by Edward Lee
“That’s right, sir. It was raining on the night in question. The perp somehow managed to get through a bi-layered, 1500-volt electric fence.”
“Bolt-cutters?” Garrett presumed.
“No way. We’re not talking your average back-yard fence here, It’s heat-treated wire made of sub-carbundum steel alloy. Bolt-cutters wouldn’t do it; besides, the fencing actually looked more like it had been pulled, or spanned, apart. Probably a power-spreader or hydraulic retractors.”
Garrett fingered his chin, contemplating, trying to picture it. “Okay, the fence—the perp or perps somehow busted through the fence without getting electrocuted. What next?”
“Next? He busted three milspec-grade security padlocks on the storage vault’s door. That’s the real kicker. Padlocks like this? You can put a 20mm round through them and they won’t open. But this guy? He broke those locks like they were plastic toys. Popped the bolt housings right off the tempered shackles.”
“In other words, it wasn’t a crowbar that did the job on the locks.”
“Impossible,” Shaw asserted. “For a piece of work like that? Again, it had to be some model of hydraulic retractors to be able to do it. You tell me how somebody got a diesel-powered spreading tool like that into the compound without any of the sentries hearing it.”
Garrett nodded, still calculating. “All right, fine, but as impossible as it seems, the perp did it, and then he wheeled the ADM off the compound, right?”
“That’s the weird thing, or I should say one of the weird things,” Major Shaw divulged. “The device wasn’t wheeled off, nor was it dragged off. It was raining, and the depot perimeter, deliberately, is bare dirt. If the perp had wheeled the ADM off on a hand truck, or even dragged it off, there would’ve been wheelmarks or grooves in the mud. But there weren’t. There were only footprints, a single set, leading in and out.”
Garrett jacked an immediate brow. “Then the perp must be a body-builder and then some. Even the strongest man would have a hell of a time carrying off a 300-lb. bomb on foot.”
“You’re telling me,” Shaw agreed. “But that’s not even the weirdest part. The Army’s forensic crew, particularly our latent-cast techs, are probably as good as yours, probably as any evidence-analysis outfit in the world.”
Latent-cast techs, Garrett thought. “Raining. Mud. Footprints.”
“You got it, sir. This was an ideal crime scene as far as residual evidence is concerned. The perpetrator left perfect latent tracks leading in and out of the depot. But you know what our techs found, Agent Odenton?”
“I’m almost afraid to ask,” Garrett replied.
“They found a shoe-sole pattern traced to a U.S. manufacturer of tennis shoes called Stompers. You want to know what else?”
Garrett fixed his gaze on the major.
“The shoe size was six-and-a-half,” Shaw finished.
Garrett was floored by this shocking bit of information. “Six-and-a-half,” he muttered. “Jesus Christ. That’s the size of a kid’s shoe…”
CHAPTER TEN
A dream—
But all of life was a dream.
His legal name was Sanders, though he would use a multitude of aliases throughout his career. And he would be known, within the darkest warrens of clandestine operations, under just as many “crypts”: SR/POINTER, TP/STOLE, MH/CHAOS. His last cryptonym, a rover, was the one that had stuck: QJ/WYN.
In the dream he’d killed children because children in Southeast Asia were just as deadly as the Vietminh and the Vietcong. He chopped them down from about fifty yards with an antique German MG-42 machine gun, part of the Waffen SS inventory that had been granted to Stalin after World War II. The Soviets used this old yet ever-reliable weaponry to discreetly arm the Communist insurgents in Vietnam once Ho Chi Minh had buried the French at Dienbienphu. Arms for might.
But this wasn’t Vietnam, this was Laos, 1961. Sanders’ unit hadn’t needed to wait eight more years for Nixon’s secret authorization of bombing and incursions past the Laotian border. Sanders got his orders from the CIA’s Directorate of East Asian Operations. Back then, he was young and patriotic, and his orders were his mission. Kennedy and MacNamara refused to increase military aid, so it was Sanders’ job to find that aid somewhere else. By keeping the Laotian heroin routes open clear to Saigon, the Company’s ten-percent gross bought a lot of guns and ammunition for the ARVNs.
