Area 51

CHAPTER 21

The first thing Colonel Dickerson did as his command-and-control helicopter zeroed in on the personnel beacon from Bouncer Three was have his aide, Captain Travers, remove the silver eagles on his collar and replace them with two stars. That was for any military personnel they might run into. The typical military mentality viewed generals as gods, and that was the way Dickerson wanted people responding to his orders this night.

“ETA to beacon two minutes,” the pilot of the UH-60 Blackhawk announced over the intercom.

Dickerson glanced out the window. Three other Blackhawks followed, spread out against the night sky, their running lights darkened. He hit the transmit button for his radio. “Roller, this is Hawk. Give me some good news. Over.”

The response from his second-in-command at the main White Sands complex was immediate. “This is Roller. I’ve got people awake here. The duty officer is rounding us up some transport. They’ve got two lowboys we can use and a crane rated for what we need for recovery. Over.”

“How long before you can get them out to the range? Over.”

“An hour and a half max. Over.”

“Roger. Out.”

The pilot came on the intercom as soon as Dickerson was finished. “There he is, sir.”

Dickerson leaned forward and looked out. “Pick him up,” he ordered.

The Blackhawk descended and landed. The man on the ground sat on his parachute to prevent it from being inflated by the groundwash of the rotor blades. Two men jumped off the rear of Dickerson’s aircraft, ran over to Captain Scheuler, and escorted him back to the bird, securing the parachute.

Scheuler put on a headset as soon as he was on board.

“Have you picked up Major Terrent’s signal?” he asked.

Dickerson indicated for the pilot to take off. “No. We’re going to the disk transponder.”

“Maybe his equipment got damaged when he was getting out of the disk,” Scheuler said.

Dickerson glanced across at the pilot, who met the look briefly, then went back to flying. There wasn’t time to tell Scheuler about the slight slowing in descent of Bouncer Three just before impact.

“ETA to disk transponder?” Dickerson asked.

“Thirty seconds.”

The pilot pointed. “There it is, sir.”

“Shit,” Dickerson heard the copilot mutter. And that was a rather appropriate comment on the current condition of Bouncer Three. He keyed his radio. “Roller, we’re going to need a dozer and probably a backhoe too. Over.”

His aide back at main base was ready. “Roger.”

The pilot brought the aircraft to a hover, the searchlight on the belly of the helicopter trained down and forward on the crash site. Bouncer Three had hit at an angle. Only the trail edge was visible, sticking up out of the dirt ridge it had impacted into. Knowing the dimension of the disk, Dickerson calculated that it was buried at least twenty feet into the countryside.

“What about the beacon on the hatch?” he asked Captain Travers.

“Nightscape Two has it on screen and is closing on it. About four miles to the southwest of our location,” Travers responded.

They had to clean up every single piece of gear and equipment. There was always the chance that someone they had to recruit to help with the recovery — such as the drivers of the lowboys or the bulldozer or crane operator — might talk, but as long as there was no physical evidence, they were good to go.

“Let’s land,” Dickerson ordered.

General Gullick scanned the haggard faces around the conference table. There were two empty seats. Dr. Duncan had not been informed of, or invited to, the night’s activities, and Von Seeckt was, of course, absent. As recorder and data retriever, Major Quinn was seated away from the table, at a computer console to Gullick’s left.

“Gentlemen,” Gullick began, “we have a problem occurring at a most critical time. We have Bouncer Three down with one casualty at White Sands. We also have six aircrews currently being debriefed on the night’s events. And all we have gained against those potential security breaches is a replay of the events of the other night. We have more pictures of this foo fighter to add to our records and we have almost the exact same location in the Pacific Ocean that it disappeared into.”

Gullick paused and leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers. “This thing, this craft, has beaten the best we could throw against it, including our appropriated technology here.” He looked at Dr. Underhill. “Any idea what it did to Bouncer Three?”

The representative from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory held a roll of telemetry paper in his hands. “Not until I get a chance to look at the flight recorder and talk to the crewman who survived. All I can determine from this,” he said, shaking the paper, “is that there was a complete loss of power on board Bouncer Three in conjunction with a near collision with the foo fighter. The power loss lasted for one minute and forty-six seconds, then some power began returning, but too late for the pilot to compensate for the craft’s terminal velocity.”

