Okun narrowed his eyes. “Are you trying to talk me out of it?”
“Don’t take my word for it. Ask Dr. Wells.”
*
“What the hell are you doing in here?” Radecker asked, poking his head into the vault.
Okun responded with his Bela Lugosi imitation. “I have come to the crypt to visit my long-lost friends.” He had developed a morbid fascination with the alien bodies and came into the secured room every couple of days to watch them floating in their tanks. “It’s like having an aquarium full of really strange dead fish.”
“Well, I’ve got the information you wanted. If you want to hear it, come outside. This place gives me the creeps.”
Okun stepped into the hallway and fastened the thick steel dead bolt, locking the bodies inside. He’d asked Radecker for help in finding the whereabouts of Dr. Wells. None of the scientists knew what had become of him after he failed to return from his trip to the capital. There had been a phone call from Dr. Insolo of the Science and Technology Directorate saying that Wells was being held for psychiatric observation and that Dr. Dworkin should take over his responsibilities as director during the interim. That had been four years ago.
“The good news is I found a copy of the report you asked for, the one Wells wrote in ‘47. That should be interesting. It’s in Washington, but they’re going to send us a copy. The bad news is he’s dead.” Radecker feigned disappointment. “The story I got from headquarters was he was in a meeting back in DC when he snapped. Just went berserk. Started shouting and throwing things at people. They took him to Seabury Psychiatric Hospital, where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. Then about six months later, he was transferred to Glenhaven Home in Richmond. That’s where he died about two and a half years ago.”
Masking a wave of authentic disappointment, Okun shrugged. “No biggie. Thanks for checking it out.”
“Just doing my job. I’ll tell you when the report comes in.”
Brackish smiled pleasantly until Radecker disappeared around the corner. Then he kicked the wall and used language his mother wouldn’t have approved of. He was sure Wells, demented or not, could have given him information about other ships. He had already imagined the scene a dozen times: him walking down the deserted institutional corridors with all the windows heavily barred, a pair of body-builder orderlies unlocking a heavy steel door and pulling it open to reveal the insane scientist, hair standing on end as if he’d recently been struck by lightning, eyes bulging wide as he struggled to escape from his straitjacket. Oh, well. Lenel had warned him about promising trails suddenly going cold. After a moment of consideration, he realized he had no other choice: he headed back to the stacks.
This time, he was looking for something in particular. And even with Freiling’s help, it took the next twenty-four hours to find it. Realizing it would take the rest of his life to read through the anarchic accumulation of archives in the stacks, Okun needed to limit the scope of his search. There had to be a way of separating the genuine reports from the rest. He had no idea how to do it, but reasoned that the logical place to begin would be with the one alien encounter he knew for sure had taken place: the one at Roswell.
*
The incident actually began two days before the crash. On July 2, 1947, radar screens scanning the skies above the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico picked up an unsteady blip wandering back and forth. It appeared to pulse larger, then smaller, every few seconds, and the crew in the tracking room suspected an equipment malfunction. They called two other facilities, one in Albuquerque, the other in Roswell, and asked if they could confirm the sighting. Within hours, they had. There was no doubt that something was up there. All three tracking stations went on alert as Intelligence Officer Ian Leigh boarded a plane in Washington, DC. If the same phenomenon had occurred in another part of the state, there would have been less concern. But White Sands was a highly restricted area. Besides the secret rocket and missile tests being conducted there, White Sands had been the site, a couple of years before, of the world’s first nuclear explosion. The Manhattan Project, led by Robert Oppenheimer, had caused a “controlled detonation” near Alamogordo in a quiet valley once called Jornada de los Muerton, or Trek of the Dead.
On the Fourth of July, the blip returned at approximately ten-thirty. This time it didn’t wander across the radar screen; it tore across. According to those most familiar with the tracking technology, it reached speeds of better than a thousand miles per hour. What made these speeds all the more amazing was that the plane—or whatever it was—seemed to accelerate, then come to a dead stop, then accelerate again, racing helter-skelter over the southeastern part of the state. At 11:20, the blip flared into a wide splotch of light and vanished from the screens. After communication between the various tracking stations, they decided the ship had gone down somewhere north of Roswell. The search began at dawn.