Stopping the threat of global Communism was more important than a few handfuls of peasant kids, many of whom were sappers for the VC anyway. Sanders had seen it too many times. Besides, processing the kids as refugees would be too risky. Too many questions would be asked, and too many answered.
In war, people died. Children died. It wasn’t Sanders’ fault the world was so flawed.
The stream of bullets, fired in deft six-round bursts, had torn the line of children apart along with their three adult teachers. No men were in the village; they were all off in the field now, helping the Vietcong hide. When the gunsmoke cleared, most of the children lay dead, exploded like little bags of blood. But a few still twitched with life.
That’s when Sanders ordered in the rest of his team, to execute the wounded and burn the village down, and—
—and when he awoke, he was almost forty years older. Chiefly nocturnal, he slept during the day. He lay awake now in the motel bed registered under a false name that was untraceable. Two hours of sleep twice a day was all his practiced metabolism needed, even after all these decades.
And after all these decades, the principles of life hadn’t really changed. When something threatened to obstruct or taint those principles, men had to die.
Sometimes children too.
««—»»
Garrett had finally found a pack of cigarettes in the post PX, but he scarcely felt the nicotine’s savory kick when he took the first drag. A kid’s shoe, he thought over and over again. A kid’s sneaker print…
As the sun baked down on his back, Garrett sat smoking on the butt of the cement planter wall that rung around the Edgewood Arsenal’s Redepositions Battalion: a series of cheap but gleaming Quonset huts situated on the post’s western edge. No hardware was stored here, just processing and location files, hundreds of thousands of them, no doubt.
Garrett was waiting for the man in charge of all that paper.
He looked at the personnel photo from the files that Swenson had given him. A surprisingly young guy, with beaming eyes and a hearty smile. A chief warrant officer-grade-three.
Obviously Swenson had been passing the protectorate torch down to younger men as the old MJ-12 members died off from natural and not-so-natural causes. Garrett wondered how many other such torches had been passed.
Just as Garrett ground out his third cigarette under his shoe, the man he was looking for walked briskly out of the building, heading for the parking lot.
Garrett walked up from behind.
“Are you Chief Warrant Officer Ubel?”
Ubel turned, flagged at once by Garrett’s civilian clothes. “That’s right, unless I just got demoted and nobody told me. Who’re you?”
“Did you know that Urslig, Farrell, and General Swenson are dead?” Garrett asked.
Ubel’s face blanked. “Sorry, sir. I’ve never heard of the people you’re referring to.”
“You sure about that? They were all murdered within the last several days. They were executed.”
Ubel kept up the necessary method-act of non-confirmation. “Sorry, sir. You must be mistaking me for someone else. I don’t know anybody by those names.”
“Well maybe here’s a name you do know. Icarus.”
Ubel faltered. “Really, I’ve do no idea what you’re—”
Garrett grabbed Ubel’s arm. “Let me tell you something, Mr. Ubel. Back in Washington, I’ve got a friend of mine analyzing something. It’s something that my dear friend General Swenson gave me. You want to know what that something is?”
Ubel stared, the color in his face fading.
“It’s part of an alien skeleton that was recovered in April, 1962, near Nellis Air Force Base,” Garrett finished.
Ubel rubbed his face, the anxiety starting to gnaw at him. “Come on. We better go someplace secure to talk.”
««—»»
“So you’re the guy Swenson sent?”
“Yeah,” Garrett answered, lighting a cigarette.
“But you’re not military. What, FBI, like Urslig?”
“Don’t ask,” Garrett said, spewing smoke. What could he say? I’m a tabloid writer. I write for kook magazines.
