by Jim Hougan
Roscoe looked up from Archaeus. a “What?”
“The guy’s got Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s Disease.”
Roscoe frowned. “Who has? And what is it?”
Dunphy ignored the first question. “Mad cow disease,” he said. “It’s got another name in humans, but in England, where it’s bad—I mean, they’ve lost a hundred thousand animals—that’s what they call it. And kuru. In New Guinea, where the cannibals get it, they call it kuru.”
“Hunh,” Roscoe muttered. “Thinka that.”
“You got any quarters?” Dunphy asked.
“Yeah . . . I guess. On my bureau—where I keep my change. How many do you need?”
“I don’t know—ten, twelve. How many you got?”
Roscoe shrugged. “Lots, but . . . why do you want quarters?”
“I need to make a phone call.”
Roscoe gave him a look. “That’s why we have that thing in the hall—the one with all the buttons on it, and the curly plastic cord.”
Dunphy shook his head. “I don’t think I should call from here. I think I should use a pay phone. You need anything from the 7-Eleven?”
Brading wasn’t inclined to help.
“I can’t discuss any of that,” he said. “All that’s classified.”
“Fine,” Dunphy replied. “Then I’ll put that in my report, and that’ll be the end of that.”
“Whattaya mean, the end of that? The end of what a?”
Dunphy sighed audibly. “Well, hopefully—not your pension.”
“My pension?!”
“Or the health care, but—”
“What?!”
“Look, Mr. Brading—Gene—you know what Washington’s like: the GAO’s looking for fraud. That’s their job. They take a random sample of pensions and entitlements—not just from the Pentagon, but every agency—and check ’em out. Every year. So we’re talking about maybe one person in two thousand who’s audited, and the idea is to find out if the government’s writing checks to someone who’s dead. Anyway, your name was kicked out by the computer and—”
Brading groaned with exasperation.
“—you can see the problem. The way it looks to the accountant is, the army’s paying a disability pension to someone whose military records don’t exist, and who claims he was injured while serving with a unit that’s nowhere on the books. So it looks like fraud—which is bad for you, and bad for us. ’Cause, as you know, we don’t need the publicity.”
“Oh, for cryin’ out loud—can’t you tell them—”
“We can’t tell them anything. We can talk to them, but before I do that . . . I’m going to need some basic data about the circumstances of your illness, and—”
“Who’d you say you’re with?”
“The Security Research Staff.”
Brading grunted. “Well, you know as well as I do that we can’t talk about any of this on an open phone. They’d cremate the both of us.”
“Of course,” Dunphy said. “I just wanted to touch base. Unless you’re busy, I could fly out tomorrow and—”
“No, no, tomorrow’s fine. Let’s get it outa the way.”
Dunphy flew to Kansas the next day, rented a car, and drove out to see Brading that same afternoon. He lived in an enclave of condominiums beside an eighteen-hole golf course, an oasis of bluegrass that surged toward a nearby shopping mall.
As it happened, Eugene Brading was a thin and sallow man in his sixties. He answered the door in a wheelchair, a blanket over his knees. His first words were, “Can I see your ID?”
Dunphy took a small black case from inside his jacket and flipped it open. Brading glanced at the laminated eagle, squinted at the name, and, apparently satisfied, gestured for his visitor to come into the living room.
“You want some lemonade?” he asked, rolling toward the kitchen.
“Sure,” Dunphy said, glancing around the room. “Lemonade would be nice.” His eyes fell on a gold-framed postcard that hung on the wall beside a small bookshelf. It was a picture of a religious statue, a golden-robed Madonna standing in a black marble chapel, gazing out at the camera. Surrounded by lightning bolts and clouds, and with armloads of carnations at her feet, the Madonna herself was inexplicably black. Coal black. And at her feet was a printed inscription:
La Vierge Noire
Protectrice de la ville
A handwritten note on white matting read Einsiedeln, Switz., June 1987.
Weird, Dunphy thought. But that was as far as it went. The postcard meant nothing to him, really, and so he let his eyes wander along the wall. There was a Keane painting of the usual doe-eyed waif, replete with a single tear, and farther along, something stranger: a square, black cloth hung like a curtain from the wall, concealing something that Dunphy very much wanted to see.
