“All the phones are dead in town. We’ll have to drive clear down to the main highway again.”
“And we’re already down to half a tank of gas.”
“Maybe we should go back into town and figure out our next move.”
Okun kicked the dirt. He wasn’t ready to give up, but knew the men were right.
“Hey, look up there,” Freiling interrupted. “Look at that cactus and all the plants around it. Isn’t that kinda fishy? All these cliffs around here are bare rock, but there’s a bunch of plants all growing in one little area up there.”
The crew walked to the base of the cliffs and looked up. They were standing near a twenty-foot rock wall, which led to a steep, forty-five-degree slope, which led in turn to a second set of much taller vertical walls. There was something odd about the patch of rock Freiling had pointed out. All day, they’d been noticing agave plants and cacti clinging to the rocks. After establishing toeholds on the cliffs, the plants spread their roots over the exposed surface of the rock. No roots were visible on this cliff despite the number of plants. Could there be a hidden cave up there?
Pedro climbed up the wall in front of them, then walked carefully up the slope until he came to the top. The cliffs surrounding him formed an eerie tower of ribbed rock bleached pale yellow by the elements. Great black streaks ran down them, as if someone had poured buckets of tar over the sides.
Okun went back to the car, retrieved a tire iron and a candle, then scrambled up the hill himself. When he reached the narrow shelf of flat rock at the base of the upper cliffs, he noticed a couple of strange things. The area Freiling had pointed to was smooth. It didn’t match the wavy rocks of the neighboring cliffs. Also, there were long, thin cracks running through it. They looked like the ones he’d seen in plaster walls after quakes in Los Angeles.
He stepped back, spotted a squarish hole near his feet, and poked the tire iron into it. He couldn’t find the back of the opening. He lay down and put his face up to the hole, but could see nothing. Running his hands over the surface of the cliff, he became convinced it was a wall built to conceal one of the caves. He picked up the tire iron and used the wedge end to begin chipping away at the face of the hillside.
The surface was hard, but it wasn’t the solid boulder it appeared to be. Handfulls of sand and small stones rolled away down the slope behind him. When one of his strokes caused a dull sound, he brushed away the last pieces of debris. Something in the hole was made of soft, patterned material. On closer inspection, it turned out to be dried grass woven to form a kind of mat. He pushed on it and felt it give. Strange. He slashed at the matting with his tire iron and succeeded in breaking through it. He started fumbling with one of the candles to look inside, but before he could light it, he knew he had found what he was looking for. Wafting out of the hole came a distinctive aroma, something like ammonia.
“We got it. It’s here!” he yelled down the cliff. “I can smell the pod chairs from here.” He lit a candle and inserted it through the hole. The cave inside was huge, narrower than the first cave but much deeper. And sitting in the middle of the space, about twenty paces from him, was a dusty alien spacecraft. “Gotcha, baby,” he told the ship. “I can’t believe I finally found you!” He backed out of the hole and started jumping around, waving his arms in the air screaming, “It’s here. It’s here. I can see it. We did it!” In his excitement, he jumped too high and the gravel underfoot gave way. He crashed to his back, then started sliding down the slope. He was headed for a two-story plunge to the rocks below, but reached out at the last second and latched on to one of the bushes, his body doing a 180-degree flip. Head dangling over the edge, he smiled at the upside-down scientists. “There’s a ship in there. Identical to the one we’ve got. I think it’s time to call in the Marines.”
“Young man, get away from that opening,” Cibatutto cried out. Pedro had come hack across the huge stone shelf to see what all the excitement was about. Noticing the hole Okun had chipped into the wall, he started poking around it, curious.
“Hey, Pedro, get away from there.”
“What’s in there?”
“Nothing, please don’t go near it.”
“Why not? I wanna see it.”