Garrett sat in the passenger side of Ubel’s car, an olive-green Army sedan. Ubel had driven them out of the base’s duty sectors, quite a ways, and had parked on a remote dirt road, at the top of an incline near the woods. The sun began to recede at last, orange molten light dripping behind the trees.
“Swenson knew that you’d need help now that Urslig and Farrell are out of the picture,” Garrett explained.
“Then you must know about Sanders too,” Ubel speculated.
“The bastard didn’t even have the courtesy to let the cancer take Swenson. But I only know part of the story. Didn’t Sanders used to be part of the group?”
Ubel was staring blankly out into the trees. “Something like that. The group was originally made up of several MJ-12 men.”
“But as they died off, Swenson recruited replacements,” Garrett reckoned.
“Right. Farrell, for instance, the judge. And Jack Urslig,” Ubel verified. “I was a replacement too. The guy before me, believe it or not, was a former chairman of the National Security Council. Swenson handpicked the replacements.”
“So what happened with Sanders?” Garrett queried. “Why’d he go renegade? Did he go nuts?”
“No, nothing like that. And he didn’t go renegade. He was an original member too, sort of the security officer. He simply switched sides, and we don’t even know who the other side is.”
“A rogue cell?”
“Probably. Probably some isolated CIA circle.”
Great, Garrett thought in frustration. That’s just what I need.
Ubel looked over. “So you have the whole package, I take it?”
“Yeah. Swenson’s instructions implied that you would explain the pieces that don’t fit. It has something to do with Swenson himself, doesn’t it? And a kid, a military dependent named Danny Vander who claims he’s been abducted.”
“You’ve done your homework. Swenson and Danny Vander have one very crucial thing in common.”
Garrett’s brow creased. He couldn’t even guess.
“Swenson was abducted too,” Ubel said in the driest tone.
Garrett felt like a flower pot had just been dropped on his head. “You’re kidding me. Abducted?”
“By a vehicle very similar to the one that blew up over Nellis Air Force Base in 1962.”
Garrett’s eyes went wide as slot-machine slugs. He was speechless at this jolt of information.
“It was me, Swenson, Farrell, and Sanders,” Ubel continued. He spoke in a dread monotone, as if confessing to murder. “Sanders was our cover-man. Farrell was the most highly decorated officer in JAG, heading for a job with the feds on the U.S. Appellate Court, and rumored to be an eventual Supreme Court appointee.”
“In other words, a judge with some serious influence.”
“Exactly. Plus there was another guy, a general at Arlington Hall—”
“Army Intelligence,” Garrett recognized.
Ubel nodded the affirmative. “When he died of old age, that’s when Urslig came into the picture later. Swenson recruited him, because as an FBI agent he could monitor any Justice Department moves against us. It was our own private little shadow-group. Swenson built the whole thing from scratch, and now I guess you’re wondering why.”
Garrett could only keep staring, incredulous. “You got that right.”
“Because when Swenson was abducted shortly after the Nellis Crash, the aliens…told him some things.”
««—»»
Danny was tired of drawing, but he stayed down in the basement just the same. By now his parents had stopped yelling at each other but that didn’t mean it was okay to go back upstairs. His mother would be real quiet, and his father would be too. It was his father’s silence that bothered Danny the most. Just the look in his eyes was as bad as him yelling. So Danny decided to stay down here until someone called him up for dinner.
But it wasn’t long before—
No, please!
—before his face began to feel hot and then his head felt like someone was squeezing it with a giant pair of pliers.
No…
The headache came back. Suddenly he was holding his head, tears oozing from his eyes. The pain was bad—it always was—but somehow the worst parts were the memories, because the headaches always made him remember—
—and he remembers again. It feels so real, though, sometimes he doesn’t know if he’s actually remembering or if it’s really happening again.
