Majestic

by Whitley Strieber

  There was an orange tree in the courtyard, and I cannot remember a time when it was not in bloom.

  He screamed names, dates, everything he knew.

  My agents were rounded up, tortured in their turn, and I became a hunted man, creeping through the back streets like some movie spy, being followed by men in tailored suits who soaked their bullets in garlic and habitually aimed at the stomach. I was hiding in my room, half drunk, down to my last bottle when the Allies came marching into the city and it was over.

  Those of my agents who were still alive were released.

  In Washington I was growing fat on the fruits of victory, plotting the ruin of the French colonial empire and eating every night at places like Harvey's and the Occidental. Broiled sea trout at Harvey's one night, Hoover two tables away eating the same; a steak the next night at the Occidental, and then midnight and the whip cutting Jamshid's back like butter.

  I would wake up shaking and pour myself a glass of Pinch, drink it and listen to records on my Victrola:

  "Deep Purple," from the days that I was dating Rose deMornay, "Sweet Leilani" from Waikiki Wedding, one of those fluffy prewar movies. They were enchanted days in America, the late thirties. The depression was pretty well over, and Hitler was kind of funny and the Japs . . . well, they were awfully far away. "Whudduyu say to them Tokyo babes—I wanna nip on nese!" Tokyo Rose . . . there is to terror a pure romance. We fox-trotted our way from Waikiki Wedding to Pearl Harbor.

  Now I would wake myself up by crying in my sleep. Then came the Alien Estimate. I regarded it all as rather amusing, like a scary movie. I had not the faintest idea that it had electrified the Joint Chiefs, and scared General Vandenberg so badly that he'd spent a good bit of time literally staring at a wall. For me it was empty of reality. I was still ignorant of events in Rosewell. I wouldn't be for long.

  I drove over to the office that morning, parking the Chevy as usual on E Street, relying on my license number to keep the officer of the watch from writing me a summons. When I got into my office there was a message from Vandenberg. Please call as soon as convenient.

  As per standing orders, I informed our new boss, Admiral Hillenkoetter. He called me in and told me that I was free to see General Vandenberg as long as I didn't sell the agency to him. We were all afraid that CIG

  would be absorbed and dismembered by the Joint Chiefs, something that they had been trying to do since the war ended. Our new boss viewed any contact from his predecessor as a reconnaissance in strength. I went over to the Pentagon in one of our staff cars, driven by the sort of clean, hard young man we liked to hire, most of whom we later expended in the Soviet Union. "Moscow rules" were written by such young men.

  I'll tell you another thing about "Moscow rules," which consist of planting messages in hollow trees, not using real names or telephones and doing a great deal more sneaking around than usual: they don't work. What works are the right implements, the leather cord, the naked electric lead, the soldering iron in the anus. Insert it, turn it on, then ask your questions. You will have the correct answers. We had a tough outlook, those of us who were left over from the war. Want a woman to talk? Grab her lower lip and slap her until it starts to tear off. Women have a horror of disfigurement; she'll talk. Women believe in their faces.

  "Goddamn it, Willy, what the hell is this?" Vandenberg blurted as soon as I walked into his office. He snatched up the estimate and tossed it at me.

  "I think it's accurate, sir."

  "It's no joke?"

  I saw the fear in his eyes, and grew instantly wary. It has been my unfailing experience that men of power are randomly dangerous when they are afraid.

  "No, sir."

  "We called the Mounties." He produced a thick folder. "They damn well investigated that situation up in the Northwest Territories. The bastards stole an entire village! Holy God, Willy, what if the S.O.B.'s steal Peoria?

  What in God's name does the Air Force do about it?"

  I did not expect that my estimate would cause this much upset. "I think we ought to develop some cases around it, General."

  "You're damn right we will! But tell me what these disks can do in the air. We've developed our own data, but we haven't got much. All we know is that they're fast, and some of them are big. Are they armed? Will my cannons work against them? What the hell do I do, Willy?"