“I make it myself,” Brading said, rolling into the room with a glass of lemonade. “All natural ingredients.”
“No kidding.” Dunphy took the glass and sipped. He paused for a second, savoring the taste. “Now that’s what I call delicious.”
“Me and some buddies,” Brading said, nodding at a faded snapshot in a plain gold frame. The picture was of four men in black jumpsuits, standing together in a field of wheat. Their arms were around each other’s shoulders, and they were smiling at the camera. Dunphy saw that one of the men was Brading, and another was Rhinegold. The photo was inscribed:
Men in Black!
Ha Ha Ha!!!
Brading gazed at the picture with a grin. “In-joke,” he said.
Dunphy nodded, pretending to understand. “I see you and Mike were working together.”
Brading chuckled, pleasantly surprised. “Yeah! You know Mike, huh?”
“Everyone knows Mike.”
“I’ll bet they do. Whatta guy!”
Dunphy and Brading gazed at the picture, grinning inanely, saying nothing. Finally, Brading broke the silence. “So what can I do for ya?”
“Well,” Dunphy said, taking out a notebook and settling into a wing chair. “You can tell me about the 143rd.”
Brading furrowed his brow. “Well, I guess . . . I mean, since you and Mike go back a ways . . .” Then he shook his head. “But . . . you don’t mind me asking—just how high are you cleared, anyway?”
Dunphy coughed. “The usual. I’ve got Q-clearances through Cosmic—”
“A Q-clearance isn’t gonna cut it. We’re talking about some very heavy insulation.”
“And, beyond that, I go up through Andromeda.”
Brading grunted, suddenly satisfied. “Oh, well—Andromeda. I figured that. I mean, being with the SRS and all, you’d have to be. But, well—I had to ask. I’m sure you understand.”
Dunphy nodded. “Of course.”
“Anyway,” Brading went on, “I was with the 143rd for, I don’t know, maybe twenty-four years. Started out in Roswell—only then, it wasn’t the 143rd. It was one of them no-name units that were part of the 509th.”
“What’s that?”
Brading frowned. “The 509th Composite Bomb Group. Ain’t you read your history?”
“Of course,” Dunphy said, placating the old guy with a smile.
“They dropped the A-bomb on the Japs,” Brading explained, then added with a wink, “among other things.”
A knowing smile seemed to be required, and Dunphy provided it. “Oh . . . right,” he said, and let the smile flare.
“Anyway, I was with them for . . . what? Musta been twelve years.”
“Starting when?”
“ ’Sixty. Up through ’71, ’72, maybe. That’s when we got our name. The 143rd.”
Dunphy nodded.
“Aintcha gonna write that down?”
“Sure,” Dunphy said, and made a note.
“ ’Cause that’s when the 143rd got started. Same year as Watergate. So it’s easy to remember.”
“Right.”
“And, of course, you couldn’t run something like the 143rd out of Roswell—I mean, it’s a working town, for God’
s sake. People live there!”
Dunphy nodded in an understanding way. “So . . .”
“They set us up over in Dreamland.”
Dunphy gave him a blank look.
“You don’t know Dreamland?”
“No.”
“Hunh! I thought everybody knew about Dreamland. I mean, it’s been on 60 Minutes! a”
“Yeah, well . . . I don’t watch a lot of television.”
“By now, I expect there’s books about it. Anyway, Dreamland’s in the Nellis Range, a hundred and twenty miles northwest of Vegas. Emigrant Valley. They got about a hundred thousand acres up there—”
“They?”
“Uncle Sam. Three or four hangars, half a dozen runways.”
“You lived there?”
“No one actually ‘lives’ there. All it is, really, is an antennae farm with rattlesnakes—and funny airplanes, of course. Most of us lived in Vegas and shuttled back and forth.”
“There’s a shuttle?”
“You had half a dozen flights a day out of McCarran Airport—still do, I guess. Takes about half an hour. The flights are run by a Lockheed subsidiary. I forget what it’s called. Anyway, they fly 767s, painted black with a red line down the fuselage.”
“So how many people were going up there every day?”
“Maybe a thousand. Back and forth.”