Dr. Ferrel, the physicist, cleared his throat. “Since we don’t understand the exact workings of the propulsion system of the disks, it makes it doubly hard for us to try to figure out what the foo fighter did to Bouncer Three to cause the crash.”

“What about something we do understand?” Gullick asked. “We certainly understand how helicopters fly.”

Underhill nodded. “I’ve gone over the wreckage of the AH-6 that crashed in Nebraska, and the only thing I have been able to determine is that it suffered complete engine failure. There was no problem with either the transmission or hydraulics or else no one would have survived the crash. The engine simply ceased functioning. Perhaps some sort of electrical or magnetic interference.

“The pilot is still in a coma and I have not been able to interview him. I have some theories, but until I can work on them, I have no idea how the foo fighter caused the engine on that aircraft to cease functioning.”

“Does anyone,” Gullick said, with emphasis, “have any idea what these foo fighters are or who is behind them?”

A long silence descended on the conference table.

“Aliens?”

Ten heads swiveled and looked at the one man who didn’t rate a leather seat. Major Quinn seemed to sink lower behind his portable computer.

“Say again?” Gullick said in his deep voice.

“Perhaps they are aliens, sir,” Quinn said.

“You mean the foo fighters are UFOs?” General Brown sniffed.

“Of course they’re UFOs,” General Gullick cut in, surprising everyone in the room with the harshness of his tone. “We don’t know what the fuck they are, do we? That makes them unidentified, right? And they fly, right? And they’re real objects, aren’t they?” He slapped a palm down on the table top. “Gentlemen, as far as the rest of the world is concerned we’re flying UFOs here every week. The question I want an answer to is who is flying the UFOs that we aren’t?” He swiveled his head to Quinn. “And you think it’s aliens?”

“We have no hint that anyone on Earth possesses the technology needed for these foo fighters, sir,” Quinn said.

“Yes, Major, but the Russians sure as shit don’t think we possess the technology to make the bouncers either. And we don’t,” Gullick hissed. “My point is, has someone else dug up some technology like we have here?”

Kennedy, from CIA, leaned forward. “If I remember rightly from my inbriefing, there were other sites listed on the tablets that we never had a chance to look at.”

“Most of those sites were ancient ruins,” Quinn said quickly, “but the thing is, there are more high runes at those sites. Who knows what might be written there? We haven’t been able to decipher the writing. We do know that the Germans deciphered some of the high runes, but that was lost in World War II.”

“Lost to us,” Gullick amended. “And it’s not certain that the Germans were able to read the high runes. They might have been working off of a map like we did when we went down to Antarctica and picked up the other seven bouncers. Remember,” Gullick added, “that we just uncovered what was at Jamiltepec eight months ago.”

That caught Major Quinn’s attention. He had never heard of Jamiltepec or of a discovery having been made there related to the Majic-12 project. Now, though, was not the time to bring it up.

Kennedy leaned forward. “We do have to remember that the Russians picked up quite a bit of information at the end of World War II. After all, they had a chance to go through all the records in Berlin. They also knew what they were doing when they conquered Germany. If people only knew the fight that went on over the scientific corpse of the Third Reich between us and the Russians.”

The last comment earned the CIA representative a hard look from General Gullick, and Kennedy quickly moved on.

“My point is,” Kennedy said quickly, “that maybe the Russians found their own technology in the form of these foo fighters. After all, we have no reports of Russian aircraft running into them during the war. And it is pretty suspicious that the Enola Gay was escorted on its way to Hiroshima. Truman did inform Stalin that the bomb was going to be dropped. Maybe they wanted to see what was going on and try to learn as much as they could about the bomb.”

“And remember, they put Sputnik up in 1957.” General Brown was caught up in Kennedy’s theory. “While we were dicking around with the bouncers and not pursuing our own space program as aggressively as we should have, maybe they were working on these foo fighters and reverse-engineering them with a bit more success than we had. Hell, those damn Sputniks looked like these foo fighters.”

