“I think you’re right,” DeLuca said.
The road took them east, then south toward a place called Sheep Mountain, in the Sierra Juarez range, the blacktop rolling in roller-coaster fashion for several miles until it turned to gravel, the desert flora of jumping cholla and creosote bushes and prickly pear. He’d brought along a pair of five-gallon gas cans, just in case the H2 ran low, and it seemed to be consuming a gallon every thirty or forty feet. They stopped at one point at a fork in the road that Henry Soto had failed to include on the map, but a brief consultation with Peggy Romano and a check of his GPS receiver put them back on course. While they were stopped, Yutahay scrutinized the tire tracks in the road, but it had rained enough in the interval to wash out any useful information. They drove for another hour, never making better than fifteen or twenty miles per, stopping occasionally for Ben to get out and examine the road, squatting to touch the ruts and grooves with his fingertips. He said he couldn’t be certain of the timing, as it was hard to determine the rate of sign decay without knowing exactly what the weather had done, but he recognized the tire prints left by the Jeep, heading out, and he thought he saw the narrower tracks of a smaller car, headed in, something with fifteen-inch tires with about thirty-five thousand miles on them.
“I think she was going pretty fast, and then she slowed down,” Yutahay said. “Her right front tire went out of alignment since the last time we stopped. That happens sometimes when you hit a pothole at fifty or sixty miles an hour.”
They found the trailer another five miles down the road, parked in a hollow with a grove of cottonwoods for shade and a small mountain stream trickling behind it for drinking water. Escavedo’s Honda Civic was parked in the trees beside the trailer. The sun had set, an early star twinkling on the horizon that Yutahay identified as Venus, but there was still enough light to have a look around. They examined the car first. Yutahay took the backseat, where he found an article of clothing on the floor.
“What’s this?” he said, holding it up to the light.
“Thong underwear,” DeLuca said. “Something that fell out of a suitcase?”
“Maybe,” Yutahay said. “My wife used to wear these but they gave her a rash so she got rid of them, but she still has the rash. I guess you could say the thong is gone but the malady lingers on.”
“You could say that,” DeLuca replied.
He’d hoped to pop open the glove compartment and find a stack of diskettes held together with a rubber band, but no such luck. The keys were in the ignition. A quick turn revealed that the car was nearly out of gas. She’d gone past the point of no return. The radio was tuned to 1190 AM. In the trunk, he found a receipt from a supermarket in Yuma. DeLuca showed it to Yutahay.
“What do you think?” he said. “Two weeks’ worth of food?”
“Maybe three,” Yutahay said, looking at the list. “Nothing perishable. That means she knew when she bought the food that she was coming here, since there’s no refrigerator, without electricity.”
“Let’s have a look inside,” DeLuca said. “I’ll grab the flashlights.”
A canopy of corrugated green fiberglass extended from the side of the trailer, propped on a frame of two-by-fours, and beneath it, two lawn chairs and a table. Yutahay said that judging from the footprints in the dust, there was only one person occupying the trailer, wearing size eight Army-issue desert combat boots.
“Are those dog prints?” DeLuca asked.
“Coyote,” Yutahay said. “Cleaning up the table scraps. I think she ate a meal out here.”
DeLuca found a kerosene lantern on the table inside the trailer and lit it. Yutahay searched the bedroom end of the trailer while DeLuca searched the kitchen. There was a pair of binoculars on the table, focused at infinity, beside an ashtray with three cigarette butts in it. He examined what was in the trash, compared that to what was in the cupboards, using the grocery list as a guide, and determined she’d been in the trailer no more than two days. There were no cigarette butts in the trash—who smoked three cigarettes in two days? Someone trying to quit, or someone trying not to start again. The only other thing of interest in the trash was a rubber band she’d used to pull back her hair, with a few hairs entangled in the knot. He put the rubber band in a plastic Ziploc evidence bag, to have the hair tested—it would tell him if she’d done any drugs in the last six months, but he doubted he was going to find any such indicators. Ben showed him where she’d laid two uniforms out on the bed, her dress blues and her forest green camos, as if she were choosing between them to decide what to wear.
“Guess she couldn’t make up her mind,” Ben said.
