The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy

by David Bischoff

  “Something you’ve left out?”

  “No, something I remember seeing. I’m a member of a clipping service. Scarborough. You know what they are?”

  “Of course. They save articles from all publications. Local as well as national. International, if you want them.”

  “Exactly. Well, this service clips out news items concerning UFOs. Invaluable in my trade.”

  “I should imagine. Yes, I’ve heard of that service.” “Sorry. Keep forgetting we’ve been working the same fields for a while. This is a service, though, which I’m sure you didn’t subscribe to. It sends the stories immediately. Quite necessary for a timely publication like the Intruder.”

  “Sounds quite expensive as well.”

  “Yes, but well worth it. Anyway, there’s this one particular story I was reading on the plane here last night. Just came in. I think you should have a look at it. It’s back at my hotel room.”

  “I think maybe you should call Marsha and read it to her. I’ll contact her this evening.”

  “Not a bad idea. I assume you’re leaving town then.” “Yes. I probably should have left last night.”

  Camden chewed his lip a moment, as though trying to figure out the right way of saying something. “Look, man. I know this is all pretty tough on you, and you have to take the brunt of all this on your own shoulders. God, it must be rough to have your whole world tom apart like this. Jeez, your daughter kidnapped ... I guess we ain’t had exactly the warmest of professional relationships and all, us being from different sides of the camp and all. But in this situation, you just gotta know that I’m in there, rooting for you. And I’ll help you whatever way I can.”

  “Thanks, Camden. I guess you did me a favor back there. I was really out of it. Maybe the first thing I should do is check into some hotel in the sticks and sleep awhile.”

  “Who knows? Maybe your two guardian angels would have come around and kicked your butt. By the way, where are you going?”

  “I have to head back to the D.C. area.”

  “Isn’t that a little dangerous?”

  “Not any more than New York City.”

  “What’s in D.C.?”

  “I’ve got a friend who works in the CIA. A field agent. He’s on record as an individual not particularly in favor of illicit activities of the Company. And he owes me a favor. I’ve been trying to reach him. Maybe I have to go down and visit him personally. “

  “This guy have a name?”

  “Why do you need to know?”

  “Yow! Get thee behind me, Paranoia!”

  A weary smile crossed Scarborough’s face. “Yes, maybe you should know, Jake.” He finished the last dregs of his beer and clopped the mug down onto the grainy table. “His name is Edward Ross Myers.”

  Chapter 13

  “Pardon me, Lieutenant Manning? I don’t mean to bother you; I just have a new file of documents for you, pertaining to your present assignment.”

  The knock on the door had already startled Marsha Manning, but she didn’t have time to put her book away before Captain Fredricks marched in, a manila folder tucked under one arm, a tentative smile on his face.

  “Captain!” said Manning, turning the large fiat hardback down onto a pile of printouts. “I was just taking a coffee break! Fascinating stuff, this statistical work!”

  “Thank God for people who know computers, that’s all I can say,” said Captain Fredricks, the twinkle in his eye matching the gleam that the strip lighting made on his bald head. “Without you folk, I guess we’d have to march the troops out and invent some kind of drill involving fingers and toes, eh?”

  Manning laughed hollowly. “I must say, I do prefer field work.”

  “So I hear ...” The captain bent his neck, fingered the spine of the book. It was a Time-Life book called The UFO Phenomenon. “Reading up on your aircraft, eh?”

  “I realized there were large areas of ignorance concerning the subject, sir.”

  “All bullshit of course.” He gave her an appraising look, raising his bushy eyebrows. He was getting into his mid-forties and those eyebrows were turning grey, which gave him a rakish appearance he liked to use on women. “I’ve piloted for years and I’ve never seen a one. Mind you, I’ve seen a few odd things in the skies. Sun dogs. Moon dogs. Ice crystals. All explainable. Atmosphere does funny things. So does lack of pressurization, lack of oxygen.” He handed her the folder. “Well, then, you think you can incorporate this material into your sublimely athletic algorithms?”

