Читать книгу Alien Secrets - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 12

PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. Eisenhower stood on the deck outside the control tower, looking out into the night across the endless salt flats and hard-packed sands of Muroc Air Force Base in California. He’d been on vacation at nearby Palm Springs when his aides had arrived that evening to usher him off to this godforsaken stretch of emptiness. Not that it didn’t have its own austere beauty. The sky in particular was brilliantly clear, strewn with stars.

It might have been nice if several searchlights hadn’t been switched on, their beams aiming up into the sky.

“I don’t see a damned thing,” Eisenhower said, testily. “Did they stand us up?”

An aide checked his watch. “It’s only a little past midnight, Mr. President. Let’s wait a few minutes yet and see.”

Other people in the select group stood in a huddle nearby: Edwin Nourse, who’d been Truman’s chief economic advisor; Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, current head of the Los Angeles Catholic Church; Franklin Allen, an eighty-year-old former reporter with the Hearst Group, leaning heavily on his cane; and perhaps fifteen others. Eisenhower’s aides had rounded them up that evening and driven them up to Muroc as “community leaders,” asking them to witness what promised to be a spectacular event—the dawn, perhaps, of a new era for Humanity.

“We’ve got incoming,” a voice inside the tower called over a loudspeaker. “From the north-northwest, range fifty miles.” Eisenhower turned to face that direction and raised his binoculars to his eyes. He had not, he decided, been this nervous since he’d waited out D-day in his command post, code-named “Sharpener,” in a Hampshire woods.

A star just above the horizon grew steadily brighter. “There it is, sir!” an aide called.

“I see it.”

The star swelled rapidly to a brilliant light, like an aircraft’s landing lights, and it was accompanied now by four other objects traveling behind it. Through the binoculars, Eisenhower could see that the craft was flat and circular, perhaps sixty yards across. Windows across the leading edge were the source of the light, too bright for him to see inside.

Utterly silent, the craft came to a stop, hovering two hundred yards out from the control tower, extended four landing legs, then gently settled onto the hard-packed desert floor. Light spilled onto the ground as a garage-sized hatch slid open, and a ramp extended in apparent welcome.

“Well,” the President said, “I guess it’s showtime.”

“I still don’t like this, Mr. President,” Sherman Adams said. Adams was Eisenhower’s chief of staff, the first man ever to hold that title. “Not one bit. We can’t help you in there if they’re hostile—”

“I’ll be fine, Sherman.”

“Sir, if this is an invasion, what’s the first thing they would do? Take down the target’s leadership! They could kidnap you, hold you hostage. Or—”

“Enough, Sherman! I am going to do this.” Eisenhower gave Adams a hard glare. His senior advisor already had a nickname among his opponents in Washington: The Abominable No Man. He was outspoken and direct, and not afraid to tell the President exactly what he thought.

Which was why the former Army five-star general appreciated him as much as he did.

But right now, Sherman was wrong. Still, Eisenhower relaxed the glare into a wry grin. “Let Dick know what happened if things go south.” Vice President Richard Nixon was back in DC, having been deliberately kept out of the loop. “But don’t worry. If they wanted me dead, they wouldn’t go to all of this trouble to arrange a meeting. They’d just vaporize the White House.

“It’s what I’d do, at least.”

Eisenhower handed Adams his binoculars, turned, and descended the metal steps from the control tower deck. A couple of Marine honor guards fell into step behind him.

It will be all right.

The meeting had been arranged by Project Sigma, a classified program signed into existence by Eisenhower when he took office. It worked under the direction of Truman’s shadowy MJ-12, the committee tasked with overseeing contact with the aliens, and the recovery of their spacecraft. Just last month, Sigma had detected large alien spacecraft in orbit around Earth, and soon established radio contact with them—in English, which suggested that these creatures had been observing Earth for some time. The aliens had asked to talk with Earth’s leadership; Sigma had suggested in return an initial meeting with the President of the United States, and specified a place for the encounter, far out in the desert away from reporters and an already anxious public. Just two years ago, large numbers of UFOs had overflown Washington DC, and while that had been hushed up, the country, already nervous about the global march of Communism and a Soviet hydrogen bomb, needed to be kept calm.