“No,” DeLuca said. “It means she’s wearing her DCUs. She probably picked the desert camo because she knew when she left that she was headed south.”
“Do you think it means she was hoping to come back?”
DeLuca shrugged.
“Would you wear thong underwear with a camo uniform?” Yutahay said.
“I’m sure it’s more common than anybody knows,” DeLuca said.
The Winchester rifle mounted above the door was unloaded and hadn’t been fired. There were no diskettes or CDs anywhere. DeLuca stood in the doorway, gazing out at the darkening landscape.
“It’s probably not going to be worth it, but do you think you could come back with some men and really go over the grounds here and make sure she didn’t hide anything under a rock?” he asked. “Maybe she walked out and dug a hole somewhere.”
“I could do that,” Yutahay said, opening the door to the wood stove. “Though it looks to me like she pretty much kept to the trailer. This might be of interest to you.”
He’d fished three scraps of paper from the wood stove, computer printouts, partially burned but with enough text on them to discern the subjects. Yutahay spread the scraps out on the table while DeLuca shone his flashlight on them. Escavedo had evidently Googled for the words “Shijingshan,” “Qadzi Deh,” and “Congressman Bob Fowler.”
“They didn’t burn completely because she forgot to open the flue,” Yutahay said.
“Destroying evidence?”
“Maybe she was just trying to start a fire,” Yutahay said. “It gets pretty cold up here. There was kindling on top of the paper, but that didn’t burn either.”
On their way back to Yuma, DeLuca tuned the Hummer’s radio to 1190 AM, where he found an all-night phone-in show, hosted by a man with a very calm and soothing voice named Ed Clark. The in-studio guest had an interesting theory about the Kennedy assassination, one he’d recently published in a book called Angry Are the Gods.
“…there was no invasion being planned, per se. And in fact, a review of some of the best telescopic imagery we had of the moon at the time will show you that the base the Travelers were building in the Sea of Tranquility was at a rudimentary level, we think for a simple lack of funding, but of course we can’t know that. What we do know is that shortly after President Kennedy promised we were going to put a man on the moon, activity at the aliens’ lunar base increased tenfold. But as the last caller correctly pointed out, the Travelers’ own way of experiencing the uni-mind ultimately misled them because they projected that paradigm onto a terrestrial governmental system that was anything but. It was quite reasonable, from their point of view, to believe that killing President Kennedy would have been an effective way of stopping the space program to protect their base on the moon, because the command to go there originated with him.”
The author spoke very deliberately, authoritatively, as if the things he was saying were things anybody in their right mind would of course know and/or agree with.
“Now, as to the caller’s second question, why, if the Travelers were able to effect a soul-transference with Lee Harvey Oswald, which by the way is a one-way street, sort of like a kamikaze suicide mission, because once you cross, you can’t cross back, so why, if they could occupy Oswald’s body, why couldn’t they just occupy President Kennedy’s body and then have him call off the space program?
That question is somewhat simpler to answer, because we know that perhaps the most reliable way to identify the Travelers living among us, intuitively, is by their charisma. Though few of us trust our intuition. That’s the one thing they can’t hide, and in fact it often becomes amplified, depending on the type of individual they possess and occupy. But what they can’t do is occupy someone who already has charisma, and I think most Democrats over the age of fifty or sixty will recall that perhaps no human being in modern American recollection had more charisma than John Kennedy. Human charisma is toxic to them. In other words, it wouldn’t have worked. And you can see, watch the old videotapes, and compare the aura that Kennedy projected to the one that exited from Lee Harvey Oswald’s body when Jack Ruby shot him, Sunday morning, 11:21 A.M., November 24, 1963, at police headquarters, and they are measurably different. Measurably different.”
“Is he trying to say aliens from outer space killed Kennedy?” Ben Yutahay asked. He’d been riding with his eyes closed. DeLuca had assumed he was asleep.
“You don’t buy it?” DeLuca said.
“I always thought it was the wife,” Yutahay said. “It usually is in domestic cases. It sounds kind of Hopi to me. They believe in star-people.”
