Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11 (9 page)

“… and he’s driven by one ambition and one ambition only: to be top man, first of Wall Street, then the cabinet, and now he’s got his eye on the presidency. And were he president, with his worldview that the godless, evil Soviet Union is on the verge of invading us, we’d find ourselves in a catalysmic world war. He has to be stopped. I
have
stopped him.”

“You’ve crushed him, Drew.”

“Then good for me.” Pearson was shaking his head. “He’s been a law unto himself, Nathan, and behavior like that can’t be countenanced.”

“From a public official, you mean. It wins columnists Pulitzers.”

“Listen, my friend, Jim Forrestal has nurtured, has created, this nightmarish Central Intelligence Agency, and mark my words, America will suffer the consequences for decades. And before he had that charming organization up and running, peddling its counterintelligence and counterinsurgency around the world, he would step in himself, raising huge funds from his rich friends to pay off railroad strikers in France, to buy off politicians in Italy—”

“Save it for the broadcast.”

He arched an eyebrow. “All right. Since you seem disapproving of my campaign—
successful
campaign—to induce Harry S. Truman to remove James V. Forrestal, I have to ask: why did you want to see me today?”

“Why were
you
willing to see me?”

The smile turned sly again; he stroked his purring pussy and said, “Well … I thought, as someone who’s spent time with Forrestal … who has his ear, his trust … you could, you might, let me know just how far around the bend he is.”

“Why, so you can put it on the radio tonight?”

“Yes,” he said, with no shame. “It appears to me that Forrestal has gone off his rocker. That he’s mad as a hatter. And if I could say that, with confidence, on the air, it would be a great service to our country.”

“Jesus! Suppose the guy
has
lost his marbles … and I’m not confirming that, mind you … what purpose does it serve humiliating him further? You won, Drew! Isn’t that enough?”

“You don’t think the country has a right to know that its Secretary of Defense is a madman? I want to know how long he’s been demented, I want to know what orders, policies, security breaches might be ascribed to his mental state! If a raving lunatic has made government policy, mightn’t we want to undertake a critical review of those policies?”

“Well, I hate to disappoint you, but I haven’t seen a ‘raving lunatic’—just a man battered down by years of hard work for his country, and maybe buckling a little under your barrage of bullshit.”

He rocked gently. “I ask again, Nathan: why did you want to see me today?”

“To ask you, out of common decency, not to broadcast any speculation about Jim Forrestal’s mental condition. He’s quitting tomorrow—give him a chance to go out with a little goddamn dignity.”

Both eyebrows lifted. “This is unexpected, Nathan.”

“What is?”

“The milk of human kindness in one so monetary.”

“Why don’t you surprise me, Drew, and behave like the liberal lover of mankind you pretend to be: give the guy a fucking break.”

He thought about that, as he scratched his cat’s neck. Finally he said, “All right. But if Forrestal gets back into the political fray, all bets are off.”

I hadn’t expected it to be this easy; frankly, I hadn’t expected him to go along with me at all.

“Understood,” I said.

“But … I need a favor of you, in return.”

So much for the milk of human kindness.

“What kind of favor?”

“Your presence in Washington is fortuitous, Nathan.”

“It is?”

“Yes. I’d like you to do a job for me. Today. This afternoon.”

“… What kind of job?”

He folded his hands prayerfully on the desktop. “I want you to talk to somebody for me. I don’t want to be seen talking to this individual myself, and I don’t even want my staff knowing about this particular … subject matter.”

That didn’t surprise me. Pearson had a conspiratorial managing style, never letting an investigator or legman know what each other was up to.

I asked, “What subject matter is that?”

He spoke very softly: “In researching your client, Secretary Forrestal, I stumbled onto some information that is either the biggest story of the century … or an attempt to make such a fool out of me that I would be discredited, once and for all.”

“All right. You’ve got my attention. But, favor or no favor, my fee is a hundred a day.”

Immediately, he reached in a desk drawer, withdrew a checkbook and began filling out a check, asking, “You want that made out to the A-1 or to yourself?”

“A-1 will be fine … but make it four hundred, to bring your account up to date.”

Pearson shrugged. “All right.”

My jaw dropped. “Now you really have my attention….”

He handed the check across to me, its black ink glistening wetly. “No further expenses, though … for right now, this is a one-day affair, and you can buy your own damn meals.”

“Fair enough. Who do I talk to, and on what subject?”