Okun was too far down the slippery slope to get there in time. He knew if Pedro saw the spaceship, it would go hard on him. Desperate, Okun yelled as loud as he could. “Chupacabra!” The kid froze in his tracks. “We’re not really looking for iron. We’re looking for the goat sucker, and this is his home. Don’t let him pull you inside!” Suddenly the boy couldn’t be far enough away from the hole. He retreated along the narrow shelf at the base of the upper cliffs until he was around a corner.
*
Thirty minutes later, the five of them were standing around the car again. Pedro had found two trails running along the edge of the cliff. One of them was a switchback leading up to the top of the bluffs, while the other one came out of the hills not far from where the car was parked.
It was time to split up. Okun and Lenel would stay and investigate the ship while Cibatutto and Freiling took the kid to find the nearest phone.
“Time is of the essence,” Cibatutto observed. “We’ve only got about twenty-four hours until our friends show up.” So off they sped to find the nearest phone.
“Let’s hurry up and get inside before dark.”
Okun helped Lenel, unsteady, climb the narrow trail. They came out onto the great stone shelf outside of the hidden cave. Lenel sat down and watched the sun sink toward the horizon as Okun used the tire iron and his bare hands to cut a doorway into the cave.
13
The Mogollon Cave
Radecker had been so busy setting up his dragnet and feeling sorry for himself, he didn’t get around to questioning the chauffeur until the next morning. The man had spent the night sleeping on a bench at the police station. He repeated everything that had been said in the car, including a verbatim account of Freiling’s infernal jabbering.
“In my opinion, it’s something the young guy saw in the newspaper.” He described how Okun had snatched the paper out of his hands and was still holding it as they began the drive toward the cemetery. “If these guys were dangerous criminals, why wasn’t I warned? And who’s gonna pay for fixing up the hearse?”
When one of the cops handed Radecker a copy of Saturday’s paper, it didn’t take him long to figure out which story had caught Okun’s eye. Now it was his turn to nod. By the time he was finished reading the story, he knew exactly where they were headed.
He grinned at the chauffeur and wrote a phone number on the back of his business card. “You’ve been very helpful. Call this number. They’ll fix your car.” Then he turned to one of the cops. “I need to use a phone for a private call.”
He was shown into a small office and dialed Spelman’s direct line. “I think I’ve figured out where they’re headed.”
Spelman told him to hold the line, then passed the receiver to someone else. “Is this Radecker?”
“Yes, sir. Who’s this?”
The man ignored him. “We found out your boys rented a car at Ontario Airport yesterday. The vehicle is a gold Ford LTD station wagon with wood-trim panels, California plates CYS 385. You got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You say you know where they’re headed?”
“I believe so, sir. But before I say anything, I’ll need to know who I’m talking to and if you have proper clearance.”
“This is Deputy Director Nimziki. Now where are they?”
“Mexico, sir. Somewhere in the State of Chihuahua, probably in the town of Guerrero.” He went on to explain Okun’s sudden interest in the newspaper and the likely connection to a paragraph in the Majestic 12 documents he had personally inked out before handing the document over to Okun. “He must have learned about it from Wells.”
“You think they’re down there looking for an alien vehicle?”
“Yes, sir,” Radecker said almost apologetically. He’d b
een given very few specific instructions on how to do his job, but one thing had been made crystal clear: deny Okun access to information concerning other spacecraft. It seemed simple enough, but he had failed miserably. Okun had learned everything, despite his efforts. “With your permission, Mr. Nimziki, I’ll fly down there immediately and round them up.”
There was a pause while the man on the other end thought it over. “No, that won’t be necessary. You’ve served your purpose. Collect your things and report back to Company Headquarters for reassignment.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” He hung up the phone, confused. Until that moment he had no idea who’d been pulling the strings on the project, and he was surprised it went right to the top, Nimziki’s office. Everyone in the company knew the presidential appointee wasn’t the real power at the CIA. Day-to-day operations and who-knew-how-many covert operations were increasingly run out of the Deputy Director’s Office. It was only a matter of time until he was named to head the Agency. But what had he meant by You’ve served your purpose? That sounded ominous. At least he’d mentioned reassignment. Radecker allowed himself to be optimistic in spite of the mess he’d allowed to happen. Perhaps he was going to be promoted after all. At least he knew that wherever they sent him, it couldn’t be any worse than being trapped in Area 51.