“You’re listening to the Ed Clark show, Sea to Shining Sea, 1190 AM, WROZ, out of Roswell, New Mexico,” the host sang out. “Back to the show after this. Did you know that interest rates for home equity loans…”
“I listen to this guy sometimes when I’m on patrol at night,” Yutahay said. “It can be quite amusing, I have to say. Some of the people who call in are out of their minds. One night a woman called and said the aliens had replaced her husband with someone who was much better, but sleeping with him would have meant she was being unfaithful—what should she do?”
“What’d Ed say?”
“His advice was to go ahead because when they brought her husband back, they’d wipe his memory. She said it wasn’t his memory she was worried about, it was hers. People that night thought that was a fairly interesting moral dilemma.”
“What was the conclusion?”
“I think people said it wasn’t cheating if your lover was in another dimension. Then they started talking about cross-dimensional marriage and polygamy. They were against that.”
DeLuca checked his watch. It was too late to give Bonnie a call. They passed a curve in the road where three white crosses staked into the ground, decorated with plastic flowers, marked the spot as dangerous. Yutahay closed his eyes again. DeLuca nudged the volume on the radio down a notch.
“We’ve got Bartleby in Chloride, New Mexico. You’re on the air.”
“Hi, Ed—how you doing tonight? Love your show,” Bartleby said.
“I’m quite well, quite well indeed,” Ed Clark said placidly.
“Listen, I’m just calling to correct the caller before last, Warren from Illinois.”
“Yes,” Ed Clark said. “Go ahead.”
“He was saying that the Helstaff site at White Sands was an anti-UFO battery…”
“For our listeners,” Clark interrupted, “Helstaff is no relation to Flagstaff. Helstaff is…”
“H-E-L-S-T-F,” Bartleby said. “High-Energy Laser System Test Facility. And calling it ‘The Miracle Program’ sounds like your caller was missing the acronym there, too. It’s not ‘M-i-r-a-c-l-e,’ as in virgin births or gas for under a dollar fifty a gallon. It’s ‘M-I-R-A-C-L.’ Mid-Infra-Red Advanced Chemical Laser. The Russians were building one in Tajikistan, their version of Helstaff, at a place called Dushanbe, before they ran out of money. At any rate, I doubt that MIRACL or anything ground-based that the Russians have would pose much of a threat to an alien vessel. They can give a sitting unshielded bird in close-earth orbit a pretty good sunburn, but they’re not going to do much to the kind of ships you’re talking about, assuming they could acquire the target in the first place.”
“I would think any aggression on our part would also invite retaliation,” Ed Clark said.
“Well,” Bartleby said, “you might be right, though that’s a pretty terrestrial mindset you’re talking about. Even supposing that were true, we’d have to pose a much more significant threat than we do, at least at present. MIRACL just can’t generate enough power to be much more than annoying. Though maybe that posits a terrestrial mindset too.”
“How does it work?” Ed Clark asked. “The MIRACL laser?”
“Well,” the caller said, “it’s basically a megawatt laser with a continuous wavelength between 3.8 and 4.2 microns. You burn C2H4ethylene and NFnitrogen fluoride in something like a rocket engine and then catch the excited fluorine atoms and mix them with deuterium in the exhaust cavity to make deuterium-fluoride, stabilized and cooled with helium. The resounder mirrors extract energy in the exhaust cavity and reroute it into a fourteen-square-centimeter beam, which is a nice little bit of directed energy, but the drawbacks are multiple. It takes tons and tons of fuel, it’s slow to power, hard to retarget, and it’s a sitting duck on the ground. It’s just not the weapon of the future that some people say it is.”
“Would that future weapon involve antimatter technologies, then?” Ed Clark asked.
“It would,” the caller said. DeLuca felt a bit disappointed. Up to that point, the caller had sounded rather reasonable and informed, but now he was venturing into pure woo-woo land. Antimatter? He thought of the episode of the old Star Trek, where the good Captain Kirk somehow slipped into the parallel universe where everyone including Spock was immoral and scheming—was that a sly dig at the Nixon White House at the time?
“Do you know the history of antimatter research?” Ed Clark asked.
