‘I shot near you, damnit!’ Everest growled. Talking set off his wet cough. ‘Ain’t the same thing at all.’
‘You two saucer ghouls?’ Vigo asked, fixing us with sharp, liquid eyes.
‘No. Nothing of the kind.’
‘You work for the new folk who bought up the old Foster ranch?’
‘No. We’re looking for someone. Now, he may well have been one of these saucer ghouls you mentioned. We’re not really sure about that. But we do believe he came here. We think he may have been up at Area 51, then here, and maybe then in Roswell. That sound like these UFO nutjobs to you?’
‘Nutjobs?’ Vigo said with a groan as she helped Everest to his feet. She leaned the old man against her side, taking his arm in her hand. ‘You ever have the privilege to meet my daddy, I suggest you keep that sort of talk to yourself. Old as he is now, he’ll kick your ass for calling them nutjobs.’
‘Sorry. I meant no offence.’
‘Well, there was plenty taken. Look, I don’t know you or your friend there from a hole in the ground. I’m not saying I believe in little green men and all, but something sure as shit came crashing to earth back then and it weren’t no aircraft or weather balloon neither.’
‘Grey men,’ Everest said, correcting her. ‘They’d be grey men if they was anything at all.’
‘Whatever goddamned colour, Dale, what I’m trying to tell these fellahs here is that my daddy is no crank. He knows what he saw. And though maybe he don’t know exactly what it was that came down, he sure as shit knows what it wasn’t. Your daddy was the same way.’
Neither Terry nor I had it in us to argue. We helped Vigo ease Everest into the truck on the double-wide passenger seat. Got him comfortable and pulled the belt tight. When she closed the door on him, she turned back to us.
‘You want, you boys can follow me into Roswell. That’s the best hospital for this old fossil. I can tell you where to find your bunch of “nutjobs” – and believe me there are plenty of those, too.’
‘Thank you,’ Terry said. ‘Listen, we need to be kept out of this shooting business if it’s all the same to you. We’d have some explaining to do which we’d rather avoid. And Dale there would have to reveal why he fired on a couple of strangers for no good reason. We spoke to him about it and he’s going to tell them he never saw the shooter, and can’t recall precisely where it happened, either. He’ll tell the doctor that he did his own bandaging, and the police that he must have been close enough to a cell signal that he didn’t have to struggle too far before calling you. Now, are you going to be okay with that story?’
The woman looked between us, then nodded on a sigh. ‘I reckon it was that coot’s fault, and you did right by him afterwards. I hope you find whoever you’re looking for, fellahs.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Maybe you could give us a call, let us know how he’s doing and maybe we can tell you both what we discover along the way.’
Vigo nodded. We swapped numbers.
‘What were you expecting to find out here in the desert?’ she asked.
‘Trouble,’ Terry said.
‘And what do you think you’ll find in Roswell?’
‘More trouble.’
‘That what you two boys do with your day? Go around looking for trouble?’
‘We don’t necessarily go looking for it,’ I explained, giving her my best world-weary look. ‘But it seems to have a habit of finding us.’
Vigo smiled as if she knew exactly what I meant. Then we said goodbye, climbed into the Jeep, and followed her back to the city.
15
The bar was filled with UFO-related items filling almost every inch of wall space. Vigo had given us the location of the bar, and the name of the person to ask for once we got there. Sure enough, we made our way there, bought ourselves a couple of beers and the bartender agreed to pass on our request. He made a call from the bar phone.
While we had been waiting for Al Chastain to arrive, Terry and I discussed what our approach to the meeting ought to be. He was all for sliding a couple of drinks across the table and showing the stranger Vern Jackson’s photo before he had even picked up the first glass. I knew why. Terry thought we were wasting our time, and the sooner we had that confirmed the quicker we could both be on our way. I could tell he was fast losing patience with this line of investigation, and I could not entirely blame him.