  Manning took the folder. She flipped through the thick sheath of Xeroxed reports on the mechanical functioning of various jet and propeller engines utilized by the United States Air Force over the last thirty years. This kind of stuff was the sort of thing the Pentagon usually farmed out to contractors in Washington D.C. Giving her this assignment was the Air Force’s form of retribution. They couldn’t pin anything on her, but they had their own sort of punishment, anyway. Rather like Chinese water torture, except the “drip drip drip” here was “byte byte byte.”

  “Thank you, sir. I believe this will help on the attrition tables.”

  Captain Fredricks cleared his throat officiously and then turned to leave. He stopped himself, though, and turned back to Lieutenant Manning. “I suppose you’ve heard the stories about this air base.”

  “What?” Manning blinked, playing dumb. “A UFO landed at Wright-Patterson?”

  “No, no. I mean, about the crashed saucer. The one that was supposed to have gone down in New Mexico in ‘47. Near Roswell, I think. Well, the myth goes that we’re keeping it here in some hangar, along with the recovered bodies of dead spacemen.

  “Sounds a little wild, doesn’t it, Captain. Is it true?”

  “Of course not. I just thought you’d be interested in a little local mythology.”

  “I guess the place does need every little bit to liven it up, doesn’t it?”

  “That it does, Lieutenant. That it does. When do you think we’ll see the preliminary charts on these statistics?”

  “What, the graphs? Well, I’ve got two weeks, but unless there’s more stuff you want me to work with, and unless I find I have to recode the program to suit this material, I suppose I’ll have it finished by ... about next Tuesday?”

  “Oh, no hurry, No hurry at all.” The captain smiled a faintly perturbed smile, bid farewell, and left. Clearly, the man had only received hints of what she’d been up to a couple of weeks ago and was curious—was fishing for juicy details. All he knew was that suddenly, she’d been figuratively chained to an outlet of a mainframe, doing very boring detail work, far, far beneath her abilities.

  But then, this was the military, wasn’t it?

  Marsha Manning was a career officer, and generally speaking, when you’d chosen that path for your professional career, you either loved being part of Uncle Sam’s Defense Family—or you were planning a new career after you served your twenty-five years. Manning was in the latter category. She wasn’t looking forward to actually being in her mid-forties, but she was looking forward to her new career. In the meantime, she’d been trying to figure out a way to actually experience something akin to being alive. Meeting Everett Scarborough, getting involved with all this, was an exciting roller coaster, but now she was back in mundanity. She wanted to get on that ‘coaster again. She liked the feeling, and she liked Scarborough.

  Manning tossed the packet of papers contemptuously into her in-box, and then stared back at her computer screen. She’d called a subroutine of the program up for a little fine-tuning. It was in C language and she diddled a little here, a little there, and then quit. Hell with it. It certainly wasn’t the most elegant subroutine. But then, elegance was lost on the basic program anyway, which was clunky as hell. You’re really good programmers and analysts were out in private industry, pulling down hefty chunks of change. Air Force programs tended to wear hobnailed boots and crash a lot, like Air Force pilots lately.

  “Shit,” she said disgustedly, picking up her cup
of cold Maxwell House and sipping bitter reality, without cream. She stared out the dun brown window onto a bleak day across the plain of architectural nightmare which was the Wright-Patterson office complex. A Boeing jet was taking off one of the runways, screaming into the sky to tear hell out of the sound barrier and bum a lot of fuel, probably for no particularly good reason. A light rain had fallen early this morning, and clouds still hung low over the base. The grey blandness of the cement and the buildings seemed to seep in around the window sill, smelling of tarmac and oil and khaki pants. The smell that Manning had lived with for a long time, which now weighed down upon her, like those clouds up there pressed down upon dull Ohio earth.

  Marsha shuddered with an imaginary chill, feeling oppressed, feeling claustrophobic.