He rocked back, folded his arms. “Let’s start with the subject. Nathan … what do you know about flying saucers?”

I winced. Weren’t Commies, Zionists and Nazis enough? Must I add spacemen to the list?

“Nathan, please … answer the question.”

Money was money. “Well … last year or two, there have been a lot of sightings of flying saucers, flying discs, flying cigars, whatever, some of ’em by fairly reputable types. I figure it’s some kind of postwar hysteria—like the gremlins pilots in the war talk about seeing. I saw ’em myself.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, in Bugs Bunny cartoons.”

Pearson shuffled through some manila file folders on his desk, came up with a thick one, folded it open and began thumbing through; I hoped it wasn’t my FBI file again.

“The first published report of a saucer sighting was in June of ’47,” he said, “by an air rescue pilot—Kenneth Arnold, of Boise, Idaho—who said he saw nine flying saucers flying at twelve hundred miles per hour over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State, in formations, shifting positions like … what’s it say, here, where is it … ‘like the tail of a kite.’ This seemed to trigger sightings, with saucers spotted in Texas, New Mexico, Oregon, Idaho, Missouri, Colorado, California, Arizona, Nebraska …”

I nodded. “Yeah, for a few months there, if you wanted to see your name in the paper, all you had to do was just call in and say you saw an unidentified flying what’s-it.”

“Your attitude mirrors my own, essentially; but some of these sightings are from credible sources—a United Airlines pilot, a National Guard captain—and I’ve learned that the U.S. Air Force is studying and cataloguing these sightings.”

“Or pretending to—after all, these ‘saucers’ could be some new experimental top-secret aircraft or weapon of ours. The kind of thing a civilian might easily misconstrue.”

Pearson nodded. “And the inquiry into ‘saucer’ sightings could be a military screen of ‘black propaganda’—lies. In any case, that effort—whether sincere, or simply cosmetic—started in December ’47, as Project Sign, but it’s evolved into something called Project Grudge.”

“That sounds like the code name for your Forrestal crusade.”

He arched an eyebrow. “Well, Secretary Forrestal
is
involved in this matter.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not at all. As I said, I came across this information in my investigation of Forrestal…. Take a look at this, Nathan.”

Pearson handed me a photostat from his folder; it was of a single sheet of stationery, rubber-stamped at the top: top secret/majic eyes only.

White House stationery.

The date was September 24, 1947, and the contents were as follows:

MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE

And it was signed, with a flourish: “Harry Truman.”

“This doesn’t say anything about flying saucers,” I said.

“Indeed it doesn’t. But a Pentagon source has informed me that Operation Majestic Twelve is a government research and development project formed with exploring the ‘flying saucer’ problem as its mandate.”

I reread the letter, then asked, “Who’s this Dr. Bush?”

“Dr. Bush is, with Forrestal, one of the twelve—the ‘Majestic Twelve’—that is, key government, scientific and military figures. Bush is former dean of MIT; he led the development of the atomic bomb, radar, the proximity fuse, the analog computer, and much more. The top government science mind.”

I tossed the photostat back on his desk. “Do you believe your source?”

“You know what they say—in Washington, if your mother says she loves you, get a second source to corroborate it.”

“Glad to see you checking your facts, for a change.”

He sighed rather heavily. “Nathan, as I said, I suspect this may be an effort to make a colossal boob out of me. But if what I’ve been told does prove correct, our government may have in its possession technology from another planet, which they are intending to capitalize upon for military purposes.”

“I’m gonna vote for the colossal boob theory on this one.”

Pearson was shaking his head. “I know, I know—it sounds incredible, even bizarre … but it all seems to stem from one incident—the crash of an unidentified flying object in Roswell, New Mexico, in July of ’47.”

I shifted in my chair. “Not a sighting—a crash….”

“Yes—a crash by an alien spacecraft.”

“And Forrestal is nuts? Drew, you thought about trying a smoking jacket that buttons up the back?”

“The Air Force base at Roswell—the 509th Bomb Group, who incidentally are the only squadron in the world armed and ready to drop atomic bombs—issued a public statement to the effect that a flying saucer had crashed, and its wreckage been recovered … a statement that was, within hours, withdrawn by the powers-that-be.”

“You’re making this up.”

“No. I’ll give you my clipping file to take with you, on your way.”

“My way where?”

