Nolan glanced back the way he had come and gave Simpkins the come-ahead signal. As his partner crossed the open space, Nolan covered him, tensely scanning in all directions for signs of danger. Although Delta Company hadn’t heard or seen any live fire, reports had been made in other sectors of alien snipers using handheld weapons. As Simpkins made his dash, the ship under him settled slightly, groaning deeper into the pile of identical ships on which it rested. He was momentarily knocked off balance, recovering just in time to avoid being tossed over the side. Peering over the edge, he looked into the maze of narrow tunnels created by the jumble of saucers. He gulped before backing carefully away toward higher ground.
First Simpkins, then Myers, then Henderson joined Nolan under the ledge where the edge of one ship rested on another. Their objective, a cigar-shaped craft, visibly different from the others, was just on the other side of the ship they were using for cover.
Nolan spoke into his handset, “OK, Captain, we’re one ship away from the target. I see some windows, but no doors. Looks like the best way in would be to shoot out one of the windows.”
“Roger, team leader. Use your discretion. If you can’t find a quick way in, turn around and come back down to base. Over.”
“Confirmed.” Nolan slipped the walkie-talkie back in his belt. Turning to the other men, he said, “Me and Simpkins go in first. As soon as we get through the windows you two advance and cover. Here we go.”
And off he went. At close range, Nolan squeezed off a few rounds from his M-15, and the armor-piercing bullets completely shattered the clear material. Up close, the surface of this long ship had a weathered look. Unlike the others, it seemed to have seen service out in the elements. And this one wasn’t covered with any of the strange symbols embossed into the surfaces of the attackers. He ducked and peered through the opening. No sign of movement, but he was only looking into one, mostly empty, chamber. Using his flashlight, he could see there was a doorway leading deeper into the ship.
“Looks like an operating table,” Simpkins said sourly, his own flashlight sweeping across the ceiling of the ship. Indeed, since the vehicle was upside-down, there was a weirdly contoured metallic table firmly attached to the ceiling. On what was now the floor of the vehicle, all manner of debris, including several objects that might have been surgical tools, lay in heaps.
“Sick mo’ fo’s,” Nolan snarled to himself. “I’m going in.” He fitted his flashlight into the mount at the top of his rifle, rolled through the opening, and snapped to his feet, ready to fire. Once Simpkins had joined him, he signaled toward a doorway covered with some stiff material drawn closed and obstructing the view to the back of the ship.
Communicating by gesture alone, the pair put themselves in position, then Simpkins tore back the curtain. Fingers tense against triggers, the men aimed into the next chamber. It was a narrow corridor with large shelves on both sides. These shelves had been full when the ship turned over, spilling their contents into the narrow aisle between them. Beyond the pile of debris, the space opened again.
“Nolan, check this out. What the hell were they doing in here?” Simpkins’s flashlight was focused on the spilled contents of the shelves: a green nylon baseball cap with the Quaker State logo, a prosthetic leg, hunting jackets, shoes, scarves, a rifle, photographs, all manner of human artifacts, the detritus of a thousand abductions.
“All those people who said they got kidnapped by aliens and they stuck probes up inside of them and did experiments, looks like this is where it happened. And this pile of crap is the coatroom.”
“…or the lost and found.”
Nolan took four measured steps deeper into the room, crunching a pair of eyeglasses under his boot. He reached down and picked through the debris, retrieving an audiocassette. “It’s in Japanese,” he said, tossing it aside and picking up a piece of paper. He studied it for a second, then reached for a second sheet.
“What is it? You find something?”
“Maybe. You know how people are saying they must have had spies, humans who were helping them?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that, but it’s bullshit. Like they needed any help.”