My spin on things was different. It sounded to me as if this man we were about to meet with had a story to tell, a story he clearly enjoyed telling, a story that came with a reputation that endured beyond the confines of the bar. I reckoned that allowing him to tell his story might put him in a better frame of mind to answer our questions. Without even meeting the man, I got the distinct impression that whilst alcohol was the lubricating oil for the mechanism, the story was what opened up the spigot.
‘Where’s the harm in stroking his ego for a few minutes?’ I asked. I appreciated my friend’s position. We were being bounced around New Mexico, when all the time he was convinced that Vern’s story was playing out to the north-west in Nevada. ‘We give him twenty minutes to tell his tale. Ten minutes later we’re out of here. I’m asking you for half an hour more, Terry.’
‘It’s your rodeo,’ he said by way of a response.
I raised my eyebrows. ‘Get you with the lingo. You’re really trying to fit in, cowboy.’
His smile matched my own. ‘I draw the line at chaps,’ he said. ‘Thirty minutes it is, Mike. Then I’m off to Vegas with or without you.’
Twenty minutes later an elderly man entered the saloon and made his way on unsteady legs across to the booth Terry and I had taken.
‘You the two Brits who want to hear what really happened the night that UFO came down?’ he asked.
‘That’s us,’ I admitted.
Chastain slid into the seat alongside Terry and let out a hearty chuckle. ‘Set me up with some Jim Beam, boys. Believe me, the truth ain’t out there, it’s in here.’
Chastain proved to be a charming old man. With his first Jim Beam knocked back in two thirsty swallows, he readily confirmed that a farmworker by the name of William Brazel had brought a pile of debris into Corona in the back of a pickup truck in the first week of July 1947. The area was rife with rumour that an airliner or fighter jet had come down a couple of weeks earlier, but since no one had found any wreckage, and no investigation had been carried out, it remained little more than barroom tattle until the moment Brazel showed a handful of Corona residents the pieces of metal he had with him.
That fired the starter pistol on what became known as the ‘Roswell Incident’. No sooner had the USAF been contacted at the nearby Roswell base, than the military and defence agents swooped in to seal off the area and kill the entire story. Those who claimed to have seen alien figures strewn across the desert, and mysterious metal debris thin as paper that moved on its own and was as strong as steel, were dismissed as tellers of tall tales, seeking to gain either cash or notoriety or both. The story rumbled on and on, and the conspiracy theorists refused to be denied. Ultimately, the official version was that a weather balloon had snapped its moorings and had eventually landed up in that wide-open space thirty-odd miles outside Corona.
‘Course, that ain’t what happened at all,’ Chastain said as he started in on his second shot. I watched the man slide it down smoothly, enjoying his enjoyment. For a man into his nineties he still had some tough meat on his bones and a good sharp mind, but rheumy eyes and a rattle in his bronchi suggested he had more bad days than good to look forward to.
‘So you’re saying it wasn’t a weather balloon?’ I said, urging him on, conscious of Terry’s growing impatience.
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying. Wasn’t no USAF jet fighter, neither.’
‘Then what was it?’
‘It was exactly what folk said it was. A UFO.’
I glanced across at Terry and frowned. I was confused. Delta Vigo had told us this man was a non-believer.
Chas
tain spotted our exchange of looks and cackled a wet-sounding laugh into his curled hand. ‘No, I don’t mean it was no spaceship manned by alien beings. Unidentified Flying Object. That’s what a UFO is, yeah? So that’s what this thing was – unidentified. Officially, anyhow. Now, the panic that set in when this craft came down led to all kind of mistakes being made by the military and department of defence agents in the first few days after the site was discovered. Story after story was leaked, but each had holes you could drive a tank through. Of course, they tried dismissing it as nothing more than a weather balloon having shot its moorings and come to ground, but that never sat right with the destructive force that put craters in the desert soil out there. So later they came around to “admitting” that it was part of a US experiment called Project Mogul, which was all wrapped up in the nuclear arms race and a desire to create aircraft that were lighter and faster and capable of going further than anything ever thought of before.’
