“Lydia Sleppy?” McBoyle stared in disbelief over Whitmore's shoulder. “Hold on a sec. What's going on outside?”
Daniel and Jack both turned and looked. An army truck and a jeep had pulled up at the curb and were disgorging eight or nine MPs. Jack exchanged looks with him, and, with a nod of agreement, indicated they should leave by the side exit.
“Hey, officers,” the waitress declared when a lieutenant and a sergeant strode into the diner, helmets pulled low over the faces. “We don't want no trouble here.”
Sidling toward the rear, Jack tried the side door and found it locked. Seemed the fire regulations of 1947 didn't require fire exits to be actual exits. The remaining MPs were piling in through the front door. Daniel glanced behind them. The cook, Casey, was still flipping burgers like nothing was happening, while the waitress, Dorothy, was wiping her hands on a dishrag as she walked out from behind the counter.
“I told you before we ain't closing down at nine just 'cause you got some silly curfew regulations at the base. I got truckers coming through at all hours and they rely on gettin' a decent meal here.”
And that was when Daniel realized that aside from himself, Jack, Brazel and the reporters, the diner was empty of patrons. The MPs seemed to realize that at the same moment, because two of them herded Marc Brazel politely, but insistently, toward the front door. Another two men flanked Whitmore and McBoyle.
The MP lieutenant turned to Jack and Daniel. “Hey, you two.”
“You can't treat me like this!” Whitmore objected. “I'm the owner—”
Ignoring Daniel and Jack for the moment, the lieutenant whipped out his nightstick and slammed it on the counter. “Yesirree, I can. You was warned to keep your goddamned mouth shut.” The nightstick swung around until it was directly under Brazel's nose. “And so was you. All this talk about little green men, huh.”
“They weren't green, ya big ape,” Brazel said gamely. “They was gray!”
Whitmore continued to object to the military's shabby treatment of upstanding citizens who were just doing their civic duty. Something about the Constitution and the First Amendment were thrown in for good measure, but Daniel couldn't hear much more because by then they were outside and the radio station owner was being manhandled into the back of the truck, along with McBoyle and Brazel.
“You.” The lieutenant's nightstick swung around in an arc. He stabbed it in Daniel and Jack's direction as he approached them.
“Who? Us?” Jack said, adopting a well-practiced expression of cluelessness that worked so rarely, Daniel wondered why he bothered to try it on anyone. “Names!”
Jack smiled disarmingly. “Ah...names. Mulder and Scully.”
“Where do you live?”
“Colorado,” Daniel replied, before Jack could get too carried away. “We're just passing through town, lieutenant.”
“Where ya headed?”
“New York,” Daniel said without thinking.
“Kinda taking the scenic route, ain't, ya?”
“But there's so much to see,” Jack said. “Little green men, and flying saucers... Oh, and arresting innocent citizens eating in a diner.”
“Jack]” Daniel hissed in warning, but it was too late. The damage was done.
The MP's eyes narrowed dangerously. “Wise guy, huh?' the lieutenant grabbed Jack by the arm. “Outside. The both of you. You're coming, too.”
Daniel felt the brief moment of tension before Jack allowed himself to be pushed out the door. Raising his hands in surrender, Daniel followed, squinting against the last blazing rays of the sunset. He wasn't worried about a little shoving around, but he was concerned that it could reveal their zat guns and radios.
Although this particular scene was absent from Teal'c's prediction of what to expect, he had mentioned there'd been several accounts of military 'debriefing' that had involved everything from the invocation of patriotic duty to outright threats on family members.
Of course, if Jack had just kept his big mouth shut...
Still, he doubted the MPs would bother to search them. Right now, the best thing was to play along.
“If nothing else,” Jack muttered to Daniel, “this'll save us a three-mile hike back to the jumper.”
“Why did you have to say anything at all?” he hissed in a low voice.
“I hate MPs.” Even as he spoke, Jack was edging away from the truck so that the sun was in the eyes of the MPs.
“You're a general, Jack.”
“So? It's the whole tyrannical power-mongering thing they've got going.”
“Pat 'em down, corporal,” the lieutenant ordered. “I don't like the look of these two... itinerants.”
Okay, so much for the non-confrontational theory. Before Daniel had a chance to object, one of the MPs grabbed his arms from behind and shoved them into the air. The lieutenant's eyes zeroed in on the zat.
And that's when Jack decided to shoot everybody.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The doors burst outward, and two officers, a brigadier general and a major, staggered out, coughing and gagging. Sam's olfactory nerves had been assaulted before, but not like this. Even Bayou hadn't smelled this bad. The stench tore through her sinuses and down into the back of her throat, along her Eustachian tubes and into her ears and eyes, overwhelming all of her other senses and triggering a reaction much like tear gas. Yet even through watering eyes she was able to make out the decaying corpses of four Asgard lying on stainless steel tables. A fifth body lay on a separate table with its chest cracked open. It reminded Sam of the specimen that Heimdall had been researching; an Asgard ancestor, except that its features were slightly more human. Sam guessed the odor was coming from the green, frothy fluid bubbling out of its chest cavity.