“Take a look.” Nolan shrugged. He handed the pages over his shoulder and picked up a third. The pages had been torn from a blank book, and were full of quick-but-skillful engineering schematics of alien technology. One showed some kind of screen at the top of a wiring chart, another page labeled “aqua box” had a two-second sketch of something that looked like an Egyptian hieroglyph in a six-sided box. Surrounding the picture were equations and notes, all of them completely indecipherable to the soldiers. “There’s a whole book of this crud. Let’s take some of this stuff down to show the captain and come back with more men.”
Simpkins relayed that plan back to Henderson and Myers, then returned to where Nolan was gathering evidence. “How convenient,” he said when he noticed that his partner had found a shopping bag and was dumping items into it like this was a rummage sale. Simpkins spotted some poor slob’s wallet and started flipping through it when he thought he heard Nolan say something like, Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you. Be calm. He glanced over at Nolan, who looked right back at him.
“Quit messing around, Simpkins.”
Don’t be afraid. Do not use your weapons. No harm will come to you. This time they were looking right at one another, and nobody’s lips had moved. Do not use your weapons, the command repeated itself out of nowhere. Both men turned toward the back of the ship, fully expecting to see a tall alien figure step into the murky light. And a second later, that is exactly what happened.
Nolan snapped his rifle up and took aim at the thing’s forehead, in the spot above its eyes where the brain was so close to the surface you could literally see it thinking. In the glare of the flashlight, the creature’s glistening skin looked ghost white. Long almond-shaped lids blinked over bulging reflecting eyes the size of ripe plums.
Simpkins’s first impulse was to shout “enemy in the hole,” and open fire. Instead, he froze, staring down the barrel of his rifle, locked on the alien’s chest. Then, almost mechanically, he felt himself change his mind. Tell the others not to fire, he said to himself. Then, quite aware that he was being manipulated by this bony, snot-shiny, shell-headed crawdad, he felt the need to tell the guys outside. Without breaking concentration on his target, he backed into the rounded room with the table on the ceiling and yelled to the others, “We got one. It’s alive, but it’s not dangerous! He won’t attack! Hold your fire.”
“It’s messing with us, man,” Nolan said, visibly trembling—partly from fear, partly because of the effort it took not to lay his rifle aside as the thing was urging him to do. “It’s messing with my head.”
In this confusing situation, Nolan and Simpkins were, quite literally, of two minds. Without losing any possession of their regular consciousness, they were “mentally listening” to the alien, who had found some way to “speak” to them. They were about to shoot anyhow, but then both men felt something like an emotion, a vibe, which assured them the alien would cooperate. It was a teletactile communication, a skillful imitation of the human feeling of friendship, a trick the creature could only have learned through previous exposure to Earthlings.
“All right, let’s try to take this boy prisoner,” Nolan relented. “Hands up, asswipe. Hands up.” The creature awkwardly complied, lifting its slender, semitransparent arms away from its sides. Nolan and Simpkins carefully backed into the doorway before signaling the thing forward. Slowly, clumsily, it made its way over the pile of clothing and other objects until there was nothing between it and the men’s rifles.
“Hold your fire,” Simpkins ordered the two men leaning in the broken window, weapons trained on the doorway. The alien stepped into the open space of the upside-down examining room, its fleshy, two-pronged feet carefully exploring the surface of the debris-littered ceiling for a secure foothold each time it advanced.
From beyond the shattered window, Henderson
’s voice could be heard as he spoke into his radio. “Cap, we got one. We got a prisoner. Send in some backup.”
It took two full hours to march the alien prisoner back to the command post at the western extremity of the central chamber. The hard slopes created by the jumble of ships proved treacherous footing for a creature accustomed to a very different environment. At every fork in the mazelike journey, the soldiers carefully selected the path that would offer the least chance of an escape. By the time they arrived with the Extraterrestrial Biological Entity they were calling “the monster,” over a hundred armed men were there, with rifles drawn to greet them.