*
The front wall of the cave was an ingenious construction of meticulously stacked stone, woven grass, and mud. After baking in the desert sun for twenty-five years, it was almost as hard as solid stone. When Okun hesitantly stepped through the opening, he noticed another curious piece of construction material: a large section of shell armor. He recognized it as the circular door of the alien ship. The last light of day was coming through the squarish hole Okun had found earlier. When he lit one of the candles and approached the hole, he made a rather gruesome discovery. Something was lying in front of it. The thing looked like a degraded plastic bag with hands and feet. He moved closer and discovered it was the decomposed body of an alien. The hands and feet, made of a thicker, tougher material than the rest of the body, were decaying more slowly. Lenel came up behind him, holding a candle of his own.
“He must have been looking out his little window waiting to be rescued when he died. The electromagnetic field generated by the power lines must have created a ceiling which allowed the signal to travel laterally, but not upward. That must be why the aliens never located the distress signal.”
Okun lowered himself toward the body until his face was only inches above the decomposed corpse and looked through the opening. “Guess what the last thing he was looking at when he died?”
“A large Y standing in a desolate landscape?”
“Bingo.”
“It looks like this one has been dead for years. But we picked up his visual signal less than two years ago. Does it mean there’s a telepathic interface between the creatures and their ship?”
“Makes sense. And this little guy must have programmed the ship’s sending unit to repeat the message endlessly.” He looked over his shoulder at Lenel. “Now I know why the image felt so lonely. This would be a crummy way to die, marooned in a cave on some foreign planet.”
Lenel grunted. He wasn’t about to start feeling sorry for the extraterrestrials. He walked deeper into the darkness to take a look at the ship. They lit a dozen candles, which cast an eerie, dancing glow around the ceiling. Like the first cave they’d explored, this one had mud-brick apartments standing side by side around the perimeter of the space. Staying close to one another, the two men began walking around the ship.
“This one didn’t crash,” Lenel observed. “There’s no sign of damage anywhere. The shell armor seems to be in perfect condition. I don’t even see scrape marks.”
Okun squatted down. “One problem. Where are the thrusters? This baby’s lying flat on its belly. Shouldn’t it be raised up off the floor?”
Lenel shrugged and moved on. They walked all the way around the exterior of the ship, pausing to make an investigation of the small rooms farthest from the mouth of the cave. They found several Mogollon artifacts, including what seemed to be a grinding stone, but no evidence at all that the alien had used the rooms. As they returned to the ship and came around toward its nose, Okun’s attention was drawn to something happening behind the windows. He was about to say something when he took another step and fell into a hole. The sudden scream and downward flicker of candlelight scared Lenel half to death. “Okun? What happened?”
“I’m OK,” he said, “but be careful. There’s a hole over here.” When he struck a match and relit his candle, Lenel came to the edge of the three-foot-deep pit. He reached a hand down to help Okun climb out, but Okun didn’t take it. He was sniffing. ‘The ammonia smell is stronger down here.” He turned around and noticed he was in a trench that led in the direction of the ship’s door. “It looks like this tunnel leads inside the ship. Should we go in?”
“What if I said no, that we should wait for the help to get here?”
Okun admitted, “I’d probably go in anyway.”
“So why are you even asking?” the habitual sour-puss snapped. “Help me down into this hole.”
They crawled the thirty feet to the center of the ship on their hands and knees, the ammonia smell growing stronger. When they were under the open hatch, Okun saw the light of his candle flickering across the dark interior of the ship. Something suddenly struck him as terribly wrong. As Lenel caught up with him, muttering something under his breath, Okun reached out and arrested the old man’s progress with a hand clamped onto his shoulder. He was looking up into the ship in a way that made Lenel very uneasy.