*
Caesar “Corky” Riddle slammed the door of his pickup and started the engine. He was frustrated, more frustrated than his kids were, and now all of them were soaking wet. For a month, he’d been promising his three daughters a big fireworks show on the Fourth. He’d driven all the way to Albuquerque and spent a fortune at the Red Devil stand. Then he’d put up with the girls’ impatience all day, telling them to wait until dark. But by the time evening began to fall over the desert, a storm had blown in. Thirty-and forty-mile-per-hour winds were gusting, pushing a thunderstorm up from the Gulf of Mexico. The Riddle family gathered on their front porch and watched the situation grow worse. Finally, about ten-thirty, the winds died down. The girls wanted to light the fireworks out on the road in front of the house, but Corky insisted on sticking to the original plan. So they piled into the truck and raced toward the park in downtown Roswell. As long as they had all that gunpowder, Corky figured, they ought to put on a show for the whole town. But at nearly 11 p.m. on a stormy night, the streets were deserted, and the park was empty. As soon as they were ready to start lighting fuses, the winds picked up again, knocking the blast cones on their sides. They kept at it anyhow, trying various ways of anchoring them to the ground. Then the rain came out of nowhere—it poured down in sheets—drenching the Riddles and their stockpile of fireworks.
They rode home in silence, driving north along 268. A bright flash behind the truck cast shadows of the family across the dashboard. Corky assumed it was another flash of lightning, but then a bright streak came over the top of the truck and shot away into the distance. A bright sizzle of white light, tearing through the night like a meteor. But it wasn’t like any meteor they’d ever seen. For one thing, it wasn’t falling. It was traveling parallel to the ground. And instead of a smooth stroke of light, this one was scattering blue-and-green energy. It reminded Corky of the shower of sparks created by a welder’s torch. As it sank behind the hills and disappeared from view, he pulled onto the shoulder of the road and told the girls to stay inside. He got out and climbed onto the front bumper, expecting whatever it was to explode on impact. He cupped his hands behind his ears and waited. But everything stayed quiet.
He climbed back inside feeling a little better. His fireworks show had turned out to be a disaster, but at least they’d seen something unusual. The girls were excited again. They said it was God playing with a sparkler and talked about it all the way home.
*
Grant Weston had spent the afternoon hunting for fossils. He was the leader of a group of seven archaeologists, vertebrate paleontologists to be exact, who had hiked into the desert and set up camp for the three-day holiday weekend. The sudden rain had nearly extinguished their campfire, and he was adding dry kindling to it when the sky lit up above his head. He looked up and watched the hissing fireball flash past. A few seconds after it disappeared behind the trees, the group heard two crashing noises in quick succession. The first was a hollow thud, while the second was a sharp echoing crack.
“What the hell was that?” everyone wanted to know.
One of the graduate studen
ts initiated a brief panic by proclaiming they had just witnessed the crash of a flying saucer. But Weston proposed a more plausible theory. Familiar with that part of New Mexico, he explained that nearby Roswell Field was a testing site for the Army’s new and experimental aircraft. Residents of the area, he said, had grown accustomed to seeing strange-looking planes in the sky. That calmed the nerves of his fellow campers. They discussed setting out immediately to look for the wreckage, but decided it was too dangerous. Judging from the trajectory of the streaking light and the sound of the crash, they estimated the craft had gone down about five miles north of their location. The moon was new, and the terrain could be treacherous even in daylight. There was nothing they could do until daybreak.
In all probability, Weston knew, there would be no survivors. But all night the possibility of a wounded survivor tangled in the wreckage haunted him. He couldn’t sleep, and he wasn’t the only one. Well before dawn, the archaeologists were sipping coffee, waiting for first light. They had packed up the first-aid kit and enough food and water for the day. As soon as they could see the edges of their campsite, they set out.
