Majestic (16 page)

Joe was not simply amused by secrecy; he obviously studied it as an implement of government: Martin Philippson, Ein Ministerium unter Philipp II, essentially a book about the network of spies created by this notorious Spanish monarch; books on the Cathars, the great heretics of southern France, on the Knights Templar, on the Order of Our Lady of Mysteries.

During the war Joe had functioned as a deep-cover assassin in Germany, murdering targeted Gestapo agents in order to interrupt investigations when they got too close to Allied spy networks.

According to Will, Joe's genius was that he had made the Gestapo itself his chief ally. How? He gave them assistance in their work against the Reds. Thus the Gestapo was in the position of trading the lives of its own operatives for information about Stalin's Red Choir.

How he managed all this and still maintained "deep cover" Will did not say. Maybe Will's love for his old friend has combined with time's notorious corrosion of memory to enhance his stature a bit.

Even if that is so, the man's books do suggest that he was remarkable.

After the war Joe had become known as one of the best interrogators we possessed. He cut his teeth on the very Gestapo officers who had helped him during the war, and after that shifted to work with home-front communists. (Will still calls them "commies.") He was a master of persuasion, moving with the greatest care from one level of tension to the next, until his subject finally broke. He worked only with words, having like Will acquired a dislike of violence during the war.

Then they had Sally Darby. Every once in a while I fall in love with Sally Darby, looking at the pictures of her Will keeps around. She had a complex, distracted expression and the darting pace of a sparrow.

Did Will love her? Of course he did.

She had graduated Smith with honors, and she could if she wished fulfill the image of the Smith girl. This is how she came to CIG.

In 1938 she moved to Paris and met Janet Planner and William Carruthers. Even after the fall of France she stayed on, so certain she was that the United States would remain neutral.

When occupation shortages became annoying she took a vacation in Geneva, where she met Bill Donovan.

Or rather, as an American resident of occupied France, he sought her out.

She returned to Paris as a newly recruited OSS agent - and was trapped there when Germany declared war on us. Her friendship with Countess Eva Rollentz meant that her German social connections were excellent.

She specialized in going to parties with generals and field marshals, then wrote richly insightful essays about them that ended up in Washington. My guess is that she must have slept with them, but it was never mentioned and I certainly never brought it up with Will. I don't think he ever slept with her.

It must have been idealism that kept this wealthy and well-connected woman with CIG, or it may have had something to do with the grudging love that certain people develop for their organizations.

Even bureaucracies have their patriots.

The three of them were a strike team. Will says, "We thought we were generals, but we were really front-line soldiers, dogfaces, poor bloody infantry."

They were sent to Roswell by the fastest possible means, which turned out to be the secretary of defense's personal airplane.

This must have added to their hubris. It is important to remember at all times that Washington felt as if it would be able to control the situation. The spaceship had crashed, for God's sake.

To hear Will talk about Forrestal's airplane, it was a sort of flying Yale Club with cigar humidors and fine brandy and Persian stretches on the floor.

I have done some research, and it's true that the plane was exceptional. It was more than nice enough to make three smart young strivers feel very, very important.

In addition to the pilots there was a communications officer with a radio shack up front. He was capable of reaching the telephone operator, and there were ordinary phones throughout the plane. You could call anywhere in the world from the craft, as you could on some of the more extravagant ocean liners.

As soon as they were airborne the threesome had a meeting. Joe Rose smoked one of the secretary's superb Havanas and Will indulged in old cognac. Sally sipped a Prior's.

Will reported their conversation to me as if he remembered it verbatim. Given his prodigious memory and his ability to call on pretty extensive notes and diaries, it might be verbatim. If so, it was so pompous that, given the circumstances, it was rather poignant.

"Is Van going to shoot one of them down?" Sally asked. To his face she would certainly have referred to him as General Vandenberg.

"Harry nixed it," Will replied. I imagine that he sniffed the bouquet of his cognac, perhaps even took a sip.

