"All
right, let's try to take this boy prisoner," Nolan relented. "Hands
up, asswipe. Hands up." The creature awkwardly complied, lifting its
slender, semi-transparent arms away from its sides. Nolan and Simpkins
carefully backed into the doorway before signaling the thing forward.
Slowly,
clumsily, it made its way over the pile of clothing and other objects
until
there was nothing between it and the men's rifles.
"Hold
your fire," Simpkins ordered the two men leaning in the broken window,
weapons trained on the doorway. The alien stepped into the open space
of the
upside-down examining room, its fleshy, two-pronged feet carefully
exploring
the surface of the debris-littered ceiling for a secure foothold each
time it
advanced.
From
beyond the shattered window, Henderson's voice could be heard as he
spoke into
his radio. "Cap, we got one. We got a prisoner. Send in some backup."
It took two full
hours to march the alien prisoner back to the command post at the
western
extremity of the central chamber. The hard slopes created by the jumble
of
ships proved treacherous footing for a creature
accustomed to a very different environment. At every fork in the
mazelike
journey, the soldiers carefully selected the path that would offer the
least
chance of an escape. By the time they arrived with the Extraterrestrial
Biological Entity they were calling "the monster," over a hundred
armed men were there, with rifles drawn to greet them.
A
Jeep was
brought forward to transport the alien outside. By this time, Simpkins
had
appointed himself the creature's bodyguard and was busy channeling the
soldiers' hostilities by reminding them how valuable a prisoner would
be for
preventing any future attacks. The creature, doing exactly what was
required in
the situation, remained perfectly docile, even when Simpkins came
forward with
a large piece of canvas. It was draped over the alien, then tied down
in a way
that completely concealed its body. This was done more for the
creature's
security than for fear it might try to escape. Simpkins had already
visualized
the seven-mile journey to the outside, and foreseen the danger of an
angry
soldier squeezing off a few rounds in spontaneous hatred. Everyone was
anxious
to get some payback for what its race had done to theirs.
Bundled
like a rolled-up carpet and lying passively in the back of the Jeep,
shotguns
leveled at its head, the creature endured the long rough road out of
the
destroyer without moving a muscle.
Hours later,
Simpkins, Nolan, Henderson, and Myers reported to the remnants of Area
51's main
hangar. Their prisoner was en route back to Fort Irwin for
interrogation, and
they had come to deliver the evidence they had gathered from the
cigar-shaped
craft to General Grey. He had requested to meet personally with these
men. They
were quickly coming to be known as the guys who brought the only
prisoner out of
Whitmore's ship. As their story circulated, each retelling added some
new
detail which emphasized their bravery. In time, their story would join
hundreds
of others and would be told, in different forms, for many years, as
part of the
folklore that arose in the wake of the invasion.
While
they
were waiting, Nolan started thumbing through the sketchbook he'd found.
He
could see it was the haphazard journal of someone with very sloppy
handwriting.
Its pages were filled with equal parts of machinery sketches, English
sentences, and mathematical equations. He turned to a watercolor
painting of
the desert and admired the artist's skill. The picture was signed in
the bottom
comer. The book had belonged to someone named Okun.
At 5:58
A.M.,
the hallway leading to the inner
ring
of the Pentagon complex was
busier than usual. Office workers and uniformed officers had come in
early to
get the latest issue of the
Washington Post
and read
about the latest
development in the Watergate case, which felt, at least to those in the
District of Columbia's political circles, like the end of the world.
Slicing
through this early-morning mull and buzz, came a tall figure in a
conservatively cut suit half a size too small for his lanky frame.
Albert
Alexander Nimziki stopped briefly outside one of the Pentagon's many
coffee
shops and studied the headlines shouting hack at him from a newspaper
rack:
COX, SPECIAL COMMITTEE CONSIDER IMPEACHMENT. Of course, that morning's
news
came as no surprise to him. As deputy director of the Central
Intelligence
Agency, it was his job to know what was going to be in the newspapers
days,
weeks, and sometimes years before the papers themselves knew.
Nimziki
was the youngest man ever to attain the post of deputy director, but he
had
gotten a jump on the competition, having been a professional spook
since he was
sixteen years old. Nimziki grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he
internalized some of his chilliness of public demeanor from his Amish
neighbors. When his agronomist father landed a job with the UN, he
moved the
family to New York City's Roosevelt Island, into a neighborhood crowded
not
only with UN diplomats but with the spies sent from around the world to
keep an
eye on them. Overlooking a busy, upscale intersection, the family's new
apartment afforded young Albert the perfect vantage point for watching
the
endless game of cat and mouse. For two years it had been a spectator
sport,
with him spying on the spies.
But one
day he boldly walked downstairs
and talked
to one
of them. Only a day later, he had a parabolic mike and
telephoto lens, using them to eavesdrop on conversations transpiring at
the
posh outdoor cafe across the street. From this early training, he'd
moved
on to Georgetown U., where he earned a double major in criminology and
international relations. Soon after joining the CIA, he proved himself
to be
not only a daring and talented field operative but also a highly
efficient
administrator, and it was this second skill which had fueled his steady
rise
through the agency's ranks. At only thirty-four years of age, he had
aspirations to rise higher still.
He
found his elevator and rode it down one floor to the building's
basement. The
heavy doors opened after he inserted a security card into the lock,
depositing him
into a bare hallway guarded by a pair of
soldiers. After glancing at his ID plaque, they waved him through, and
he
stepped into the Tank, the most secure conference area in the entire
Pentagon
complex.
Inside,
sitting around a long walnut conference table, were a dozen men, all of
them
white, all of them older than Nimziki. They were elite figures from the
U.S.
military and intelligence communities, men who had been entrusted,
however
reluctantly, with "the nation's dirtiest little secret."
