Area 51

CHAPTER 16

With only fifteen minutes before his flight was scheduled to depart, Peter Nabinger debated whether he should check his answering machine, but impatience won out. He punched in his long-distance code and then his number.

Two rings and the machine kicked in. After the greeting he hit his access code, then the message retrieval.

“Professor Nabinger, this is Werner Von Seeckt returning your call. Your message was most interesting. I do know of the power of the sun, but I need to know about the rest of the message. Both what you have and what I have. I am going to a place where there are more runes. Join me. Phoenix. Twenty-seven sixty-five Twenty-fourth street. Apartment B-twelve. The twelfth. In the morning.”

The message ended. Nabinger stared at the handset for a few moments, then headed toward the gate with a bounce in his step.

Lisa Duncan was in her hotel room in Las Vegas. Gullick’s reasoning about the accommodation was that there were no suitable quarters available at Area 51 for her. She thought that was a bunch of bullshit, just like a lot of what she had seen and heard so far about Majestic-12, more commonly known as Majic-12.

Lisa Duncan had everything that was available in the official files about Majestic-12, and it was a pretty slim reading file. Majestic-12 had been started in 1942 when President Roosevelt signed a classified presidential order initiating the project. At first, no one had quite understood the strange facts that were being uncovered with the transfer by the British in the fall of 1942 of a German physicist, Werner Von Seeckt, and a piece of sophisticated machinery in a black box.

The British had not known what exactly was in the box, since they couldn’t open it, except that it was radioactive.

Since, in those days of the Manhattan Project, nuclear matters were the province of the United States, Von Seeckt and the box were sent over the ocean.

At first, it had been thought that the box was of German development. But Von Seeckt was clearly ignorant, and the contents of the box, once it was opened, raised a whole new set of questions. If it had been German, then most certainly they would already have won the war. There were symbols on the inside of the box — which they now knew belonged to a language called high rune — that the early Majestic-12 scientists puzzled over. One thing was clear, though: there was a map outline of North America on which a location had been marked— somewhere in southern Nevada, they determined.

An expedition armed with detecting equipment was sent out, and after several months of searching they discovered the mothership cavern. The men of Majestic-12 had quickly identified the black metal of the box container with the metal used in the struts of the mothership. They now had more information, but were no closer to figuring out who had left the equipment, or why the box had been placed in the pyramid and the ships left out here in the desert. The other bouncers had been discovered in Antarctica from maps found in Hangar Two. And they had been able to piece together that the Germans had most likely been led to the hidden chamber under the Great Pyramid by maps they had discovered elsewhere.

The MJ-12 program had remained the most highly classified project in the United States for the past fifty-five years, at first because of the atomic information. Then, after the Soviets had finally detonated their own bomb — using information stolen from the United States — the existence of the mothership and the bouncers was kept secret for several reasons.

Duncan turned the page in the briefing book and looked at the official reasons. One was the uncertainty of the public’s reaction should the information be released — a topic Dr. Slayden was supposed to cover in his briefing.

A second reason was that once flying the bouncers had been mastered, in the mid-fifties, the craft were incorporated into the Strategic Air Command on an emergency use-only basis. All of the bouncers were fitted with external racks for nuclear payloads to be used in case of national emergency. It was felt that because of their speed, maneuverability, and nonexistent radar signature, the bouncers would be a last-ditch method to get to the heartland of the Soviet Union to deliver a fatal blow in case of all-out war.

Another reason, spawned by the Cold War, was simply security. The Russians had been able to develop their own atomic weapons off of plans stolen from the U.S. It was feared that, even though the American scientists couldn’t figure out the propulsion system of the bouncers or even, for so many years, how to get into the mothership, the Russians might do a better job. That fear was especially heightened after the Russians lobbed Sputnik up into space, beating the United States to the punch.

One thing the report didn’t mention, though, Duncan knew, was the existence of Operation Paperclip and its effect on the MJ-12 project. Paperclip was officially launched in 1944 as the war in Europe was winding down, but Duncan felt that Paperclip really began the day Von Seeckt was shipped over from England to the United States.

Paperclip — a rather innocuous name for a very deceitful operation. As the war in Europe was ending, the United States government was already looking ahead. There was a treasure trove of German scientists waiting to be plundered in the ashes of the Third Reich. That most of those scientists were Nazis mattered little to those who had invented Paperclip.

When Duncan had first read of Paperclip, she’d been shocked by the blatant incongruity of the situation. The end justifies the means was the motto of those who recruited and illegally allowed the scientists into the United States. Yet at the same time, colleagues of those same scientists were being tried for war crimes where the defense of the end justifying the means had been ruled immoral. In many cases intelligence officers from the JIOA, Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, were snatching Nazi scientists away from army war-crimes units. Both groups were hunting the same men but with very different goals in mind.

Despite the fact that President Truman had signed an executive order banning the immigration of Nazis into the United States, the practice continued unabated, all in the name of national security.