Gullick turned to Kennedy. “Do you have any information that might be connected to this?”

Kennedy stroked his chin. “There’s several things that might be of significance. We know they have been carrying out secret test flights at their facility at Tyuratam in southern Siberia for decades, and we’ve never been able to penetrate the security there. They do everything at night and even with infrared overhead satellite imagery, we haven’t been able to figure out what they’ve got. So they could be flying foo fighters.”

“But these things went down into the Pacific,” General Brown noted.

“They could be launching and recovering off a submarine,” Admiral Coakley said. “Hell, their Delta-class subs are the largest submarines in the world. I’m sure they could have modified one to handle this sort of thing.”

“Any sign of Russian submarine activity from your people at the site?” General Gullick asked.

“Nothing so far. Last report I had was that our ships were in position and they were preparing to send a submersible down,” Coakley replied.

Major Quinn had to grip the edge of his computer to remind himself that he was awake. He couldn’t believe the way the men around the conference table were talking. It was as if they had all halved their IQ and added in a dose of paranoia.

Gullick turned his attention back to Kennedy and indicated for him to continue. “This might not have anything to do with this situation, but it’s the latest thing we’ve picked up,” Kennedy said. “We know the Russians are doing work with linking human brains directly into computer hardware. We don’t know where they got the technology for that. It’s way beyond anything worked on in the West. These foo fighters are obviously too small to carry a person, but perhaps the Russians might have put one of these biocomputers on board while using magnetic flight technology such as we have in the disks. Or they simply might be remotely controlled from a room such as we have here.”

“We’ve picked up no discernible broadcast link to the foo fighter,” Major Quinn said, trying to edge the discussion back to a commonsense footing. “Unless it was a very narrow-beam satellite laser link we would have caught it, and such a narrow beam would have been difficult to keep on the foo fighter, given its speed and how quickly it maneuvered.”

“Could Von Seeckt have been turned?” Gullick suddenly asked. “I know he’s been here from the very beginning, but remember where he came from. Maybe the Russians finally got to him, or maybe he’s been working for them all along.”

Kennedy frowned. “I doubt that. We’ve had the tightest security on all Majic12 personnel.”

“Well, what about this Turcotte fellow or this female reporter? Could either of them be working for the other side?”

Quinn started, remembering the intercept of Duncan’s message to the White House chief of staff. Gullick mustn’t have gotten to it yet. Again, he decided to keep his peace, this time to avoid an ass-chewing.

“I have my people checking on it,” Kennedy said. “Nothing has turned up so far.”

“Let’s see what Admiral Coakley finds us in the Pacific. Maybe that will solve this mystery,” Gullick said. “For now, our priorities are sterilizing the crash site at White Sands and continuing our countdown for the mothership.”

Major Quinn had been working at his computer, reading data from the various components of the project spread out across the United States and the globe. He was relieved when information began scrolling up. “Sir, we’ve got some news on Von Seeckt.”

Gullick gestured for him to continue.

“Surveillance in Phoenix has picked up Von Seeckt, Turcotte, and this female reporter, Reynolds.”

“Phoenix?” Gullick asked.

“Yes, sir. I ordered surveillance on the apartment of the reporter who tried to infiltrate the other night once I found out that Reynolds was asking about him. The surveillance just settled in place this evening and they’ve spotted all three targets at the apartment and are requesting further instructions.”

“Have them pick up all three and take them to Dulce,” Gullick ordered.

Quinn paused in sending the order. “There’s something else, sir. The men we sent to check out Von Seeckt’s quarters have found a message on his answering service that might be important. It was from a Professor Nabinger.”

“What was the message?” General Gullick asked.

Quinn read from the screen. “‘Professor Von Seeckt, my name is Peter Nabinger. I work with the Egyptology Department at the Brooklyn Museum. I would like to talk to you about the Great Pyramid, which I believe we have a mutual interest in. I just deciphered some of the writing in the lower chamber, which I believe you visited once upon a time, and it says: ‘Power, sun. Forbidden. Home place, chariot, never again. Death to all living things.’ Perhaps you could help shed some light on my translation. Leave me a message how I can get hold of you at my voice-mail box. My number is 212-555-1474.’”

