The Stickmen (17 page)

“Bolt-cutters?” Garrett presumed.

“No way. We’re not talking your average
back-yard fence here, It’s heat-treated wire made of sub-carbundum
steel alloy. Bolt-cutters wouldn’t do it; besides, the fencing
actually looked more like it had been pulled, or spanned, apart.
Probably a power-spreader or hydraulic retractors.”

Garrett fingered his chin, contemplating,
trying to picture it. “Okay, the fence—the perp or perps somehow
busted through the fence without getting electrocuted. What
next?”

“Next? He busted three milspec-grade
security padlocks on the storage vault’s door. That’s the real
kicker. Padlocks like this? You can put a 20mm round through them
and they won’t open. But this guy? He broke those locks like they
were plastic toys. Popped the bolt housings right off the tempered
shackles.”

“In other words, it wasn’t a crowbar that
did the job on the locks.”

“Impossible,” Shaw asserted. “For a piece of
work like that? Again, it had to be some model of hydraulic
retractors to be able to do it. You tell me how somebody got a
diesel-powered spreading tool like that into the compound without
any of the sentries hearing it.”

Garrett nodded, still calculating. “All
right, fine, but as impossible as it seems, the perp did it, and
then he wheeled the ADM off the compound, right?”

“That’s the weird thing, or I should say
one
of the weird things,” Major Shaw divulged. “The device
wasn’t
wheeled
off, nor was it dragged off. It was raining,
and the depot perimeter, deliberately, is bare dirt. If the perp
had wheeled the ADM off on a hand truck, or even dragged it off,
there would’ve been wheelmarks or grooves in the mud. But there
weren’t. There were only footprints, a single set, leading in and
out.”

Garrett jacked an immediate brow. “Then the
perp must be a body-builder and then some. Even the strongest man
would have a hell of a time carrying off a 300-lb. bomb on
foot.”

“You’re telling me,” Shaw agreed. “But
that’s not even the weirdest part. The Army’s forensic crew,
particularly our latent-cast techs, are probably as good as yours,
probably as any evidence-analysis outfit in the world.”

Latent-cast techs,
Garrett thought.
“Raining. Mud. Footprints.”

“You got it, sir. This was an
ideal
crime scene as far as residual evidence is concerned. The
perpetrator left
perfect
latent tracks leading in and out of
the depot. But you know what our techs found, Agent Odenton?”

“I’m almost afraid to ask,” Garrett
replied.

“They found a shoe-sole pattern traced to a
U.S. manufacturer of tennis shoes called Stompers. You want to know
what else?”

Garrett fixed his gaze on the major.

“The shoe size was six-and-a-half,” Shaw
finished.

Garrett was floored by this shocking bit of
information. “Six-and-a-half,” he muttered. “Jesus Christ. That’s
the size of a
kid’s
shoe…”

CHAPTER TEN

A dream—

But all of life was a dream.

His legal name was Sanders, though he would
use a multitude of aliases throughout his career. And he would be
known, within the darkest warrens of clandestine operations, under
just as many “crypts”: SR/POINTER, TP/STOLE, MH/CHAOS. His last
cryptonym, a rover, was the one that had stuck: QJ/WYN.

In the dream he’d killed children because
children in Southeast Asia were just as deadly as the Vietminh and
the Vietcong. He chopped them down from about fifty yards with an
antique German MG-42 machine gun, part of the Waffen SS inventory
that had been granted to Stalin after World War II. The Soviets
used this old yet ever-reliable weaponry to discreetly arm the
Communist insurgents in Vietnam once Ho Chi Minh had buried the
French at Dienbienphu. Arms for might.

But this wasn’t Vietnam, this was Laos,
1961. Sanders’ unit hadn’t needed to wait eight more years for
Nixon’s secret authorization of bombing and incursions past the
Laotian border. Sanders got his orders from the CIA’s Directorate
of East Asian Operations. Back then, he was young and patriotic,
and his orders were his mission. Kennedy and MacNamara refused to
increase military aid, so it was Sanders’ job to find that aid
somewhere else. By keeping the Laotian heroin routes open clear to
Saigon, the Company’s ten-percent gross bought a lot of guns and
ammunition for the ARVNs.

