Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  Tommy wasn’t sure what he made of that. It sounded like defeat, but then, they had been fighting in the jungle for years already and it sounded to him like the mess was just getting worse. It had started quietly, when Tommy was a kid in Cleveland, so quietly he barely remembered it. Gradually, the word had started to echo from every radio, every TV set.

  Vietnam.

  It felt constant, like an itch that wouldn’t go away. Except that it was more than an itch. It was a fire, and it was spreading, getting hotter. It was terrifying.

  When Tommy enlisted in the Air Force, rather than letting himself get drafted into the Army, he thanked his lucky stars he was in Montana, under the big, open American sky, and not huddled in some soaking jungle trench, waiting for some guy in black pajamas to run a bayonet through his guts as he slept. He stared up at the sky to banish the image, the great velvety black canopy with its constellations scattered like glitter. The long night patrols around the base perimeter were tedious, but hell—there were worse places to be. He hugged his parka, stamped his bunny boots for warmth and hummed the opening bars of The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t it Be Nice.”

  It wasn’t unusual to see shooting stars up there, and Tommy, born and raised a city boy from Cleveland, a place that always seemed shrouded in smog and street lamp glare, still marveled at them—but the one he saw now was something special. It had moved steadily across the sky from roughly east to west, but then it seemed to slow, changing direction quickly twice, executing a rough circle before coming to rest like the star of Bethlehem, right over head.

  Tommy stared. It wasn’t a star, shooting or otherwise. That much was obvious. But there was no sound in the still Montana night, and its initial approach had surely been too fast to be a helicopter. You could sometimes see satellites, like Echo. He remembered Sputnik, the satellite the Ruskies had sent up when Tommy was eight years old and had found his parents sitting by the radio, white faced, holding hands. But satellites didn’t move like this. They didn’t change directions and hover. There had been missions sending men into space, of course, again chasing the Ruskies who had beaten them to it, but after the Apollo disaster in January when all the astronauts had burned before takeoff, Tommy wasn’t sure that would ever happen again.

  Which meant that what he was seeing wasn’t a US spacecraft, and that meant Soviet, because no one else could do it, and that was very bad news indeed. Tommy’s private nightmares were all about the jungles of Vietnam, a place he couldn’t find on a map and that lived in the whispered horror stories he heard among the men who had been out there and seen it. But the nation’s nightmare was the Russian commies, an enemy they were fighting by proxy in ’Nam, but who were an altogether different brand of scary. The kind of scary that demanded bases like Malmstrom.

  Tommy’s patrols were routine, but they were also meticulous, like everything else at Strategic Air Command. You had to be careful around nuclear missiles, and that was what was pointing skyward in the ten silos of Oscar Flight, only a few hundred yards from where he stood. Tommy was part of the Combat Support Group, located some thirty miles east of Lewiston, one of five launch control facilities in the area that formed the 490th missile squadron, each equipped with ten Minuteman I Nuclear armed Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.

  Tommy moved close to the perimeter fence and gazed upward, the Beach Boys’ song momentarily forgotten as he unslung his AN/PRC-6 “banana” walkie-talkie and turned it to broadcast.

  “Base, this is Airman Reznik, come in. Over.”

  There was a momentary silence, then a crackle and the radio came to life.

  “Right here, Reznik. What’s on your mind? Over.”

  “Got a weird light in the sky, just outside the north east perimeter fence. Over.”

  “What do you mean, ‘weird?’ Over.”

  “Moving erratically. Hovering. I don’t know. Weird. Over.”

  “Er … Okay. Not sure what to do with that, Reznik. Let us know if it gets weirder, I guess. Over and out.”

  Tommy could hear the amusement in the squad leader’s voice, and he hesitated before retrying.

  “Airman Reznik again. I think you should come see this. Over,” he said.

  The silence was longer this time, and the voice, when it came, less amused.

  “Be right there, Reznik. Make sure the site is secure. I will alert Command Post. Over and out.”

