Eventually, when they had finished the lunch, settled the check and were preparing to leave, Scaduto said: ‘I’m telling you, Dwight, I still believe the UFOs are manmade and probably originate from both Canadian and American top-secret establishments, notably in the White Sands Proving Ground.’
‘I’m still not sure of that,’ Dwight confessed, as they made their way out of the packed garden restaurant, through the indoors bar, then back into M Street.
‘Don’t forget,’ Scaduto continued, unperturbed, as they stood on the busy sidewalk, observing the passers-by, many of them exuberant students from Georgetown University, ‘that the Brits have already demonstrated a vertical- take-off aircraft using swivelling jet nozzles – the Hawker P1127. And laser-beam technology
– often included in UFO reports, though generally treated as pure science fiction – has been making incredible advances since its discovery four years ago by the Hughes Aircraft company in California. So the capabilities of the flying saucers reported are definitely moving into the area of the possible. The saucers could be man-made!’
‘But some of the saucers are really so far advanced that I find it difficult to believe they could be man-made.’ Dwight glanced automatically along M Street, towards Canal Road, and found himself trying to imagine what had happened to Bob Jackson that fateful night of his death. This in turn led him to another line of thought. ‘Take Beth’s experience, for instance. The one she recounted under hypnosis. That wasn’t a dream – it was a real experience – and the technology suggested by her recollections had to be pretty stupendous. The beams of light from the small saucers somehow immobilised her car, then magically drew it into the mother ship. The beams of light from the mother ship disorientated her and temporarily paralysed her. Then, of course, when she was inside the mother ship, she was shown... Earth and the stars.’
‘Yeah,’ Tony said, softly, in wonder, ‘she saw the damned stars!’
‘That mother ship was out there in space,’ Dwight continued. ‘I can’t imagine manmade aircraft, or spacecraft – flying saucers or other kinds – being capable of that, if based on the known technology.’
‘Why not?’ Scaduto responded. ‘Our astronauts have been in space. Certain of our conventional aircraft can now reach the stratosphere. And according to Beth, the guy with the oddly expressionless face told her to warn you off the search for, quote, man-made flying saucers... And now this flying saucer sighting at Socorro, New Mexico, seems to prove conclusively that whatever Deputy Marshal Zamora saw, it was certainly real enough and piloted by two small males wearing white coveralls... No planes in the air at the time, no weather balloons... It was real, Dwight. It left burn marks and depressions in the soil. It was physical... So where the hell did it come from?’
‘I don’t know,’ Dwight confessed. ‘I only know this... I’m frightened for Beth and Nichola. I’m even frightened for myself. So if I continue to work for Epstein, I’ve got to do it off the record and you’ve got to cover the more public sightings. You’ve got to cover for me.’
‘No sweat,’ Scaduto said.
The two men shook hands on the crowded sidewalk, then went their separate ways.
Chapter Thirty-Eight Stopping his car in the middle of the desert between Las Vegas and Nellis Air Force Base in the dead of night, Fuller lit a cigarette, inhaled gratefully, blew a cloud of smoke, and realised that he wasn’t looking forward to this particular meeting with Wilson.
For the past year, ever since Wilson had called a meeting to angrily discuss the socalled Socorro Incident, when a USAF flying saucer, based on the Kugelblitz I, and its two-man crew had been spotted by Lonnie Zamora, Fuller had been having regular, mostly unpleasant meetings with Wilson, who had expressed his concern about the resurgence of public interest in UFOs generated by the Air Force’s carelessness in letting one of their flying saucers from the White Sands Proving Ground be seen by a widely respected Deputy Marshal.
Indeed, the Socorro Incident of 1964 had become in the collective mind of the public the most fascinating UFO sighting since the original Socorro case of 1947. Approximately a year later, on June 12, 1965, one of Wilson’s own, smaller flying saucers had crashed near Nellis AFB, right here in Las Vegas, Nevada. The saucer and dead crewmembers had been taken into a top-secret research laboratory on the base for examination. That was two weeks ago.
