Trade-Off

by Trade-Off (retail) (epub)

  Groom Lake Air Force Base, Nevada

  In the long silence that followed Ketch’s remark, Hunter heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. He got up, walked to the window and peered out. A grey USAF van was just pulling up outside the main gate of the compound and, as he watched, a group of men, heavily armed, climbed from it and fanned out in a loose semi-circle around the gate in the compound fence. One walked across to the gate, pressed the buzzer and waited for a reply.

  ‘We got company?’ Reilly asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Hunter said. ‘About half a dozen men, all wearing body armor and carrying assault rifles and side-arms. Ketch,’ he snapped. ‘How secure is this building?’

  ‘Very,’ Ketch said, his breathing now almost normal again. ‘There’s no external access without an Omega card. The compound fence is electrified, and the outside walls and roof of the building are lined with half inch steel plate. The windows are bullet-proof. We’re secure against anything short of armour-piercing rounds.’

  ‘Unless,’ Reilly said, standing up with an obvious effort, ‘somebody down there obligingly opens the door to let those goons in. I’ll go down and make sure all your people understand that that would be a real bad idea.’

  He reached down into his black leather bag and straightened up with a grunt, his SPAS-12 held in his right hand, the collapsible truncheon in his left.

  ‘Thanks,’ Hunter said, somewhat distractedly, as Reilly headed for the door.

  After the door closed, another long silence settled over the room, a silence finally broken by Doctor Evans.

  ‘Aliens?’ he said. ‘What aliens?’

  Oval Office, White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

  ‘Mr. President,’ William McGrath began. ‘I’m sorry it’s so late, but the matter is vital and extremely urgent.’

  Charles Gainey nodded and shook McGrath’s hand. The president was wearing dark green silk pyjamas under a maroon dressing gown. When the substance of McGrath’s telephone call had been relayed to him, he had been on the point of climbing into bed.

  ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t have come here if it wasn’t,’ he said, gesturing McGrath to a chair next to the coffee table. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m afraid, Mr. President, that the situation with Roland Oliver is now critical. All the evidence we have suggests that Hunter and Reilly have not only penetrated Area 51 and Groom Lake, but they’ve even gained access to the Roland Oliver building.’

  ‘This is not good news, Bill,’ Gainey said, leaning forward and characteristically using understatement to underline his concern. ‘What evidence are you talking about?’

  ‘Earlier this evening Roger Ketch approved the transport of two of the clean-up team – Harris and Morgan – out to Groom Lake in case Hunter and Reilly managed to penetrate the Area 51 security system. We know from another member of the team – a man named Templeton – that at the time Harris suggested this course of action to Ketch, Morgan was already dead. The obvious conclusion is that Harris was speaking under duress, on the instructions of Hunter or Reilly.’

  ‘And then?’ Charles Gainey asked.

  ‘We know that two men did board the last Janet flight of the day from McCarran Air Base to Groom Lake. We have to conclude that these two men were Hunter and Reilly, using Omega identity cards they’d taken from Harris and Morgan. And,’ McGrath added, ‘I’ve tried contacting Ketch by telephone at the Rolver Systems’ building, but there was no reply. I also tried other telephone numbers in the building and finally reached a loader. He confirmed that two men identified as Harris and Morgan had entered the building some thirty minutes earlier.’

  Charles Gainey stood up and paced back and forth for a couple of minutes.

  ‘What do they hope to achieve?’ he muttered, almost to himself. ‘What can they achieve?’

  Gainey walked across to his desk, pressed a button on the intercom unit, and ordered coffee for two.

  ‘You’re acting Director of the FBI, William,’ Gainey said, as he crossed the Oval Office and sat down again. ‘What are your recommendations?’

  That was the one question McGrath had been hoping the President wouldn’t ask.

  Groom Lake Air Force Base, Nevada

  ‘I’m not interested in fairy stories about aliens,’ Hunter said, and reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a small Sony tape recorder, switched it to ‘record’ and placed it carefully on the edge of the desk, the internal microphone pointing at Ketch.

