Majestic (12 page)

"I thought you'd gone home," Blanchard said acidly to Gray. He hated to wait.

"I had to tilt a kidney." Was his quite intentional failure to mention his stop at Hope's office a breach of duty?

No, he'd made it clear to Blanchard and Jennings both that there was a release being prepared. He didn't have to do more.

"We've got to tell Ramey," Blanchard said. "I want you to get on the horn with us, Don. He's gonna be pretty damn sure his leg's being pulled and I want you to make it clear to him that we're being straight with him."

Gray made a play for time. "Sir, I think we ought to wait until we have men on the scene and are in radio communication with them before we report this up the chain." "Why so?"

"Well, I'm sure that we have an alien vessel, and so are you. But how is the Commander of the Eighth Air Force going to react from the far end of a telephone line? He could order the base sealed. Forbid us to touch the wreckage. Send a team of white coats to net us and ship us off to the funny farm. Any damn thing."

"I've got to tell the man. It's my duty. Not only that there are regulations involved. This clearly qualifies as an unknown event. The way I understand my mission, I'm required to report such an occurrence to higher headquarters. This is a sensitive installation, remember."

"We need to be able to tell him that we've examined the craft."

Payne Jennings unexpectedly spoke up. "I think Don has a good point, Bill. We've got to be able to say to Ramey clearly and in no uncertain terms that we are not dealing with some sort of Soviet device. Also, there's another thing - if it's ours."

There was a silence. Nobody had thought of that. Gray was a little disappointed in himself for not considering it. Then he thought of the hieroglyphics and the strange foil and the rows of numbers. No. No way it was ours.

He couldn't say that though. "We need to cover all our bases."

"Okay, guys. But if he starts hacking and slashing, I'm going to tell him it was a staff recommendation."

"Can't do that," Jennings said. "Makes you look weak."

Blanchard laughed, loud and hard. He looked around the room. "I think I can let you guys go home, if we're putting off the report till morning." He looked at Gray. "I want you out on that flight line at dawn, you and Walters both. I want both intelligence commands covered."

Walters spoke up. "Is this still considered a counterintelligence problem? It's pretty obvious there's no commie involvement - "

"Somebody flew that thing. And they did it for a reason. That reason is a counter-intelligence problem, Mr.

Walters."

"Yeah, I can see that, Bill." A sort of half smile crossed his face. "I can see that as kind of a big counterintelligence problem."

As the meeting broke up, Major Gray hurried back to Lieutenant Hope's office. "You released it yet?"

"Well, sir - "

"We're going to do some final confirmation in the morning. What say you release it at ten hundred?"

"You tell me, Major."

"Ten o'clock tomorrow morning, you tell the world."

Without a backward glance Major Gray left the office. He went out to the parking lot and got into his car and drove home, eager for a good supper and a clean bed.

Late that night he awoke very suddenly. For a moment he thought there was somebody in the house. So clear had this impression been that he got up and checked around. They didn't lock doors in Roswell in those days, but on this night Donald Gray dropped the latches. He listened to the night wind rushing in from the desert. There were faint sounds, very faint, the cries of the things that lived in the dark land.

A car passed in the street. From behind some black window a woman sighed. He laid his hand on his wife's breast and also slept.

And the stars crossed the sky.

From the Roswell Daily Record, July 8, 1947:

ARMY AIR FORCE CAPTURES FLYING DISK IN ROSWELL REGION

No Details of Flying Disk are Revealed

The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment Group at Roswell Army Air Force Base announced at noon today that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer.

According to information released by the department, over authority of Maj.

D. O. Gray, intelligence officer, the disk was recovered on a ranch in the Roswell vicinity, after an unidentified rancher had notified Sheriff Geo.

Wilcox, here, that he had found the instrument on his premises.

Major Gray and a detail from his department went to the ranch and recovered the disk, it was stated.

After the intelligence office here had inspected the instrument it was loaned to "higher headquarters."

The intelligence office stated that no details of the saucer's construction or its appearance had been revealed.

