ERO

by F. P. Dorchak

  Gee, no stretch of the imagination there.

  He’d just been in the most infamous location in the world, a location that officially did not exist. He’d read the books, but in all his imaginings, he’d never thought he’d ever be part of something that took him to Area 51. Let alone kidnapped by his own kind. As he was outbriefed by the general, he was told never to discuss what he’d done there, or that there was even a “there” to begin with. Whether or not he’d been kidnapped and to where were to forever remain their dirty little secret.

  But perhaps the strangest thing of all was that a frigging general—a three-star lieutenant general—had come to get him. A three-star had come to extract a first lieutenant.

  Had to be a first.

  But far from resting on any such laurels that also meant one thing: something about him—about his abilities and mission—was important enough to warrant said action, and by a member of said national command staff rank.

  This wasn’t going to be pretty.

  * * *

  Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field

  6 July 1986

  0325 Hours Pacific Time

  While their attack escort remained airborne, the Blackhawk Cherko and Hammond were in landed, immediately surrounded by the same type of crack security forces he’d unceremoniously met in that hallway in S-4. He was quickly surrounded by Black Team personnel and rushed away from the chopper, which immediately took off. The attack choppers remained hovering until he was ushered into a dark van. Once inside the van and again surrounded by Black Team personnel in the rear of the van, he heard what sounded like some of the choppers breaking off to go with the Blackhawk, while one or two remained to follow the van to wherever they were headed.

  The general looked to Cherko without a word as he settled into the front seat.

  “Thank you,” Cherko offered.

  What else could he say?

  He certainly wasn’t used to being in the presence of such elevated rank. Hammond turned part way to him and nodded.

  The van pulled away from the landing zone and took bumpy roads toward their (to him anyway) unknown destination. It seemed every time he got into one of these things it was never over paved road.

  Finally beginning to feel the hour, Cherko closed his eyes to take a nap, but didn’t want to keep them closed for too long, given his contacts were still in. He felt his pocket for his wetting solution. Still there.

  * * *

  A bump jarred Cherko awake.

  Opening his eyes, he looked out to brighter skies and a nondescript block of a building that looked as if it had been built during WWII.

  “We’re here, Lieutenant,” Hammond said.

  The van pulled to a stop and everyone piled out. The way these guys secured an area was powerful to see, the fact they were doing it for him—or maybe, more so the general—was humbling, if not totally cool. He knew this wasn’t a game, was obviously serious business, but he just wasn’t used to this kind of treatment, except within the realms of his imagination. He observed how the Black Team interacted with each other: crisp, highly professional, and silent. The phrase existed for a reason: if looks could kill. He had no doubt about that.

  Spirited into the building within his cocoon of security, himself and the general in the center of it, he wondered how the general felt about extracting a lowly first lieuy.

  He feel demeaned?

  His stature lessened?

  Embarrassed to be paired off with a lieutenant in such important matters, and soon to be—hopefully—explaining himself, again—to a lieutenant?

  Inside the building the doors were shut. Two personnel remained outside. One of the team members set down a compact box, extended a narrow antenna, and switched it on. A red light slowly blinked. The team member then used a hand-held device as he continued with his comrade-in-arms in checking out the building.

  Cherko stood uncomfortably alongside the general, who never looked to him. Thankfully the two Black Team members soon returned, obviously satisfied.

  “Area secured, General,” one said.

  Hammond nodded, and the team members departed outside. Hammond finally turned to him.

  “Lieutenant, I’m General Hammond, director of ERO.” Surprisingly, he stuck out a hand. Cherko looked to it.

  “Pleasure, sir,” Cherko said, shaking it.

  “Apologies for the dramatics, but I assure you, it was all necessary. What I’m about to tell you does not leave this room, your lips, or your fingertips. That box over there,” Hammond said, nodding toward it, “is emitting EMP to deny eavesdropping. But nothing’s ever 100% certain. Remember that.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Hammond again nodded; came in close to Cherko.

  “There are organizations out there that know about you, your abilities. Your involvement in The Program.”

  “Sir?”

  “I understand you are under orders not to acknowledge the Program, so just listen and make up your own mind.”

  Again, here was a guy of probably thirty-five years’ experience and a small universe on his lapels explaining himself to a lowly silver bar.

  Though the building had been declared secured, Hammond still looked around nervously; lowered his voice even more.

  “Lieutenant... you have been selected and carefully bred to be more than just a satellite operator. There are... elements... out there closely observing... guiding you toward destiny. Your destiny.”

  Cherko didn’t know whether it was just that he was tired, or what, but he felt... odd. In a dream. He was just a kid from New York, a kid with high-flying aspirations of stars and Star Trek. This was the stuff of fiction.

  But as he listened to the general’s words, images flew through his head, and feelings of déjà vu saturated him.

  An image of Earth from orbit.

  If this was fiction... then it was the truest fiction ever told....

