If it had not been for the needles and catheters, Johnny believed he would have thought himself dead and his soul exiled to hell. But this was a living hell, a physical one.
He felt a coppery taste in his mouth. He didn’t even wait for the pain now. His mouth contorted open and he silently screamed.
CHAPTER 21
The first thing Colonel Dickerson did as his command-and-control helicopter zeroed in on the personnel beacon from Bouncer Three was have his aide, Captain Travers, remove the silver eagles on his collar and replace them with two stars. That was for any military personnel they might run into. The typical military mentality viewed generals as gods, and that was the way Dickerson wanted people responding to his orders this night.
“ETA to beacon two minutes,” the pilot of the UH-60 Blackhawk announced over the intercom.
Dickerson glanced out the window. Three other Blackhawks followed, spread out against the night sky, their running lights darkened. He hit the transmit button for his radio. “Roller, this is Hawk. Give me some good news. Over.”
The response from his second-in-command at the main White Sands complex was immediate. “This is Roller. I’ve got people awake here. The duty officer is rounding us up some transport. They’ve got two lowboys we can use and a crane rated for what we need for recovery. Over.”
“How long before you can get them out to the range? Over.”
“An hour and a half max. Over.”
“Roger. Out.”
The pilot came on the intercom as soon as Dickerson was finished. “There he is, sir.”
Dickerson leaned forward and looked out. “Pick him up,” he ordered.
The Blackhawk descended and landed. The man on the ground sat on his parachute to prevent it from being inflated by the groundwash of the rotor blades. Two men jumped off the rear of Dickerson’s aircraft, ran over to Captain Scheuler, and escorted him back to the bird, securing the parachute.
Scheuler put on a headset as soon as he was on board.
“Have you picked up Major Terrent’s signal?” he asked.
Dickerson indicated for the pilot to take off. “No. We’re going to the disk transponder.”
“Maybe his equipment got damaged when he was getting out of the disk,” Scheuler said.
Dickerson glanced across at the pilot, who met the look briefly, then went back to flying. There wasn’t time to tell Scheuler about the slight slowing in descent of Bouncer Three just before impact.
“ETA to disk transponder?” Dickerson asked.
“Thirty seconds.”
The pilot pointed. “There it is, sir.”
“Shit,” Dickerson heard the copilot mutter. And that was a rather appropriate comment on the current condition of Bouncer Three. He keyed his radio. “Roller, we’re going to need a dozer and probably a backhoe too. Over.”
His aide back at main base was ready. “Roger.”
The pilot brought the aircraft to a hover, the searchlight on the belly of the helicopter trained down and forward on the crash site. Bouncer Three had hit at an angle. Only the trail edge was visible, sticking up out of the dirt ridge it had impacted into. Knowing the dimension of the disk, Dickerson calculated that it was buried at least twenty feet into the countryside.
“What about the beacon on the hatch?” he asked Captain Travers.
“Nightscape Two has it on screen and is closing on it. About four miles to the southwest of our location,” Travers responded.
They had to clean up every single piece of gear and equipment. There was always the chance that someone they had to recruit to help with the recovery — such as the drivers of the lowboys or the bulldozer or crane operator — might talk, but as long as there was no physical evidence, they were good to go.
“Let’s land,” Dickerson ordered.
General Gullick scanned the haggard faces around the conference table. There were two empty seats. Dr. Duncan had not been informed of, or invited to, the night’s activities, and Von Seeckt was, of course, absent. As recorder and data retriever, Major Quinn was seated away from the table, at a computer console to Gullick’s left.
“Gentlemen,” Gullick began, “we have a problem occurring at a most critical time. We have Bouncer Three down with one casualty at White Sands. We also have six aircrews currently being debriefed on the night’s events. And all we have gained against those potential security breaches is a replay of the events of the other night. We have more pictures of this foo fighter to add to our records and we have almost the exact same location in the Pacific Ocean that it disappeared into.”
Gullick paused and leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers. “This thing, this craft, has beaten the best we could throw against it, including our appropriated technology here.” He looked at Dr. Underhill. “Any idea what it did to Bouncer Three?”
The representative from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory held a roll of telemetry paper in his hands. “Not until I get a chance to look at the flight recorder and talk to the crewman who survived. All I can determine from this,” he said, shaking the paper, “is that there was a complete loss of power on board Bouncer Three in conjunction with a near collision with the foo fighter. The power loss lasted for one minute and forty-six seconds, then some power began returning, but too late for the pilot to compensate for the craft’s terminal velocity.”
Dr. Ferrel, the physicist, cleared his throat. “Since we don’t understand the exact workings of the propulsion system of the disks, it makes it doubly hard for us to try to figure out what the foo fighter did to Bouncer Three to cause the crash.”
“What about something we do understand?” Gullick asked. “We certainly understand how helicopters fly.”
Underhill nodded. “I’ve gone over the wreckage of the AH-6 that crashed in Nebraska, and the only thing I have been able to determine is that it suffered complete engine failure. There was no problem with either the transmission or hydraulics or else no one would have survived the crash. The engine simply ceased functioning. Perhaps some sort of electrical or magnetic interference.
“The pilot is still in a coma and I have not been able to interview him. I have some theories, but until I can work on them, I have no idea how the foo fighter caused the engine on that aircraft to cease functioning.”
“Does anyone,” Gullick said, with emphasis, “have any idea what these foo fighters are or who is behind them?”
A long silence descended on the conference table.
“Aliens?”
Ten heads swiveled and looked at the one man who didn’t rate a leather seat. Major Quinn seemed to sink lower behind his portable computer.
“Say again?” Gullick said in his deep voice.
“Perhaps they are aliens, sir,” Quinn said.
“You mean the foo fighters are UFOs?” General Brown sniffed.
“Of course they’re UFOs,” General Gullick cut in, surprising everyone in the room with the harshness of his tone. “We don’t know what the fuck they are, do we? That makes them unidentified, right? And they fly, right? And they’re real objects, aren’t they?” He slapped a palm down on the table top. “Gentlemen, as far as the rest of the world is concerned we’re flying UFOs here every week. The question I want an answer to is who is flying the UFOs that we aren’t?” He swiveled his head to Quinn. “And you think it’s aliens?”
“We have no hint that anyone on Earth possesses the technology needed for these foo fighters, sir,” Quinn said.
“Yes, Major, but the Russians sure as shit don’t think we possess the technology to make the bouncers either. And we don’t,” Gullick hissed. “My point is, has someone else dug up some technology like we have here?”