The Roswell Swatch

by Scott Powers

“Have you found Max?”she asked.

  “I found a lot. Not enough, probably. But some,”Ted said.“Hey, by any chance, did you get the tail number on that helicopter?”

  “Um, no,”Eve said, cradling a cup of coffee near her mouth.

  “Why the hell not? Not even a picture? That’s the one stupid thing you did,”Ted said. “With a tail number, we’d have a much better chance. And they had to have one.”

  “Thanks. I’ll remember that next time I’m running from people who are shooting at me.”

  “I thought you said the helicopter had already left when they spotted you.”

  “Whatever.”

  Ted was a man in his forties, with messy dark hair and an untrimmed beard. Quite different from the Ted in the lab. This Ted’s thin legs lay beneath him in his chair like anchors. Jen stepped in with her own cup of coffee, gave Eve a smile, and then moved behind him. She had dark eyes in a square face, draped by long dark hair, which included grey streaks. There was a pious, maybe holy, look to her face as if she were blessed with serenity.

  “How are your arms?”she asked Eve.

  “Fine.”

  “That Mercedes you tagged is heading north on I-77,”Ted said, changing the subject.“I traced the plate you shot to a wholesaler in New Jersey.”

  “I traced a couple of those numbers on the phone you found. And holy shit. One goes to Dr. Ian Melnat Ohio State. Ever heard of him?”Ted added. He said that as if it should mean something.

  “Who?”Eve asked.

  “So happens I know him,”Ted said.“He and I go way back, the bastard. Meln’s a materials engineering scientist. He sat on my dissertation review committee. He blocked my work for years.

  “That explains a lot,”Ted said.“So he’s an IBTT stooge. I don’t know why I’m even surprised.”

  Eve sipped her coffee, pretending this mattered to her.

  “Melnworked with Hal Evans on a mercury liquid crystal project. You wouldn’t have heard about it. It was clearly an IBTT project, and I’ve always had my suspicions about Evans. He had worked for years in northern Virginia and in Cambridge, in England. Those are two hotbeds for UFO denial research. Evans was there, in Cambridge, I mean, back in the 1980s when that was, in all likelihood, the center of IBTT activity. That’s where deGeorgewas from. I…”

  He finally looked at Eve. She’d lost interest. Ted tried hard to catch himself whenever he could. He was working on it.

  Eve looked at his screen and feigned interest in something else.

  “What was your dissertation on, Ted?”

  “Call me Dr. Lee,”he said.“It took me eleven years. I earned the title.”

  “No, I’m never going to call you Dr. Lee.”

  He stared her down for a moment

  "Do what you want," he said angrily.

  Jen laughed. Ted shot her a look to kill and she flipped him off.

  “I wrote on the theoretical makeup of the Roswell materials. I’m not going to go into detail. You wouldn’t understand. But there’s enough data out there from eyewitnesses and other sources to develop some theories. I’m the Goddamn leading expert in the world. There’s been some research by some grad students at Stanford, and I think some of the work done by Al Beasley in Paris was rather insightful, but they all acknowledge my work. It’s gotten quite a bit of attention. It’s also gotten a shitload of blowback. Meln, I think, was behind it. And I, uh, that’s what I did.”

  “Theoretical? Ted?”Eve said, punching the name.

  She reached into her bra, pulled out the swatch corner, and then put in front of him. Dr. Ted Lee fingered the little square of metallic cloth as if it were the most beautiful thing he’d ever touched or seen.

  “Thisis it?”

  Eve sipped her coffee, just to annoy him.

  “No. Those bastards stole the rest. This is all that’s left. This is the piece the other Ted forgot when he burned down your lab. With us inside, by the way.”

  "Fools. You shouldn't have trusted him."

  "He tried to kill us!"

  "Your mistake."

  "Kiss my ass," Eve said.

  Ted ignored that.“This is plenty. I just need to take a close look.”

  Eve objected.“We already know what it is. We saw the results. He said it was carbon.”

  “And you believed him?”Ted asked.“Keep in mind, even before we had reason to believe he was IBTT, Melnis a scientific roach. He comes out at night and steals from others. And he creeps everyone else out, shitting on everything he can’t claim."