Demanding the release of the remains through Fuller, Wilson had been refused and, at a later meeting, had coldly told Fuller to inform his superiors at CIA Headquarters, Langley Field, Virginia, and in the White House and Pentagon, that he would be taking ‘retaliatory’ measures.
Knowing that Wilson was capable of inflicting great damage on the United States, Fuller had conveyed his message to the Pentagon. Unfortunately, because of the speedy advances being made on their own flying saucer projects at Avro-Canada in Malton, Ontario, and at other top-secret research establishments in the White Sands Proving Ground and elsewhere in New Mexico and Arizona, the top brass of the Air Force were growing arrogant, believing that they could outflank Wilson, and so refused to hand over the invaluable debris of Wilson’s vastly superior crashed saucer.
Now, as he glanced up and saw what appeared to be a star rapidly growing bigger in a black sky flooded with stars, Fuller was preparing to convey this second refusal to Wilson. He didn’t look forward to it.
On the other hand, as he realised when he glanced back over his shoulder and saw the neon spires and minarets of Las Vegas soaring out of the vast desert darkness, this was where Elvis Presley had made his latest movie, Love in Las Vegas, also known as Viva Las Vegas. Fuller loved Elvis. Elvis was a great American. Fuller also loved Ann-Margret who, when she performed with Elvis in the recently released movie, had almost made Fuller cream his pants.
Amazing, he thought, the things I get to see doing this job. Here I am, metaphorically speaking, walking in the footsteps of Elvis and Ann-Margret. No wonder I love my country. Where else could you do this? Turning away from the sparkling, high-rise, neon splendours of distant Las Vegas, he stuck his head out of the open window of the car and looked up again. The expanding star grew bigger, until it became dime-sized, then like a weather balloon, and finally, with startling speed, a large, saucer-shaped dark mass surrounded by a pulsating whitish glow. Seeming to widen as it descended, until it was immense, almost blotting out his entire view of the night sky, it stopped abruptly and hovered directly above him. Then, as if sensing the presence of his car below it – which in fact, as Fuller knew, it had – it glided slowly sideways, all 250 feet of it, stopped where it could not damage his car, then dropped lower again, its whitish glow dimming more with each second of its stately descent.
Eventually it settled gently on the ground, its nearest edge about fifty yards from Fuller’s car. The whitish glow faded away, the lights flashing around its rim then blinked out, one after the other, in rapid sequence, and finally it was just a vast, silvery-grey, dome-shaped mass, eerily beautiful in moonlight.
Fuller was, of course, used to the sight of Wilson’s extraordinary flying saucers (he rarely thought of them as UFOs) and, to a certain degree, now took them for granted. He therefore waited patiently for the seamless panel in the outer body to move outward and down, forming a doorway into the holding bay and a ramp that led from there to the ground. He did not wait patiently when the unmistakable form of Wilson was framed in that brilliant light, but instead slipped smartly out of the car and advanced to meet him.
The knowledge that he, Jack Fuller, the fearless, could be frightened of Wilson filled him with nausea. Nevertheless, approaching Wilson, meeting him halfway, Fuller was able to maintain his outward appearance of sardonic pragmatism.
‘Mr Wilson!’ he exclaimed softly, by way of greeting. Wilson’s hair was silvery-white but abundant. His face was lean and handsome, with piercing sky-blue eyes and slightly odd, almost immobile features. That, Fuller knew, was due to plastic surgery, though he wouldn't have dared mention the fact.
Wilso
n nodded. ‘Fuller.’ His face was as near to grim as his normally expressionless face would allow. ‘Let’s waste no time in idle conversation. You know why I’m here. Do I get my crashed saucer back or not?’
Fuller spread his hands in the air, indicating that he had come empty-handed. ‘They said “No”?’