  "You've prepared your own background paper?"

  "S-2 pulled something together. You can read it in this office. Eyes only. Two copies. The other one is at the White House."

  I didn't like the drift of this conversation. Admiral Hillenkoetter wasn't going to be happy to hear that Van had already involved the President. "I think we need to present all of this stuff to the board—"

  "No, sir! This is an Air Force matter, as of this moment! You are ordered to withdraw this estimate. No board meeting!"

  "General, Hilly's gonna raise a stink."

  "The hell he is. I called Truman at seven o'clock this morning and told him that he either gives this thing lock, stock and barrel to the Air Force or I'm out. I gave Harry an ultimatum!" Van was serving notice to me that this was of absolutely paramount importance to him. You did not threaten Harry Truman unless you were genuinely prepared to resign. Van cleared his throat, sucked his cigar hard. "He listened to me and then he says, 'Okay, Van, you take it. It's your baby.' " Vandemberg laughed bitterly. "I am not about to sit down in any NBK meeting and say to those men that my opinion is that the Air Force is completely helpless, impotent to prevent the mass kidnapping of Americans by monsters from outer space!" He glared at me, chewed the roaring cigar. "Goddamn it!"

  "I realize the problem."

  "You and your fancy suits and your shot cuffs and your goddamn Aqua-Velva! Why don't you ever get upset, Willy!"

  "Would it help?"

  Vandenberg glared at me. "Of course not. You're here because you don't get upset. We've built this magnificent Air Force and more-or-less survived the most stupidly conceived demobilization in the history of armed conflict—and now I find that it cannot fulfill its basic mission right here at home. You don't have to get upset, Willy. But I do. And I am."

  "Okay, Van. I understand your position perfectly. If I was to put a reliability number on that estimate, I would give it about a seventy. Seven out often chances it is correct. What else could have happened to the Canadian villagers?"

  "They even took the goddamn dead out of the graves! It implies that they were taken somewhere—some other place and planted there, like you say. Somewhere those villagers are living, with their dead in new graves.

  God. Willy, I looked up at the stars last night, and I have to tell you, I felt for those poor Eskimos."

  "We can surmise a few things about the matter. First, the dead were taken. They were Inuit people, and their ancestors were vitally important to them. Meaning? They were not simply murdered or enslaved. Their beliefs were respected."

  "They were taken somewhere. Intact."

  "Exactly."

  "What happened to the others? The boy that disappeared into the sky? And the poor man that went underground, Willy? I just—my blood ran cold!"

  "Van, maybe—" He looked at me. I hesitated, unwilling to finish my sentence. I had been about to soften the stand I took in the estimate. But I thought better of it at once. If there was the remotest possibility that I was right, the position I had taken was the correct one. "Maybe we'll find out it isn't as bad as it looks," I concluded rather lamely.

  Vandenberg stared at the ash on his cigar. "Should I bother to ask what Hilly thinks?"

  "Hilly's still getting into the job. He's going to be fine." Vandenberg raised his eyebrows. "He's concerned about this, naturally. He said that he felt we should wait for events to unfold a little further."

  "I think that we should get aggressive. I think we should attempt to shoot down one of the disks."

  "Hilly won't agree."

  "It's a decision for the Air Force, the Defense Department and the President." He pa
used. "Truman is interested in this. He's read your estimate, as well as ours."

  I concealed my amazement. This was not being handled according to established procedures. The National Board of Estimate should have read my paper, questioned and revised it, then transmitted it to the Defense and State departments. Then it would have come to the attention of the White House, and only if a presidential decision was needed. "Secretary Forrestal?"

  "He'll be informed in due course."

  Van looked at me. At last, I thought, he's coming to the point. Van could be very subtle. The blustery, tough exterior was there at once to confuse his enemies and make them imagine that he was vulnerable. He was a master bureaucratic infighter, and a brutal one. "I have a copy of a report from the 509th Bomber Wing in Roswell, New Mexico to Eighth Air Force headquarters." He handed me a piece of carbon paper.