“And they’re all with the 143rd—”
“No, no, no. Nothing like it. When I was working, there were maybe ten of us—tops.”
“And the others . . .”
Brading gave a dismissive shrug. “Testin’, trainin’ . . . there’s an Aggressor Squadron, MiG-23s and Sukhoi Su-22s—they’re outa Groom Lake. And I guess they’ve come up with a replacement for the Blackbird—”
“Really!”
“Oh, yeah! What I hear, it’s a Tier III reconnaissance jet that’ll do mach six with a radar profile the size of your hand.”
“Wow,” Dunphy said.
“Wow’s right. It was all very impressive, and it was actually good cover for what we were doing. Though, if you wanta know the truth, the choppers we had were more advanced than the planes.”
Dunphy blinked, uncertain that he’d heard correctly. He wanted to ask Brading to repeat what he’d said, the part about cover. Instead, he asked, “What kind of helicopters?”
Brading’s eyes lighted up. “MJ-12 Micro Pave Lows! Best in the world. We’re talking about a twin-turbo, tilt-rotor aircraft with the most advanced terrain-following/terrain-avoidance avionics anywhere. Totally Stealthed, low-light/no-light mission-capable with a twelve-hundred-mile range. I get all üggy inside, just thinkin’ about it. I mean, this is a machine that’s got four million lines of software in the computers, and an external cargo hook that can lift five thousand pounds. You could fly ’em low and slow, or tilt the rotors—wham, bam! you’re in a turboprop. Absolutely revolutionary! We cruised at three hundred knots, and—here’s the best part—here’s the revolutionary part—the only sound we made was collateral! The wind kicked up, and sometimes things got blown around.”
Dunphy must have looked skeptical because Brading became even more animated.
“I’m not exaggerating, y’know. That was it. Them things were dead silent.”
“Jesus!”
“Hallelujah!”
The response took Dunphy by surprise, but he plunged on with the interview. “So you were in Dreamland until? . . .”
“ ’Seventy-nine.”
“And then you retired.”
“No,” Brading corrected. “I didn’t retire until ’84. By then, Dreamland was lookin’ a little iffy.”
“What do you mean?”
“The handwritin’ was on the wall. You couldn’t have that many people flyin’ in and outa Vegas all day without somebody blowin’ the whistle.”
“So they moved you.”
“I’ll say.”
“Where to?”
“Vaca Base.” When he saw that this meant nothing to Dunphy, he elaborated. “It’s a hanging canyon in the Sawtooth Mountains. Over Idaho way. Only way in and out is with a chopper. It was real peaceful.”
“I’ll bet.”
Brading cocked an eye at Dunphy. “I thought you were interested in my illness.”
“I am,” Dunphy said. “Tell me about it.”
“I don’t know what’s to tell. I’m in remission, but . . . there isn’t any cure, really. I got CJD—ever heard of it?”
“Yeah,” Dunphy said. “It’s, uhh . . .” He couldn’t think of the technical name. Finally he said, “Mad cow disease.”
Brading looked surprised.
“I lived in England,” Dunphy explained.
“Oh, well, of course—it’s bad there. I guess everybody’s heard about it over there . . . but not here.”
“How did you—”
“—get it?” Brading threw up his hands. “I got it on the Census—how else?”
“The Census . . .” Dunphy said.
“The Bovine Census. Whattaya think we’re talking about? Whattaya think I was doing?” Dunphy must have looked blank, because Brading wouldn’t let it go. “You’re Andromeda-cleared, and you ain’t never heard of the Bovine Census?!”
Dunphy did his best to look impassive but, inside, he was wincing. He didn’t say anything for a few moments, and then he leaned forward. “A mansion has many rooms, Mr. Brading.” Saying it in the way that he did, in a voice no louder than a whisper, made the platitude seem like a warning.
Dunphy could hear the wheels turning behind Brading’s forehead. What does that mean? A mansion has . . . whut? Finally, the older man grunted. “Well, anyway—what it was—maybe you know—we took off at night and—well, we went after the cows. On ranches.”
“You went after the cows.”
“Killed ’em. Not a lot on any one ranch—not a lot on any one night. But some.”