Three figures dressed in surgeon's gowns were shaking their heads and motioning with their hands for Haynes to get out of the room.
“This is crazy,” declared one of the surgeons, pushing open the main doors to the theater. Through a second entrance two soldiers wearing gas masks arrived dragging steaming cardboard boxes of dry ice.
“We have no idea what this stuff could be doing to us,” a second surgeon added between wracking coughs. “I'm ordering the autopsy abandoned.”
The captain wasted no time in following the doctors outside. Sam brought up the rear, wiping the water pouring from her eyes with the flap of her gown. It took several seconds of everyone coughing and sneezing and blinking furiously before she realized that Agents J and K—Cancer Man and Brylcreem—were demanding answers.
“What's going on in there, General?” Cancer Man stubbed his cigarette on the linoleum floor, pulled a crumpled packet from his pocket and immediately lit another.
“I've ordered all of the remains packed in dry ice,” replied Surgeon Number One. “We can't continue.”
Brylcreem sneered at the general. “Twining, your orders were to-”
“I don't give a rat's ass what you think my orders are.” Twining snapped. He wasn't about to take any crap from a couple of government agents, Sam knew. Chief of the Materiel Command for the USAF, Twining was also in charge of the high performance aircraft development at Alamogordo, where Werner von Braun was currently working. “Dr. Johnson here is right,” he added in a measured tone. “Nobody can stand that awful stench for very long.”
Positioning himself well inside the General's personal space, Cancer Man's tone turned ugly. “I want answers, General, and if you're not man enough to take a little bad smell—”
“It's not the smell, Agent, and wipe that supercilious scowl off your face—or I will.”
The surgeon, Johnson, pulled off his rubber gloves and tugged down his mask to reveal a pencil thin moustache. “The body of the one that died on the way here is giving off some sort of noxious gas. Possibly poisonous. You want to go in there, Agent, be my guest, but I'll be ordering your immediate quarantine until I know exactly what that gas is. Suit yourself, of course, but since we don't have proper containment facilities, that will
mean keeping you in there with the bodies until we can ship them out.”
Brylcreem turned his irritated glare on Johnson. “You'd better not let the survivors die.”
“And exactly how do you expect us to achieve that? No one in this room has any experience with this sort of thing, and they're in bad shape.”
“There were survivors?” Blurting that out was a risk, Sam knew, but it paid off when several sets of eyes turned in her direction.
“Who the hell are you?” the General demanded.
“Lieutenant Carter just transferred here from Los Alamos,” Captain Haynes explained in a proprietary manner.
Sam stood to attention with parade ground precision and rattled off her name and rank, delighted that Haynes was aiding her deception. '“I'll volunteer to assist in any way I can, General.” Ignoring the tears still streaming down her cheeks, she added, “I've had experience dealing with unusual...burns, sir.” Which was what the public were informed had happened to the scientists who'd died of radiation poisoning during the development of the first A bombs. “I know my patriotic duty.”
As hackneyed as it sounded to her ears, it was precisely what the men in this room wanted—needed—to hear right now. The stench of corrupted Asgard flesh and whatever that green fluid was, could not overpower the more ingrained stench of their fear and avarice.
“Well? What are you waiting for, Captain?” Cancer Man demanded. “We want the survivors transported to New York, and we want them alive.”
Ignoring Sam, who, along with Dr. Johnson was already being herded toward the recovery room, Twining turned his glare on Cancer Man, while he addressed Haynes. “Captain, I want every piece of those flying saucers that you and Marcel brought in, and the bodies, crated and flown back to Wright Field first thing tomorrow morning.”
Glancing over her shoulder, Sam saw Cancer Man stab a finger at Twining's chest. “General, I've already made it very clear that President Truman wants it all packed up and flown to—”
“Get your hand off me. My orders are also from the President. Wright AFB was set up specifically for this kind of emergency.”
The rest of the argument was lost to Sam when Johnson closed the door behind them, but it had already provided her with a chilling clarity. She now understood why the Air Force and Pentagon had no record of the Roswell crash. In less than three weeks President Truman would sign the National Security Act into law, creating the CIA, DOD, Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Council, and the NID. A month later, the Army Air Force and sections of the Navy would become a separate entity known as the US Air Force, and somewhere in an ill-defined moment, the Cold War would begin. Sam's security clearance had given her unlimited access to files the Pentagon had hidden, even from itself, but this was one mystery that they'd never been fully able to crack.
And here she was, right here, right now, standing in the middle of a what would prove to be the trigger point of a conspiracy fifty years in the making. There would be no dividing the spoils. Every man here was positioning himself to grab everything for whatever nascent agency had claimed his loyalty.