Stopping the threat of global Communism was
more important than a few handfuls of peasant kids, many of whom
were sappers for the VC anyway. Sanders had seen it too many times.
Besides, processing the kids as refugees would be too risky. Too
many questions would be asked, and too many answered.

In war, people died.
Children
died.
It wasn’t Sanders’ fault the world was so flawed.

The stream of bullets, fired in deft
six-round bursts, had torn the line of children apart along with
their three adult teachers. No men were in the village; they were
all off in the field now, helping the Vietcong hide. When the
gunsmoke cleared, most of the children lay dead, exploded like
little bags of blood. But a few still twitched with life.

That’s when Sanders ordered in the rest of
his team, to execute the wounded and burn the village down,
and—

—and when he awoke, he was almost forty
years older. Chiefly nocturnal, he slept during the day. He lay
awake now in the motel bed registered under a false name that was
untraceable. Two hours of sleep twice a day was all his practiced
metabolism needed, even after all these decades.

And after all these decades, the principles
of life hadn’t really changed. When something threatened to
obstruct or taint those principles, men had to die.

Sometimes children too.

««—»»

Garrett had finally found a pack of
cigarettes in the post PX, but he scarcely felt the nicotine’s
savory kick when he took the first drag.
A kid’s shoe,
he
thought over and over again.
A kid’s sneaker print…

As the sun baked down on his back, Garrett
sat smoking on the butt of the cement planter wall that rung around
the Edgewood Arsenal’s Redepositions Battalion: a series of cheap
but gleaming Quonset huts situated on the post’s western edge. No
hardware was stored here, just processing and location files,
hundreds of thousands of them, no doubt.

Garrett was waiting for the man in charge of
all that paper.

He looked at the personnel photo from the
files that Swenson had given him. A surprisingly young guy, with
beaming eyes and a hearty smile. A chief warrant
officer-grade-three.

Obviously Swenson had been passing the
protectorate torch down to younger men as the old MJ-12 members
died off from natural and not-so-natural causes. Garrett wondered
how many other such torches had been passed.

Just as Garrett ground out his third
cigarette under his shoe, the man he was looking for walked briskly
out of the building, heading for the parking lot.

Garrett walked up from behind.

“Are you Chief Warrant Officer Ubel?”

Ubel turned, flagged at once by Garrett’s
civilian clothes. “That’s right, unless I just got demoted and
nobody told me. Who’re you?”

“Did you know that Urslig, Farrell, and
General Swenson are dead?” Garrett asked.

Ubel’s face blanked. “Sorry, sir. I’ve never
heard of the people you’re referring to.”

“You sure about that? They were all murdered
within the last several days. They were
executed
.”

Ubel kept up the necessary method-act of
non-confirmation. “Sorry, sir. You must be mistaking me for someone
else. I don’t know anybody by those names.”

“Well maybe here’s a name you
do
 know.
Icarus.
”

Ubel faltered. “Really, I’ve do no idea what
you’re—”

Garrett grabbed Ubel’s arm. “Let me tell you
something, Mr. Ubel. Back in Washington, I’ve got a friend of mine
analyzing something. It’s something that my dear friend General
Swenson
gave me. You want to know what that something
is?”

Ubel stared, the color in his face
fading.

“It’s part of an alien skeleton that was
recovered in April, 1962, near Nellis Air Force Base,” Garrett
finished.

Ubel rubbed his face, the anxiety starting
to gnaw at him. “Come on. We better go someplace secure to
talk.”

««—»»

“So you’re the guy Swenson sent?”

“Yeah,” Garrett answered, lighting a
cigarette.

“But you’re not military. What, FBI, like
Urslig?”

“Don’t ask,” Garrett said, spewing smoke.
What could he say?
I’m a tabloid writer. I write for kook
magazines.

Garrett sat in the passenger side of Ubel’s
car, an olive-green Army sedan. Ubel had driven them out of the
base’s duty sectors, quite a ways, and had parked on a remote dirt
road, at the top of an incline near the woods. The sun began to
recede at last, orange molten light dripping behind the trees.

“Swenson knew that you’d need help now that
Urslig and Farrell are out of the picture,” Garrett explained.