Dunphy was stunned. He didn’t know what to ask. “ ‘Some,’ ” he repeated. “How many would that be?”
“Well, let’s see. Starting in ’72 . . . I guess we slaughtered a couple thousand, all told. The newspapers said there were four or five times that many, but . . . after a while, you had copycats. Once these things get started, they sorta take on a life of their own. In fact, that was kinda the point—I mean, the way I understood it, that was the whole idea. Give it a life of its own.”
“A couple thousand,” Dunphy repeated.
“And some horses.”
Dunphy nodded. Horses, too.
“In fact,” Brading said, “one of the first animals we killed was a horse. Belonged to the King Ranch. Stripped the flesh from her neck up. Which was a big deal in the papers. Snippy the Horse. You probably saw the stories. It was front-page, ever’where. Poor thing.”
Dunphy shook his head and thought, This is what they mean by cognitive dissonance. This is what they mean by gob-smacked.
“You can see her today,” Brading added.
“Who?”
“Snippy! They got her skeleton in a museum. The Luther Bean Museum. Over in Alamosa.”
Dunphy blinked. “But . . .”
“We tranquilized ’em first, of course.”
Dunphy shook his head. “But . . . why a?”
“Why?! Because it was painful!”
“No, that’s not—”
“Oh, why’d we—well, for the organs. Supposedly, it was for the organs.”
“What organs?”
Brading giggled. Nervously. “Genitals, mostly. And your tongues. Your rectum. We had one of the first portable lasers—portable, my ass, damn thing was about the size of a refrigerator—but, I’m telling you, it could core the rectum out of a cow in less than thirty seconds. Made a perfect circle. Now, I admit, it cooked the hemoglobin at the edge of the wound, but otherwise—just a perfect circle. Real round. a”
Dunphy’s palms were suddenly quite damp, and the room seemed stuffier than before. He was thinking of Leo Schidlof’s body and didn’t know what to say.
But that didn’t matter: Brading was on a roll, and the information poured from him.
“The whole idea, of course, was the effect. Farmer walks into his field, and what’s he see but ole Bossy, layin’ on the ground with her hide turned inside out and folded next to her backbone. No rib bones, tissues, or internal organs—just the hide and the skull, laying in the snow, like a pile of laundry. No blood anywhere, and no footprints a.” Brading smiled at the recollection. “I can tell you this. It was a startling sight, if you weren’t expecting it.”
“How did you . . .” Dunphy’s voice trailed off.
“Do it without footprints? Well, it depended on the time of year. If it was cold, and there was snow on the ground, we just landed and did what we had to do. And when we were done, we’d get back up in the air and make snow—just like the ski resorts do. We had a pretty big tank of water, pressure hoses, and ever’thing. So we covered our tracks that way. And if it was dry, we just lifted the cow with a hoist, did what we had to do, and dropped her half a mile from where we picked her up. So there weren’t any tracks that way, either.”
Dunphy’s question came slowly. “And the farmers. They were supposed to think—what?”
Brading shrugged. “Oh, I dunno. Different things. There were stories about satanic cults . . . aliens . . . UFOs. Basically, they thought whatever Optical Magick wanted ’em to.”
“Optical Magick?”
“Talk about ahead of the curve! Those boys were like a scaled-down version of the Skunk Works, only it wasn’t airplanes, it was special effects. Eff! Ecks! Blow your mind!”
“Good, huh?”
“I kid you not! They had technology . . . special lights . . . projectors . . . holograms. . . . You couldn’t tell the difference between what they was doin’ and magic. In fact, I think some of it was magic!”
“No kiddin’.”
“I’m tellin’ ya’! Those boys’d make you believe. a”
“Would a they? In what? Give me an example.”
Without hesitating, Brading said, “Paciparaná.”
“What’s a pocky? . . .”
“Paraná! It’s a chickenshit little village in west Rondônia. Used to be, anyway.”
“Where’s Rondônia?”
“Brazil,” Brading said. “They had a fungus there that Technical Services was interested in. Some kinda hallucinogen. Anyway, it don’t grow anywhere else, and the Agency wanted it. Locals said no. Indian tribe. Sacred land. That kinda shit.”