"We discussed it this afternoon in the Oval Office."

Joe examined his cigar. "We'll have to get compliance from any civilians involved." He blew a reflective stream of smoke from his mouth. "I can manage that, I suppose."

"The civilians?" Sally lit a cigarette. "They'll object." "They didn't object in Frankfurt, Sally." "The law - "

"Moves slowly."

Joe was looking out a window, staring long at the passing blackness. "I can see a few stars. Quite a few, actually." "Any of them moving?" "What if there were, Willy boy?" "We might be in danger."

Will insists that he said those words. I wonder. Had he been genuinely afraid, I think he might have actually been more open to the others. He would have bargained with them, then, or recommended that the President attempt to do so.

Will reports that the three of them spent some hours discussing how they would handle matters in New Mexico. It was decided that Sally would proceed to Los Alamos and start groundwork there, preparing a secure area to receive whatever Will managed to send her for analysis, as well as finding housing for the scientists they were expecting CIG in Washington to locate and make available.

Joe was to open an office in Roswell and comb the airfield and the countryside for people who knew something about what had happened. His mission was to spread silence.

They slept from about two-thirty in the morning. Will was awake for a short time at four, Washington time, and found that his stateroom was filled with blue light. His immediate impression was that an engine was burning.

Even now he doesn't know the meaning of the blue light. He is aware that it is associated with the near presence of the others. When I brought up that blue light is in folklore connected with the presence of ghosts, he gave me a sidelong look and said, "If they have developed a technology that enables them to control the soul, they might have some sort of contact with the dead."

He has worried that the world of the dead might be the primary human reality, and that the others have invaded more on that level than on this.

For my part, I wonder if the dead exist.

The changing pitch of the props woke Will for good about half an hour before they were due to land. He called for coffee and lit a cigarette. The right side of his head hurt, just behind the ear. One of the stewardesses said it looked like a spider bite.

One of the many signs of close contact with the others is a painful red mark on the temple, just like that. Did they revisit Will while he was on his way to Roswell, perhaps renewing whatever they had implanted into him when he was a boy?

I don't doubt that they did. He hated the idea of it, and refused even to speculate.

The radio operator appeared with a message from Hilly, which he and Sally decoded. In those days they used a code book and a sheet of paper. The codes were kept secure by frequent changes. Now of course codes change constantly and everything is done by computer. I suppose in 1947 it was still conceivable that a spy might carry his codes in the heel of his shoe.

The message explained that AAF Intelligence had contained the press leaks by intercepting all wire-service copy leaving New Mexico and sending agents to every radio station that had picked up the story.

That must have been reassuring, but they still had an enormous problem. The news release was now appearing in places like the San Francisco Chronicle and the London Times.

They landed in Roswell and prepared to meet the Army Air Force officers who had found the disk and so irresponsibly announced this fact to the public.

They were waiting on the apron, and Will recalls them as an impressive-looking group of soldiers. Colonel William Blanchard was flanked by two men he recognized from their file photos. One was Lieutenant Peter Hesseltine and the other was Major Donald Gray. Even then Don Gray was considered one of the best Intelligence officers in the Army Air Force. Will admires him tremendously. In 1979 Don Gray admitted before television cameras that the debris of an alien craft had been located in Roswell. It is a testament to the effectiveness of Will Stone's work that the press still considers the whole thing a fraud, even after that.

Gray, Blanchard and Hesseltine were obviously wary of the three CIG officers. Blanchard was motionless, his legs spread apart, his hands on his hips. Will recalls that Gray stood at attention, perhaps awed by the impressive Defense Department plane. Hesseltine fidgeted, his fingers drifting like nervous ghosts to the knot in his tie.

Like so many soldiers they had a boyish quality to them.

Men like Blanchard, who had flown in long-range bombers in the Pacific, were a singularly untroubled group.

They had done more killing than anybody else in the war. But they did it from such a height and in such safety that it remained quite abstract to them. They read paperback thrillers on their long journeys to Japan, then spent a few minutes blowing women and children to pieces. On the way home they returned to their books.