  Eve fell silent, realizing she may have witnessed an act last night.

  Jen spoke next.“Anyway, your lab’s gone.”

  Ted smiled.“Ian’s is better though.”

  "What are you suggesting?" Jen asked.

  "We know who Ian is. And we know he screwed up. He'll be scared. We can use him now."

  There was nothing they could do for Max, Ted continued. They had no idea where he might be, how he was, or even if he was still alive. But Ted had two or three leads, and Eve still had a couple, and they all were north. Even the Mercedes was headed north on I-77.

  "We gotta follow that Mercedes, and I think it'll take us right back to Dr. Ian Meln.”

  “And what about Max? Do you care if they kill him?”Eve asked.

  “Max knew what he was getting himself into,”Ted said.

  “Stop it, Theodore,”his sister said.“Don’t be a prick. Of course, you care.”

  “Theodore?”Eve asked.

  “Don’t call me that,”he said.

  “He hates that name. Hates it,”Jen replied.

  “Well, that’s good to know. I’ll file that away, Dr. Lee.”

  The women fist-bumped.

  “Max will be safe as long asyou have that piece of swatch,”Ted said.“That’s what they want now. When they get that, they’ll let Max go.”

  “But I’m not giving this up!”Eve shouted.

  “No one is asking you to. We want to force them to come to us, but we need to be the aggressors. We need to make it so uncomfortable for them that they’ll panic. And that’s when we’ll get Max back. They can’t keep him forever. And they won’t kill him.”

  “And how do we make it uncomfortable for them?”Eve asked.

  Ted smiled, showing surprisingly white teeth.

  “By taking the sample to them and getting the world to watch us do it.”

  CHAPTER 10

  LITTLE ROBBERS

  The car Eve had tagged drove to Columbus, and so the van and Camaro followed.

  Ted, Jen, and Eve settled into a suburban motel. Ted said he had a plan, but he remained vague, telling Jen and Eve he didn’t want to talk about it until he saw what Meln was up to.

  The next morning, Ted called for Dr. Meln. Ted, it turned out, had a gift for voices. He called as a Romanian colleague. Meln was out though, not due back until Monday.

  That gave them four days to kill. Jen and Ted scouted Meln's life, spying on his house, office, and lab. Jen also inquired about him around campus.

  Eve had other priorities though. As long as they had time to kill, she wanted to learn more about her Grandpa Joe’s experiences and secrets, as well as who had killed her grandmother. Rather than chase after Ted’s nemesis, she planned a side trip into the distant past. Eve figured she’d start by seeing if the reporter who had raised suspicions about Grandpa Joe’s unit in 1955 still was alive.

  Most of the articles she’d found in Joe’s scrapbook didn’t have bylines, but two of them did. Both were penned by the same reporter. She called the Dayton Daily News and asked if anyone there knew whatever happened to Dan Rose.

  “He’s here now,”replied the woman at the paper.

  The woman forwarded the call, and Eve expected to get an assistant or maybe a voice mail, but a high-tenor voice answered the phone.“This is Rose.”

  Eve was awash with adrenaline. Dan Rose! Her one good lead might go somewhere. It was truly beyond her hope. She had expected a quick dead end.


  “Dan Rose?”

  "This is he," the voice said.

  "I, um. This may sound crazy, but I want to talk to you about some articles you wrote back in the '50s. 1955," Eve said.

  "That wasn't me," the man said.

  Eve held her phone to her ear in silence for a moment. "Dan Rose?"

  "That would have been my father," Rose said. "I didn't start working here until 1980.”

  It took a moment for Eve, who had been awash with expectation, to realize she had missed her target.

  “Hello?”Rose said.

  “You’re, you’re Dan Rose Jr.? Is, is your father still alive?"

  “You want to speak to my dad? What for? Who are you?”

  So he is alive! That’s all Eve could think at the moment. All she cared about. That, plus, would he remember anything worthwhile about articles he wrote more than sixty years ago?

  “I’m researching,”Eve said.“I’m researching my grandparents. Your father, he wrote about them. I don’t know if he’d remember anything, or if he’d care to share anything, but I’d like to ask him.”