  Chapter Eighteen

  1

  On July 1, 1947, amid violent thunderstorms that shook the earth, the Army’s 509th Bomb Group just outside of Roswell, New Mexico, and White Sands missile range north of Las Cruces, New Mexico, both tracked bizarre radar blips. Blips tore across operator screens at impossible speeds, performed equally impossible changes in direction—sometimes actually speeding up—then vanished. Short of known test launches with acquired German V2 rocketry, compliments of Operations Overcast and Paperclip, nothing the U.S. had at the time came close to what was observed.

  Highly seasoned radar operators fresh from World War II performed calibrations, recalibrations, and verifications across every component. Surveillance flights unsuccessfully combed the area, and base commanders alerted Washington. Civilians witnessed the anomalous phenomena out on their evening porches.

  A bright oval that’d streaked across the sky.

  Over the next forty-eight hours, anxious officials tracked additional signatures, while surveillance flights repeatedly came up empty-handed. Whatever was invading the highly restricted military airspace of New Mexico was not lightning.

  The government deployed its most experienced crack Counterintelligence Corps, or CIC, operatives into the region, and it wasn’t long before they observed disturbing new behavior.

  The blips changed shape.

  High above all those celebrating Independence Day, one object, after having attained speeds well in excess of three-thousand miles an hour and after having performed multiple hair-pinned maneuvers, abruptly flared up... then all radar screens went clear.

  Operators had witnessed a crash.

  CIC wasted no time in deploying to the crash site, just outside the town of Corona. Roswell’s Sheriff dispatched the fire department, based upon witness accounts of an exploded aircraft.

  CIC had arrived on-scene first, posting sentries and stringing floodlights. Before the team was, indeed, a crash—but not like one any of them had ever expected. Plowed into the embankment of a remote arroyo at a forty-five-degree angle, rested a wing-shaped craft, one
side jaggedly ripped open. Surrounding the ship lay beings... dark gray-brown, completely hairless, and about four-to-four-and-a-half feet tall... dead and dying. One dying creature’s pleas had not been heard physically by those who came upon it, but mentally. Two had survived. One sat calmly and serenely beside the dying crew, while the other had been caught scrambling up a rise just to the other side of the craft. The unfortunate creature had been quickly brought down by a volley of M-1 rifle fire.

  The blur of activity that followed had been quickly and effectively shrouded in mystery and secrecy as everything recovered—including the bodies—had been shipped off to their clandestine locations. Over time, all “alien harvest” material had been intentionally—and unintentionally—distributed across military and civilian research and technology divisions, including the Atomic Energy Commission, RAND, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, even the CIA. A systematic seeding of this advanced technology had begun to infiltrate its way into all things human. An entirely new classification system had been created... an entirely covert government within a government.

  Majestic-12.

  Unimaginable levels of deception, disinformation, and cover-ups sprang up around anything and anyone having to do with Roswell. What people didn’t know, they didn’t need to know. Some insisted on bringing this information out to the public, but, its detractors insisted, to do so would be to blanketly hand it over to the Russians. To let it out would be whole-sale acknowledgment of our own incompetence and deficiency in being all-knowing and all-powerful. And some... some kept it secret merely because that’s all they knew... was all they did, because, once you got as deep as this was in the Black World, everything became classified, and knowledge, after all, was power. This new extremism knew no bounds, was beyond human law, and wasn’t above making individuals and events disappear....

  Over the years subgroups and sub-subgroups developed, and things had gotten lost in safes where the only individuals with the knowledge and access to these safes also died, never having relinquished their combinations.

  Nothing had been passed on because no one had had the need-to-know.

  Knowledge was power.

  Rumors grew, including the possession of one or more live extraterrestrials. Area 51, S-4. Agencies were created under the pretenses of other cover missions to deal with what was called the growing threat of alien intruders. In the sixties and seventies, and through the direct use of some of the alien technology that had been harvested, were created two covert operations, both of which ERO managed on the strictest need-to-know basis: projects Saint and Blue Gemini. Saint was the surveillance arm through which the CIA tracked and targeted alien craft in orbit with specifically designed reconnaissance satellites, and Blue Gemini was the hunter-killer arm with platforms that swooped down from higher orbits to take out—or capture—these crafts and their occupants.

  This was ERO’s heritage, its actual mission. What it was all about.

  And as Lieutenant General Robert Mitchell Hammond laid all this out for First Lieutenant James Francis Cherko, in that tiny, no-name building that reeked of history and desert rot, Cherko reeled over the possibilities. Everything he’d ever heard, ever read, had all been true—and he was now smack-dab in the middle of all of it.

  “Why?”

  Hammond looked to him.

  “What do you mean ‘why’? Because they’re dangerous. Dangerous and hostile.”

  “With all due respect, General, but how do you get that? None of what you’ve told me leads me to believe their intentions are hostile.”

  “They buzz our installations, our spacecraft and aircraft. Destroy our spacecraft and aircraft. None of our pilots have ever come back. Ever. They constantly evade us.”

  “But evading is not—”

  Hammond paused as he paced the dusty floor, like someone not used to being questioned—nor considered wrong—but backed off his usual, blistering and soul-crushing reprisal.

