“Yes, sir. Von Seeckt was there,” Quinn replied.
“And we still don’t know anything about these foo fighters, do we?” Gullick asked.
“No, sir.”
“Russian?” Kennedy asked.
Quinn stared at him. “Excuse me, sir?”
“They couldn’t have been Russian, could they? The sons of bitches did beat us with Sputnik. Maybe they made these things.”
“Uh, no, sir, I don’t believe there was any indication they were Russian,” Quinn replied. “Once the war was over, reports about the foo fighters ended for a while.”
“For a while?” Kennedy repeated.
“In 1986 a bogey was picked up in the atmosphere by space surveillance and tracked,” Quinn said. “The object did not fit any known aircraft parameters.” Quinn pressed a key and a new picture appeared on the screen. It looked as if a child had gone crazy with a bright green pen. A line zigzagged across the screen and looped back on itself several times. “This is the flight path of a bogey they picked up back in eighty-six flying at altitudes ranging from four to one hundred and eighty thousand feet.” Quinn hit another button. “This is the flight pattern of our bogey tonight superimposed on the one from eighty-six.” The two were very similar. “There’s something else, sir.”
“And that is?” Gullick asked.
“There was another series of unexplained sightings right after this one. The Navy along with the DIA were running an operation called Project Aquarius. It was, um, well, what they were doing—”
“Spit it out, man!” Gullick ordered.
“They were experimenting using psychics to try to locate submarines.” “Oh, Christ,” Gullick muttered. “And?” he wearily asked.
“The psychics were doing reasonably well. About a sixty-percent success rate on getting the approximate longitude and latitude of submerged submarines simply by sitting in a room in the Pentagon and using mental imaging of a photograph of each specific submarine.
“There was an unexpected thing that occurred every once in a while, though. One of the psychics would pick up the image of something else at the same coordinates as the submarines. Something hovering above the location of the sub.”
“And, let me guess,” Gullick said. “We don’t know what that something was, correct?”
“Space surveillance picked up…” Quinn hit his keyboard and let the flight-path schematic speak for itself: another radical flight pattern. “Did anyone ever explain any of these sightings?” Gullick asked.
“No, sir.”
“So we have a real UFO on our hands now, don’t we?”
Gullick said.
“Uh, yes, sir.”
“Well, that’s just fucking fine!” Gullick snapped. “That’s all I need right now.” He glared at Admiral Coakley. “I want that thing recovered and I want to know what the hell it is!”
As the men filed out, Kennedy stopped by General Gullick and sat down next to him. “Maybe we should check with Hemstadt at Dulce about these foo fighters,” he said.
“There might be some information about them in the Machine.”
Gullick looked up from the tabletop and stared into Kennedy’s eyes. “Do you want to go to Dulce to hook up to the Machine?”
Kennedy swallowed. “I thought we could just call him and ask. It’s possible that the Machine might be controlling—”
“You think too much,” Gullick cut him off, ending the conversation.
CHAPTER 11
Johnny Simmons awoke to darkness. At least he thought he was awake. He could see nothing, hear nothing. When he tried to move, panic set in. His limbs didn’t respond. He had a horrible feeling of being awake but asleep, unable to connect the conscious mind with the nervous system to produce action. He felt detached from his body and reality.
A mind floating in a black void.
Then came the pain. Without sight or sound it exploded into his brain, becoming all his mind, all of his world. It was coming from every nerve ending in jagged, climbing spikes, far beyond anything he had thought possible.
Johnny screamed, and the worst of it all was that he couldn’t hear his own voice.
CHAPTER 12
Las Vegas slowed down slightly at five-thirty in the morning. The neon still glowed, and there were people on the streets, most heading to their rooms for a few hours of sleep before starting over again on the games of chance.
Kelly Reynolds was doing the opposite, starting her day after catching three hours of sleep in her motel room. The first thing she had done when the alarm went off was call Johnny’s apartment on the slim chance that he might be there or have changed the message.
She looked up as a red-eye flight roared in toward the horizon. Walk to the sounds of the planes, she thought to herself, paraphrasing Napoleon. She’d rent a car at the airport. Right now she needed the fresh air and the time to think. This is what dad would have done, go for the strongest link.
The thought brought a sad smile to her face. Her father and his stories. The best time of his life had been over before he was twenty. What a horrible way to spend the rest of one’s life, Kelly thought.
World War II. The last good war. Her dad had served in the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. He’d jumped into Italy during the last year of the war and worked with the partisans. Running the hills with a band of renegades licensed to kill Germans and take what they needed by force. Then he’d worked in Europe as the war closed out, helping with the war crimes trials. Much of what he saw there had soured him on mankind.
Peace had never been the same. He’d turned to the slow death of the bottle and lived with his memories and his nightmares. Kelly’s mom had retreated into her own brain and shut out the outside world. And because of them Kelly had grown up fast. She wondered if her dad had still been alive, if his liver had lasted a little longer, how the affair at Nellis would have turned out. She might have been able to go to him for help. At the very least, she would have considered what he would have done instead of blazing her own path to destruction. He certainly would not have bought into Prague’s line so naively. He would have told her to approach the bait very slowly and to watch out for the hook.
The only legacy she had from her dad was his stories.
But she was his legacy and that was more than she could say for herself at forty-two. No children and not much of a career to counterweight that. As she walked to the airport, Kelly felt an overwhelming depression. The only thing that kept her going was Johnny. He needed her.
She stopped in an all-night market and bought two packs of cigarettes and a lighter.
Turcotte strapped himself into the plane seat and tried to get comfortable. He’d spent the last two hours, since leaving the underground control room, alone, waiting in a small room off of the hangar, until they rolled out the stairs to load the 737 to fly into Las Vegas and pick up the morning shift of workers. He was glad that he was going to be able to get out of here. First thing he would do in Las Vegas after getting his arm sewn up was call Duncan on the number he had memorized. He wanted to get everything off his chest. Then hopefully he could leave all this behind.
He noticed an old man come on board, accompanied by two younger men whose demeanor suggested they were bodyguards for the first man. Despite the fact that they were the only other passengers on board, the old man took the front row of seats on the other side of the plane from Turcotte. The bodyguards, apparently satisfied there were no immediate threats, sat down a few rows back as the plane’s door was shut by the same hard-faced man who had greeted Turcotte with the breathalyzer a little less than forty hours ago. That man disappeared into the cockpit.