Dulce Base (The Dulce Files Book 1)

by Greg Strandberg

  7 – Super Soldiers

  “Super soldiers?” Charlie scoffed, but he quickly quieted down as a group of men began to filter into the room from the same door Anderholt and Ellis had come through.

  “Whoa!” Ronnie laughed. “These boys are…well, just boys!”

  It was true – most of the men coming into the room looked barely old enough to shave.

  “They’re all approaching 30 if they’re not past it, and all have seen the battlefield,” Anderholt said, his arms crossed over his chest as the men kept coming in, forming a line in the center of the room.

  There were many – more than a dozen in fact, and not all of them so young. Many of them actually looked older than the astronauts and specialists sitting at the table.

  Finally as the last entered and all nineteen were standing, General Anderholt stepped forward, and Ellis moved over to his side. The men around the table all stood up as well.

  “These are the men that’ll be heading into Dulce with you,” Anderholt said, walking forward to stand in front of their line, “and these six men especially should aid each of your teams. Gentlemen!”

  Anderholt stepped out of the way as he gave the command, and six men stepped forward, six that looked just like plain, everyday ordinary soldiers.

  “What’s so special about them?” Stan laughed.

  “Let me tell you,” Anderholt said, stepping up to the first man that’d stepped forward, a young man with short black hair that seemed never to have figured out how to lay down properly.

  “This is Corporal Tommy Wynn,” Anderholt said, “killed in Vietnam in ‘68.”

  “What?” Carl shouted, although just a second before Ellis did the same.

  Anderholt nodded. “Yep, all six of these men were ‘killed’ in action, although that’s just the official story. In reality, each of them was given a certain amount of telepathic-blocking abilities as well as a special ‘gift,’ if you will. Tommy’s here is to withstand mind attacks.

  “Wish I could show it to ya, but I don’t think you could see it,” Tommy said with a sideways grin, one that showed everyone there that he was a perpetual joker – how else could laugh lines become so deep on one so young?

  “Sergeant Sammy Williams here and Corporal Bobbie Baker are the same,” Anderholt said, moving down the line to the next two men. Williams was a young black man, clean-shaven and about as clean-cut as you could get. Bobbie Baker, on the other hand, had that mischievous look in his eye that told Ellis right away that he’d be trouble. His hair was cut short and his large ears were prominent, but it was that shit-eater grin that seemed to set him apart. Ellis made a note to bust his balls a bit.

  “That’s three,” Charlie said, “what’d the others do?”

  “First Lieutenant Robbie Biscaye here has undergone chemical treatments to make his skin tougher than yours, literally three times tougher.”

  “Like a rhino,” Robbie smiled, his spiky blonde hair sticking up. He had a hard-chiseled face and those far-off James Dean eyes, a pair the ladies probably couldn’t resist if they knew he was still alive, which Ellis highly doubted. Nope, it was a good bet none of these six – and possibly the other thirteen – had seen a real woman in years, or at least since shipping off to Vietnam…probably ten years ago now. How the hell do they look so young?

  “Sergeant Paul Carson is up next,” Anderholt said, breaking Ellis’s thought, “and he’s got one of the most unique gifts – the ability to block all telepathy, not just for himself, but anyone within a 10-foot radius of him.”

  “Now that will come in handy down in Dulce,” Carl said.

  “Whoa, wait a minute,” Charlie said, crossing his arms. “I thought you said they all could do that.”

  Anderholt shook his head. “Yes and no. Paul here’s the only one that can do it all the time, even when he’s sleeping. The others, well…let’s just say that if you stay within 10 feet of ‘em you’ll be safe about 80% of the time, how’s that?”

  Charlie frowned, but held his tongue under the general’s intense gaze.

  “And the last one?” Ellis asked, already growing impatient with these new ‘super soldiers,’ although he did see the value they had even despite that last remark by the general.

  “This is Turnicot Dupree,” the General said, “and his special gift is one most soldiers in the future will have, and that’s bionics. Show ‘em, Turn.”