  “Son,” Hammond said wearily, “you’ll see. You’ll discover their motives. Admittedly we don’t know everything, but we do know that they’ve taken out many, many of our airmen when they’d been scrambled to intercept. Destroyed military and surveillance satellites we’ve sent into orbit. Astronauts.”

  “You can’t be... Astronauts?”

  Hammond nodded grimly.

  “Challenger wasn’t merely a faulty O-ring. It’d been destroyed through overt extraterrestrial means. Challenger was, as are many of our shuttle flights, a cover for another mission, and their particular mission was that of a new generation of alien sentry platform I’m still not at liberty to discuss. It was summarily taken out without so much as a warning. Our clashes with them had been, for the most part, subtle and gentlemanly to this point, but that one action was a clear and powerful message: they meant us harm, and they meant to keep us where they could control us.”

  “I just... I just can’t believe this...”

  “It is war, son. I wish it wasn’t, but it is. Though our government is united in its efforts to repel extraterrestrial dominance, we still have our own petty in-fighting, our own bickering, which is what you experienced tonight. Becker and his crew—Shroot—have been unable to fly those damned machines. To figure them out. Their best minds figured it had to do with mind control, but they could never make it work—until you. You’ve been watched for a long time—still will be, I’m afraid, for the rest of your life. And in order to mitigate that, I’m sending you to New Mexico.”

  “New Mex—”

  “They’ll try to grab you again, and I simply can’t have that. They need to find their own damned resources, not keep pilfering mine. I have big plans for you and I’m not about to share.

  “You’re coming up for promotion soon, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir, next July.”

  Hammond nodded. “What I have in store for you is far more important than trying to pilot some captured piece of E.T. taxi.”

  “And what would that be, sir?”

  Hammond grinned. “You might have need-to-know of all I’ve just told you, but as to that,” he chuckled, “that you don’t—yet.”

  2

  100-Mile Low Earth Orbit

  4 November 2021

  0910 Hours Zulu

  Cherko hyperventilated as he continued struggling within the unknown metal contraption. The one that enveloped him from ankle to neck.

  “There’s no need for that,” Rudy said, calmly. “Breathe... deeply... slowly—”

  “This is bullshit! Why can’t you just get me the hell out of this thing? There’s a war going on out there! There are things I need to be doing!”

  “We’re safe. It’s important to remember. You must remember.”

  Rudy’s voice was soothing and unnervingly calming, but as Cherko looked about the module things felt as if they were fast closing in on him. Compacting in on him at a psychic level he felt accelerating.

  He blinked.

  Sweat trickled down his face; his armpits. Debris floated before him.

  “This is insane! You’ve got to get me out of this damned thing!”

  “What else do you remember? What next after that meeting?”

  Cherko stopped struggling. Rudy’s voice connected with something deep inside.

  Yes, that meeting. In Nevada. Right. He’d just been told all this funky shit about—

  UFOs.

  Yeah. They were real all right, Hammond’d just told him so. And there was this government-within-the-government thing, running the whole show since ‘47. Silencing people, making them “disappear.” He had to wonder... what would be of such severe importance that this clandestine inner government was willing to kill to keep secret?

  “What happened after that meeting?” Rudy asked.

  “I...”

  Cherko wrinkled his face. C’mon, pull it out...

  Well, soul be damned...

  “What do you remember?” Rudy asked, “what do you remember about the path that led you here? How did y
ou get here?”

  Cherko rested his head back against the bulkhead, and longingly looked outside the viewport.

  “Now, that’s the billion-dollar question, ain’t it....”

  3

  Dulce, New Mexico

  16 September 1986

  0840 Hours Mountain Time

  First Lieutenant Cherko ran his Dulce restricted-area badge, scanned his hand, and entered his office. He went directly to one of several safes, spun the combo, flipped the safe’s magnetic “Closed” sign to “Open,” and removed the report he’d last been reading. He took it to his desk and sat down; opened it to where he’d left off. He’d just come off a Saint/Blue Gemini training support. He was to get console certified, but he wasn’t to become just another console jockey. Yes, he’d be certified on-console, but his real work was much more. In his new capacity at Dulce he was tasked with multiple responsibilities: not only was he to keep his hands in on-orbit ops and to further develop his ability at (apparently) controlling alien craft, but he was also to assist LG Hammond in the continued covert and insidious insertion of alien technology into the world.

  Any one of these tasks would have been enough to stretch the realms of credibility with anyone, but he was assigned with all three.

  And there was also some life-long grooming he was supposed to be thankful for.

  But it was the third one that surprisingly caught him the most off-guard.

  Inserting alien technology into the world?

  Since arriving at Dulce, much of his time had been spent reading. Reading and assimilating reams and reams of highly classified intel. Reports buried in several safes both in his office and Hammond’s. Reports Hammond did not want others outside the two of them to ever see. Though these reports repeatedly referred to the Roswell crash, there were other crashes also defined across its pages, as well as a fair amount of information and other technology also coming from another unidentified source only identified as “Alan.”