by Ian Douglas
Even so, that was all she would know. SEALs didn’t talk about their missions, even when they weren’t classified. The barflies who claimed to be Navy SEALs to any and all who would listen were fucking liars, every damned one of them.
“It’s just I worry about you,” she said.
“And if you knew where I was and what I was doing, that wouldn’t help one little bit, now, would it?”
She sighed. “I guess not.”
“So . . .” He gave her butt a stinging slap. “Let’s go to the beach!”
“Ummm . . .” She was working her way down his chest with kisses . . . then down his stomach. “In a minute,” she told him. “In just a minute . . .”
It took considerably longer than a minute, but eventually they worked their way down the steep slope and onto the sand at Black’s Beach, a tough-to-reach stretch of coastline just north of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute and Torrey Pines bluffs.
Gerri had brought him here a month ago. Divided between the city of San Diego and Torrey Pines State Park, the northern part of the beach had long been a secluded gathering place for naturists. Technically, public nudity was illegal in California, and the city of San Diego had banned nude sunbathing on the southern part of the beach in the ’70s, but the part of Black’s Beach belonging to the park was still clothing optional, unofficially at least. Gerri and Hunter found a good spot, put down a blanket, and peeled out of their shirts and swimsuits.
In the middle of October there weren’t many other people in evidence, either clothed or nude. The air was cool for Southern California—sixty-two degrees with a strong, offshore breeze—and the powerful surf pounded on the rocks. An underwater canyon out there funneled the incoming waves, and made the southern part of the beach a mecca for experienced surfers. A couple of surfers were out there now, riding in on a big roller.
Hunter glanced up at the sky . . . then back to the bluffs looming over the beach.
No one.
“Mark?” his companion asked. “What’s worrying you?”
“What makes you think anything is worrying me?”
“You asked me to drive in my car. You never do that. During the drive here, you kept checking behind us, like you thought we were being followed. In the parking lot you took your time checking out everything: the people on the deck over at Scripps, the other cars in the lot, even the sky. When we came down the trail, you kept looking back over your shoulder. And now you’re doing it again.”
“Sorry. Am I that obvious?”
“Yes! And it’s driving me nuts!”
He scanned the deep blue and empty sky overhead. Funny how he kept looking up, just in case. . . .
“I just . . .” Damn. What could he tell her? That he was afraid government spooks were watching them, even out here?
They were getting an eyeful right now if they were.
“I just . . . I’m just having a bit of nerves,” he told her. “Where we were, what we did . . . it was really rugged. To get out, we hiked over thirty miles in rough terrain like you wouldn’t believe. Took us two days to do it, and that was just because we were really humping it. I’m still . . . I don’t know. Still getting my head together, I guess.”
She lightly caressed his leg. “If you want to talk about it,” she said. “You know I won’t tell a soul.”
He nodded. “I know, babe.”
He believed her. Last month, she’d taken him to meet her parents in La Mesa, and when her father asked them what he did for a living, she’d laughed and said, “Dad! He works in San Diego and he has a short haircut! What do you think he does?” About 30 percent of the working population in San Diego worked at the Coronado bases.
When her father pressed the issue, she’d told him, “He takes wonderfully good care of me! And that’s all that matters, right? Now quit pestering him about it!”
And there the matter dropped. By the end of the evening, her parents were assuming that he was Navy . . . but the SEALs were never even mentioned. She was good.
Yeah, Gerri could keep a secret.
But he wasn’t going to test it.
Instead, they lay down on the blanket and watched the sky—the blessedly empty sky—for almost an hour, as the sun slowly westered toward the horizon.
“Tell me something, babe.”
“Sure.”
“What’s your take on UFOs? Life on other planets?”
“Flying saucers?”
“I guess.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I believe there’s life out there. I mean, the universe is so big, right? There has to be other life . . . other intelligence. To assume anything else seems pretty damned arrogant.”
“Yeah . . .”
“But according to everything I’ve read, even the nearest stars are so awfully far away. You have to wonder how any of those races could make it all the way here. If you believe the saucer nuts, Earth must be like LAX, with thousands of UFOs zipping in from space every year. That just doesn’t sound very likely to me.”
“Yeah. That’s what I always thought.”
The words just slipped out. He’d intended them to mean simply that—that he’d long believed in extraterrestrial life, but not in UFOs. But the way he’d said it sounded more like, “I thought that before . . . but not now.”
“So . . . you saw a UFO?” she asked.
Damn. She was quick on the uptake. But one of the things Hunter liked about Gerri was how quick she was, how smart, so he wasn’t exactly surprised.
“I don’t know.” He didn’t like the idea of lying. Perhaps misdirection was the best way to go. “Remember, all UFO means is ‘unidentified flying object.’ Doesn’t necessarily mean spaceships. Lots of stuff in the sky could be unidentified, depending on circumstances.”
“Yes,” she pressed, “but you’re a trained observer, right? Disciplined. You know aircraft, especially military. You’re not going to mistake the planet Venus for a spacecraft.”
“Right now, babe, I don’t know what I believe.”
“Tell me about it?”
“Uh-uh. Not now. Just that I saw . . . something. But maybe I hallucinated everything.”
Hunter’s cell phone, tucked into a pocket of his shirt lying in the sand nearby, buzzed.
“Now, who the hell is calling you on your day off?”
“Don’t know,” he answered. “Unless they’re canceling liberties . . .”
He fished the phone out of the shirt and held it to his ear. “Hunter.”
“Well, well, well,” a voice said on the other end of the line. “Lieutenant Commander Hunter.”
“Yes . . . ?”
“Right now, Commander, you are on thin ice. Very thin ice. . . .”
Now, what the hell? “Who is this?”
“Never mind that. You should be more concerned about yourself. Or, if you’re not worried about being court-martialed, you might at least give some thought to the safety of that pretty little girl sitting next to you.”
“What the fuck!” He sat up, looking around, both nervous and angry.
And he was leaning toward “angry” more and more.
“Hey,” the voice continued, “we know you like Gerri Galanis. Pretty. Smart. An amazing dancer. And we know she’s fantastic in bed! We know. It would be such a shame if anything . . . unpleasant happened to her. Quite a waste.”
The threat, awful in its hackneyed melodrama, like something out of the pages of some cheap detective novel, left Hunter dumbfounded. He opened his mouth to reply—he had no idea what he was about to say—and then he realized the line had gone dead.
He lowered the phone, then glanced up at the bluffs over the beach. A solitary figure stood up there, silhouetted against the early evening sky.
The figure raised one hand . . . and waved.
Fuck!
“Mark!” Gerri cried with concern. “What’s the matter? You’re white as a sheet!”
He took a deep breath. “Never mind. C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”
“Why? D
id they recall you?”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
He looked back up the bluff. The lone figure was gone.
They got dressed, gathered up the blanket, and started up the long and rugged trail back to the parking lot at the top of the bluff, the mood subdued. Behind them, in the distance, several naked people were playing volleyball while others watched, and a couple of wet-suited surfers cruised a thundering wave toward the shore.
Maybe, he thought, it would be best if he didn’t see Gerri for a while.
Hell, maybe it would be best if he never saw her again.
Chapter Three
Decades ago, visitors from other planets warned us about the direction we were heading and offered to help. Instead, some of us interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after. . . . Trillions . . . of dollars have been spent on black projects which both Congress and the Commander-in-Chief have been kept deliberately in the dark.
Paul Hellyer, former Canadian defense minister, 2010
21 February 1954
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 t
hen 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.