Chapter Eight

The Chronicle of Wilfred Stone

Washington, D.C., July 8, 1947. Time: 7:40 A.M. My condition: standing naked before a mirror. I have a slight paunch, noticeable and a little upsetting to me. It is composed largely of beer, steak, Hershey bars, champagne, sweet rolls and whiskey. It is there because I have been trying to eat my way out of my war nightmares.

A boy called Jamshid was still dying in my mind, in those days, still dying at the hands of the Surete, his genitals tied off, his belly bloated with wine. I remember the Surete and the Gestapo men as extremely clean, eating huge Arab meals in nameless backrooms in the souk of Algiers, their voices melodic with confidence, softened by self-importance. They cherished the secret knowledge that great pain takes any man to his truth.

If a human being reaches a sufficient depth of agony even his attempts at deceit will contain useful information.

Another of the truisms of tradecraft: torture always works. Human beings, it seems, cannot lie. If we do not say the truth then we indicate it another way. It's an endearing trait.

Jamshid worked for me because I paid him a dollar a week. In his family he was therefore more important than his own father. He was twelve and quick of eye. He was full of humor and bitter hatred for the French and the Germans.

He would slip from house to house with messages, helping me to forge a network of agents provocateurs that later served Franz Fanon so well. And then one night while I lay beneath my ceiling fan naked and slick with heat, my belly dotted by festering fly-bites, a woman came and murmured like a ghost that Jamshid was in the custody of the police.

First they scraped the skin of his buttocks raw with metal files, then sat him in a bath of acid. They raped him, they forced themselves on him, shattering his innocence and causing him in his torment to cleave to them. He became the slave of his tormenters. They used the Roman whip on him, an instrument of punishment known in that place from the time of the Third Augusta, the Roman occupation army. This whip has twelve cords of leather, and into the end of each is knotted a little hook.

I can remember him lying in the sun, and I thought grandly of the innocence of the child, and the weighty sophistication of my own twenty-eight years. I smoked, he was too young. I tied one on now and then. His Moslem eyes widened in horror and amazement at the sight of a liquor bottle. I relaxed in the carpeted fastness of Madame Jouet's while he squatted on the porch and heard the sharp voices of the French girls inside reciting exhausted amours.

There was an orange tree in the courtyard, and I cannot remember a time when it was not in bloom.

He screamed names, dates, everything he knew.

My agents were rounded up, tortured in their turn, and I became a hunted man, creeping through the back streets like some movie spy, being followed by men in tailored suits who soaked their bullets in garlic and habitually aimed at the stomach. I was hiding in my room, half drunk, down to my last bottle when the Allies came marching into the city and it was over.

Those of my agents who were still alive were released.

In Washington I was growing fat on the fruits of victory, plotting the ruin of the French colonial empire and eating every night at places like Harvey's and the Occidental. Broiled sea trout at Harvey's one night, Hoover two tables away eating the same; a steak the next night at the Occidental, and then midnight and the whip cutting Jamshid's back like butter.

I would wake up shaking and pour myself a glass of Pinch, drink it and listen to records on my Victrola:

"Deep Purple," from the days that I was dating Rose deMornay, "Sweet Leilani" from Waikiki Wedding, one of those fluffy prewar movies. They were enchanted days in America, the late thirties. The depression was pretty well over, and Hitler was kind of funny and the Japs . . . well, they were awfully far away. "Whudduyu say to them Tokyo babes - I wanna nip on nese!" Tokyo Rose . . . there is to terror a pure romance. We fox-trotted our way from Waikiki Wedding to Pearl Harbor.

Now I would wake myself up by crying in my sleep. Then came the Alien Estimate. I regarded it all as rather amusing, like a scary movie. I had not the faintest idea that it had electrified the Joint Chiefs, and scared General Vandenberg so badly that he'd spent a good bit of time literally staring at a wall. For me it was empty of reality. I was still ignorant of events in Rosewell. I wouldn't be for long.

I drove over to the office that morning, parking the Chevy as usual on E Street, relying on my license number to keep the officer of the watch from writing me a summons. When I got into my office there was a message from Vandenberg. Please call as soon as convenient.