  “Shit,” she repeated. Then she went and closed the door of her small office cubicle, locking it so no more captains would barge in with barely a knock.

  She picked up the Time-Life book again, and turned to the index. Sure enough, there it was: “Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.” She turned to the indicated page and then read the passage. She read the page before the paragraph mentioning the base, and then the page after it.

  Hmm.

  Apocryphal information, of course. Hearsay, rumor ... myth, just as Captain Fredricks had said. Nonetheless...

  According to the story, an Unidentified Flying Object had crash-landed in some rancher named Brazel’s land in southern New Mexico; close enough to an air field that military personnel were able to go check it out. Here was where the story split off into a collection of odd newspaper clippings. Initially, it was said, the commanding officer was supposed to have let it be known that it was a flying saucer that had landed, and the military team had also discovered the bodies of “aliens.” There were reports of wreckage consisting of a strange and tremendously strong foil-like metal. Suddenly, however, the official Air Force line changed. No saucer, no aliens, they said. It was just a weather balloon, newly tumbled from the heavens. That’s it. Really. Honest! Actually, from what Manning read, that was indeed probably what it was. She could see how easily such a story could snowball into rumors afterward. How this “saucer” and its contents made it to Wright-Patterson, the authors did not mention.

  Still, it wasn’t like she wanted to go back to working on that stupid statistical program-next thing she was supposed to do was to start inputting the information, and that was close to just secretarial work. She dreaded the thought. Besides, it had already been proven to her that the Air Force could be duplicitous; Scarborough’s dealings with them showed that plain and bold. Maybe there was something to this story, some scrap of truth that the boys in brass were covering up.

  Wouldn’t hurt to look, would it? Besides, it was a challenge.

  Smiling, Marsha spun back to her computer keyboard. With the password (which she hoped they hadn’t changed yet) she accessed the mainframe.

  Phosphor dots wriggled, letters and numbers jiggled.

  Suddenly, she was through. She was on-line.

  As she recalled, there was some sort of menu in this system where’d she seen a storage section. All she had to do was to wade through the byzantine corridors of this clumsy system.

  If something was there, she’d find it.

  Even if she had to work through her lunch hour.

  The sky, if anything, had gotten darker. An occasional fat droplet fell down, splashed onto the ground or into one of the many puddles scattered about like sad little mirrors reflecting the grimness above. Marsha avoided these puddles as she walked the network of sidewalks and parking lots, past the grids of buildings toward Storage Area 34. She wore a standard issue Air Force parka against a possible downpour. It wasn’t serious yet, so she kept the hood down. It was drowned-worm weather, and it smelled of damp soil and grease on water. The squeal and roar of jets had dimmed somewhat—she was closer into the building complex, so the sounds were muted somewhat. Her flats squished slightly as she walked. A northeastern breeze flipped along the luxuriant growth of spring green grass where it had been allowed to grow, filling a tattered wind sock near a barracks that someone had put up as a joke—wind socks were hardly the stuff of your high-tech Tom Clancy Air Force, no sir!

  In her pocket was a piece of paper upon which she had written a compartment number. Stall A-97, Room 18, Storage Area 34. She’d picked through the storage directory for close to an hour before she found the listing.

  All it said was, “Roswell, ‘47.”

  Not “Artifacts,” not “Flying saucer,” and certainly not “Dead alien bodies.” Nothing else. Just “Roswell ‘47.”

  Still, the fact that there was a listing like that was worth taking a look. Nothing else to do. Who knew what she might turn up that might help Scarborough, might help explain exactly what the government had been covering up all these years.

  A map of the base had provided the location of Storage Area 34. It wasn’t too far away, not driving distance anyway, on an older part of Wright-Patterson. Now, as she approached the area, Marsha could see that the buildings were old hangars and support buildings. They looked particularly dilapidated and grey—-the Air Force hardly built things to last a long time, and doubtless bureaucratic foul-ups had allowed these things to remain standing.