America had tested its first thermonuclear device on November 1, 1952. Less than a year later, just six months ago, the Russians had exploded their own weapon, known to US Intelligence as Joe-4 because it was the fourth known nuclear test carried out at the behest of Joseph Stalin. The iron curtain predicted by Churchill in 1946 had just become terrifyingly deadly. The so-called Cold War, emerging from the Truman Doctrine of 1947 which called for the containment of the Soviet Union, was on the point of turning hot.

One reason Eisenhower had agreed to this meeting was the chance that the extraterrestrials might be able to provide the United States with technologies, possibly weapons, that would help America stay secure in the face of Communist aggression. That, Eisenhower was the first to admit, was the longest of long shots, but any chance at all made the risk worthwhile.

He reached the bottom of the ramp. “Stay here, fellows,” he told the Marine bodyguards. “I’ll be back soon.”

“Sir—” one of the Marines began.

“It’s okay, son. They want just me.”

As if on cue, a figure was waiting for him, silhouetted against the light at the top of the ramp. Strange. The figure looked human: six feet tall, with long hair, and a raised hand with five fingers. Eisenhower had been expecting one of the short aliens, the “Extraterrestrial Biological Entities,” recovered from several crashed saucers. Those things gave him the creeps. So to see this new kind of being?

What the hell?

A long and anxious hour later, Eisenhower returned to the tower, looking white and shaken. “My God, Sherman,” he whispered. “My God in heaven.”

“What was it, Mr. President? What happened?”

“They offered … a trade,” Eisenhower told his aide. “A negotiated exchange. They offered to begin giving us technology. No weapons, but free energy and antigravity and …” He stopped, then shook his head. “Jesus Christ.”

“And what did they want in return, sir?”

“Nothing much. Unilateral nuclear disarmament. We get rid of our nukes, and they give us toys … trinkets, really. I felt like a South Seas island native being offered beads and baubles by the Europeans!”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them ‘no,’ and then I told them ‘hell no!’ of course.”

Adams seemed relieved. “That’s wise, Mr. President. If we lose our nuclear deterrent …”

“That’s what I told them. They were ready to sign a treaty with us, but I told them no. We will be staying in contact, though. Maybe we can still work something out.”

But privately, Eisenhower doubted that anything more would come out of this meeting in the desert. That disturbingly human alien had been adamant. Humans were on a deadly path which they must abandon … or face extinction. And while its English had been perfect, there was just the slightest hint of something foreign in the accent. Eisenhower, for his part, couldn’t help but wonder if these beings were in fact Germans, a Nazi remnant escaped from the collapse of their Reich, and somehow provided with advanced technology. There’d been rumors of just that scenario ever since Operation HighJump, in the Antarctic.

There was no way to confirm any of that, though. And so he would return to the hotel. His staff would concoct a story about him needing emergency dental surgery after he lost a crown at the fried chicken dinner last night. The whole incident would be kept hush-hush.

And he would go back to the mundane world of running a country, and do his best to forget those visitors and their trinkets.

But he knew he would always wonder if he’d made the right decision.

HUNTER WASN’T sure what was in store for him now. That morning, he’d received a peremptory summons to the office of Captain Scott Mulvehill, the CO of the Coronado facility, and presumed that he would be receiving new orders.

He was still seething, though, over the phone call on the beach. How dare they threaten his girlfriend, a complete innocent, just to shut him up! Perhaps even worse, the timing of the call, and the call itself, strongly implied that he was under constant surveillance. That crack about Gerri being good in bed … He recognized that for what it was: a crude and blunt declaration that they were watching, or at least listening in on him, even when he was in Gerri’s apartment. Was her apartment bugged? It must be. And the intrusion left him furious.

And clearly they’d been listening in on them at the beach. It hadn’t been a bug, a tiny microphone planted on him at one of the interviews. He knew that much. He hadn’t been wearing anything on the nude beach … and he’d been in uniform during the interviews. Or …

Now there was a thought. There were, he knew, ways to activate a cell phone from a remote location, and turn the device into a live mic even when it was switched off.

For that matter, a simple shotgun mic from the top of those bluffs might have been able to listen in on their conversation.

No matter how they’d done it, the blatant intrusion, the violation of his right to privacy had him boiling mad.

It also had him more paranoid than before, and terribly concerned for Gerri’s safety. If he was about to get new orders—like back to Virginia, or even another overseas deployment—then breaking things off with her might be the very best thing for both of them.