“To talk to the Air Force major who says he found the saucer. Sure you won’t have a cookie?”

Due west of the white-marble temple of the Lincoln Memorial, and bordering the low-slung but formidable granite-and-concrete Arlington Bridge, yawned a convex arc of granite steps known as the Water Gate. A couple hundred feet wide at the top, fanning out gently to maybe another thirty feet wide at bottom, these steep steps formed an ornamental buttress between the bridge and the roadway ramp angling from the memorial toward Rock Creek Park. The Water Gate was designed, in part, to serve as an outdoor amphitheater; in the summer, a barge outfitted with a band shell would be anchored at the foot of these forty or so steps as a stage for concerts by the National Symphony Orchestra, among others. But late March was too early for the band-shell barge and the only stage that stretched out in front of the scattering of Sunday-afternoon loungers seated there was the sun-shimmering gray-blue Potomac itself, where pleasure boats—mostly canoes streaking by—were the featured attraction.

He was easy enough to spot, as I came down the steps: seated alone, a third of the way down, a small, even mousy-looking man in a light tan short-sleeve sportshirt with a wide pointed collar and brown corduroy slacks. His hair was dark brown and cropped short, his forehead high, and—I noted when he turned to see who’d sat down next to him—his eyes were buggy, nose beaky, chin rather weak.

Major Jesse Marcel would have been unimpressive if I hadn’t read the material in the file folder Pearson had given me, a combination of newspaper clippings and background check, which I’d perused when I parked the rental Ford over by Honest Abe’s memorial.

Marcel had entered the U.S. Army Air Force in 1942; he had both studied and taught at the Air Intelligence School at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where his civilian experience with Shell Oil, making maps from aerial photographs, soon developed into a much-valued expertise in mapping, and photographic reconnaissance and interpretation. His duties in the South Pacific had included serving as squadron intelligence officer as well as flying several combat missions in B-24s, winning two Air Medals.

Promoted to group intelligence officer and transferred stateside, Marcel was involved with radar navigation study at Langley Field when his unit, the 509th, dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Shortly thereafter he was named intelligence officer for the bomb group; his first assignment: observer at the atomic tests at Bikini.

Right now Major Marcel was assigned to Strategic Air Command headquarters here in Washington: the officer in charge of the War Room, Intelligence Branch Operations Division, AFOAT-1. Apparently this mousy little guy was head of something called the Long Range Detection Program, intended to alert the U.S. to any atomic explosions elsewhere in the world, in particular the Soviet Union.

This latter information was probably classified, at least, and possibly top-secret; and I had to wonder if Pearson had gotten it from Marcel himself—and why a guy so tied to intelligence work would share it with a muckraker like Pearson.

Also, my neck was getting prickly with apprehension at atomic bomb stuff turning up again, even in this sidebar to the Forrestal investigation: first Frank Wilson of the Atomic Energy Commission, and now SAC’s atom bomb watchdog, Major Marcel.

Who said, in a husky tenor, “Jesse Marcel, Mr. Heller. You
are
Mr. Heller?”

His tan sportshirt was a print design of cartoony representations of vacation spots: Miami, Cuba, Rio, palm trees, volcanoes, hotels.

“Nathan Heller, yes,” I said, shaking the hand he offered.

His smile was friendly but nervous. “Mind if I see some identification?”

“Not at all.” I got out my wallet, showed him my Illinois private operator’s ticket.

“No offense,” he said, and sucked on the stub of his cigarette. “Can’t be too careful. Swell day, huh? Nice breeze—my wife and son are over at the park, so we should have plenty of time to talk.”

“Major,” I said, slipping my wallet back in my hip pocket, “I read the newspaper accounts about the incident at Roswell, but considering the inconsistencies … I’d really like to hear your version of it.”

“Call me Jesse,” he said, dropping the spent cigarette to the granite, heeling it out. “We seem to be pretty much by ourselves here, but let’s keep it un-military, all right? You prefer Nathan or Nate?”

“Nate’ll do. Jesse, if you’re planning to reveal anything of a classified nature, I’ll have Pearson send somebody else over to talk to you.”

He shook his head, as he plucked a Camel out of a half-used pack. “Smoke?”

“No thanks.”

“None of this is classified, Nate, or top-secret or anything. But it’s military matters just the same, and I’m in intelligence, and I might get a tit in the wringer if it was known I was a damn source for ‘Washington Merry-Go-Round.’”