‘You seem to be implying that this was also bogus,’ Terry said.
‘That’s because it was. Oh, the project itself was real enough. Mogul existed exactly like they told it. Just had nothing to do with that crash. Fact is, the craft was unidentified by the USA because it was a new Russian flying machine. A Russian aircraft so advanced that our own scientists and military personnel were scared rigid by it. Think about that for a moment. Better to have US citizens believe it was just about anything else other than what it actually was. In those days, not long after the Second World War, and just about slipping into the Cold War, there was not a snowball in hell’s chance of our government owning up to the Russians having more advanced technology than us.’
‘But it was manned, right?’ I said, leaning across the table. I knew we were not there for this, but I was intrigued and still had time out of my allotted thirty minutes. ‘That’s where these so-called alien figures come into it.’
He nodded. ‘The craft was small, scaled down from the real thing for testing purposes, and the Russians used only small men to crew the craft. Four of them in all. Tiny little fellahs they were. I guess you’d call them midgets at the time, or dwarfs these days. The size of them, added to the type of flight suits they wore, plus the breathing apparatus, made people think they’d set eyes on alien beings. In a way, I guess they kinda had.’
‘If you don’t mind my asking,’ Terry said. ‘How do you know all this, Al?’
‘Oh, I was there,’ he said looking up. In those watery eyes of his I saw no obvious deception. ‘I saw the wreckage, I saw the crew. You can find my name on the records to prove I was on base at the time. I was military police, and it was my job to help guard it all. Since I came out with my story – shamefully far too long after it all happened – there’s been three attempts on my life. My own government tried to shut me up. Now that I’m old and crusty I guess they figure nobody is gonna believe me anyway. But there you have it. No great mystery after all.’
It was some story. I didn’t know if I believed it or not, but I’d heard crazier things in my time. ‘Thank you for telling us, Al. I appreciate it. We both do.’
‘But it’s not why you’re here, huh?’ The old man smiled at me and his eyes glistened.
I took out my phone, found Vern’s photo and showed it to Chastain. ‘We’re looking for this man. It’s important to us that we find him, and soon. We believe he may have been one of these UFO hunters, who came down here looking to confirm his own beliefs. We wondered if he had stopped by for a chat with you, Al.’
Chastain was already shaking his head. ‘I can safely say that I have never knowingly laid eyes on this young man before in my life. Not in person, anyhow.’
I set my frown on him. ‘What do you mean by that?’
He jabbed a finger at the screen on my phone. ‘I seen him in another photo, on another phone.’
‘You have? When was this, Al? Who showed it to you?’
He smiled at us. ‘You got me at just the right time. A few days more, a few shots more, I might not have recalled the face. But I remember it well not only because I saw it just yesterday, but also because the pretty little thing that showed it to me was just about the most gorgeous creature I ever laid eyes on.’
16
The Days Inn, Roswell, stood on the corner of Highway 285 and West College Boulevard. On one side opposite was the New Mexico Military Institute, on the other a strip mall that featured a unit that sold and fitted tyres, a pub and eatery, and a large Starbucks. I sat in the Jeep out in the car lot directly facing the entrance to the Days Inn hotel on the other side of the highway, sipping my plain Americano. I stared through the windscreen as Terry came jogging across the road from the hotel, his face as inscrutable as ever.
As I looked at my friend I think I became more fond of him with every pace he took. Once again I had summoned him with a call out of the blue. Once again he had asked few question, and only then after agreeing to my proposal. This time it was overseas, unknown territory for us both. If that made any difference to the man, he never once showed it. If I excluded my ex-wife and daughter, Terry Cochran was not only my best friend, he was that by default because he was also my only friend. I was by far the more gregarious of us, but Terry was the kind of man who said so much without needing to speak. We seldom discussed our time in battlefronts together; no drunken, back-slapping tales of heroic deeds. Neither Terry nor I felt the need to reminisce on a regular basis in order to cement the bond between us. I treasured his friendship, and was certainly glad of his presence.