He wondered, though, if unseen voyeur spooks were going to be dogging him and all of his girlfriends from now on. His friends. His family. Or would they just arrange for a quick, simple accident, and shut him (and them) up permanently?

Damn it all!

He checked in with Mulvehill’s secretary and walked into the office. To his surprise, Mulvehill wasn’t there. Instead, it was a two-striper admiral, a rear admiral, who was waiting for him.

“Commander Hunter? Have a seat.”

“Sir! Thank you, sir.”

“I’m Rear Admiral Kelsey. I’m with … let’s just say I work for JSOC.”

JSOC was the Joint Special Operations Command, the multiple-service umbrella under which all of the US special ops groups served. JSOC’s command umbrella included DEVGRU, along with the 75th Rangers, Delta Force, and others.

“Yes, sir.” More important, to Hunter’s way of thinking, was the big, gaudy Budweiser pinned to the upper left of Kelsey’s blue uniform jacket.

The man was a SEAL. Or, rather, he might have been an active SEAL years ago, but been promoted up to senior management. As with the Marines, however, once a SEAL, always a SEAL.

There were no ex-SEALs.

What the hell is this about? Did I really fuck things up even loosely talking to Gerri?

Fuck.

Because, the thing was, rear admirals did not, in the normal course of duty, have anything to do with mere lieutenant commanders.

“I’m authorized to offer you a new billet—a very special billet. And a rather extraordinary deployment.”

That didn’t sound like he was in trouble. In fact, that sounded interesting. He perked up—if such a thing was possible when in the ramrod straight posture any SEAL would affect in front of top brass.

“Yes, sir. Where are you sending me?”

“I can’t tell you that, not yet. What I can say is that it will be a long deployment—probably in excess of two years. And it involves travel. A lot of travel.”

Hunter considered this. One very real possibility he’d been considering was the classic Navy response to a fuckup, which was to ship him out to someplace remote. So maybe he wasn’t out of the woods yet. “Counting penguins in Antarctica” was how such a duty change was phrased in a typical barracks bull session. And while that specific scenario didn’t seem very likely, the Navy did have a facility on the island of Adak, in the Aleutians—very remote, and very cold.

No, wait a sec. NAVFAC Adak had been closed in ’97. So what else was there?

Kelsey continued. “This assignment will be strictly on a voluntary basis. It will be dangerous, and it may involve combat, though we don’t know that for certain at this time.”

“I see, sir.” Combat was no problem. And danger was already in the job description. It was the secrecy that made Hunter a little cautious—there’d been too much of that in his life recently, and he couldn’t help but wonder if the events in North Korea were related to this new assignment. “And you can’t tell me about it unless I volunteer, is that it?”

“That’s it in a nutshell, Commander.”

“Two years?”

“At least—I can’t guarantee it won’t be longer. I should tell you this, as well: we have already approached several of your men. Two have refused the assignment. Both of them are married, so that’s completely understandable and it’s no reflection on them. The others say they will volunteer, but only if you sign on as well, as their CO.” Kelsey gave Hunter a wry near-grin. “It seems that you inspire considerable loyalty in your people, Commander.”

Hunter was thunderstruck at that. His squad was close and tight-knit, but he hadn’t realized that his men felt that strongly about it. “I … I’ll have to think about this, Admiral.”

“Of course, of course. Take all the time you want … just so long as I have an answer by 0900 hours tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow!”

“If you say yes, you’ll be shipping out for training tomorrow afternoon.”

“What kind of training?”

“Again, I’m not at liberty to say, Commander. It will be extensive and it will be tough, though. Might make SEAL training seem easy in comparison.” Hunter shuddered when he heard this, and Kelsey seemed to be at least a bit sympathetic—as sympathetic as a rear admiral could be with a grunt. “That’s all you need to know.”

“I see. And if I say yes and then wash out?”

“My recommendation? Don’t.” He seemed amused by the look on Hunter’s face. “Don’t worry. I have every confidence in you.”

“Thank you, sir. Question, Admiral?”

“Shoot.”

“Does this have anything to do with the spaceship my men and I saw in North Korea?”

Hunter had expected a neutral or negative answer—something like “Spaceship? What spaceship?” But that was not Kelsey’s response.

Instead, he scowled, his expression darkening like a thunderstorm. “Don’t you ever, ever ask me something like that again, Commander! You are completely out of line!”

“So you know what we saw over there?”

