“The location?”
“The apartment in Phoenix,” Quinn answered.
Gullick smiled for the first time in twenty-four hours.
“So we can bag all our little birds in one nest in a few hours. Excellent. Get me a direct line to the Nightscape leader on the ground in Phoenix.”
The engine on the crane whined in protest, but the earth gave before the cable, and inch by inch Bouncer Three was pulled up out of its hole. As soon as it was clear, the crane operator rotated right, bringing the disk toward the flatbed that was waiting. In the glow of the hastily erected arc lights, Colonel Dickerson could see that the outer skin of the disk appeared to be unscathed.
As soon as Bouncer Three was down on the truck, Dickerson grabbed hold of the side of the flatbed and clambered up onto the wood deck and then onto the sloping side of the craft itself. His aide and Captain Scheuler were right behind him. Balancing carefully, Dickerson edged up until he was at the hatch that Scheuler had thrown himself out of two miles above their heads.
The interior was dark with the power off. Taking a halogen flashlight off his belt, Dickerson shone it down on the inside. Despite having fought in two wars and seen more than his share of carnage, Dickerson flinched at the scene within. He sensed Scheuler coming up next to him.
“Oh, my God,” Scheuler muttered.
Blood and pieces of Major Terrent were scattered about everywhere inside. Dickerson sat down with his back to the hatch, trying to control his breathing while Scheuler vomited. Dickerson had been a forward air controller during Desert Storm and had seen the destruction wrought on the highway north out of Kuwait near the end of the war. But that was war and the bodies had been those of the enemy.
Goddamn Gullick, he thought. Dickerson grabbed the edges of the hatch, and lowered himself in. “Let’s go,” he ordered Scheuler, who gingerly followed.
“See if it still works,” Dickerson ordered. He’d sure as hell rather fly it back to Nevada than have to cover it up and take back roads by night.
Scheuler looked at the blood- and viscera-covered depression that Terrent had occupied.
“You can take a shower later,” Dickerson forced himself to say. “Right now I need to know whether we have power, and we don’t have time to dean this thing up.”
“Sir, I—”
“Captain!” Dickerson snapped.
“Yes, sir.” Scheuler slid into the seat, a grimace on his face. His hands went over the control panel. Lights came on briefly, then faded as the skin of the craft went clear and they could see by the arc lights set up outside.
“We have power.” Scheuler stated the obvious. He looked down at the altitude-control level and froze. Terrent’s hand was still gripped tightly around it, the stub of his forearm ending in shattered bone and flesh. He cried out and turned away.
Colonel Dickerson knelt down and gently pried the dead object loose. Goddamn Gullick, Goddamn Gullick; it was a chant his brain was using to hold on to sanity. “See if you have flight control,” he ordered in a softer voice.
Scheuler grabbed the lever. Space appeared below their feet. “We have flight control,” he said in a rote voice.
“All right,” Dickerson said. “Captain Travers will fly with you back to Groom Lake. We’ll have pursuit aircraft flying escort. Got that, Captain?”
There was no answer.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Scheuler weakly said.
Dickerson climbed back out of the disk and gave the appropriate orders. Finally done, he walked away from the lights and behind the sandy ridge that the disk had crashed into. He knelt down in the sand and vomited.
The lights were dim in the conference room and Gullick was completely in the shadows. The other members of Majic-12 were gone, trying to get some long-overdue sleep or checking in with their own agencies — except for Kennedy, the deputy director of operations for the CIA. He had waited as the others filed out.
“We’re sitting on a fucking powder keg here,” Kennedy began.
“I know that,” Gullick said. He had the briefing book with Duncan’s intercepted message in it. It confirmed that Turcotte had been a plant, but of more import was the threat that Duncan would get the President to delay the test flight. That simply couldn’t be allowed.
“The others — they don’t know what Von Seeckt knows, what you and I know, about the history of this project,” Kennedy said.
“They’re in it too far now. Even if they knew, it’s too late for all of them,” Gullick said. “Just the Majestic-12 stuff is enough to sink every damn one of them.”
“But if they found out about Paperclip—” began Kennedy.
“We inherited Paperclip,” Gullick cut in. “Just as we inherited Majic. And people know about Paperclip. It’s not that big of a secret anymore.”
“Yeah, but we kept it going,” Kennedy pointed out. “And what most people know is only the tip of the iceberg.”
“Von Seeckt doesn’t know Paperclip is still running, and he was only on the periphery of it all back in the forties.”
“He knows about Dulce,” Kennedy countered.
“He knows Dulce exists and that it’s connected somehow with us here. But he was never given access to what has been going on there,” Gullick said. “He doesn’t have a clue what’s going on there.” The right side of Gullick’s face twitched and he put a hand up, pressing on the pain he felt in his skull. Even thinking about Dulce hurt. He didn’t want to speak about it anymore. There were more important things to deal with. Gullick ticked off the problems on his fingers. “Tomorrow, or more accurately this morning, we take care of Von Seeckt and the others there in Phoenix. That will close that leak down.
“By dawn we’ll have the mess at White Sands all cleaned up and the aircrews involved debriefed and cleared.
“We have the eight o’clock briefing by Slayden, which should help get Duncan off our back for a little while. Long enough.
“Admiral Coakley should be giving us something on these foo fighters soon.
“And last but not least, in ninety-three hours we fly the mothership. That is the most important thing.” General Gullick turned, facing away from Kennedy to end the discussion. He heard Kennedy leave, then reached into his pocket and pulled out two more of the special pills Dr. Cruise had given him. He needed something to reduce the throbbing in his brain.
The seats on both sides of him were empty and there were photos spread out all over the row. He drank the third cup of coffee the stewardess had brought him and smiled contentedly. The smile disappeared just as quickly, though, when his mind came back to the same problem.
How had the high rune language been distributed worldwide at such an early date in man’s history, when even negotiating the Mediterranean Sea was an adventure fraught with great hazard? Nabinger didn’t know, but he hoped that somewhere in the pictures an answer might be forthcoming. There were two problems, though. One was that many of the pictures showed sites that had been damaged in some way. Often the damage appeared to have been done deliberately, as in the water off Bimini. The second, and greater, problem was that many of the pictures were of high runes that were, for lack of a better word, dialects. It was a problem that had frustrated Nabinger for years.
There were enough subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, differences in the high rune writing from site to site to show that although they had very definitely grown from the same base, they had evolved differently in separate locales.