“If this Nabinger knows about Von Seeckt and the pyramid—” began Kennedy, but a wave of Gullick’s hand stopped him.

“I agree that is dangerous”—Gullick was excited—“but of more importance is the fact that it seems Nabinger can decipher the high runes. If he can do that, then maybe we can…” Gullick paused. “Did our people check to see if Von Seeckt has contacted Nabinger?”

Quinn nodded. “Yes, sir. Von Seeckt called Nabinger’s service at eight twenty-six and left a message giving a location for them to meet tomorrow, or actually this morning,” he amended, looking at the digital clock on the wall.

“The location?”

“The apartment in Phoenix,” Quinn answered.

Gullick smiled for the first time in twenty-four hours.

“So we can bag all our little birds in one nest in a few hours. Excellent. Get me a direct line to the Nightscape leader on the ground in Phoenix.”

The engine on the crane whined in protest, but the earth gave before the cable, and inch by inch Bouncer Three was pulled up out of its hole. As soon as it was clear, the crane operator rotated right, bringing the disk toward the flatbed that was waiting. In the glow of the hastily erected arc lights, Colonel Dickerson could see that the outer skin of the disk appeared to be unscathed.

As soon as Bouncer Three was down on the truck, Dickerson grabbed hold of the side of the flatbed and clambered up onto the wood deck and then onto the sloping side of the craft itself. His aide and Captain Scheuler were right behind him. Balancing carefully, Dickerson edged up until he was at the hatch that Scheuler had thrown himself out of two miles above their heads.

The interior was dark with the power off. Taking a halogen flashlight off his belt, Dickerson shone it down on the inside. Despite having fought in two wars and seen more than his share of carnage, Dickerson flinched at the scene within. He sensed Scheuler coming up next to him.

“Oh, my God,” Scheuler muttered.

Blood and pieces of Major Terrent were scattered about everywhere inside. Dickerson sat down with his back to the hatch, trying to control his breathing while Scheuler vomited. Dickerson had been a forward air controller during Desert Storm and had seen the destruction wrought on the highway north out of Kuwait near the end of the war. But that was war and the bodies had been those of the enemy.

Goddamn Gullick, he thought. Dickerson grabbed the edges of the hatch, and lowered himself in. “Let’s go,” he ordered Scheuler, who gingerly followed.

“See if it still works,” Dickerson ordered. He’d sure as hell rather fly it back to Nevada than have to cover it up and take back roads by night.

Scheuler looked at the blood- and viscera-covered depression that Terrent had occupied.

“You can take a shower later,” Dickerson forced himself to say. “Right now I need to know whether we have power, and we don’t have time to dean this thing up.”

“Sir, I—”

“Captain!” Dickerson snapped.

“Yes, sir.” Scheuler slid into the seat, a grimace on his face. His hands went over the control panel. Lights came on briefly, then faded as the skin of the craft went clear and they could see by the arc lights set up outside.

“We have power.” Scheuler stated the obvious. He looked down at the altitude-control level and froze. Terrent’s hand was still gripped tightly around it, the stub of his forearm ending in shattered bone and flesh. He cried out and turned away.

Colonel Dickerson knelt down and gently pried the dead object loose. Goddamn Gullick, Goddamn Gullick; it was a chant his brain was using to hold on to sanity. “See if you have flight control,” he ordered in a softer voice.

Scheuler grabbed the lever. Space appeared below their feet. “We have flight control,” he said in a rote voice.

“All right,” Dickerson said. “Captain Travers will fly with you back to Groom Lake. We’ll have pursuit aircraft flying escort. Got that, Captain?”

There was no answer.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Scheuler weakly said.

Dickerson climbed back out of the disk and gave the appropriate orders. Finally done, he walked away from the lights and behind the sandy ridge that the disk had crashed into. He knelt down in the sand and vomited.

The lights were dim in the conference room and Gullick was completely in the shadows. The other members of Majic-12 were gone, trying to get some long-overdue sleep or checking in with their own agencies — except for Kennedy, the deputy director of operations for the CIA. He had waited as the others filed out.

