the airship wanted water and that Wilson requested that their visit be kept secret from the townspeople; then he and the other men climbed back into the airship and, quote, its great wings and fans were set in motion and it sped away northward in the direction of San Angelo, unquote. Incidentally, the county clerk also saw the airship as
it left the area.’
He glanced up from his notes to see what effect he was having on the learned gentlemen; thirteen faces stared attentively at him through a haze of cigarette and cigar smoke, so he lowered his gaze and started reading again.
‘Two days later, in Josserand, Texas, a whirring sound awoke farmer Frank Nichols, who looked out from his window and saw brilliant lights streaming from what he described as a ponderous vessel of strange proportions, floating over his cornfield. Nichols went outside to investigate, but before he reached the large vessel, two men walked up to him and asked if they could have water from his well. Nichols agreed to this request – as farmers in those days mostly did – and the men then invited him to inspect their airship. When he did, he noticed that there were six or seven crew members. One of those men told him that the ship’s motive power was highly condensed electricity and that it was one of five that had been constructed in a small town in Iowa with the backing of a large New York stock company.’
‘So what we’re talking about,’ Lindbergh said, ‘are five or six airships, originating in a small town in Iowa.’
‘Right,’ a granite-faced Pentagon general confirmed from a haze of smoke.
‘The next day,’ Bradley continued, ‘on April 23, witnesses described in this Houston Post clipping as two responsible men, reported that an airship had descended where they lived in Kountze, Texas, and that two of the occupants had given their names as Jackson and...’
‘Wilson,’ General Taylor said with a sly grin.
‘Right,’ Bradley said, not returning the grin, but instead concentrating on his reading, which was making him feel oddly selfconscious. ‘Four days after that incident, on April 27, the Galveston Daily News printed a letter from the aforementioned C. C. Akers, in which Akers claimed that he had indeed known a man in Forth Worth, Texas, named Wilson; that Wilson was from New York; that he was in his middle twenties; and that he was of a mechanical turn of mind and then working on aerial navigation and something that would, quote, astonish the world.’
INCEPTION (Projekt Saucer, Book 1) Page 11