  The soldier named Turnicot nodded and then reached down and started to unbuckle his belt.

  “Whoa, there,” Ronnie laughed, “I don’t know if I need to see no bionics.”

  “Can it,” the General replied, and a moment later Turn had his pants undone and then dropped them to his feet.

  “Damn!” Charlie said while beside him Eddie whistled. Before them were two sleek, metal legs, titanium it looked like, although both men suspected it was something much stronger, and perhaps unknown.

  “Graphene is what they’re made out of,” Turn said as everyone marveled at his ‘legs,’ “one hundred times stronger than steel and a fraction of the weight.”

  “Those puppies will still be there long after Turn there is gone,” Anderholt said.

  “Yeah, but will you have any puppies here when you’re gone?” Tommy said with a laugh and a slap on the back of Bobbie beside him.

  Turn frowned, but instead of saying anything just started to lift up his blue and green plaid boxer shorts.

  “Well I’ll be!” Charlie laughed as the metal legs began to give way to dark, black skin.

  “I’d take them up further, but I don’t want to show any of you boys up on the puppy-making department,” Turn said, a sideways look directed Tommy’s way. It was a comment that had every man in the room laughing, and even Anderholt cracked a smile.

  “And the rest of the men?” Ellis said after the commotion had died down ad Turn had pulled up his pants again.

  “The best of the best,” Anderholt said as the six ‘super soldiers’ stepped back into the line and the other thirteen stepped forward. “Each was taken out of active duty while in Vietnam and each has been training with special forces and the new Delta Force since then.”

  “Those are my men!” Aaron shouted, a second before Charlie was about to do the same.

  “But they’re our tactics,” the general said with a gruff look, “and now you’ll have a chance to try out your leadership skills with those tactics.”

  Aaron shrugged at that, and then the introductions began.

  “From left to right here we’ve got Captain Frank Burchak, Sergeant Andy Byrd, Sergeant Billy Brigham, Captain Walter Leathers, Lieutenant Colonel Emil Wiseman, Major Jake Zates, Second Lieutenant David Tish, Major Fred Sayer, Corporal Johnny Williams, Sergeant Lewie Yates, Major John Bingham, Captain Moses Cochrane, and Sergeant Jerry Carol.”

  The thirteen men stepped back and the nineteen stood there again.

  “So you’re twenty-nine men, and I’m the thirtieth,” General Anderholt said, “this is our team.”

  The men looked around at one another and nodded. This was their team.

  8 – The Grays

  Blue Lake

  Tuesday, May 22, 1979

  The days went by, the men training together, getting to know one another…and learning to put up with one another. They were a disparate group, that was for sure, but a good mix from all the armed forces. And they reflected all the areas of the country as well.

  There were the Ivy-League-educated boys, the commanders mainly, though that wasn’t really accurate either. While it was true most of the men that’d be flying were from the upper-crust of society, others like Fred Sayer and Chargin’ Charlie were not.

  Most of the men were poor, or had at least grown up that way. Even though they had money now, most hardly ever used it. They’d give up private lives upon joining the most special of special forces, and few regretted it. Most of the men were white, most from the South. Of the four black men on the team, Sammy and Moses were from the North while Turn was from Mis
sissippi and Johnny was from Georgia. Johnny was just on the reserve team, the one with super soldier Paul Carson and Carl as commander, at least on paper. It was clear to the men after that first week of training together that there were a lot of eventualities, a lot of backup plans, and a lot of second-guessing. But not nearly as much as there was briefings, at least four a day, all so the men could learn what had been hidden from so many of them for so long, the incredible news that aliens not only existed, but were among them, operating by government treaty, and now running amok doing what they willed, something that’d been going on for four years and with consequences unknown and hardly guessed at either, so terrible they seemed.

  It was yet another of those briefings, this on a Friday before a weekend that looked to be full of work. The men’s morale had never been much lower.