As per standing orders, I informed our new boss, Admiral Hillenkoetter. He called me in and told me that I was free to see General Vandenberg as long as I didn't sell the agency to him. We were all afraid that CIG

would be absorbed and dismembered by the Joint Chiefs, something that they had been trying to do since the war ended. Our new boss viewed any contact from his predecessor as a reconnaissance in strength. I went over to the Pentagon in one of our staff cars, driven by the sort of clean, hard young man we liked to hire, most of whom we later expended in the Soviet Union. "Moscow rules" were written by such young men.

I'll tell you another thing about "Moscow rules," which consist of planting messages in hollow trees, not using real names or telephones and doing a great deal more sneaking around than usual: they don't work. What works are the right implements, the leather cord, the naked electric lead, the soldering iron in the anus. Insert it, turn it on, then ask your questions. You will have the correct answers. We had a tough outlook, those of us who were left over from the war. Want a woman to talk? Grab her lower lip and slap her until it starts to tear off. Women have a horror of disfigurement; she'll talk. Women believe in their faces.

"Goddamn it, Willy, what the hell is this?" Vandenberg blurted as soon as I walked into his office. He snatched up the estimate and tossed it at me.

"I think it's accurate, sir."

"It's no joke?"

I saw the fear in his eyes, and grew instantly wary. It has been my unfailing experience that men of power are randomly dangerous when they are afraid.

"No, sir."

"We called the Mounties." He produced a thick folder. "They damn well investigated that situation up in the Northwest Territories. The bastards stole an entire village! Holy God, Willy, what if the S.O.B.'s steal Peoria?

What in God's name does the Air Force do about it?"

I did not expect that my estimate would cause this much upset. "I think we ought to develop some cases around it, General."

"You're damn right we will! But tell me what these disks can do in the air. We've developed our own data, but we haven't got much. All we know is that they're fast, and some of them are big. Are they armed? Will my cannons work against them? What the hell do I do, Willy?"

"You've prepared your own background paper?"

"S-2 pulled something together. You can read it in this office. Eyes only. Two copies. The other one is at the White House."

I didn't like the drift of this conversation. Admiral Hillenkoetter wasn't going to be happy to hear that Van had already involved the President. "I think we need to present all of this stuff to the board - "

"No, sir! This is an Air Force matter, as of this moment! You are ordered to withdraw this estimate. No board meeting!"

"General, Hilly's gonna raise a stink."

"The hell he is. I called Truman at seven o'clock this morning and told him that he either gives this thing lock, stock and barrel to the Air Force or I'm out. I gave Harry an ultimatum!" Van was serving notice to me that this was of absolutely paramount importance to him. You did not threaten Harry Truman unless you were genuinely prepared to resign. Van cleared his throat, sucked his cigar hard. "He listened to me and then he says, 'Okay, Van, you take it. It's your baby.' " Vandemberg laughed bitterly. "I am not about to sit down in any NBK meeting and say to those men that my opinion is that the Air Force is completely helpless, impotent to prevent the mass kidnapping of Americans by monsters from outer space!" He glared at me, chewed the roaring cigar. "Goddamn it!"

"I realize the problem."

"You and your fancy suits and your shot cuffs and your goddamn Aqua-Velva! Why don't you ever get upset, Willy!"

"Would it help?"

Vandenberg glared at me. "Of course not. You're here because you don't get upset. We've built this magnificent Air Force and more-or-less survived the most stupidly conceived demobilization in the history of armed conflict - and now I find that it cannot fulfill its basic mission right here at home. You don't have to get upset, Willy. But I do. And I am."

"Okay, Van. I understand your position perfectly. If I was to put a reliability number on that estimate, I would give it about a seventy. Seven out often chances it is correct. What else could have happened to the Canadian villagers?"

"They even took the goddamn dead out of the graves! It implies that they were taken somewhere - some other place and planted there, like you say. Somewhere those villagers are living, with their dead in new graves.

God. Willy, I looked up at the stars last night, and I have to tell you, I felt for those poor Eskimos."