  “My father’s been retired more than twenty years. Who were your grandparents?”

  “You wouldn’t know them. They were nobody. But my grandmother was killed in a car crash. Your dad wrote about it. And I guess I’m just trying to learn more about what happened. It was back in the fifties. I thought maybe he’d know something that would help.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you think he’d know something about it? He probably wrote about hundreds of car crashes in his career.”

  “Because the circumstances were unusual, suspicious. Weird. It’s kind of a mystery. He’s still alive?”

  “My father’s not well.”

  “But he’s alive. Would he remember? Can you ask him for me? It’s really important to me.”

  “Okay,”he said.“I’m intrigued. I'll ask him. But no promises. My father's not exactly a warm and fuzzy soul.”

  “Tell him it’s about the airmen who died in 1955. My grandfather’s name was Joe Fynn. My grandmother was Fay. She died in a car crash,”Eve said.“Your father wrote about it.”

  A half hour went by before the younger Dan Rose called Eve back. She punched the air when he said his father did remember, and would like to meet with her.

  Somehow, she had known he would.

  The next evening, Eve drove to Dayton in Max’s car and met Dan Rose, Jr. in the lobby of the paper. He drove from there, taking her to a nursing home in the suburb of Kettering. The home was a sprawling, one-story place with wings jutting out everywhere, crowding three curving streets. The front was unmarked, except for a small sign near the lobby entrance.

  Dan Jr. was fiftyish, heavy, and well groomed, with a flat face and penetrating dark eyes. On the drive over, he asked nothing, but once they were seated in the lobby, he broached the subject.

  “I gottaadmit, I’m curious about something that happened so long ago that both you and my father would be interested in talking about. Especially Dad.”

  “You’ll see. I hope.”

  In a few minutes an attendant arrived, a heavy, black woman in her forties dressed in a marine-blue jacketed dress suit that waved while she walked. They came to a snack room. There was just one person in the room, and he stood and smiled when he saw Eve and his son enter.

  The elder Dan Rose was much thinner. He had full white hair, thick glasses, and darting eyes. There was a desperate, maybe frantic, look about him, as if he’d just been sucker-punched and was trying to figure out who hit him. He waited for them to approach.

  The old man sat without a word, and Eve took the chair next to him. She opened Joe’s scrapbook to the newspaper clips and then turned it to face him.

  “Goddamn!”the old man shouted.“The flying saucer story.”

  “The what?”His son looked completely surprised.

  Eve gasped.“So you knew!”

  "Damn right. Some shit you never forget. Pardon my French, ma'am. Reporters talk worse’n sailors."

  He touched the page.“I talked to these guys,”he said. His words sounded forced, as if he had had a stroke and had learned to talk all over again. "They were a scared bunch."

  He turned to his son.

  “I never told you about this story’causeit was so out there. And it never came to anything. Hell, I never told anybody, really. But it always stuck with me. I never saw GIs so scared, not even in Korea. They weren’t afraid of death, but of what they’d done. And what it was going to do to them.”

  The old man looked up at Eve and stared her in the eyes.“Why are you here now?”

  Eve turned to the group shot and pointed to her grandfather.“Because of him.”

  He looked closely for a moment, squinting through his glasses, and finally said,“Joe Fynn.”

  “You knew my grandfather?”

  “Not well, but I talked with him. Did he tell you what happened?”

  “No. Never. But he told some friends, and after he died, his friends told me. They gave me this scrapbook. That was the first I’d ever heard. But I want to know. I want to know what really happened to my grandmother.”

  “She died in a car crash, didn’t she?”the old man said.

  “What’s this all about, Dad?”the younger Rose asked.

  His father ignored him. He stared long and deep at the scrapbook on the table. The past rose from it like mist. He breathed it in. It seemed to rejuvenate him. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and turned a couple of pages back and forth without saying anything. Finally, he got to the group photo.“It was strange as hell. There’d been a couple fatal accidents. Him. And, I think, him.”

  Dan Senior was twenty-six at the time. The paper sent him out to the base to find out what was going on. Nothing, he was told. Two tragedies.