  Tommy bit his lip. He wasn’t sure he was ready to start a panic down in the launch bunker, but it was protocol that the duty officers sitting in the launch capsule be made aware of any security concerns, however preliminary. Someone would have to come and give the okay before getting back on the phone and calling down to the officers sixty feet below ground. It would all be officially recorded and documented. Tommy chewed his lower lip nervously. His breath billowed clouds of steam into the cold night air. He had to keep his nose clean. He was a good airman, reliable, punctual, always in control of himself. He didn’t need a mark on his record, saying he was some Ohio rube who imagined stuff or cried wolf. If he called the base quickly, told them he’d made a mistake, he might head off any call down to launch control, and it might not make it into his record.

  But the light was still there, and as he watched, it moved, getting lower as it swept out toward the main gate of the launch facility. Canceling the alert was not an option.

  Tommy broke into a jog in the direction of the light, talking into the walkie-talkie as he did so.

  “Base, this is Reznik. Come in. Over.”

  “Still here, Reznik. What’s up? Over.”

  “The light is coming your way. Over.”

  Another momentary hesitation.

  “Say again. Over.”

  “It’s coming down and heading for the main gate. Over,” said Tommy, who was now running, his rifle bouncing on its shoulder strap.

  The light was larger now, and had gone from cold white to a burning orange that shone on the eight-foot fence and lit the ground like a forest fire. It moved again, drifting closer and closer until, quite slowly, it moved over the gate. It was hard to tell how big it was. The light seemed to fluctuate and spread, so that Tommy wasn’t sure of the outlines of the object inside the light. He had the impression of looking at something about the length of an El Camino or a Plymouth Barracuda, though it was circular, disk-shaped. He could see no jets, no rotors, no means of keeping the thing up. It remained eerily soundless.

  It continued its steady slide through the air over the gate, no more than thirty or forty feet above the ground, he thought. Suddenly the air was torn by sirens as the Russian craft—if that were indeed what it was—started tripping sensors all over the base. Over from the far side of the road, he could see four or five other guards moving quickly, heads turned upward, weapons at the ready. As cold dread settled in the hollow of his gut, Tommy did the same, dropping to one knee as Sgt. Pinter—the NCOIC he’d been talking to on the walkie-talkie—came scuttling over to him, his eyes wide and scared.

  Pinter outranked him, something Tommy had resented until about five seconds ago. Now he couldn’t imagine anything worse than being the guy who had to decide what to do next.

  “Get over to the comm station,” said Pinter, trying to look sure of himself and not quite pulling it off. “Call security and tell ’em what’s going on.”

  “Okay,” said Tommy, though he hesitated just long enough to add, “What is going on?”

  Pinter, whose eyes had not left the amber glow overhead, shook his head. “Damned if I know,” he said.

  Tommy ran clumsily, still looking up, unable to believe what he was seeing. When he reached the phone and snatched it off the hook, his hand was unsteady.

  “What the hell is going on up there?” demanded Lieutenant Salas, the Intercept Control officer.

  “Sir, we’ve got a glowing red object right over the gate. It’s just … floating there. We’re ready to engage but …”

  “But what?”

  “I’m not sure that would be … wise
.”

  He wasn’t sure why he said it. It was just a hunch.

  “Well, you’re gonna need to do something,” said Salas. Tommy could hear another man’s voice in the background, exclamations of astonishment and panic from down in the launch bunker.

  “What’s happening, sir?” asked Tommy.

  “I don’t have a clue,” said Salas. “But whatever that thing is, it’s shutting down our guidance systems. Every missile just went off-alert and no-go, one by one. This facility’s capacity to launch a nuclear strike was just switched off.”

  OSCAR FLIGHT WASN’T THE ONLY FACILITY WHERE THE missiles went down that night. Fifty miles away, Tommy later discovered, the weapons of Echo Flight also shut down, one by one, despite the fact that each missile was separately controlled and powered by its own generator. Something similar had, it turned out, happened at Minot Base almost a year earlier. The missiles were taken off line and examined. All were deemed to be fully functional, and no explanation for their going down could be found.