“Then you must know about Sanders too,” Ubel
speculated.

“The bastard didn’t even have the courtesy
to let the cancer take Swenson. But I only know part of the story.
Didn’t Sanders used to be part of the group?”

Ubel was staring blankly out into the trees.
“Something like that. The group was originally made up of several
MJ-12 men.”

“But as they died off, Swenson recruited
replacements,” Garrett reckoned.

“Right. Farrell, for instance, the judge.
And Jack Urslig,” Ubel verified. “I was a replacement too. The guy
before me, believe it or not, was a former chairman of the National
Security Council. Swenson handpicked the replacements.”

“So what happened with Sanders?” Garrett
queried. “Why’d he go renegade? Did he go nuts?”

“No, nothing like that. And he didn’t go
renegade. He was an original member too, sort of the security
officer. He simply switched sides, and we don’t even know who the
other side
is.
”

“A rogue cell?”

“Probably. Probably some isolated CIA
circle.”

Great,
Garrett thought in
frustration.
That’s just what I need.

Ubel looked over. “So you have the whole
package, I take it?”

“Yeah. Swenson’s instructions implied that
you would explain the pieces that don’t fit. It has something to do
with Swenson himself, doesn’t it? And a kid, a military dependent
named Danny Vander who claims he’s been abducted.”

“You’ve done your homework. Swenson and
Danny Vander have one very crucial thing in common.”

Garrett’s brow creased. He couldn’t even
guess.

“Swenson was abducted too,” Ubel said in the
driest tone.

Garrett felt like a flower pot had just been
dropped on his head. “You’re kidding me. Abducted?”

“By a vehicle very similar to the one that
blew up over Nellis Air Force Base in 1962.”

Garrett’s eyes went wide as slot-machine
slugs. He was speechless at this jolt of information.

“It was me, Swenson, Farrell, and Sanders,”
Ubel continued. He spoke in a dread monotone, as if confessing to
murder. “Sanders was our cover-man. Farrell was the most highly
decorated officer in JAG, heading for a job with the feds on the
U.S. Appellate Court, and rumored to be an eventual Supreme Court
appointee.”

“In other words, a judge with some serious
influence.”

“Exactly. Plus there was another guy, a
general at Arlington Hall—”

“Army Intelligence,” Garrett recognized.

Ubel nodded the affirmative. “When he died
of old age, that’s when Urslig came into the picture later. Swenson
recruited him, because as an FBI agent he could monitor any Justice
Department moves against us. It was our own private little
shadow-group. Swenson built the whole thing from scratch, and now I
guess you’re wondering why.”

Garrett could only keep staring,
incredulous. “You got that right.”

“Because when Swenson was abducted shortly
after the Nellis Crash, the aliens…told him some things.”

««—»»

Danny was tired of drawing, but he stayed
down in the basement just the same. By now his parents had stopped
yelling at each other but that didn’t mean it was okay to go back
upstairs. His mother would be real quiet, and his father would be
too. It was his father’s silence that bothered Danny the most. Just
the look in his eyes was as bad as him yelling. So Danny decided to
stay down here until someone called him up for dinner.

But it wasn’t long before—

No, please!

—before his face began to feel hot and then
his head felt like someone was squeezing it with a giant pair of
pliers.

No…

The headache came back. Suddenly he was
holding his head, tears oozing from his eyes. The pain was bad—it
always was—but somehow the worst parts were the memories, because
the headaches always made him remember—

—and he remembers again. It feels so real,
though, sometimes he doesn’t know if he’s actually remembering or
if it’s really happening again.

He’s standing inside the ship now, in a tall
thin hallway of light. He’s following one of the Stickmen down the
hall, and the hall is humming. The Stickman is taking him by the
hand, Danny’s
five-
fingered hand clasped inside of the
Stickman’s
two-
fingered hand. On the left and right he sees
the trapezoid windows and he thinks
Wow!
because he knows
it’s dark outside now but the windows make it look like daylight
and he can see things in great detail. He sees a four-leaf clover
in the grass, he can see several tree frogs climbing up a muddy
branch in the creek behind the baseball field, he can see ants in
the grass.