Men like Blanchard looked as they felt: invulnerable.

By comparison, the CIG officers were tense and obviously uneasy. They were squinting, troubled by the blasting desert sun.

The first one out of the plane was Will Stone - a pale young man in what was probably the most expensive suit any of them had ever seen. The way Colonel Blanchard looked at him, Will thought that he was sizing him up as a pansy.

During the war years, Will had acquired the ability to read lips, meaning that he was able to tell what the three officers were saying to each other before he got into earshot. The conversation he reports is most revealing.

"The second one's the hired killer," Blanchard said softly.

"He looks like he could break you in half with his breath," Hesseltine added.

"Shut up, Hesseltine," the colonel muttered.

When Sally appeared the soldiers reacted again. "Wow," said Hesseltine, "I could stand to nibble that sandwich."

"Don't worry yourself, boy. Gals like that don't eat Army meat."

"Yes sir, Colonel."

"You'd be lucky to get her to bed the Duke of Windsor."

"Hell, Colonel, try the Pope."

"Saint goddamn Francis of Asskissi."

The irreverent Hesseltine laughed at Colonel Blanchard.

"You'd blister your lips on that hot little ass," the colonel said in reply to the sneer.

Major Gray, most proper, was disgusted with them. "You gentlemen are sick."

"I've got it figured," Lieutenant Hesseltine said in an insincere twang. "These palookas are the team that pulled down Al Capone."

"Those were T-men."

"Hell, Colonel, I'm not talking about the team that arrested him. I'm talking about the team that gave him syphilis."

"Not the Virgin Mary? Don't shatter my dreams."

"Hell no. The pansy dancing up the front. The way they did it, the guy danced up and breathed on old Al.

Presto, one case of drippy dickie."

Now even the Colonel was disgusted. "I'm going to have you up on charges for language like that before breakfast." "Yes, sir!"

As the CIG party approached, Blanchard locked eyes with Will. "Look at him," he said under his breath. "My opinion has changed. Fancy-pants is the gunman. The other guy's a toughie with a heart of lead. And that lady's probably some kind of whiz kid. Nobody's ever managed to get in her pants. That's as good as law."

There were introductions all round, and then they moved to a bacon-and-eggs breakfast at the officer's club, which was a barracks full of surplus furniture and steam tables. In lieu of air conditioning there was tinfoil on the windows to reflect the heat.

Will recalls being surprised to find that the food was more than passable. No powdered eggs here, no Spam.

He made an immediate frontal assault. "I propose that we go to the site at once," he said around a mouthful of sausage.

Colonel Blanchard responded nervously. "We've got to have confirmation on that from Eighth Air Force."

It was as Will expected. Those words meant to him that Vandenberg was going to try to keep the whole affair under his own authority. Will would perhaps have preferred to play a more cunning game, but he had no time.

He decided to use his strongest card at once. "We should have brought a doctor's note," he said to Blanchard. " 'Dear Colonel, Please let these children do what they have to do.' Signed, Dr. Harry Truman."

Blanchard was the hottest colonel in the AAF. He didn't want any waves that might disturb his shot at becoming commanding general of Eighth Air Force. Undoubtedly Will was right to threaten him with serious waves.

He capitulated, at least partially. "Okay, fair enough," he said. "Hesseltine here will take care of it."

"Very well." Will relaxed. He thought he'd won his point.

Major Gray got up from the table. "I'm afraid I've got to leave you folks in capable hands. I'm off to Wright Field with the debris we collected."

Will was furious. "We expected to see that material!"

Gray glanced at Colonel Blanchard. The colonel spoke quickly. "It's already loaded aboard a B-29. General Ramey's going to press conference the stuff at five this afternoon. My own second is flying it up to Forth Worth and Major Gray is going with him."

Joe was charged with the practical task of keeping things quiet. He exploded. "Press conference! That's just what we need."