  No one died. No missiles launched. The glowing object simply left, and the base eventually went back to normal. Or at least its systems did. Its machines. The men did not. Though the morning came without the disasters the night had threatened, the guards were all haunted by what they had seen.

  They were never debriefed, and though they had made formal reports, all investigations as to what had happened were abruptly terminated and everyone involved forced to sign nondisclosure documents. The guards were reassigned, split up, scattered into other parts of the service, which, for some, meant a change of nightmares. Tommy Reznik received his orders in April. By June he had deployed to Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Saigon, where he died when the base came under attack during the Tet Offensive of the following year. He never told a living soul what he had seen in the skies over Montana.

  48

  JENNIFER

  Rachel, Nevada

  SHE WAS STILL MAD ABOUT THE GUY IN THE BAR, OR rather about the way she’d behaved. Or something. Maybe she was just mad.

  She’d sat eating her food, drinking her beer, watching the sun go down through the plate glass windows, ignoring the other few stragglers who came in to drink and chat, and she was acutely aware of the bandaged man called Alan, sitting at the bar by himself in his private cloud. When she felt the urge to apologize getting the better of her, she left without a word. She hadn’t actually said anything she didn’t believe, but it had been unnecessarily confrontational of her to say it.

  She left to escape the bar, not because she had anywhere better to go. She sat in the rented Chevy with no idea what she was going to do next. She’d considered spending the night at the Little A’le Inn, but she couldn’t face talking to the waitress who she’d snapped at and who, she worried, was also the owner.

  She also knew that Alan might be able to see her rental car from where he sat inside the bar, so she drove off quickly. Wouldn’t want to look indecisive.

  That’s so typical of you, she scolded herself. Backing yourself into a corner, forcing your own hand, out of what? Defiance? Pride?

  “Fuck off,” she muttered to herself.

  It was surprisingly dark. The English spring days—being further north—lengthened gradually, so that by mid-summer, the evening unfolded over several hours. She’d been unprepared for how quickly day became night here. Now she was driving with her high beams on, wondering where the hell she was going. A sign to her left flashed white in the dark. Red letters shouted “Warning.” She slowed to read the small print. Military Installation. Trespassing prohibited. Photography prohibited.

  She sped away, her anger cresting once more as she felt the presence of the impervious monoliths she’d always fought against: authority, control, private interest, exploitation of the masses … It was all here. She could smell it on the night air, like blood.

  Your temper will be the death of you, she thought, but she heard her father’s voice. So impulsive, so quick to fight …

  “I said, fuck off!” she shouted, stepping hard on the accelerator as if to emphasize the point.

  But for all her bravado, the point was a good one. Her bullheadedness had got her where, exactly, since she’d run from Letrange in the fields outside Heathrow? Leads that didn’t go anywhere and the death of a Senator, perhaps because he was seen talking to her. If she were going to take any more chances, pick any more fights, they had to lead somewhere. The men in black had let her go with a surreal lecture and a warning, but next time, they might not be so bizarrely forgiving. Letrange hadn’t been. She was lucky to be alive, she reminded herself. She should be very sure of what she was doing before putting herself in that kind of danger again.

  Specific risks, she thought. Productive danger. That was what she needed if she wanted answers.

  She thought of the Hapsel’s ranch, the single strand of barbed wire surrounding it, the way the “EPA” guys had driven her round in circles, never pushing more than a mile or so into the old couple’s curiously well-funded acreage. Wandering around there after dark sounded like a pretty specific risk …

  She drove along the road that ran around the edge of the Hapsel farm, looking for a place she might pull over where the car would not attract attention, and as she did, she thought about what Powers had said about unexplained aerial phenomena. It had sounded crazy then, and it still did, though out here where the world was so unfamiliar, it felt, perhaps, a little less crazy. The blackness of the night beyond her headlights was uncanny. In England, there would be hedges and trees flashing green like walls on either side of her, but this strange openness here, an emptiness so complete her headlights found nothing but the asphalt strip and the sky, was unnerving. Whatever might be out there was impossible to see.