‘’Fraid so.’
‘That was foolish of them.’
‘The military mind can be foolish at times.’
‘I do not require your facetiousness, Fuller.’
‘Sorry.’
‘What did they find in the wreckage?’
‘Crewmembers. Very strange, I’m told. Someone used the word “cyborgs”, which
was new to me at the time, though I’ve since been familiarised. All dead, of course.’ Wilson offered a chilling smile. There was a certain aspect to Fuller’s bottomless pool of corruptibility, cynicism and blind patriotism that amused him. The crass stupidity of the majority of the human race, but in this case combined with low cunning, was exemplified in Fuller. The CIA agent, Wilson realised, had grandiose ideas about himself. Well, time would teach him...
‘You’re not too far from being a cyborg yourself,’ Wilson said in a rare demonstration of cynicism, which was, after all, a human attribute.
‘That sounds facetious, Mr Wilson.’
‘You don’t like to be put down. You have the need to prove yourself. These are admirable traits in a child, but you should have risen above them. Still, you are what you will be – which is not much at all – and I will therefore, willy nilly, be forced to accept this and deal with it. You’re a message boy and I treat you as such by asking one question: Your superiors said “No”?’
‘Yes, they said “No”.’
‘You do realise, I take it, that I could go into that Air Force base and take what I want without a problem.'
‘Without a short-term problem,’ Fuller replied, taking as much satisfaction as he could from this conversation, which wasn’t, in his view, all that much. ‘But in the long term it wouldn’t do you much good. By which I mean that the use of force would only draw attention to that secret hangar in the base. And the more – how shall I put it? – the more unusual the method of your assault, the more attention it would subsequently receive in the media. Which isn’t, if I may say so, exactly the kind of attention you want.’
‘What a clever man you are, Mr Fuller.’
‘Gee, thanks, Mr Wilson.’
Wilson ignored the nervous sarcasm. ‘Why do they want to keep my saucer and its dead crewmembers?’
‘Because your saucer is more advanced than their own and the nearest we’ve come to workable cyborgs are fairly basic Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine Systems, or CAMS.’
‘I’m surprised you could pronounce that.’
‘I have my moments.’
‘So they’re no longer satisfied with what I’ve already given them. They think they can steal my technology and, perhaps, catch up with me.’
‘I’m afraid that’s the case, Mr Wilson. It’s the nature of the beast to grow arrogant and turn on its master.’
Wilson seemed to sigh, though that was unlikely. ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Fuller, because I had hoped to avoid unpleasantness. Now, alas, I’m going to have to teach the White House and the Pentagon a lesson they won’t easily forget.’
Not being as stupid as his superiors when it came to an assessment of Wilson’s powers, Fuller had feared that this was how he would react – and feared even more what he might do. ‘What lesson would that be, Mr Wilson?’
Again, when Wilson smiled, the effect was chilling. ‘I’m going to black out most of the East Coast of the United States. A total blackout, Mr Fuller. If, by the first week in August, I do not have my crashed saucer back, I will begin the process of turning out all the lights. I will do this gradually, bit by bit, to give you time to change your minds. But if, by November, you’re still holding my crashed saucer and dead cyborgs, every light on the east coast will go out.’
‘Every single light on the East Coast of America?’
‘Yes. Every single light. Now take that message back to your superiors and, if they still refuse my request, keep your eye on events during the first week of August. Goodnight, Mr Fuller.’
Fuller returned to his car and sat in it until the enormous, majestic flying saucer ascended vertically, then abruptly shrank to the size of a star and shot off to the east. Then, feeling chilled by Wilson’s warning, he drove straight back to Las Vegas airport and caught the first plane back to Washington DC.
When he had conveyed Wilson’s message to the White House and the Pentagon, via CIA Headquarters in Langley Field, Virginia, they refused to believe that Wilson could do what he was threatening. They all thought he was bluffing.