Collectively, they were known as Project Smudge.
After
a brief round of perfunctory greetings, Nimziki sat down, and Bud
Spelman,
assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency, walked to the podium at
the front
of the room. Serious as a bulldog, the barrel-chested Colonel Spelman
had once
been an Army drill instructor, and it showed in the blunt way he
handled the
meeting.
"Gentlemen.
The purpose of this meeting is to update you on a series of possibly
threatening UFO occurrences and, if warranted, to adopt an action plan.
Now I
trust everyone has had a chance to review the status report I sent
around, so
you basically know the situation, but I do want to show you a piece of
radar
tape shot last month by Northern Tracking Command." After pulling down
a
retractable white screen and dimming the lights, he moved to a
projector set up
at the back of the room. As the film began, the screen went black.
"You're
looking at the night sky over our atomic storage facility near Bangor,
Maine.
These are enhanced-composite radar images transferred to film to
improve their
quality. And here comes our visitor."
From
the upper corner, an uneven blotch of white light appeared. The
pulsing,
indistinct shape began a slow and steady descent toward the bottom of
the
screen, its outline slowly coming into better focus. "In addition to
the
radar, we had several naked-eye witnesses on the ground who say they
got a good
look at it. But, as usual, their descriptions are all over the map.
Some of
them said the thing gave off a golden light, others called it an
orange-red
light, while another maintains it was bluish in color. The same with
engine
noise. Some people heard 'a high whine, like an electric motor' while
others
noted a 'complete absence of sound.' What we know for certain is that
this
thing hovered directly over our underground storage bunkers at an
altitude of
fifteen hundred feet for approximately two minutes, then—and here comes
the
reason for showing you the film."
All
eyes were turned toward the screen. The UFO suddenly darted straight
up, rising
another thousand feet above the earth before commencing a series of
startling
zigzags across the night sky. Whatever it was, it moved with both
incredible
speed and astonishing agility as it executed a series of right-angle
and
hairpin turns without significant loss of velocity. Then, as
mysteriously as it
had appeared, it zipped out of view in one long streak. Spelman stopped
the
tape and turned to face the others.
"Looks
like my wife has been giving driving lessons," an Air Force general
quipped, eliciting a polite chuckle from the others.
Spelman
didn't change expressions. "No aircraft known to Defense Intelligence
has
performance capabilities equal to what we just witnessed. After review
of the
tape, DIA considers it likely that what you have seen is a
reconnaissance
mission. And where there's smoke, there's fire. This intelligence
gathering
could be preparatory to some sort of attack, or, in a worst-case
scenario, a
full-scale invasion."
Spelman
paused to let that sink in. His audience was less amazed by the tape
they'd
seen than by Spelman's ability to make this speech as if it were the
first time
he'd ever made it. Once a year, he would call a meeting such as this
one to
present evidence to the members of Project Smudge. And each
time, he and Dr. Wells, his sole
ally on the committee, would argue that the nation was exposed to a
clear-and-present danger. They were the hard-liners who argued that the
world
was on the brink of imminent invasion by extraterrestrials. Behind
their backs,
they were known as the crazies, especially Dr. Wells, the only man
known to
have held a conversation with an intelligent life-form from another
world.
Eventually, Wells's desperate insistence on the need to adopt his
proposals led
to his banishment from Smudge. Isolated, Spelman was reluctant to call
another
meeting, but then had found a most unexpected ally, someone with a
daring plan
which might finally end the interagency bickering which had crippled
the
government's research into UFOs for more than a decade—Nimziki.
When
it was apparent that Spelman was finished talking, Dr. Insolo of the
Science
and Technology Directorate was the first to raise a familiar objection,
"We've
been getting sightings like this for years; why is this one special?"
To
Spelman, one of the true believers, the question seemed ridiculous,
almost
insulting. "First off,
all
of these sightings are
significant. What
makes this one especially threatening is that it didn't take place over
the
desert or the ocean. This vehicle buzzed one of our most sensitive and
potentially damaging installations. We don't want all that uranium
falling into
the wrong hands."
Jenkins,
subchief of the CIA's Domestic Collections Division, did little to
disguise his
feeling that this meeting was a waste of time "Are you proposing that
the
committee adopt the Wells plan?" The oft-proposed and always rejected
course of action recommended by Wells called for nothing less than a
full-scale
preparation for war, a series of projects so large that the presence of
the aliens
would soon become public knowledge. The plan was always rejected by an
overwhelming margin. Secrecy was priority number one, and there were
two
reasons for this. In the wake of every group sighting of a UFO,
civilians
became hysterical. There was no telling what kind of mass chaos the
country
would face if the government were forced to confirm the presence of
these
visitors. The second, related reason, was that no one wanted to take
responsibility for having kept the information hidden for over
twenty-five
years. Secrecy begat secrecy, one denial led to another, until the
participating agencies found themselves, a quarter of a century after
the crash
at Roswell, sitting on a full-blown conspiracy to keep the American
public—and
the world—in the dark. There was not a chance in hell that anyone in
that room
was going to commit himself to an effort like the one Wells had
envisioned,
especially given the present unstable political climate. No one wanted
to be
caught holding the bag if Congress started one of its investigations
into the
nation's spy agencies.
Then
Nimziki unleashed his bombshell. "I've decided to support Colonel
Spelman.
After reading through some past reports and looking at the tape we've
just
seen, I think the time has come to start taking this threat seriously."
Since
Nimziki had joined Smudge, he had been the most ardent critic of the
Wells
plan, arguing that it was a gigantic waste of time and money, that the
aliens
posed no significant threat. In fact, he had taken a personal dislike
to Wells
and had not been content with kicking him out of Smudge, but had
stripped him
of any security clearance and had him run out of the government
altogether.