  ‘Let’s keep it simple,’ Hunter continued, ‘and start with an answer to just one question. Why the hell is the American Government snatching women off the streets and killing them?’

  Ketch shook his head and looked at the tape recorder, then replied anyway. ‘It isn’t as simple as that,’ he said. ‘And it’s not actually the government doing it, although every President since Eisenhower has known all about it.’

  ‘What, exactly, is “it”?’ Hunter demanded.

  Ketch looked at the silenced muzzle of the Smith and Wesson, then at Hunter’s expressionless face behind it. He knew he had no choice, really no choice at all, and as he began speaking he experienced a kind of strange catharsis, as if by finally telling the tale to a third party, somebody outside the tightly-regulated community of government officials with Omega One clearance, he was somehow able to distance himself from the true reality of the situation.

  ‘It’s like this,’ he began. ‘It’s a kind of trade-off, and it’s been going on for over fifty years. Since 1947, to be exact.’

  Hunter just looked at him. The door opened suddenly, and Reilly walked back into the office. Hunter glanced up at him.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘No problem,’ Reilly said. ‘They’re sleepin’ peacefully.’

  ‘Good. You’d better listen to this, Dick. Ketch is just about to tell us what the hell’s going on here.’

  ‘Look,’ Ketch said. ‘You’ve heard of Roswell, New Mexico?’

  Hunter nodded, but it was Reilly who replied. ‘Yup,’ he said, sitting down again behind the desk with a grunt of pain. ‘Where that weather balloon thing happened, right? Back in the forties?’

  Ketch shook his head. ‘It wasn’t a weather balloon,’ he said impatiently. ‘It wasn’t even a secret kind of goddamn balloon from Project Mogul, despite what you may have heard and what the American Government and military have claimed ever since. On the third of July 1947, a ranch manager named William Brazel found a pile of debris from an unknown object on his land, about seventy-five miles northwest of Roswell.’

  ‘I thought he was called “Mac”,’ Reilly said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That Brazel guy. I thought his name was Mac Brazel.’

  ‘His name was William, but he was known locally as “Mac”. Does it matter?’

  ‘No, I guess not,’ Reilly said.

  ‘OK,’ Ketch continued. ‘Brazel alerted the local sheriff and eventually a Major Jesse Marcel visited the site. He was the intelligence officer from the 509^th^ Bomb Group Intelligence Office at the Army Air Force Base at Roswell Field. He collected some items of the wreckage and took them back to Roswell with him, and reported seeing a crashed ‘flying saucer’ type vehicle. Some fool at the base authorized a press release saying they’d found an alien craft, and a couple of days later the Eighth Air Force issued a statement that the wreckage was actually from a weather balloon.’

  Reilly nodded. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Like I said, it was a weather balloon.’

  ‘But it wasn’t a weather balloon,’ Ketch said, ‘and what happened next proves it. The Brazel ranch was completely sealed off by the military. Every scrap of debris from the ranch was collected – a huge operation involving hundreds of men – and all the pieces that Jesse Marcel had collected were taken away from him. Every other bit of wreckage that had been removed from the ranch by Brazel or anyone else was recovered. And all that debris was flown under armed guard to Wright Field.

  ‘People in Roswell who’d actually seen th
e wreckage, or who’d talked to people who had, were intimidated and threatened. In at least one case a family was told they’d be taken out into the desert and shot if they didn’t fall into line. The local radio station was told its broadcasting license would be pulled immediately if it broadcast any more stories about the incident. The local newspapers were promised total, immediate and permanent closure if they published anything else about it.

  ‘You don’t,’ Ketch finished, ‘need to be a rocket scientist to work out that not even the US military would do all that just for a weather balloon.’

  * * *

  ‘There’s no reply, sir,’ the sergeant reported, stating the obvious.

  Lieutenant Keating stared thoughtfully at the building. It seemed deserted, although there were a few windows behind which lights were burning, but that was normal in secure buildings. Behind him, the men were growing somewhat restive, and he heard muttering, followed by muffled laughter, as one of them cracked a joke – probably, he realized, at his expense.