The following week, the first week in August, 1965, Fuller asked the Langley Field press-cutting department to send him reports on any unusual stories regarding power lines or electricity generators. In fact, even before the first cuttings had been received, he knew that Wilson’s game was starting when one of his CIA physicists, engaged in an intelligence study of the relationship between UFOs witnessed over power lines and subsequent, inexplicable power failures, submitted an unusual report.
During the first week of August, thousands of citizens in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and neighbouring states witnessed one of the biggest UFO displays ever. Unidentified lights flew across the skies in formation, were tracked on radar, and played tag with civilian and Air Force aircraft. Reading the written reports of hundreds of witnesses, Fuller thought the descriptions of the lights were strikingly similar to those he had received about the Nazis’ World War II Feuerballs.
As Fuller subsequently found out from his daily perusal of the relevant press cuttings, this unexpected major display of UFOs ended abruptly a week later.
During the evening of the first day in which the UFOs had not been seen, when in bed with the most recent of his nubile girlfriends – he liked them young these days – Fuller was shocked to receive a personal phone call from Wilson.
‘I didn’t know you had my home phone number,’ Fuller said, trying to hide his feeling of violation at close to midnight.
‘I have everything on you,’ Wilson replied, ‘including every last detail of the blonde creature lying beside you, just about legal age.’
Now almost sweating, wondering where the hell Wilson was speaking from and wondering just what he had seen of his frolics with the nubile, jailbait blonde, Fuller said, fighting to keep his voice steady, ‘So what do you want at this time of night?’
‘I want to know if the ambitious morons above you have seen enough and are willing to return my crashed saucer and its dead cyborgs.’
‘I’m really sorry to have to say this,’ Fuller replied, feeling even more sorry for himself, ‘but the ambitious morons above me are acting like just that – morons. They’re insisting that the recent UFO flap was purely accidental.’
‘Then they are truly moronic.’
‘Well,’ Fuller said, trying to recover his equilibrium and act cool for the benefit of the nubile blonde beauty stretched out beside him, looking seriously puzzled, ‘as they said, what you threatened didn’t actually happen: the lights didn’t go out.’
‘I told you I would give them a chance to change their minds before I went further.’
‘They thought you were bluffing.’
‘Then I’ll show them otherwise,’ Wilson said, ‘and I’ll do it in the middle of winter, to cause even more chaos.’
‘That’s three months away,’ Fuller reminded him.
‘I’m sure you can wait that long. Goodnight, Mr Fuller.’
Fuller carefully put his phone back in its cradle, rolled over to the blonde and slithered onto her naked, sweat-slicked body like a snake in a swamp. Attaining an instant erection, he slipped it into her and whispered, ‘How long do you think we can keep this up? Does three months sound good?’
The remark was, he soon
realised, a very poor joke designed to quell the unexpected, uncustomary fear that was making his stomach churn. He knew the joke hadn’t worked when the fear, crawling through him like a ghostly, malignant presence, made him lose his erection before he could properly use it.
This had never happened to him before, but then he’d never known fear before.
He would have to get used to it.
Three months later, on the night of November 9, 1965, hundreds of UFOs, most in the form of darting lights, were reported from Niagara, Syracuse, and Manhattan. That same night, all the lights went out – in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and a section of Canada. They went out over a total area of 80,000 square miles and a population of twenty-six million people. The biggest power cut in American history, it caused chaos and panic.
Even while this blanket of darkness was falling over the land – and was already being dubbed the Great Northeast Blackout – Fuller was on the phone at CIA headquarters in Langley Field, Virginia, trying to find out what had caused it. He learnt that the huge power grid that controlled all of the blacked-out areas – an interlocking network linking twenty-nine utility companies, with hundreds of automatic controls and locking devices – had always been considered to be invulnerable... yet the system had failed and the cause of the black-out couldn’t be ascertained.
PHOENIX: (Projekt Saucer series) Page 46