“I do,” Bartleby said. “We probably can’t really limn it here, but you go back to a colleague of Einstein’s named Paul Dirac, who theorized in 1929 that electrons and protons had mirrored counterparts with reversed charges, which he called antielectrons, or positrons, and antiprotons. Those theories were confirmed in 1936 when a Caltech scientist named Carl Anderson saw a positron fly through his lab, and then antiprotons were detected at Berkeley in the fifties, the point being that this is stuff that has been with us and studied for a long time.”
“And the energy potential of antimatter is phenomenal, as I understand it,” Clark said.
“Oh yeah,” Bartleby said. “It’s maybe ten billion times the power of dynamite. One gram, which is about a fifth of a teaspoon, would equal twenty-three space shuttle fuel tanks as a propellant. As an explosive, fifty millionths of a gram would have been enough to take down the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City—colliding positrons and antielectrons is probably the ultimate energy source in the universe. It’s kind of hard to imagine another, but then our imaginations have always limited us, so who knows.”
“And this is a fairly rare substance?” Ed Clark said.
“Antimatter?” Bartleby said. “Well, it is in this universe, by definition, but in the larger cosmos, there’s just as much antimatter as matter, so I guess I’d have to say no, it’s not rare. One of the concerns scientists working with this stuff have had has been that a man-made collision of significant size might create a cataclysmic chain reaction in which all the matter in this universe would collide with all the antimatter in the mirrored universe, which would mean the largest energy release since the original big bang.”
“And me with only four more payments to go on my dinning-room table set,” DeLuca said, but now Yutahay really was asleep, snoring softly with his head against the window.
“But that’s what they said about splitting the atom,” Ed Clark said.
“That’s true,” Bartleby agreed. “And thank goodness we didn’t listen, or we wouldn’t be blessed with the ten-thousand-plus nuclear bombs we have today. They’re talking about suitcase nukes today, but tomorrow, we could have antimatter superbombs a thousand times more powerful, the size of maybe a small transistor radio. And the scientists are big on the idea of antimatter bombs because after the initial burst of gamma radiat
ion, there wouldn’t be any residual contaminants, so they’re thinking of them as ‘clean’ bombs. It’s sort of insane.”
“And what exactly is stopping this technology, at present?” Ed Clark asked. “I’m assuming, because all indications suggest an alien invasion by the Lizaurian Second Wave some time before 2011, that DARPA and some of the other agencies are proceeding apace… ?”
“Well,” Bartleby said, “DARPA is certainly involved, but most of the research, the black-budget stuff, is going on at the DEL at Kirtland, the Directed Energy Lab, and at the Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, and the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts in Virginia, and various programs at places like the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, and Livermore, MIT, Cornell, Nellis, Wright-Patterson…”
“Area 51?” Clark interrupted.
“Except that Area 51 is like cyberspace,” Bartleby said. “I had a friend that somebody years ago wanted to hire to be their Los Angeles presence on the Internet, and he had to explain to them, there is no Los Angeles in cyberspace. There’s no California and no United States either—it’s one world now. As for your question as to what’s stopping it, the technology always stopped before at creating a perfect penning field, because you obviously can’t grab a bit of antimatter and stick it in a glass jar like catching a ladybug. You have to store it in something it can’t collide with, which means you have to trap and pen it in an electromagnetic field, but that field has to be perfect or the particles escape, and once you generate it, you have to maintain 100 percent integrity or you lose containment, which means at least a nuclear power source, and maybe something else.”
“And this is being developed to power warp-drives, munitions?” Ed Clark asked. “Where’s the priority right now?”
“Right now, I couldn’t tell you,” Bartleby said. “There was a guy working on an antimatter drive for a trip to Alpha Centauri, a few years ago anyway, but he’s a complete idiot. And weapons, yeah, but I think the most attractive application is as a power source for a space-based laser system. And that actually just might work as a weapon to use against alien craft, but as we said earlier, once we become an actual threat, we invite retaliation or more likely preemptive strikes. The Israelis blew up an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1984 to stop Saddam from developing his nuclear weapons program. My point is that power invites power. Power begets power. Power assimilates and corrupts and coopts the people who deploy it. Power protects itself. Where it ends is anybody’s guess, but the handwriting is on the wall.”
Dark Target Page 12