“I’m not at liberty to speak about it, and neither are you. I advise you to keep your thoughts on the subject to yourself. Do not make me regret asking you for this assignment.”

But the anger inside Hunter surged up and out in a furious blast. “Sir! Someone phoned me yesterday and threatened the life of my girlfriend. That was what was out of line!” He was shouting, and it was with a bit of struggle that he caught himself and dialed it back. “I’m sorry, sir. But ever since our return from Korea, I have been the subject of rather intensive surveillance, including, evidently, in bed! If my oath isn’t enough for you—”

Kelsey was mad, but it didn’t seem like it was solely at Hunter’s outburst. “Who made the threat? Who did you talk to?”

“Damned if I know. He didn’t leave me his fucking name and number.”

Kelsey seemed to consider this for a moment, then sighed. “Commander … let’s play a game of hypotheticals.”

Hunter was about to reply that he didn’t play games, but stopped the words before they came out of his mouth. This was a damned good time to keep his trap shut. “I’m listening, sir.”

“I’m not saying there are, but let’s pretend for a moment that there are aliens, okay? They’ve known about humans, have been visiting us, watching us, maybe even interfering with us for a long, long time.”

“I’m with you so far, sir.”

“Now, just hypothetically, let’s say that there are more than one group of aliens out there. Like in Star Trek. You have the Federation of good guys. You’ve got Vulcans, you’ve got humans, you’ve got … I don’t know. Lots of other good guys. But you have others that aren’t so good.”

“Okay …”

“Now, just suppose for the sake of argument, that the bad guys are trying to take over Earth. It’s an invasion, but they’re being sneaky about it. You see, there aren’t many of them, a few million, maybe, but there are seven billion of us. They might have really wizard superweapons, but they’re outnumbered at least a thousand to one.”

Hunter wasn’t ready to admit that a mere difference in numbers would stop aliens who had the technology to cross interstellar distances. “They wouldn’t need to be sneaky about it, sir. They just trot out the Death Star and obliterate the planet!”

“That’s Star Wars, Commander, not Star Trek. Your point is taken, though. With the technology they have, just about anything is possible. But let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that they want to take over the Earth, but they want to have the planet intact. Maybe they want us as slaves. Or, hell, I don’t know. For food.”

“Sounds like your typical scenario for a 1950s sci-fi B movie, Admiral.”

Kelsey nodded. “It does, doesn’t it? Again, this is all conjecture. But back to our bad guy aliens. They want to invade, but they don’t want to kill everyone, and they don’t want to blast the entire planet into space rubble, okay? So how would they go about taking over the Earth?”

“Well, if they looked like us, I guess they could infiltrate the government. Infiltrate all the governments of the world.”

“And if they didn’t look like us?”

“I don’t know, Admiral. Too many variables. Could they disguise themselves? Or infiltrate with a few key humans they’ve brainwashed or something? Use them as Manchurian candidates and slip them in to positions of power, but have them working for the aliens?”

“Bang on the money, Commander.”

“But … this is all hypothetical, right?”

“Completely. I just want you to understand that not everyone in the government is on our side. There are … elements, let’s say, perfectly capable of what you described. Eavesdropping. Blackmail. Strong-arm tactics. Threats. Threats to kill you or your girl or other people close to you. Even actual murder. Make people disappear.”

“And might these elements be aligned with various intelligence services?”

“CIA, FBI, DIA—you name it. A lot of our alphabet soup of current government agencies might have been compromised. Hypothetically speaking, of course. It wouldn’t take much. A few key people at the top, giving the orders.”

“Of course.”

“So what do you say, Commander?”

“I still need some time to think about it, sir.”

“Okay. But I do need your answer ASAP.”

“Oh-nine-hundred tomorrow. Yes, sir.”

He left, his mind whirling.

HE SPENT the night with Gerri.

“But where are they sending you, Mark?”

They were having dinner together at Top of the Market, a seafood and wine restaurant right on the bay with a fantastic view out over the water. Hunter’s paycheck didn’t normally stretch to include fine dining—not this fine—but he figured he owed a really special night to the girl he was about to dump.

For some reason, the food didn’t taste quite as good as he’d expected.

He’d left his cell phone at home, and made a point of asking her to do so, as well. He wasn’t going to spill any secrets, but, just in case, he didn’t want their dinner interrupted by unpleasant threats or bombast.

He didn’t think They could have bugged every damned table in every restaurant in San Diego.