Majestic-12 had started with Werner Von Seeckt — an undisputed Nazi — and it had continued over the years, using whatever means were required. Several of the scientists used in the early work on the bouncers and mothership were Nazis, recruited by Paperclip. While the names of some of the former Germans working on the NASA space project were highly publicized, the vast majority of the work covered by Paperclip went on unobserved. When news of the project became public, the government claimed that Paperclip had been discontinued in 1947. Yet Duncan had affidavits from an interested senator’s office that the project had continued for decades beyond that date.

One of the things that disturbed Duncan the most about the present state of affairs was not so much the work being done at Area 51 with the mothership and the bouncers.

What bothered her was what General Gullick was hiding. She was convinced he was holding something back. And she had a strong feeling it had something to do with other aspects of the MJ-12 program that they weren’t showing her.

The senator who had provided Duncan with information on Paperclip was under pressure from several Jewish groups to disclose the history of the project, with the possibility in mind of prosecuting some of those involved.

Duncan was concerned about the past, but she was more worried about the future. While the German physicists had gone to MJ-12 and the German rocket scientists had gone to NASA, the largest group of Nazi scientists involved in Paperclip had yet to be uncovered: the biological and chemical warfare specialists.

As advanced as German rocketry had been at the end of the war with the V-2 and jet aircraft, their advancements in the field of biological and chemical warfare had been chilling.

With plenty of human beings to experiment on, the Germans had gone far beyond what the Allies had even begun to fear. While the Americans were still stockpiling mustard gas as their primary chemical weapon, the Germans had three much more efficient and deadly gases by war’s end: tabun, soman, and sarin — the latter of which the American military immediately appropriated for its own use after the war.

Where were all these biological and chemical scientists whom Paperclip had saved from prosecution? Duncan wondered. What had they been working on all these years?

She put the briefing book down in aggravation. There were too many questions and everything was going too rapidly. Not only was this whole Paperclip issue a problem, but she also wondered about the Mothership test itself. Was Gullick moving ahead quickly with the flight for reasons that weren’t apparent, and in doing so was he overlooking problems with the mothership and its propulsion system?

She most definitely remembered the feeling of nausea she’d had in the hangar during the test.

She’d been sent here by the President’s advisers to check on the situation and look into the potential problems that revealing the existence of the MJ-12 project might create.

After all, the President had been in office three years already and his administration by default would be implicated in any cover-up.

She flipped open the lid on her laptop and went to work, typing out her findings so far.

She attached a cable from her laptop into a breadloaf-sized black box that she’d been given by a Secret Service man when she’d been inbriefed for her new job in Washington. All she knew was that the box was supposed to encrypt her message so that only the addressee could read it. She plugged the cord coming out of the box into her phone socket and waited until a green light glowed on the side— apparently it did its own dialing.

Duncan waited until the green light went out, then she unplugged all the machinery. She walked to the window of her hotel room and looked out, watching the people scurrying about, going into and out of casinos. How would they react if what was hidden in the desert beyond the buildings were revealed to them? If they learned that, at least once upon a time, mankind had not been alone in the universe?

If it was shown that while their ancestors were still living in caves and struggling to make arrowheads, aliens were visiting the Earth in craft we still couldn’t understand?

Those were the large, theoretical questions. Of more immediate concern to Duncan was to follow through on the instruction she’d received from the White House chief of staff. The President was concerned about what he had not been getting briefed on in the twice-yearly status reports from Majic-12. Because the organization had been around so long and had members from almost every major government agency of significance, he didn’t trust using normal channels to check it out; thus Duncan’s assignment. She’d had Turcotte assigned to her based on the recommendation of the President’s national security adviser. Apparently Turcotte was some kind of hero for actions on a classified mission overseas. She’d briefed him personally, but he had not yet called with anything.

Duncan rubbed her forehead, walked over to the bed, and lay down. She sincerely hoped the people out at Area 51 would give her some good answers tomorrow and that they’d be of a higher quality than the ones she’d been given so far.

Major Quinn noted the alert signal blinking in the upper right-hand corner of his computer screen. He finished the order he was working on and transmitted it, then accessed the signal that had caused the alert.

Since the Cube had access to every piece of top-of-the-line equipment the government possessed — and access to all codes and encryption techniques — Dr. Duncan’s message to the White House chief of staff had taken less than six seconds for the Cube computer to decrypt. Quinn read the text. He connected the name “Turcotte” to the man injured on the Nightscape mission into Nebraska. Another complication he didn’t understand. This was Gullick’s territory.

He printed out a hard copy and walked to the rear corridor, taking the message with him. Gullick wasn’t in his office. The code above the handle to Gullick’s private quarters read DO NOT DISTURB. Quinn stood for a few seconds in thought, hand poised to knock. Then he turned and went back to Gullick’s office. He clipped a top-secret cover on the message and placed it in General Gullick’s reading file.