A Jeep was brought forward to transport the alien outside. By this time, Simpkins had appointed himself the creature’s bodyguard and was busy channeling the soldiers’ hostilities by reminding them how valuable a prisoner would be for preventing any future attacks. The creature, doing exactly what was required in the situation, remained perfectly docile, even when Simpkins came forward with a large piece of canvas. It was draped over the alien, then tied down in a way that completely concealed its body. This was done more for the creature’s security than for fear it might try to escape. Simpkins had already visualized the seven-mile journey to the outside, and foreseen the danger of an angry soldier squeezing off a few rounds in spontaneous hatred. Everyone was anxious to get some payback for what its race had done to theirs.
Bundled like a rolled-up carpet and lying passively in the back of the Jeep, shotguns leveled at its head, the creature endured the long rough road out of the destroyer without moving a muscle.
*
Hours later, Simpkins, Nolan, Henderson, and Myers reported to the remnants of Area 51’s main hangar. Their prisoner was en route back to Fort Irwin for interrogation, and they had come to deliver the evidence they had gathered from the cigar-shaped craft to General Grey. He had requested to meet personally with these men. They were quickly coming to be known as the guys who brought the only prisoner out of Whitmore’s ship. As their story circulated, each retelling added some new detail which emphasized their bravery. In time, their story would join hundreds of others and would be told, in different forms, for many years, as part of the folklore that arose in the wake of the invasion.
While they were waiting, Nolan started thumbing through the sketchbook he’d found. He could see it was the haphazard journal of someone with very sloppy handwriting. Its pages were filled with equal parts of machinery sketches, English sentences, and mathematical equations. He turned to a watercolor painting of the desert and admired the artist’s skill. The picture was signed in the bottom corner. The book had belonged to someone named Okun.
1
A NEW ROOF FOR PROJECT SMUDGE
1972
At 5:58 A.M., the hallway leading to the inner ring of the Pentagon complex was busier than usual. Office workers and uniformed officers had come in early to get the latest issue of the Washington Post and read about the latest development in the Watergate case, which felt, at least to those in the District of Columbia’s political circles, like the end of the world. Slicing through this early-morning mull and buzz, came a tall figure in a conservatively cut suit half a size too small for his lanky frame. Albert Alexander Nimziki stopped briefly outside one of the Pentagon’s many coffee shops and studied the headlines shouting back at him from a newspaper rack: COX, SPECIAL COMMITTEE CONSIDER IMPEACHMENT. Of course, that morning’s news came as no surprise to him. As deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, it was his job to know what was going to be in the newspapers days, weeks, and sometimes years before the papers themselves knew.
Nimziki was the youngest man ever to attain the post of deputy director, but he had gotten a jump on the competition, having been a professional spook since he was sixteen years old. Nimziki grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he internalized some of his chilliness of public demeanor from his Amish neighbors. When his agronomist father landed a job with the UN, he moved the family to New York City’s Roosevelt Island, into a neighborhood crowded not only with UN diplomats but with the spies sent from around the world to keep an eye on them. Overlooking a busy, upscale intersection, the family’s new apartment afforded young Albert the perfect vantage point for watching the endless game of cat and mouse. For two years it had been a spectator sport, with him spying on the spies. But one day he boldly walked downstairs and talked to one of them. Only a day later, he had a parabolic mike and telephoto lens, using them to eavesdrop on conversations transpiring at the posh outdoor cafe across the street. From this early training, he’d moved on to Georgetown U., where he earned a double major in criminology and international relations. Soon after joining the CIA, he proved himself to be not only a daring and talented field operative but also a highly efficient administrator, and it was this second skill which had fueled his steady rise through the agency’s ranks. At only thirty-four years of age, he had aspirations to rise higher still.
He found his elevator and rode it down one floor to the building’s basement. The heavy doors opened after he inserted a security card into the lock, depositing him into a bare hallway guarded by a pair of soldiers. After glancing at his ID plaque, they waved him through, and he stepped into the Tank, the most secure conference area in the entire Pentagon complex.