Earlier, back in the bar following his story and a third shot of bourbon, Chastain had provided us with a name, hotel and room number. Grace Bergstrom. Room thirty-five. From the bar it was a straight run east on the 70 and then north on the 285. It was evening by the time we got back in the Jeep, and we hit the local rush hour traffic. What was probably no more than a ten-minute drive at any other time of day took three times as long. That was okay by us – we had nowhere else to be. Not now that we had our first human lead.
Having avoided the traffic on his way across the highway, Terry jumped in beside me, the Jeep rocking as he settled into his seat. I handed him his cappuccino. ‘She’s not there,’ he said. ‘But she hasn’t checked out, either. She also gave a false name to Chastain. Her real name is Chelsea van Dalen, at least according to her ID. I got the bloke on reception to give away the make and model of her car as well; I went for broke and asked him if she was still in the Kia, but he told me she’d had to rent a vehicle and he had arranged it for her. She’s in a silver Ford Explorer.’
‘Good man. You want to sight it or should I?’
‘You go for it. I was wrong about this and you were right.’
‘I don’t know about that, mate. We may have found someone who maybe knows Vern. That’s not exactly a resounding success for a day and a half of our time.’
He sipped some of his coffee before responding. ‘It’s more than we had, and a lot more than I thought we would ever get out of this particular line of investigation. We’ll have more answers soon enough. I have a feeling this woman is crucial.’
‘You think Vern is still alive?’ I asked, the question having hung unasked between us for too long.
‘I have no idea. I have no answer, and neither do you.’
‘But what does your gut tell you?’
‘I honestly don’t know, Mike. The moment we find out why he’s here, why he disappeared, then I’ll have a better idea of what to expect. We both will.’
I nodded. ‘I’m afraid for him.’
After a brief pause, Terry nodded as well. ‘I am, too,’ he said.
I retrieved the sniper scope from the kit bag behind Terry’s seat. Held it to my eye and fingered in the correct focus. In a US city the night is never really dark, and even here on the northern outskirts we were illuminated by neon. The highway was wide, and although we would make the vehicle coming from a block away, there had to be plenty of them in these parts. This way, the moment we saw one I could get a close look
at the driver through the scope. We were looking for a young woman. A gorgeous one, if Al Chastain were to be believed. That was good enough for me.
‘I’m wondering what to say to Drew and Donna,’ I said. ‘I have to update them. What we have right now is something, but I wonder if it’s enough to call it in.’
‘Hey, you can also tell them we went UFO hunting, that we got shot at by a crazy old man who I ended up wounding in the crossfire, after which we dragged his sorry arse out of the desert and put him in the good hands of the youngest sexagenarian I’ve ever seen, and talked with a man who knows the absolute and final truth about the Roswell spacecraft crash incident.’
I laughed. ‘Yeah, pretty boring I suppose, when you put it that way.’
‘Wait it out,’ Terry suggested. ‘See how this plays. We could have a whole new story to tell once we’ve spoken to this woman.’
Nodding, I took out my phone anyway. ‘Tell you what, I’ll get an update from them instead.’
Drew had specifically asked me to use his phone when reporting back, so I called Donna’s number and started things off casually with a few questions about Wendy. A couple of minutes in she asked me how things were going. I told her I’d be calling Drew within the next hour or two, hopefully with a strong lead.
‘How goes it at your end?’ I asked, throwing it out there.
‘A little rough if I’m honest. The PI guys were getting nowhere. We had them working on the security feeds, but they seemed so disorganised that we had to let them go. Drew has another recommendation if you think you might need more eyes and ears.’
I was grateful for the thought. ‘Let’s put that on the back burner for now, see where we end up today. Did he get anywhere with his one-time IT colleague? He was going to ask her about gaining access to hotel feeds and then get back to me. I’ve not heard from him, though.’
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