  I still remember the feeling of the blood rushing from my head as I stood there looking down at the laconic message from Colonel Blanchard to General Ramey, the commanding general of the Eighth Air Force.

  "We have this day obtained debris from a flying disk of unknown origin and have located the remains of the object intact by photo recce. Please advise how we should proceed."

  "The pictures are being flown here right now."

  "Manna from heaven," I said quietly. I tried not to reveal my fear. Were we about to find people disappearing from New Mexico? Empty towns? Graveyards full of holes? "You realize that this is at present the most sensitive secret that the United States possesses. Even more sensitive than the formula for the atomic bomb."

  Vandenberg did not reply directly, and I realized that I had just condescended to a man who had bypassed his own chain of command and mine in order to restrict knowledge of this secret. He obviously understood the level of sensitivity involved.

  "Hilly has to know," I added.

  "I think we should convene a meeting with the President as soon as we get the photographs. You, me, Hilly and the secretary. We'll decide what to do from there."

  "I'll brief Hilly."

  "We can get the President one-fifteen to one forty-five."

  "The pictures?"

  "Barring weather delays, the plane will land at Andrews at twelve-forty."

  "You need to think about containment. Ramey knows. The 509th's Colonel knows. Presumably his staff knows. Was the debris found by a member of the public?"

  Vandenburg nodded.

  "I'll tell you, Van, I think we should be damn sure that none of these people will say a damn word. And any of them we can't be sure of—well, this is a very sensitive matter. If we have to take extreme steps, I don't think we should hesitate."

  How safe we felt, plotting our strategies deep in that Pentagon office. We were already doing the work of the others, playing into their hands, doing it their way.

  If only we had understood, but we did not understand. Sometimes wars are fought without battles, won without weapons. The best strategist conceals his attack behind a shield of confusion. The best strategist can make even an invasion seem like an accident.

  The others understood that fantastically powerful principle of warfare.

  We did not.

  Chapter Nine

  That was not the only principle of strategy that our government didn't understand. It is fascinating and rather infuriating to me that Will literally cannot think about our relationship with the others except in terms of conflict. Strategies. Battles. Subterfuges. His war years have so warped his perception of the world around him that everyone is an adversary and every action a stratagem.

  Understandably, the one thing he won't fight is death itself. It's obvious that he welcomes his cancer. The only reason he resists at all is to get this book finished. The closer we get to the end, the more he smokes and the harder he hits the bottle.

  I have cried because of this man.

  As much as I feel that he misperceived the others, he was in a sense right that they had a strategy. It would probably be more appropriate to call it a plan. A simple, staggeringly deceptive plan.

  I like to think that I discovered its outlines on my own. Will missed it, precisely because of its simplicity.

  While Washington stumbled the others were acting with decision. The government seems to have perceived the others as being rather ineffectual—which was no doubt exactly how they intended themselves to appear.

  They had advanced ships, yes, but they'd crashed one. Washington fell into the trap of viewing the event in Roswell as a failed attempt to scout unfamiliar terrain.

  Meanwhile, the others were capturing the night. Obviously they knew that an unbalanced government would be easiest for them to control. They began to achieve this control by taking an action that was calculated to cause panic in high places. They did this out in far West Texas, on the vast and dreary reserve known paradoxically as Fort Bliss.

  Second Squad, 4th Platoon, Company D, 53rd Infantry dropped their weapons to the hard West Texas ground arid watched the sun go down. They were recruits just out of basic, attending infantry school while they awaited orders to occupation duty. They were involved in a war-game maneuver and wishing they were almost anywhere else.

  I have reconstructed what happened over the next twelve hours from the reports contained in Will's files.

  These start in 1947 and end in 1956, when all the members of 2nd Squad were hypnotized to uncover hidden memories. That was the year Dr. Steven Reich discovered that the amnesia induced by the visitors could to a degree be broken by this process.