Inside, sitting around a long walnut conference table, were a dozen men, all of them white, all of them older than Nimziki. They were elite figures from the U.S. military and intelligence communities, men who had been entrusted, however reluctantly, with “the nation’s dirtiest little secret.” Collectively, they were known as Project Smudge.
After a brief round of perfunctory greetings, Nimziki sat down, and Bud Spelman, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency, walked to the podium at the front of the room. Serious as a bulldog, the barrel-chested Colonel Spelman had once been an Army drill instructor, and it showed in the blunt way he handled the meeting.
“Gentlemen. The purpose of this meeting is to update you on a series of possibly threatening UFO occurrences and, if warranted, to adopt an action plan. Now I trust everyone has had a chance to review the status report I sent around, so you basically know the situation, but I do want to show you a piece of radar tape shot last month by Northern Tracking Command.” After pulling down a retractable white screen and dimming the lights, he moved to a projector set up at the back of the room. As the film began, the screen went black. “You’re looking at the night sky over our atomic storage facility near Bangor, Maine. These are enhanced-composite radar images transferred to film to improve their quality. And here comes our visitor.”
From the upper corner, an uneven blotch of white light appeared. The pulsing, indistinct shape began a slow and steady descent toward the bottom of the screen, its outline slowly coming into better focus. “In addition to the radar, we had several naked-eye witnesses on the ground who say they got a good look at it. But, as usual, their descriptions are all over the map. Some of them said the thing gave off a golden light, others called it an orange-red light, while another maintains it was bluish in color. The same with engine noise. Some people heard ‘a high whine, like an electric motor’ while others noted a ‘complete absence of sound.’ What we know for certain is that this thing hovered directly over our Underground Storage bunkers at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet for approximately two minutes, then—and here comes the reason for showing you the film.”
All eyes were turned toward the screen. The UFO suddenly darted straight up, rising another thousand feet above the earth before commencing a series of startling zigzags across the night sky. Whatever it was, it moved with both incredible speed and astonishing agility as it executed a series of right-angle and hairpin turns without significant loss of velocity. Then, as mysteriously as it had appeared, it zipped out of view in one long streak. Spelman stopped the tape and turned to face the others.
“Looks like my wife has been giving driving lessons,” an Air Force general quipped, eliciting a polite chuckle from the others.
&
nbsp; Spelman didn’t change expressions. “No aircraft known to Defense Intelligence has performance capabilities equal to what we just witnessed. After review of the tape, DIA considers it likely that what you have seen is a reconnaissance mission. And where there’s smoke, there’s fire. This intelligence gathering could be preparatory to some sort of attack, or, in a worst-case scenario, a full-scale invasion.”
Spelman paused to let that sink in. His audience was less amazed by the tape they’d seen than by Spelman’s ability to make this speech as if it were the first time he’d ever made it. Once a year, he would call a meeting such as this one to present evidence to the members of Project Smudge. And each time, he and Dr. Wells, his sole ally on the committee, would argue that the nation was exposed to a clear-and-present danger. They were the hard-liners who argued that the world was on the brink of imminent invasion by extraterrestrials. Behind their backs, they were known as the crazies, especially Dr. Wells, the only man known to have held a conversation with an intelligent life-form from another world. Eventually, Wells’s desperate insistence on the need to adopt his proposals led to his banishment from Smudge. Isolated, Spelman was reluctant to call another meeting, but then had found a most unexpected ally, someone with a daring plan which might finally end the interagency bickering which had crippled the government’s research into UFOs for more than a decade—Nimziki.
When it was apparent that Spelman was finished talking, Dr. Insolo of the Science and Technology Directorate was the first to raise a familiar objection, “We’ve been getting sightings like this for years; why is this one special?”
To Spelman, one of the true believers, the question seemed ridiculous, almost insulting. “First off, all of these sightings are significant. What makes this one especially threatening is that it didn’t take place over the desert or the ocean. This vehicle buzzed one of our most sensitive and potentially damaging installations. We don’t want all that uranium falling into the wrong hands.”
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 31