He’s standing inside the ship now, in a tall thin hallway of light. He’s following one of the Stickmen down the hall, and the hall is humming. The Stickman is taking him by the hand, Danny’s five-fingered hand clasped inside of the Stickman’s two-fingered hand. On the left and right he sees the trapezoid windows and he thinks Wow! because he knows it’s dark outside now but the windows make it look like daylight and he can see things in great detail. He sees a four-leaf clover in the grass, he can see several tree frogs climbing up a muddy branch in the creek behind the baseball field, he can see ants in the grass.
When he looks up, he can see the moon and all the craters and peaks. The harder he looks at it, the closer it seems to get, until he can even sees flag and pieces of equipment that astronauts have left up there.
He can see satellites orbiting the earth.
He’s never afraid of the Stickmen, not here, not when he’s with them. The Stickmen are nice to him, and they seem to know about the bad things in Danny’s life. They know about his father and mother, and they know how bad he feels sometimes. They seem to be sorry for something.
The light inside the hallway would be blinding, but Danny can see just fine. The ship is long and thin; it’s like a white tunnel. Every so often he passes an object mounted on the curved wall that looks like controls for something, with blinking multi-colored lights like slits.
The further the Stickman leads Danny through the ship, the louder the humming gets, but even though the humming is loud, he starts to hear things in it.
Things that sound like words.
Words in his head.
When he gets to what he guesses is the back of the ship, the bright light dies down. Now he’s in a darker room tinged with reds and yellows, and he can see that several other Stickmen are there too.
Then the first Stickman turns around and leans over to face Danny.
He sees the Stickman’s face real close now, but it’s not really a face at all. More like a stub of pale-pink flesh. No ears, mouth, or nose, either. Only a single slit for eyes.
The slit blinks.
Danny isn’t afraid at all when the Stickman begins to talk and begins to tell him what to do—
—and then—
—and then the headache was gone, and Danny felt fine. He leaned up from where he’d been laying his head against the work table.
He remembered what the Stickmen had told him.
They told him exactly what to do and exactly where to go. He’d need the glove again, of course, the glove they’d given him the first time they’d come.
Well, it was sort of a glove. It only had two fingers in it, so it didn’t fit right, but—
“Danny!” his mother’s voice suddenly called down from upstairs. “Dinner’s ready! “Be right there, Mom!”
Danny got up off the work bench stool and went up the basement steps. He hoped they were having something good tonight, like fish sticks or cheese dogs.
“Don’t forget to turn off
the light.”
Oh, yeah, he thought. I always forget that.
At the top of the landing, Danny switched off the basement lights.
Then darkness fell on everything down below: the stacks of old moving boxes, the sheet-covered piece of furniture mom didn’t like any more, and all the other old basement stuff.
The darkness fell on a couple of other things, too, that Danny had hidden well behind the moving boxes: a green canvas sack and an olive-drab box about the size of a portable television set.
Embossed letters on the box read:
CONTENTS: ONE (1) (S-)A-D-M:
(SMALL) ATOMIC DEMOLITION MUNITION
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Each job required a select wardrobe, so to speak. Right now, Sanders wore Army BDUs with the rank of full-bird colonel, and had phony TDY orders in case he was stopped. Getting onto the post had been uneventful; he’d simply driven on in the HUM-V with U.S. Army plates and ID stickers from Fort Meade, Maryland. The orders had been called in and passed.
How many men have I killed? came the sudden and peculiar thought. Peculiar because it was honestly the first time the question had ever occurred to him.
The question pricked at him for several moments. He didn’t quite know why, and then he thought of old women on their death bed trying to remember the tally of lovers in their lives. Eventually, though, Sanders realized that his death tally, by now, was probably incalculable.
Hundreds, he knew. That was fine.
Death was relative anyway.
In his lap lay the pieces of the black Barrett M82A2 semi-automatic sniper rifle. In his rather qualified opinion, it was the best in the business, pure and simple. In his time, Sanders had used them all: the H&Ks, the Steyr-Mannlichers, the Marine M40 variants. But this put them all to shame. It was the only long-range sniper rifle that fired absolutely flat every time.