  It is interesting to me that Will never allowed himself to be hypnotized, even though his agency routinely required that all other personnel exposed to direct alien contact undergo the process.

  According to a report prepared by the Fort Bliss MP's who investigated the events that transpired that night, the squad was on a practice combat patrol. They had been assigned an area far from any expected

  "aggressor" activity, and I suspect that they anticipated a quiet night.

  The squad leader, Corporal Jim Collins, would have put the men at ease when they reached their destination.

  He himself sat down heavily, and pulled off his pack. After a moment he signaled to his radioman, who came trotting over with his antenna bobbing. "You working, Lucas?"

  "Yes, sir." Lucas bent his back and Collins pulled the handset out of its cradle and turned the radio on. He waited for the "ready" light, then made a brief transmission to Platoon.

  "This is Baker Delta Mike at Checkpoint zero-two-two-Harvey-eight. Out."

  The radio crackled. "Acknowledged," came the laconic reply. "Order: Rockabye."

  Collins flipped off the radio. "We got an order to bed down for the night," he said. There were a few groans of relief.

  No fires were allowed; they ate cold C rations. According to a typical C ration chow manifest from the period, supper could easily have been Vienna sausages, peas, processed cheese and rice pudding. There was no bread, and water was the only drink. No lights were allowed, which meant no cigarettes, and many of them wanted a smoke right now more than they wanted a woman.

  There were ten of them, plus Collins. The oldest was twenty-two. That was Mastic, who had a tattoo of a long-stemmed red rose on his chest.

  The youngest was a boy from Lufkin, Texas, called Sweet Charlie. Charlie Burleson.

  Officially, this monster was eighteen years old. According to his birth certificate as recorded on November 7,1931, in Austin, Texas, he was actually sixteen.

  For some reason nobody had bothered to check his age when he enlisted. It could have been his looks: Sweet Charlie was also known as "Bullhog."

  His great hope was to become a member of the Army boxing team and go professional after his tour was up.

  His hands were as big as most men's heads, and I believe that he had the disposition of somebody who'd swallowed a razor blade.

  This kid was scraping grease out of the bottom of a Vienna sausage can and staring off across the darkening landscape when he saw somethi
ng strange. "What the fuck they throwin' at us," he muttered.

  The whole squad looked where he was pointing.

  "Goddamn."

  "That's them Marfa Lights. I know what that is."

  "We're way the fuck away from Marfa, boy. You ain't got no goddamn sense. That's some kinda aggressor flare."

  Collins looked at the glow. It rose a little distance from the surface of the desert and hung in the air, a round, yellow ball about the size of the full moon.

  "Lucas, get HQ on the horn."

  After a moment the radiotelephone burped. HQ sounded a million miles away. "Permission to transmit in the clear."

  "Granted."

  "We are observing a stationary yellow flare south-southeast our position at approximately nine o'clock. Advise please."

  There was a fairly long silence, during which Collins watched the flare. "This is Lieutenant Ford, repeat that location."

  "South-southeast our position, approximately nine o'clock."

  "That is off the game board, Corporal. Assume it's unconnected activity."

  "Yes, sir. Over and out." He put the receiver back into the unit. "That flare is unconnected activity," he said aloud. "HQ says to disregard."

  The men hardly heard him. They were watching the flare, which was now moving about in the sky, fluttering from side to side like a leaf. For a long time nobody said anything.

  The disappearance of the thing was as sudden as a light being turned off.

  The men remained still and silent. Finally Mastic farted, which brought a snort of derision from Sweet Charlie.

  "Season the fuckin' bivouac, right Mastic?"

  "The more you eat, the more you toot."

  "Vienna sausages ain't beans."

  "All C rations are beans. See the numbers on these cans? This means they were made in June of 1944.

  That's three years ago."

  "Hell, they're new. I hearda guys openin' these cans and findin' hardtack and molasses. The U.S. Army ain't issued rations like that since the Civil War."