“Understood. I just have no desire to see the inside of Fort Leavenworth.”

“You’re comin’ in loud and clear on that one.” He fired up his Camel with a silver Zippo, which he snapped shut. “No, they clamped the lid on this thing, but oddly, I never got any kind of serious debriefing or orders to clam up or anything. But, understand, this deal blew over real quick.”

And it had. One day the headlines were trumpeting
AIR FORCE CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER ON RANCH IN ROSWELL, the next ARMY DEBUNKS ROSWELL FLYING DISK AS WORLD SIMMERS WITH EXCITEMENT and GENERAL RAMEY EMPTIES ROSWELL SAUCER
. These had been the headlines of Roswell’s own
Daily Record
and
Dispatch,
but the story had been carried via the Associated Press and United Press, and spread worldwide—the Pearson file had clips from Rome, London, Paris, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Tokyo—creating a momentary sensation, only to be laughed off as a fluke of the flying saucer “craze.”

“So what really happened at Roswell, Jesse?” I was getting out my small spiral notebook.

“No notes, Nate. We’re just two pals chatting, okay?”

“Sure.” I put the spiral pad away.

He plucked tobacco flakes off his tongue. “I can only tell you my part of it; I’ve heard of some fantastic things that other people witnessed, but I’m not gonna pass that along to you. If you’re interested, you can go talk to ’em in Roswell; I’ll even give you, or Mr. Pearson, a list of names. Make some calls for you—pave the way. But I’m in the intelligence game myself, Nate—and I’m not going to insult
your
intelligence with hearsay.”

“Fair enough. What’s your story, Jesse?”

Laughter echoed across the water, as pleasure boaters glided by; the afternoon sun was turning the surface of the Potomac a glimmering gold.

Marcel drew on the cigarette, held the smoke in, blew it out through his nostrils, dragon-style. “It was the first Monday after Independence Day weekend, what—two years ago. I was just sittin’ down to lunch, at the officers’ club, when I got called to the phone. It was Sheriff Wilcox, saying he had a man in his office tellin’ him something real strange.”

“This is the sheriff in Roswell.”

“That’s right—Chaves County sheriff, to be exact. Anyway, Wilcox says this rancher from over by Corona has come trampin’ into his office, yammering about a flying saucer crashing on his property. Well, as you can imagine, the sheriff took this with a big ol’ grain of salt, but this rancher—Mac Brazel, your typical dusty ol’ cowboy, not the owner of this ranch, just a guy running it for an absentee owner—had come three and a half hours over rotten roads and he wasn’t about to stand for the bum’s rush. Seems he had a few pieces of debris of this supposed saucer out in his pickup truck, which he shows the sheriff.”

“And this prompts the sheriff to call you.”

“Well, Sheriff Wilcox called the Army airfield and got put through to me, as Intelligence Corps officer. So the sheriff fills me in a little, and then he puts the rancher, Brazel, on the line, who says he’s found something on his ranch that crashed down either yesterday or the day before; didn’t know what it was—just that there was rubble all over a pasture of his, ‘bigger than a football field,’ he said, and that the grass looked like it had got burnt underneath.”

Despite the cool breeze, the sun was warm enough for me to slip out of my sportcoat, and drape it over the granite step beside me. “So you headed over there.”

“After I finished my lunch, I did. I wasn’t in any rush. You know the papers were full of this flying saucer baloney around then, and somebody or other, I don’t know, some radio station I think, was offering a reward to anybody who found one. I figured this might be a weather balloon—we had a lot of those come down—or some experimental thing from over at White Sands, which is nearby.”

“Or did you think it was a hoax, maybe? With a reward at stake?”

He shook his head, sucked some more on his cigarette. “That’s not the kind of thing that would occur to a guy like Mac Brazel; he was just your typical New Mexico salt-of-the-earth shitkicker.”

“So you went to the sheriff’s office.”

“I did, and I saw the stuff in Brazel’s truck, and it was pretty weird—there was this parchmentlike substance, extremely strong, so brown it was almost black, only more like a rough plastic than paper but it didn’t seem to be either one; and some scraps of this shiny, flexible metal, like tinfoil, only it wasn’t tinfoil, it was as thin as that, but much stronger. Here’s what was really peculiar—you could bend that stuff, and if you put some muscle in it, even kind of wad it up … but it would then assume its original shape—without a bend, without a crinkle.”