  ‘Your orders, sir?’ the sergeant inquired.

  ‘How many ways are there into this place?’ Keating asked.

  ‘Two, sir.’ The sergeant had already walked all the way around the compound, and pointed with the beam of his flashlight. ‘This one here’s a pedestrian gate, and there’s a vehicle gate over there, by the hardstanding. On the building itself, a similar arrangement. A single door here, and double doors over there.’

  ‘OK,’ Keating said. ‘Detail three men to cover each entrance. Get the flood lights out of the van and set them up so that both sets of gates and doorways are illuminated. Anybody trying to get out of the building is to be stopped, by force if necessary.’

  ‘Deadly force, sir?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘Only if absolutely essential. I’m taking the van and going back to the security office. I’ve got some calls to make.’

  * * *

  ‘So what was it?’ Hunter asked.

  ‘It was exactly what the press release said it was – an alien spacecraft, complete with a group of dead aliens. There’d been a violent storm a couple of nights earlier, and the craft seemed to have been hit by lightning. But whatever happened, it crashed.’

  Hunter said nothing, but looked at Ketch through narrowed eyes.

  ‘Are you puttin’ us on?’ Reilly demanded.

  Ketch shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That was the first contact, but it sure as hell wasn’t the last. Since the end of 1947, the US Government has been cooperating with the EBE’s – that stands for Extra-terrestrial Biological Entities – and we’ve been making use of their technology. We’ve got alien spacecraft, bodies and all sorts out here at Groom Lake.’

  Hunter shook his head, then stood up as the desert outside suddenly blazed with light. Reilly got up and crossed to the window. He took a brief glance in both directions, then walked back to his chair and sat down.

  ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Just the grunts playin’ war games. Got a coupla sets o’ floods aimed at the gates just in case we try to sneak out without tellin’ ’em.’

  Hunter nodded, then turned his attention back to Ketch. ‘Are you seriously trying to tell us that there’s a bunch of little green men working with American scientists out here in the Nevada desert?’

  ‘They’re grey, not green, but that’s pretty much it, yeah.’

  Hunter shook his head again. He really couldn’t get a handle on this. ‘Can you prove any of this?’

  ‘Not here and now, no,’ Ketch said. ‘But just look at the way our technology has advanced. At the end of the Second World War we were still flying around in prop planes, using valve radios and so on. Real primitive stuff. Almost exactly six months to the day after Roswell, the invention of the transistor, the first solid-state electronic device, with no well-known or obvious precursors, was suddenly announced by Bell Laboratories. It was as if it had just popped into existence.

  ‘Since then,’ Ketch went on, ‘we’ve had fiber optics, tunnel diodes, more solid-state electronics, night-vision devices, holographs, advanced ceramic technology, superconductors, lasers and masers, not to mention integrated circuits – the so-called silicon chip – and supertenacity fibers.’

  ‘What in hell are they?’ Reilly demanded.

  ‘Materials that retain whatever shape they’re originally made in. They resist bending, tearing and crushing. Anyway, none of these were invented here – they all came from out there. We just adapted the concepts for materials we could work with here. And all these devices were new – new in the sense that they weren’t just developments of some existing technology.’

  ‘So what? New technology gets developed all the time,’ Hunter said. ‘That’s what research scientists do.’

  Ketch actually laughed, then gasped as the pain from his broken ribs lanced through him. After a moment, he recovered and shook his head.

  ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘Most scientists wear blinkers. Their focus is incredibly narrow, and they disregard anything that doesn’t fit into their own cosy little world view. Since the beginning of this century almost every major advance in science that hasn’t been derived from alien technology has been made by either a non-scientist or by a scientist working in an unrelated field.’

  ‘Like what?’ Reilly demanded.

  ‘Like powered flight, telephones and television, and that’s just for starters,’ Ketch said. ‘And you know why cold fusion got rubbished by the scientific community? Because the people who discovered it were chemists, not physicists, and that broke the rules.’