Progress was slow. The land was a mixture of rock, loose sand, and thorny scrub. Flash floods had cut steep ravines between the rolling hills, forcing the group to double back and find a new path every few minutes. About the time the sun began to rise, they noticed a spotter plane searching the area, a welcome sign. Within half an hour, the plane was circling over a spot about a mile east of them.
“They must have found the crash site,” Weston reasoned. “Let’s head in that direction.”
A set of steep hills separated them from where the plane was circling. They followed a path between two peaks and came into an arroyo. A few hundred yards to their left, they noticed the tail of the craft. As they moved farther into the dry riverbed, the archaeologists, who had spent their lives studying earth’s ancient past, stepped forward to meet its future.
‘That doesn’t look like an Army plane to me, experimental or not.”
“It looks like a fat airplane without any wings.”
Skilled in the reconstruction of events, Weston deduced what had happened the night before. “See those flattened bushes on the crest of that ridge? The plane must have bottomed out there—that was the thud we heard—and then bounced up and come down here.” The black, roughly circular ship had plowed nose first into a sheer cliff. For the amount of rock it had shattered, Weston was surprised it wasn’t in worse shape. He headed up the incline for a closer look.
When Betty Kagayama saw what he meant to do, she yelled after him. “Grant, what are you doing? Please don’t go near it! Let’s wait for help.” She and Professor Weston had developed a relationship that was something more than platonic. “I don’t care what you say; that thing isn’t from earth.”
“I’ve got to check to see if anyone’s still alive. Here, take this.” He handed her his field camera.
“I’ll climb up there and pose like a big-game hunter. We’ll laugh about it later.” Over Betty’s protests, he jogged up the hill.
As he got closer, he knew she was right. The black ship hadn’t been built by humans. He stopped a few feet from the tail section and examined the small markings cut into the surface. “Looks like hieroglyphics,” he called down the slope. There was a hole torn open along the side of the ship. He squatted down and looked up into it. “Hello? Anybody in there?” He could see sunlight on the interior walls of the vessel. He considered squeezing through the gap, but the foul, acrid smell coming out of it drove him away. He walked around to the front of the ship and saw there were windows. To get to them, he began clambering up the pile of debris caused by the crash.
“Grant, someone’s coming! Over there.”
He looked in the direction Betty was pointing. Two black sedans followed by a dozen military trucks were cutting cross-country toward the site. He started to come back down the slope, but curiosity got the better of him. He knew how the military was. They’d shoo him away, and he’d never get to see what was inside. So he climbed high enough onto the slope so that he could step onto the edge of the disk-shaped craft, then carefully walked across the surface and peered in the windows. A pair of blunt, bony faces was staring back at him through the window. They looked like large death masks fashioned out of living tissue, gristle, and tendon. Horrified and repulsed, Weston fell backwards off the ship, then ran down the slope. Before he had rejoined the group, the first black sedan pulled up. The man who stepped out introduced himself as Special Agent Ian Leigh.
He talked with the archaeologists for a moment. He asked Professor Weston to sit in the sedan and directed the others to wait in a group off to the side. He then jogged hack to the head of the military convoy and called a huddle with the commanding officers. One of them asked if he should take the civilians into custody.
“They seem like a cooperative group. We’ll worry about them later. Right now our problem is these soldiers; they’ve already seen too much.” The group turned and noticed six troop transport vehicles, each one loaded to the brim with gawking enlisted men. Like everyone else, they were transfixed by the sight of the wreckage. Leigh thought for a minute before coming up with a plan. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll use these men to establish a cordon. Nobody comes in or out without my approval. Tell the men to walk back out of this ravine the same way we drove in. Put four or five guys up on the cliff above the ship and fan the rest of them out in a circle. Make sure they’re far enough away to where they can’t see what’s going on.”
“Why don’t we just have them turn their backs?”