  Nonetheless, as she walked along an old runway approaching them, as she located Storage Area 34, she was surprised to see that it was one of the two hangars which were surrounded by a fence.

  An electrified fence, with barbed wire at the top.

  There were no guards near the gate to the fence which wrapped around Storage Areas 34 and 3~but the gate wasn’t exactly hanging open either, Marsha saw. In fact, there was a

  very modem-looking booth in which a computerized access lock was stationed.

  Marsha stepped in to examine this, already suspecting what it was, but checking nonetheless. Sure enough, it was an authorization lock. You had to slip in your identification card and then put in the special authorization code particular to this machine. Just like an ATM bank-teller.

  Damn. There’d been no mention of an authorization code in the computer.

  And if she stuck her magnetic-stripe in there, who knew! Her attempted accessing might just hit an alarm bell in security, and her name might zap out onto some printer, underlined and bracketed with asterisks. After the questionable actions she’d pulled with Scarborough, Colonel Walter Dolan had wanted her ass in a sling—only intercession from her higher friends in the force prevented a serious inquiry, the first step to a possible disciplinary action or even court-martial. Her buddies had suggested that she be a “good girl” for a while. Getting caught accessing classified material was not exactly going to give her that kind of reputation.

  No guards, though. That was significant. Not even electronic surveillance. This particular classified area was apparently not all that important.

  Not exactly “Mission: Impossible” territory.

  She strode past the lock box, not even stopping to inspect it. She’d seen its type in other places on the base, knew its operation.

  Maybe she should have expected this impasse. Whatever the case, the blocking box not only intrigued her, it challenged her.

  Clearly, she was just going to have to go back, snoop a little through the security systems and do a bit of finagling with the codes.

  With a private little smile, Lieutenant Marsha Manning swept past Storage Building Number 34 and walked on around the quadrangle, heading back to her office and the modest bag lunch she’d prepared for herself.

  Yes, this was going to interest Dr. Everett Scarborough.

  A lot.

  Chapter 14

  The main headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency is an imposing fortress of a building, modern in architecture, stark against a wooded area in a place called Langley, Virginia, across the Potomac from the rest of the government and a few miles north of the Pentagon in Arlington. Although the rest of the CIA Washington employees are scattered all over Washington, D.
C., and Northern Virginia, with thousands of consultants in the science, technology, economic, government and defense community sprouted about the swampy area like mushrooms from dark, dank soil—to say nothing of the ten other agencies such as Defense Intelligence, the National Security Agency, and the FBI which report directly to the CIA—it is in Langley that the Director of Central Intelligence and the head officers have their offices.

  Washington, D.C., is a hot and humid place. Before the advent of air-conditioning, the U.S.A.’s capital was considered “subtropical” service by other country’s diplomats. Therefore, when the huge building was finished in 1961, it came as a surprise to the over 10,000 employees installed there that although the heating system was adequate, the air-conditioning system was wretched. Thermostats were placed in offices, and regulatory orders were placed on room temperatures. However, when continual manipulation of the things fouled up the AC even more, lockboxes were placed upon the thermostats. The contractors had not, however, reckoned with the fact that many of the CIA’s employees had taken a “locks and picks” course during their training. Practically all the thermostats were back in operation in very short order.

  The area housing Brian Richards’s office had never had a problem with faulty air-conditioning. This portion of the CIA was where the generals of the agency were placed—the so-called super-grades. Civilian brass of the first water. Indeed, the super-grades were accorded a remarkable number of civilities and comforts, including their own private dining room.

  Brian Richards sat in that private dining room now, having lunch.

  Although the chefs here were quite good with French cuisine, the latest trend in gastronomic preference in Washington, D.C., was Italian dishes, and so the CIA upper-crust exclusive commissary adjusted accordingly. Now, Richards was enjoying, after his antipasto, a variation of ribollita called pappa al pomodoro. For dessert today, he intended to order the zabaglione, a delicious Italian egg-custard he particularly enjoyed.