  “There are actually several types of Gray,” Stan said, continuing on with the now more than hour-long lecture, “it’s just that the Zeta Reticuli Grays are the most common, and who we generally refer to when we say the ‘Gray.’”

  Stan paused and looked out, making sure he had everyone’s attention before continuing. He did.

  “They’re from the Zeta Reticulan star system – the Bernard star – neighboring the Orion area. Zeta Reticuli is nothing more than a dim point of light to us if we’re standing outside in an empty area and looking up…though you’d have to be in the southern hemisphere to see it, approximately equidistant between the constellation Orion and the Celestial South Pole.”

  In the chairs ahead of him, Tommy yawned, audibly and to quite a few grins.

  “Not the most interesting at times, I know,” Ellis said from the side of the room, “but it just might save your life.”

  “I find it fascinating,” Paul said, and was immediately met with a round of chuckles from the more ‘macho’ men of the team.

  “The Reticulum constellation is relatively close to us, celestially-speaking,” Stan continued, pointing at the star map on the wall, “just 40 light years away…or 175,000 years if we were travelling in a regular space craft like we take to the moon.”

  From the back, someone whistled.

  Stan nodded to that. “Of course, that’s not practical, so we’d most likely take a craft that could get us there in a fraction of a fraction of the time. But then that’s something which we don’t have and probably won’t for some time.”

  “At least not publicly,” Stu said from the back of the room.

  “And that goes with Zeta 2 Reticuli as well,” Stan continued, “the name given to the Gray’s home world upon its discovery in 1944. Almost immediately it was taken from the list of known and discovered planets, the truth of what it held just too dangerous for the general public to know.”

  “Despite the Betty and Barney Hill incident in ’61,” Ellis said from the side of the room.

  Tommy again gave an audible yawn.

  “So what do we know about these things, sir?” Turn asked, his eyes open and looking on quizzically.

  “The Grays function in a mode that’s apparently military in nature with a rigidly defined social structure that holds science and ‘conquering worlds’ to be the prime movers,” Stan went on. “Physically, they stand 3 to 31/2 feet in height, have a small, thin build and heads much larger than a human’s. There are no auditory lobes, no hair, just limited facial features, a slit mouth and no nose to speak of. Their arms resemble those of a praying mantis in its normal position, and they reach to the creatures’ knees, the long hands with the small palm and claw-like fingers of a various number of digits – often two short digits and two long, but some species have three or four fingers. They have small feet with four small claw-like toes, organs that are similar to human organs but which have obviously developed according to a different mutational process. Each has two separate brains, movement that’s deliberate, slow and precise. The two separate brains are held apart from one another by a mid-cranial lateral bone, meaning they have an anterior and posterior brain, though there’s no apparent connection between the two. Some autopsies have revealed a crystalline network which is thought to have a function in telepathic functions, probably to help maintain the group-consciousness between them. Functions of group consciousness does have a disadvantage in that decisions within the larger Gray collective come rather slowly as the matter at hand filters through the group awareness to those who must make a decision. To top it all off, they’ve also evolved beyond the need for reproductive systems or digestive systems and now only reproduce by cloning.”

  “So no kickin’ ‘em in the balls,” Tommy laughed, and a few of the other men joined in, mostly the young and less-educated, like Tommy himself, and Bobbie. They were the two constant jokers of the team, but two they had to put up with – they were super soldiers. Turn couldn’t help but think the men’s opinion of he and the others was diminished because of the silly antics of those two. But then he knew they were just blowing off steam, getting ready for what lay ahead of them.

  “How ‘bout kickin’ ‘em in those big, stupid eyes of theirs instead?” Jerry piped-up next, eliciting another round of laughter.

  “Ah, yes…the eyes,” Stan said, his voice rising over the rowdy men. “They have large tear-shaped eyes – slanted approximately 35 degrees – which are opaque black with vertical slit-pupils.”