“We’re sitting on a fucking powder keg here,” Kennedy began.

“I know that,” Gullick said. He had the briefing book with Duncan’s intercepted message in it. It confirmed that Turcotte had been a plant, but of more import was the threat that Duncan would get the President to delay the test flight. That simply couldn’t be allowed.

“The others — they don’t know what Von Seeckt knows, what you and I know, about the history of this project,” Kennedy said.

“They’re in it too far now. Even if they knew, it’s too late for all of them,” Gullick said. “Just the Majestic-12 stuff is enough to sink every damn one of them.”

“But if they found out about Paperclip—” began Kennedy.

“We inherited Paperclip,” Gullick cut in. “Just as we inherited Majic. And people know about Paperclip. It’s not that big of a secret anymore.”

“Yeah, but we kept it going,” Kennedy pointed out. “And what most people know is only the tip of the iceberg.”

“Von Seeckt doesn’t know Paperclip is still running, and he was only on the periphery of it all back in the forties.”

“He knows about Dulce,” Kennedy countered.

“He knows Dulce exists and that it’s connected somehow with us here. But he was never given access to what has been going on there,” Gullick said. “He doesn’t have a clue what’s going on there.” The right side of Gullick’s face twitched and he put a hand up, pressing on the pain he felt in his skull. Even thinking about Dulce hurt. He didn’t want to speak about it anymore. There were more important things to deal with. Gullick ticked off the problems on his fingers. “Tomorrow, or more accurately this morning, we take care of Von Seeckt and the others there in Phoenix. That will close that leak down.

“By dawn we’ll have the mess at White Sands all cleaned up and the aircrews involved debriefed and cleared.

“We have the eight o’clock briefing by Slayden, which should help get Duncan off our back for a little while. Long enough.

“Admiral Coakley should be giving us something on these foo fighters soon.

“And last but not least, in ninety-three hours we fly the mothership. That is the most important thing.” General Gullick turned, facing away from Kennedy to end the discussion. He heard Kennedy leave, then reached into his pocket and pulled out two more of the special pills Dr. Cruise had given him. He needed something to reduce the throbbing in his brain.

The seats on both sides of him were empty and there were photos spread out all over the row. He drank the third cup of coffee the stewardess had brought him and smiled contentedly. The smile disappeared just as quickly, though, when his mind came back to the same problem.

How had the high rune language been distributed worldwide at such an early date in man’s history, when even negotiating the Mediterranean Sea was an adventure fraught with great hazard? Nabinger didn’t know, but he hoped that somewhere in the pictures an answer might be forthcoming. There were two problems, though. One was that many of the pictures showed sites that had been damaged in some way. Often the damage appeared to have been done deliberately, as in the water off Bimini. The second, and greater, problem was that many of the pictures were of high runes that were, for lack of a better word, dialects. It was a problem that had frustrated Nabinger for years.

There were enough subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, differences in the high rune writing from site to site to show that although they had very definitely grown from the same base, they had evolved differently in separate locales.

It was as if the root language emerged in one place, been taken at a certain point to other locales, then evolved separately at each place. Which made sense, Nabinger allowed.

It was the way language worked. It also fit the diffusionist theory of the evolution of civilization.

The real problem for Nabinger — beyond the fact that the dialect made translation difficult — was that the content of the messages, once translated, was hard to comprehend.

Most of the words and partial sentences he was translating referred to mythology or religion, gods and death and great calamities. But there was very little specific information.

Most of the high runes in the pictures seemed related to whatever form of worship existed in the locale they were found in.

There was no further information about the pyramids or the existence or location of Atlantis. There were several references to a great natural disaster sometime several centuries before the birth of Christ, but that was nothing new. There was much emphasis on looking to the sky, but Nabinger also knew that most religions looked to the sky, whether to the sun, the stars, or the moon. People tended to look up when they thought of God.

What was the connection? How had the high rune language been spread? What had Von Seeckt found in the lower chamber of the Great Pyramid? Nabinger gathered up the photos and returned them to his battered backpack.

Too many pieces with no connection. With no why. And Nabinger wanted the why.