“Can’t tell you, babe. Because they haven’t told me.”

They’d finished their dinner and were talking over the last of their wine—a good ’08 Merlot recommended by the waiter. Hunter had always thought you ordered white wine with fish, but apparently a red wine with their seared tuna was the exception to the rule.

“Isn’t that kind of strange?” Gerri asked. “I mean, is it usual to send people off and not tell them where they’re being sent?”

“Not really. But, well, in my line of work, it does happen. Look, you knew this could happen when you hooked up with me, right?”

“That doesn’t make this easy, Mark,” she said, irritated at his trying to turn this on her.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“And you don’t know how long you’ll be gone?”

“Uh-uh. But it might be a long time. Gerri …” He took a deep breath. “I guess what I’m trying to say … this evening is kind of a good-bye.”

“I got that. But you make it sound like good-bye forever!”

He swallowed. “It is. I’m sorry … but I’m not going to string you along. I don’t know when I’ll come back. I don’t know if I’ll be back.” He shrugged. “That’s just the way it is. I’m … sorry.”

Her lip quivered, and her eyes were luminous with tears, but she didn’t cry, not yet. She dabbed at one eye with her napkin. “I thought …”

“What? What did you think?”

“That we had something really special together, you and me.”

“We do.” He’d almost said “we did,” but he changed the tense from past to present at the last moment because he thought the same thing. “Gerr … you’ll just have to trust me. I really do care for you and—”

“I love you.”

For two months they’d been dancing around the concept of being in love like, well, like the way Gerri danced around her pole. This was the first time she’d said those words, and it hit Mark like a blow to the sternum.

“And I love you.” And he meant it, staggered by both that revelation and by what he was truly giving up by saying good-bye. “But I do not want you waiting for me.”

“Why not? You’re worth waiting for!”

He smiled. “I’m glad you think so. But, well … you deserve the best, the very best. Remember, my wife dumped me because I kept getting deployed overseas. I spent Christmas of ’09 sitting on top of a mountain in Afghanistan. The Christmas after that I was helping to train Kurds to kill ISIS bastards in Iraq. You deserve a hell of a lot better than that!”

“So you’re afraid I’ll treat you like your bitch of an ex?” The almost-tears were fading, replaced by anger.

“I’m afraid I won’t be around enough to treat you the way you should be treated.”

He didn’t add, “And I don’t want to be around if that means you might be killed.”

But he also didn’t tell her that he had a choice. He could tell Kelsey tomorrow that he didn’t want to go. But the outcome, he knew, would be the same so far as he and Gerri were concerned. He would be shipped off to the equivalent of Adak. There was some secret stuff going on in Uzbekistan right now, and there were SEALs over there taking part in the fun and games. And even if he just went back to Virginia, he would be gone.

He could imagine her asking to come along. She would be willing to pull up stakes and move across the country to stay with him; he could sense that in her now.

But he suspected that both of them would be looking over their shoulders all the time, half expecting a sniper’s bullet … or a mysterious brake failure … something that would take them both out of the way.

Hunter had been thinking about Kelsey’s Star Trek analogy. The bad guys, it seemed, both human and alien, played for keeps.

There was more to it than simple self-preservation, too, or protecting Gerri. Kelsey hadn’t been able to say much, but what he had said opened up some startling doors.

Hunter had seen a spaceship. His debriefing interviews, the way they’d treated him, convinced him that there was not a nice, simple, and purely terrestrial answer to the puzzle. He couldn’t prove it, but he’d seen a real spaceship, aliens were here, and they meant business.

And now, Kelsey’s talk about Star Trek politics suggested that the aliens were not friendly, did not come in peace, that they were interfering in human activities in a big way, and they were ruthless in how they were going about their business. This was no bunch of interstellar tourists stopping by to point and look at the funny humans. They meant to take over.

An invasion …

“Well … I don’t care what you say,” she told him. “When you come back Stateside, you look me up, okay? We can pick up where we left off.”

He bit back his first answer, then gave a reluctant nod. “Okay. But when I look you up, I’ll expect to find you with a husband and six kids, okay?”

“Stripping and cocktailing with six kids? That’ll be the day!”

“Not a stripper, remember? An ecdysiast.”

“Bastard. When do you ship out?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

“Damn! So soon? Who the hell did you fuck over to catch this shit?”

“Only you, I think.”

And then she cried.