  Stand paused, as if he were waiting for something, but when it never came, he continued with the lecture.

  “These cloning techniques have been given to our government in exchange for ‘favors,” Stan continued with only a slight frown, like a tired high school teacher that’d heard and seen it all before. “Their genetics are partly based on insectoidal genetics, close relative to the insect family. The larger Grays – known as Type B, or Bellatrax, Grays – apparently have some vestigial reproductive capability, and some of the hybrid species that have been cross-bred with the taller Reptilian species have full reproductive capability.”

  “Ahem,” Ellis coughed from the side of the room, “why don’t we get into their minds…if you will.”

  Stan nodded. “The brain capacity of a Gray is estimated to be between 2500 and 3500 cc, compared to 1300 cc for the average human. Due to the cloning process, the neural matter is artificially-grown brain matter, and the Grays have technology that enables them to insert memory patterns and consciousness into clones in any manner or pattern that they wish.”

  “Clones?” Charlie echoed.

  “Their science deals largely with the study of other life forms and genetic engineering,” Stu took up from the back, drawing the men’s attention. “They’ve supposedly had a part to play in the alteration of human genetics over thousands of years. It seems that they may be trying to cross breed with humans in order to create a ‘mixture race’ that would be better than either. It’s commonly believed that they’re a dying species, one that’s cloned so much that now, with each successive cloning, the species grows weaker. They’re trying to infuse new life into their species by creating the mixed breed.”

  “There seem to be two main social classes,” Stan picked up. “One is the more hawkish, more abrupt, crude and blunt. The more dove-like ones are more refined and capable of a business-like behavior towards humans, and prefer to use more ‘diplomatic’ behavior to gain control over humans. This type of Gray is what I believe is being referred to as the ‘Orange’ class of Grays.”

  “So how do we kill the bastards?”

  Stan smiled as the men chuckled to Jerry’s remark.

  “The Grays are photosensitive, meaning any bright light hurts their eyes.” Stan paused and waited for the men to get themselves together. “They avoid sunlight, and primarily travel at night for this reason. Camera flashes cause them to back up. That could be used as a weapon against them, but they recover quickly. Still,” he continued, giving the men a hard look, “that could buy enough time for an average person to escape. Use commands, or nonsensical words in the form of commands and they will back up. Their brain is more logical than ours and
they do not create ’fun’. They don’t understand poetry either, so start spouting gibberish if you’ve got nothing else. What really confuses the hell out of ‘em, however, is saying things in Pig Latin. We learned that in a hurry upon our initial infiltrations after the base was lost in ’75, and used it against them quite well.”

  “But not well enough to win,” Ellis reminded both Stan and the men.

  Stan nodded before continuing. “The Grays read your intent, because they use your body’s frequency. The human race broadcasts a frequency, one that they recognize as an electromagnetic impulse. Each person has a slightly different frequency, and that difference is what we call ’personality’. When a human thinks, they broadcast strong impulses, in the case of ’fear’ the frequency is ’loud’ and easy to recognize.”

  “And by the same right, a calm and composed mindset should be far more difficult to ’recognize,’” Carl pointed out.

  “We can shield ourselves against them, however 95% of the human race never tries to control their thoughts, and controlling our own thoughts is the best weapon,” Stan pressed on. “The average person rarely thinks in a clear pattern. That allows the brain to think in a chaotic way. Control your thoughts, and the chances that the Grays can control you – or worse, abduct you – goes way down. Controlling my own thoughts has kept me alive for years.”

  “You make it sound like bullets won’t kill ‘em,” Turn said.

  “Oh, they will,” Stan said, “it’s just that they’ll probably kill a good many of you before you have a chance to make those bullets do any harm.”

  “That’s why these weird mind tricks we’re talking about are so important,” Ellis said. “I’ve seen whole teams get wiped out because they didn’t try things as simple as that.”

  “Are their minds really that powerful, sir?” Fred asked, his voice skipping a bit. It was clear he didn’t like asking about such.