It was also clear that even now, a half-century before the NID would wreak havoc on the future with their meddling, military personnel had set up camp with them, lured, no doubt, by the black money that would soon be shoveled by the truckload into their coffers. They must have laughed their collective heads off when the Air Force was then lumbered with the task of investigating UFO phenomena in projects that would bear the names Blue Book Grudge and Sign.
“Lieutenant,” Dr. Johnson said to her as they walked across the green-walled recovery room, “we don't know the first thing about these...beings. Best we can do is make them as comfortable as possible.”
Two edgy-looking MPs were guarding a screened-off partition in the room. At Haynes's signal, one of the MPs moved the screen aside to reveal a door—which opened just as he was reaching for the handle.
A middle-aged nurse rushed out, “Sir!” She pulled up short. “I'm sorry but I think one of them just died.”
The expression on her face was more relief than concern, something that Johnson also noticed because he snapped, “Get out of here.”
Sam strode into the room behind him. Two Asgard were lying on separate beds. One of them was Loki.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Jack was in no mood to mess about. Sitting down for the last few hours had taken the edge off the pain in his chest. Being jerked around, literally, by a lieutenant with delusions of self-importance had started up the whole woodpecker thing again, which pissed him off no end.
The lieutenant was still fumbling around trying to draw his weapon when Jack zatted him, then the three MPs went down before any of them had even thought about going for their guns. Daniel had simultaneously taken out another three before the last pair, whose cumulative age still put them at least fifteen years younger than Jack, raised their hands and began backing away. With a muttered apology, Daniel zatted one while Jack took out the second.
“What's going on?” Whitmore poked his head out of the back of the truck and received a zat blast for his trouble.
Collecting two of the MPs' white helmets on the way, Daniel made for the driver's side of the lieutenant's jeep. Brazel and the reporter, McBoyle, had wisely decided to keep their noses behind the khaki flap of the truck, while the waitress, Dorothy, stood at the entrance with her hands on her hips popping gum. Inside, Casey, cigarette dangling from his mouth, was still calmly flipping burgers.
Jack pulled a fifty from his pocket, slapped it on the dusty bonnet of the truck, and eased into the passenger side of the jeep. “Sorry about the mess,” he called to her. “They'll wake up in a few minutes. Maybe you can give 'em a coffee.” It wouldn't do a thing for their post zat headaches but it might take the edge off what was bound to be some ugly dispositions.
The helmet fit like a glove but the canvas and metal seat wasn't exactly cushioned. Jack clung to his ribs as Daniel crunched the gears, and, reversing around the MPs—two of whom were already showing signs of coming around—pulled out of the parking space and took off up the street in the opposite direction of the base.
The entire incident had taken forty-five seconds, tops. Too fast for the half dozen people scattered up and down the street to do more than stand with their mouths agape. Daniel reduced their speed about six blocks later, to turn the corner. In the growing twilight, the white helmets should allow them to pass a cursory inspection from a general public familiar with the comings and goings of base personnel. That and the fact that they were currently headed north out of town should throw off the scent long enough for them to circle back and park someplace near the jumper.
Jack kept an eye behind them, happy to note that no one seemed to be following, but he could have done without the crunching of gears. The damned jeep had no shock absorbers, either, which was not making for a pleasant ride.
“Ah, where are the headlights on this thing?” Daniel enquired.
“What for?” The sun was just now setting. They had a few minutes before they needed lights.
“Just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“We hit a road block.” Daniel eased in the clutch and shifted down to second gear.
Turning forward Jack yelled, “Whoa!” Directly ahead of them was a jeep with two MPs seated up front, tagging a large flatbed truck covered in a patchwork of tarpaulins and camouflage, traveling at about ten miles an hour.
The guys in the jeep ahead reacted to their arrival with barely a glance. Although Jack would have liked the convoy to be moving with a little more speed, it was the perfect setup. When Lieutenant Quickdraw reported the attack, the last place anyone would be looking for a stolen jeep would be in a military convoy headed for the base.
“Teal'c,” Jack called into his radio. “What's happening?”
“There is little further to report, O'Neill.”
Jack glanced at Daniel. “Little further?”
“Yeah, well
you were too busy shooting everyone before I could tell you that Sam made it inside okay.”
Daniel went on to explain what Carter had in mind about going back in time via Atlantis. As Plan Bs went it sounded doable, especially since it contained several variations, although he wasn't too thrilled with the idea of a second excursion to Proclarush Taonas. He really, really didn't like lava.
Then there was the small, but delightfully convenient fact that an Asgard escape pod sat on an Army flatbed less than one hundred feet in front of them.
“Teal'c, was there any mention of MPs being, you know, zatted, in any of those tabloids?”
“There was not, O'Neill.”
“Figured as much. Okay, well. Guess it doesn't matter now.” Jack considered their next move. It was getting dark, fast, and there was a reasonable chance that they could follow the flatbed right into the base without being noticed, but then they'd have to peel off and head for the jumper. Better to lose the convoy through one of the wide turns the road took just before it reached the base.
Stargate - SG-1 - 09 - Roswell Page 20