“Good idea. As soon as they’re in position, you guys drive the trucks down close to the wreck, and we’ll use them to create a screen. OK, get busy.” Leigh moved around the crash site with impressive efficiency. It was as if he’d done all of this before. “Steiger, let’s go; this is your big moment, kid. You’re elected to be our welcoming committee,” he called across the gravel to one of the men he’d brought in from DC. “Put on that protective gear. You’re going in first.” Steiger, a rail-thin man who stood well over six feet, popped open the trunk of the first sedan. A minute later, covered head to toe in a rubbery, lead-lined suit, he was moving toward the fallen spacecraft. He carried a Geiger counter. He moved around the outside of the ship for several minutes, sampling radiation levels, and found nothing abnormal. Very carefully, he approached the breach in the wall and reached in with the Geiger counter. Finding all levels normal again, he poked his head through the gap and cautiously climbed inside.
*
A few hours later, the work was finished. Every square inch of the impact area had been carefully photographed. The three large bodies found inside had been sealed in lead-lined body bags, lowered through the opening, and piled into the back of an ambulance, which took them to the base hospital. After a loading crane had hoisted the ship onto the back of a flatbed truck, it was buried under a collection of tarps and poles meant to disguise the vehicle’s shape. Before turning the archaeologists loose, Leigh had sworn them to secrecy. He reminded them that they were the only ones outside the military who knew about the ship, and he had cataloged a short list of accidents that might befall anyone who broke the silence. The next morning he would return to the site with a hundred soldiers, MPs with reputations for being able to keep their mouths shut gathered from six different bases across three states. After cleaning the area once by hand, they used industrial vacuum cleaners to remove every last shred of evidence. At that point, Leigh was convinced he had succeeded in making the whole situation disappear.
*
But that same morning, a man walked into the Chaves County Sheriffs Headquarters carrying a crate full of a strange, lightweight material he’d found scattered over a large area of his ranch. His name was Mac Brazel. He was one of those leather-skinned, scuffed-up cowboys who eked out a living by keeping cattle and sheep herds up in the hard-scrabble mountains.
On the night of July 4, he’d heard a loud crashing
sound, one that didn’t sound like thunder. He’d forgotten about it completely until he found the field of shiny material. Initially he seemed angry. His sheep wouldn’t go near the stuff and he wanted to know who was going to come out there and clean it up. But then he asked if his discovery might lead to him collecting some of the reward money that magazines had been offering to anyone who could prove the existence of flying saucers. Until he arrived at the sheriffs office, he’d heard none of the rumors concerning the craft that had gone down north of town.
The sheriff, George Wilcox, came out of his office and examined the material. It was unlike anything he’d seen before. It seemed to be some kind of metal. Although it was as light as balsa wood, none of the men in the office could bend it. They tried hammering on it with a stapler and burning it with their lighters, all to no avail.
Wilcox was angry with the way the Army had pushed him out of the investigation of the crashed ship, refusing him access to the site. Nevertheless, he called Roswell Field to report Brazel’s find. He spoke with Major Jesse Marcel, who said he’d come into town right away. Thinking the Army would shunt him aside once more, Wilcox dispatched two of his deputies to the Brazel ranch to look for the debris field. As soon as they left, the phone rang. It was Walt Wasserman, the owner of local radio station KGFL, calling to see if there had been any new developments in the investigation of the crash. Wilcox put Brazel on the phone and, after the two men talked for several minutes, Wasserman was given directions to the rancher’s home.
Major Marcel arrived with a plainclothes counterintelligence officer, Sheridan Cavitt. After they had inspected the debris that Mac Brazel had brought to town, they instructed Sheriff Wilcox to lock it in a secure office, then made plans to follow Brazel out to his ranch. Moments after they left, the two deputies returned from the ranch. Instead of finding the field of debris, they’d come across a large circular burn mark in the grass. It was their opinion that something hot had landed in the spot, scorching the grass and baking the earth to a hard clay beneath it. They had come back to get a camera before it got dark.
Independence Day: Silent Zone Page 9