Greg Strandberg
Dulce Truths
Prelude — The Entrance
Noro continues up the trail, finally coming to its rocky top. He stands there on the ridge, surveying the vast Archuleta Mesa. It’s a rocky landscape, with scrub bushes here and there, sometimes a patch of juniper trees, but mostly jagged rocks the color of burnt orange. It was the land Noro had called home for all his 62 years. He was a Jicarilla Apache Indian, with hair still long and still quite black. It blew in the wind, though the yellow bandana tied around his forehead kept the hair out of his eyes. He’d surveyed his homeland many times, but for the others with him it was new ground. Noro stood waiting for those others to come up behind him. Colonel Harry Anderholt was first.
“There it is,” Noro says, putting his arm up to point out the area.
“Where?” Anderholt says.
“There… by those large boulders… you can’t see it from here, but once you get there you’ll be able to walk behind them.”
“And that’s where the entrance is?”
Noro nods but continues to look out at the rocks in the distance. “The bones mark it, bones that’ve been sitting there for 60 years… ever since we came to this land.” He looks back to Anderholt. “We Jicarilla know enough to stay away from that place, you should too.”
Anderholt puts his arm up. “Lead on.”
Noro was expecting such a response, and simply turns back around and starts down the trail. His mind starts down the trail of memories.
The Jicarilla Apache called Dulce home, had for nearly a hundred years. The tribe spoke the Southern Athabaskan language, though the name ‘Jicarilla’ was actually Mexican Spanish, meaning “little basket.” Hundreds of years ago they’d been located in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, in what would eventually become the state of Colorado. Beginning around the year 1525, however, they began to branch out into the Great Plains. For about 175 years they lived the life of plains Indians, riding their horses and hunting the buffalo, until the eastern tribes were pushed ever westward by the whites and their expansions inland. The Jicarilla were pushed south into the less-hospitable lands surrounding the Archuleta Mesa, an area that’d eventually become part of New Mexico. Years of smallpox and tuberculosis followed and the tribe was decimated. Then in 1887 they were given their reservation and 20 years after that they were allowed to expand into the lush San Juan Basin. Finally, things began to look up for the tribe. It didn’t last long.
By 1920 most of the tribal members were suffering from either malnutrition or tuberculosis. It was widely believed that the tribe would go extinct. To make matters worse, the reliable pastime of sheepherding fell on hard times. Many tribal members gave up on the land and moved to town. The closest was Dulce, which at that point had but a few hundred people. The Gomez family had started the place as a ranching stronghold in 1877, naming it “Agua Dulce”, Spanish for “sweet water.” A natural spring ran through the area, giving the people and the animals a reliable source of drinking water in the parched land. Then WWII came, taking a few of the Indians and town folk as recruits. For the most part the war had little impact on that corner of the country, though the area was eyed for its resource potential. That’s how things got started — with lumber.
The Jicarilla had been looking for some lumber to help them build their homes, for while the government might have allowed for a reservation back in the 1880s, it sure didn’t allow for much funding to help get it up and running. So the Indians relied on themselves, and the land around them, just as they had for centuries. That’s how a small group of them chanced upon the cave. Their bones were still there.
The Jicarilla had told the government, but the government hadn’t cared. Something mysterious killing Indians? Why, that’ll just make our job easier! Noro imagines that was the response in whatever department in Washington was in charge back then. No, the government hadn’t been interested then, but they were sure interested now. All the flying craft that’d been seen in the area lately had a lot to do with that. Just the month before, Noro knew, one of those craft had crashed 300 miles to the south of them, in a sleepy little town called Roswell. Noro wasn’t sure what had happened with that crash exactly, but ever since then there’d been more and more government and military types poking around the reservation near Dulce.
One of those military types was Colonel Anderholt.
The colonel was in his early-30s. He had short brown hair without a hint of grey in it and a firm face that looked chiseled, as did his body. He’d been in the Army ever since FDR had started the home study Army extension courses back in 1935. That’d allowed him a leg-up on joining the reserves before his 18th birthday, which didn’t come until the following year. After that it’d been the standard rigors until mobilization for WWII had started. Due to Anderholt’s high aptitude test scores, he was chosen for the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, even before it officially started in 1942. That’d limited his combat roles in Europe while increasing his intelligence gathering work. When the OSS was rolled into the CIA after the war, Anderholt was one of the first to start at the new agency. He also took on the rank of Master Sergeant in the Air Force, a sly bit of bureaucratic rigmarole that gave him even more power and influence. From there it was work with Majestic 12 — or MJ12 as it was called — and that’s the reason he’d been sent to the Four Corners region, specifically New Mexico.
The general saw things much differently, and as they walked down that rocky trail he could picture what the area would become, and how.
Just a couple weeks before, after all, the government had crafted a faux story about a lumber company building a logging road through Dulce to get at the pine, fir, and spruce trees of the nearby San Juan National Forest. The trucks that went in and out were all labeled with “Smith Corp.” on the side, a ‘company’ based out of Paragosa Springs, Colorado. No lumber was ever hauled on the road, however, though sometimes late at night people would report seeing the trucks loaded down with big equipment destined for some area close by. Now Dulce Base had a path to it, though eventually that logging road would be destroyed. It was all part of the vast plan that MJ12 had put into place, and Anderholt had been chosen to see it through.
How long the ‘base’ was there before the government got ready to refit it into a high-tech military installation was anyone’s guess, the colonel figured. Some say it’d been there for thousands of years, an entrance to the vast underground world where secret alien races lived, and had been living for eons. One story had the secret society known as the Illuminati entering into a pact with these alien nations beginning in 1933, and soon the government officials the society handled were trading humans and animals for high-tech know-how.
Power would be needed to run those high-tech gadgets, Anderholt knew. To supply it, much of what the nearby Navajo Dam produced would be diverted to Dulce. In case the need for backup power arose, the El Vado Dam would be selected as a standby, and as a second location for an entrance to Dulce. Most of this work would conducted by the Rand Corporation, with help from Bechtel.
Much of Dulce and its tunnel system, and the bases around the world just like it, would be constructed with “the Subterrene,” a nuclear-powered tunnel machine that burrows through the deep, underground rock by heating whatever stone it encounters into molten rock. This rock then cools as the machine passes and the tunnels it creates have a smooth, glazed lining.
Where would all that extra rock go that the Subterrene pushes forth before it? Why, into the lakes around the El Vado Dam! Heron Lake… El Vado Lake… Stone Lake… Horse Lake… Stinking Lake… all would be created under the guise of grants for the Indians. While the area Indians would get some work blasting and hauling rock to make the lakes and dams and reservoirs, in reality they’d just be pawns. The lakes would be underwater launch sites for aliens, and disposal areas for the tons of molten rock that the underground tunnel excavations created.