  Feels like a metaphor.

  The road was an image of what her life had become, a stumbling, half-blind pursuit of God-knew-what, and the only thing she was certain of was that her headlights would not find the one thing she really wanted: her father, walking back to meet her.

  But if she could find out what was going on, if she could connect the dots that led back to his death, maybe that would be something, even though the idea that chasing down some half-baked nonsense about UFOs would give any insight into her father’s life seemed too preposterous to seriously consider.

  Except.

  Something had been pushing against her conscious mind, a half-memory, flexing against the dark membranes that kept it hidden. She’d been conscious of it for a few days now, but it hadn’t registered as more than a kind of hunch, a pointer in the dark, a notion that there was something to see if she looked hard enough.

  Now there was more, though she didn’t know what had knocked the memory loose.

  She’d been six years old, alone in her room and unable to get to sleep because the skeleton man had been over for dinner and had tousled her hair in a way that made her want to scream. Herman Saltzburg, her father’s friend and a fellow board member at Maynard, had been their dinner guest, along with two other men whose names she did not recall. He’d sat there, grinning his skull grin, the skin of his hands painted on during the day, she’d decided, so no one would know what a monster of bones he was at night.

  She’d lain in bed, rigid with fear, waiting for the sounds of the front door and the house settling into sleep, and then she’d gone out, looking for her father, who would put her to bed properly and drive the memory of the skeleton man from her head. She looked in the train room but hadn’t found him, and had to stalk her way across the long corridor with the creaky floor to his office. She opened the door without knocking and stepped inside, finding him with his back to her, studying a chart on bluish paper pinned to the wall behind his desk.

  This was the detail her mind had buried, but she saw it now quite clearly, freed by her turning and returning of Senator Powers’ troubling phrase: unexplained aerial phenomena.

  The chart showed a curious shape that six-year-old Jennifer had thought was a kind of airplane, its details labeled
with little words and numbers that she couldn’t read. There were two images. One from in front, which reduced the craft—if that was what it was—to a long, slender line that bulged in the middle. And one from above, which showed it as a slightly rounded triangle.

  She remembered to this day, but not because the images had struck her as significant. She remembered because she’d started to speak and her father had whirled round, his face a mask of fury the likes of which she’d never seen. He snatched the chart from the wall, tearing it in the process and yelled at her to Get out! with such awful violence that it was like seeing a person she’d never met before.

  She fled to her room and locked herself in.

  The following morning, he apologized, but also said she must never enter his study without knocking again. She didn’t feel like his apology was quite real. When he asked her what she’d seen on the chart above his desk, she’d lied and told him she didn’t have chance to look at it.

  But she remembered that strange triangle, even if it never meant anything to her except as a sign of her father’s furious commitment to his work, which she preferred not to think about.

  She was thinking about it now. Wonderingly. Amazed that the memory had taken so long to surface, like something that had been lying beneath muddy water.

  There was a turnout and an outcropping of rock, screening the road. It wasn’t perfect, and would only hide the car from traffic coming from the west, but was the best she’d seen. She made the decision and swerved hard so that the car slewed slightly on the russet gravel.

  It was much cooler, now that it was dark, and reminded her of Africa, and though she wouldn’t have to worry about hippos or leopards, it occurred to her that the desert southwest had a decent supply of venomous snakes. Rattlers and the like. Did they hunt at night? She had no idea. Cold blooded. Probably not.

  Caution, regardless.

  She took a small LED flashlight from the glove compartment, brought her purse, and climbed a crumbling dirt embankment. She swept the flashlight across the dry, tall grass and desert scrub, and saw the dull, rusty glow of the Hapsel fence. The wire was slack, and she could pull it low enough to climb over easily, shutting the light off so as not to attract attention. The moon was high and partial, but the sky positively blazed with stars and once more reminded her of Africa. She found there was just enough light to see by, as long as she stayed out of the trees.