“Now what?” he whispered.
“Listen. You hear that?” Okun was moving his index finger around in a very slow loop to show how the sound was repeating itself. After watching him do this for a minute and not hearing anything, Lenel spoke a few decibels louder than he needed to.
“My ears are shot. I can’t hear anything.”
Cautiously, Okun stood up, not sure he was going to like what he saw inside. Was it possible there were survivors after all these years? He thought of Trina Glucks story, and how she’d been nose to nose with the Tall One. Although there was no one moving inside the ship, he was amazed when he located the source of the repetitive noise: the instrument panel at the front of the ship was surging to glowing life every few seconds. He climbed inside and walked to the front of the ship. He knelt and timed the surges against his wristwatch. To find part of the ship working didn’t amaze him. He’d expected to discover the signaling system still carrying the message with the Y. But what he saw happening around him made no sense. All the systems were pulsing to a very slow heartbeat. “This is impossible,” he yelled. ‘This thing is using way way way too much energy. Why does it have so much juice left?” He turned and went to confront Lenel with these questions but suddenly leaped backwards, sprawling against the dashboard, his heart suddenly pounding like a fire bell.
“What’s the matter with you now?” Lenel demanded, crawling into the cabin.
A speechless Brackish could only point to something on the floor. Lenel walked over and found three more decomposed bodies in the corner. They had been left in sitting positions, but, over the years, the heads and chests had collapsed in on themselves, sinking to the floor. Three sets of legs pointed toward the front of the ship. Okun had been so intent on checking the instrument panel, he’d literally walked right over them without noticing. The papery remains of a leg had been packed down under his shoe.
“Don’t worry. They’re just as dead as the one outside, and you didn’t seem scared of him.”
Okun looked at the cadavers like he’d just swallowed a mouthful of chunky milk. “But the way they’re sitting there. Creep-o-rama extraordinaire.”
“What’s this power issue you were hollering about?”
Brackish got back to business. “Look at these instruments!” The two of them watched the instruments run through their four-second cycles. T
he yellow shell glowed dimly, the bony arms of the steering mechanism twitched, the set of tubes under the pod chairs expanded. “Where is all this energy coming from?”
“Beats me.” The old man shrugged. He started to say something else, then stopped.
“What? What were you going to say?”
“Based on what we know about these ships, what’s the most logical energizing source?”
Okun’s mind toiled in darkness for a few moments until a lightbulb popped on. “You’re suggesting these power surges are coming from another ship? Which must mean there’s another alien vehicle within transmission range. Which means…”
“Exactly. They could be on their way down here right now.”
This theory did not brighten the mood of any of the life-forms inside the cabin, living or dead.
“Wait a sec,” Okun complained. “We worked out the Van Allen connection a couple of times. We’re supposed to have until tomorrow!”
“Don’t get your knickers all twisted up, son. It’s only an idea. Who knows where this power is coming from. Maybe this ship is using the earth’s natural electromagnetism as a battery, or maybe this is what happens every time the belts show increased radioactivity.”
But half an hour later, the instruments were pulsing in three-second cycles. Both Okun and Lenel were convinced an alien ship, perhaps even a small armada of them, was approaching Chihuahua.
“I figure we’ve got an hour, maybe two if we’re lucky,” Lenel said. “This ship is in perfect shape. We’ve got to learn as much as we can before they get here. I’ll go below and try to get a look at the aqua-box. You stay here and learn what you can about the control mechanisms.” Okun, mind racing in a thousand directions at once, vaguely agreed. “And because this is an emergency, I’m going to lend you my secret weapon.” Lenel reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a three-inch-long screwdriver. “Pull that panel apart and make us some schematics drawings we can use on the ship back home.”
Independence Day: Silent Zone Page 18