  ‘Cold fusion doesn’t work,’ Evans said. ‘MIT proved it.’

  ‘See,’ Ketch said to Hunter. ‘That’s the power of negative publicity generated by the scientific community. The only way the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could “prove” that cold fusion didn’t work was by tampering with the results of their own experiments. Since then, at least two patents have been filed for cold fusion devices – by MIT scientists.’

  Hunter realized they’d strayed somewhat from the point. ‘So what are you saying?’ he asked Ketch.

  ‘What I’m saying is that every time anybody uses a CD player or makes a trans-Atlantic phone call or switches on a computer, they’re using alien technology.’

  ‘Sounds like bullshit to me,’ Reilly said.

  ‘I don’t care what it sounds like,’ Ketch retorted.

  ‘Hang on,’ Hunter interrupted. ‘You said it was a kind of trade-off. Let’s assume for the moment that this fantasy of yours about aliens is actually true. Just what are they getting in return for giving us CD players and all the rest of the stuff?’

  For a moment, Ketch said nothing, and Hunter’s face went pale as the ramifications suddenly hit him.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Reilly said. ‘You mean our fuckin’ government’s tradin’ human beings in return for alien technology?’

  Oval Office, White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

  ‘Well, Mr. President,’ McGrath replied. ‘First, let me just outline the obvious problems. I’ve looked at the plans for the Rolver Systems’ building, and it is very well protected. The walls and roof are armoured, the external windows are bullet-proof and the boundary fence is electrified. It has its own electricity generating plant, because of the power requirements of the fence and the processing room.

  ‘It’s got adequate water stocks, again because of the processing operation, a small canteen, and limited stocks of food and drink. It could withstand quite a long siege against conventional troops. Armour-piercing rounds could penetrate the walls, but that would risk destroying the Roland Oliver operation in its entirety.

  ‘In short, as long as Hunter and Reilly are inside the building, they’re fairly safe. A direct frontal assault using military small arms would be futile, just a waste of ammunition, and calling in heavy artillery would risk destroying the entire Roland Oliver operation.’

  Charles Gainey nodded slowly. ‘A Mexican standoff,
then?’ he asked.

  ‘Exactly,’ McGrath agreed. ‘Somehow, we have to get Hunter and Reilly out of the building.’

  ‘So what options do we have?’ Gainey asked.

  ‘As I see it, Mr. President,’ McGrath replied, ‘a lot depends upon what Hunter and Reilly actually want, and that’s something we still don’t know.’

  ‘What could they want?’

  ‘Revenge, perhaps. The clean-up team tried to kill Reilly, and they did assassinate Hunter’s partner, Kaufmann. Maybe they just want to kill the person they perceive as being ultimately responsible, and that’s probably Roger Ketch.’

  A discreet knock at the door heralded the arrival of a steward with a tray of coffee, which he set down on the low table between the two men. Gainey smiled at the steward as he left the room, but the smile vanished as soon as the door closed behind him.

  ‘Any other possibilities?’

  McGrath shook his head.

  ‘It’s difficult to say. I suppose they could have embarked upon some sort of a crusade to destroy Roland Oliver, assuming that Director Donahue told them exactly what the program involved, but I would have thought they could do that more effectively using other means. Telling the newspapers, that kind of thing. Whatever the reason, these two men have proved to be incredibly dedicated, and extremely competent, in their actions.’

  ‘Yes,’ Charles Gainey said, ‘and that’s what worries me. So what can we do?’

  McGrath paused for a moment before replying, realizing that he was certainly taking his career, and perhaps even his life, in his hands.

  ‘I think we have two choices, Mr. President. Groom Lake is a secure area, which our military machine controls completely. We can simply wait them out, even if it takes weeks or months. Set up a cordon around the Rolver Systems’ building, cut off the main water supply and external power, and wait around for Hunter and Reilly to finally give up and walk out. Then we can arrange for them to disappear quietly, and permanently.