  But he was seen around the base. And word got around. When a third airman died in a fire, Rose got a call from another airman.“'Meet us. There’s something we want to talk about.' That’s all he said.”

  On a clear Saturday in June 1955, Dan Rose drove to the east side of Dayton and met four young airmen on a baseball field. Though they’d summoned the reporter, they were reluctant to talk when he first arrived. One of them tossed him a glove and nodded to the outfield, so Rose ran out there to take his place. The men took turns hitting fungos, and he joined them. For the first half hour, all they did was hit, chase, catch, and throw. Rose blended in and they accepted him. Finally, the taller one, named Robby Blair, went to his truck and got a six-pack. He handed one to each player and one to Dan, and they took a break and lit smokes.

  “You can’t let anyone know we talked,”Blair said.“Our lives depend on it. But you gotta find the truth. Someone's gottaknow. Someone’s killing us all.”

  Dan Junior interrupted his father’s story.“You remember his name? You remember details like that? From almost sixty years ago?”

  Dan Senior raised his right index finger toward his son, who was sitting to his left.“Fuck yes, I remember. This, you don't forget. What’s more, I took notes.”

  He withdrew a small notebook from his jacket pocket and laid it next to the scrapbook.“I didn’t take these notes right away, and I didn’t ever use them. I started writing things down as soon as I could. Everything I could think of. And I’ve kept this. Don’t know why. Maybe for today. I always imagined one day someone would ask.

  “Blair told me that three of them were dead, and there were five of them left. Four of them were there at the baseball field that day.”

  Blair was their de facto leader.

  “We need someone to know, to trust,”Blair insisted.“Please, believe us.”

  Dan Rose promised them anonymity, met by silence. A light-haired ballplayer named Joe Fynn, Eve’s grandfather, was busting to talk. He jumped in.

  “Look, sir,”Fynnsaid.“We all moved this stuff. Us, and them guys who died, and the lieutenant.”

  “What stuff?”the reporter asked.

/>   Fynnshook his head.“Dunno.”

  The biggest player, Ken Keller, finally spoke.

  “Bullshit. We know what it was,”he said.“We transported this flying saucer, or what was left of it. Pieces. Boxes of it. We took it from Patterson to a place in Columbus. Now someone’s killing us off, one by one.”

  Dan Rose noticed the fourth airman he met that 1955 morning in Dayton wasn’t talking and didn’t seem to want to talk. He was there, but his eyes made it clear he wasn’t a part of the conversation.

  Blair saw the reporter staring at his friend.“We’re all scared,”he said.

  “What’s this about a flying saucer?”Rose asked.

  Blair lit up another cigarette.

  “We’re not supposed to know. We're not supposed to talk about it,”he said.“But screw them. After what’s happened to Sergeant Petrelliand Rusty and that other guy, what was his name?”

  “Vanderhoff,”Fynn offered

  “Vanderhoff,”Blair continued.

  Dan saw Blair’s hand was shaking.

  “It was all this metal, and scraps of something and shit. And boxes. There were some big crates too. We never saw what was in 'em. Stuff we did see, none of us ain’tnever seen nothing like it. Some of it we moved into the trucks with a front-end loader. That was Rusty and Keller. Some of it we carried in boxes and bags.”

  “It was like scooping up empty bags, that stuff,”Keller said.“I don’t think we needed the loader. Two, three, of us could’ve lifted the biggest pieces, easily. Wasn't any heavier than the wood crates they wasin. And there was stuff wasn't crated because it was too big.”

  Except for the silent one, the airmen interrupted one another trying to describe the cargo they hauled from a hangar. Their descriptions came fast, almost like babble, but Dan kept up. The biggest pieces were the size of small cars. Smooth and shiny materials that were broken and torn, but they couldn’t seem to hurt it, even when it fell off the front-end loader. It was all very lightweight. There were boxes of fabric and pieces of plastic. Flat glass instruments. Three crates they didn’t know what was inside.

  The unit had eight men including a lieutenant and the sergeant. The sergeant was dead now. They were drawn from eight different units. Most of them never knew each other, though Blair, Keller, and Rusty played ball together in a base league.