“Is that possible?”

“I would say no, if I hadn’t seen it, held it.” Marcel took his Zippo lighter from his shirt pocket. “I tried to burn the stuff with this very lighter—held the flame under a piece, and it wouldn’t burn. You couldn’t pierce it with a sharp knife, either!”

This subject clearly made him nervous, and he was drawing on the cigarette constantly, and on this beautiful sunny fresh afternoon, I was sitting in a swirl of smoke.

“So you saw these … samples of debris, in the rancher’s truck. What then, Jesse?”

He shrugged. “I thought the matter was certainly worth reporting, so I called Colonel Blanchard at the base, commanding officer, and he asked me to bring some of the debris back for him to take a look at. I told Brazel and the sheriff I’d come back in, in an hour so, asked ’em to wait for me, and I met with Colonel Blanchard at the base. I showed him a piece of that shiny shit and asked him what he’d advise me to do. He looked it over carefully, and got the gist of how curious this stuff was, and he asked me how much debris was at the ranch, and I said, according to this Brazel character, plenty. I told the colonel, ‘I believe we have some kind of downed aircraft of an unusual sort.’ Then he said, ‘Well then, I’d advise that you drive out to that site, and take one of our three counterintelligence agents along with you for support.’”

“And did you?”

Marcel nodded, sucking on the cigarette; he was almost ready for another. “I took the highest-ranking man we had, a CIC captain named Cavitt, who drove a jeep carry-all from the base. We took two cars—I was in a staff car, a prewar Buick—and we met up with Brazel at the sheriff’s office, and followed him out to the ranch.”

“The sheriff didn’t come with you.”

“No. He’d tossed the ball to the military and that was fine with us. Anyway, it was a long, hot, bumpy ride, and it was five p.m. before we got out there. Brazel had some of the debris stored in a shed, more of the same plus some rods, maybe two and a half inches in girth, in various lengths, none of them very long.”

“What, metal rods?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what the hell they were made of. They didn’t look or feel like metal, more like wood, and light as balsa wood.”

“Plastic, maybe?”

“If so, the toughest damn plastic I ever saw—kinda like that stuff, whaddyacallit, Bakelite? Anyway, you couldn’t bend it or break it.”

“These were just little pieces?”

“Well, later we saw bigger ones, but right then, in the shed, no—although there were large pieces of the shiny stuff, and of the parchmentlike material, as big as ten feet in diameter.”

“Jesus.”

“Colonel Cavitt—I don’t remember his first name, we just called him ‘Cav’—he says, ‘This could be radioactive,’ and I says, ‘Well, we’ll find out right now.’ I’d thrown a Geiger counter in the Buick trunk, so I got it and held the sensor near the pieces and got no radiation reading. ‘Whatever this is,’ I told the fellas, ‘it’s not dangerous.’ By this time it was gettin’ dark, no point going out to the pasture till morning. So we dined on canned beans and crackers and slept in sleeping bags in an empty shack, a hired hands’ bunkhouse.”

“Sounds quaint.”

“We turned in early—this was a sheep ranch, understand, no radio, no phone—but we did sit and talk awhile. Brazel said he’d heard an odd explosion, during an electrical storm, night of the fourth, but that he hadn’t paid it any heed, figuring it was a clap of thunder, or somethin’ getting hit by lightning. Next morning he found the wreckage.”

The gleeful screams of children playing echoed across the water.

“So Brazel didn’t report finding the debris immediately?”

“No. That first day he went into Corona—smaller town even than Roswell, closer to the ranch. Place was buzzing with talk about flying saucers; in late June and early July of that year, people all over New Mexico were spotting all sorts of strange lights and objects in the sky. Almost hate to admit it, but I had what they call a ‘sighting’ myself.”

“Sighting of what?”

He smirked, sighed, letting more smoke out. “A few days before the July Fourth holiday … must’ve been around eleven-thirty at night … Major Easley, the provost marshal, called me all excited and said, get out to the base—I lived in town—and he wouldn’t even say why. On my way there, in my car, on a straightaway, I spotted a group of lights moving north to south, bright lights flying a perfect V formation, movin’ like a bat out of hell. I mean, it was visible for maybe three or four seconds from overhead to the horizon. We didn’t have any planes in the air that night, not that any of ’em could’ve traveled at that speed; maybe they did at White Sands or Alamogordo.”