“Sorry, Hilly,” Truman said, leaning back in his chair. “Hard to keep track of who’s goddamn cleared for what around here.”
“Understandable, Mr. President. You’re the one cleared for all of it.”
“Subject-1.”
Hillenkoetter nodded. “None of the other Variants know about him, but we’ll need him there. We need to know if Yushchenko is a Variant or not, for starters. And if he’s important to the Reds, they may have assigned one of their own Variants to keep an eye on him. Subject-1 can spot him, too.”
Truman smiled. “You have to admit, in retrospect, that was a neat bit of misdirection on my part.”
Despite himself, Hillenkoetter smiled back. Pissing off Jim Forrestal made up for a lot of sins. “I just feel for Wallace, Mr. President. He’s gonna be fielding a lot of angry phone calls now.”
“I’ll order Jim to go through Montague instead,” Truman said. “That young man has enough on his plate as is.”
Truman rose, and Hillenkoetter followed suit. “Are we approved for Istanbul, Mr. President?”
The President shook his head. “Not yet. I want a plan with all the contingencies neatly mapped out, and I want you and Jim to swear up and down you have these people well in hand before I sign anything. If there’s another incident like Las Vegas, it’s your ass. All right?”
“Understood, Mr. President.”
“One more thing,” Truman said, eying his CIA director carefully. “That Russian mobster you caught going after Ellis in Vegas.”
Hillenkoetter nodded. “Timofeyev. Grigoriy Timofeyev. Brighton Beach guy, came over as a kid after Lenin took over. I have a cop friend in New York who says they have some mob stuff going on there — shakedowns, that sort of thing. Makes sense they’d try to maybe work with the Vegas bunch.”
“Or maybe he’s a spy,” Truman countered. “Makes me nervous we had a Russian so goddamn close to one of our Variants.”
“He’s not going anywhere,” Hillenkoetter said. “We’ll keep the pressure on him to talk.”
Truman frowned and closed his eyes a moment. “See that he does. Anything else?”
Hillenkoetter cleared his throat. “Just your final sign off on our request to piggyback on the SANDSTONE testing. They’re setting off the first one next month out in the Marshalls.”
Truman opened his eyes. “Right, that thing. Seems a bit Don Quixote, doesn’t it? All those damn experiments on the whatchamacallit — the ‘anomaly.’ And nothing to show for it. What’s the point?”
Hillenkoetter shrugged. “It’s stubborn. It does nothing for months, then emits a blast of energy. That’s it. Otherwise, it’s like it’s not even there. We consulted with Einstein on it — without bringing him in, just some theoretical stuff — and he wrote back that we were wrong and physics doesn’t work that way. But it’s there in the lab, so somehow Einstein’s wrong.”
“Well, that’s wonderful. When the geniuses are wrong, we’re all in trouble,” Truman said with a weary look on his face. “All right, you’re approved for SANDSTONE. Try not to get in their way, OK?”
“Yes, sir. Trust me, nobody wants to get in the way of SANDSTONE.”
14
Frank peered through the scope of his Winchester Model 70 bolt-action sniper rifle and saw his target through the crosshairs. It was far — easily a mile and a half away, impossible to hit anything at that range, no matter the size. Gravity would tug the bullet to the ground before it could even get halfway there, to say nothing of accuracy at that range. In practice, Frank once hit a target three hundred fifty yards off. Once.
Good thing he wasn’t shooting at anyone today.
The operational security at Area 51 was absolutely top-notch, something for which Frank had a very grudging admiration after weeks of probing analysis. But occasionally, very occasionally, they screwed up ever so slightly, and each time they did, Frank got just a tiny bit smarter. Like when they set up the shooting range so he could aim away from their little base and off toward the vast expanse of Groom Lake’s salt flat.
That meant that the major facilities at Area 51 were right in his scope, and the scope was better than the crappy binoculars they got off Roger the Airman.
Frank turned his attention briefly to the target, roughly two hundred fifty yards off and slightly to his right, and squeezed off a round. Even with his utter inattention to the task at hand, he managed to put one in the outer ring of the target.
“Adjust for wind next time. Remember to exhale right before you take your shot.” The voice of Gunnery Sergeant William Collins echoed in his head a moment, just one of the many voices swirling around in there. Thankfully, they only seemed to offer opinions — and yes, it was an awful lot like having a room full of opinionated people in your head — on the subjects that Frank consciously gleaned from them at the moment of their deaths. Having subsumed the skill and knowledge of at least four different military veterans, Frank imagined he’d get an earful if they all chimed in. Collins had been a crack shot, a WWI sniper-turned-instructor who had died down in Phoenix a few weeks before.
“I wasn’t really aiming,” Frank muttered to himself before turning back to the main base and the “mystery hangar” that all the white coats and brass kept visiting, over and over, every day. During one of Cal’s hospital visits, he’d seen just the one entrance to the building, heavily secured by men and procedure. The guards checked IDs and lists every time someone went inside — even if they had just stepped out for a cigarette or lunch. There were patrols all around it. It was very well lit.
“What about the back? May have some limited sightlines and low light in the back,” General Sam Davis whispered in Frank’s head.
Frank filed that one away, wishing for the umpteenth time that he could simply use the expertise he absorbed without getting the voices as well. But it just didn’t work that way. At least the voices didn’t demand attention. It was as if Frank simply remembered those people saying those things to him, even if they never actually had.
Other than the big hangar, there were several other buildings — offices and probably some laboratories, Frank guessed, along with the base hospital, plus the usual assortment of barracks, personal quarters, storage areas, that sort of thing. The labs might be of interest, but if they were really going to try to break in somewhere, the hangar was the obvious goal.
Frank focused on the target again, getting a quick read on the wind speed and remembering to exhale right before he took the shot.
Not quite a bull’s-eye, but solidly in the inner ring. If it were a person, they’d be good and dead.
“Nice one,” Collins whispered.
“Thanks,” Frank muttered, shaking his head slightly.
He then focused his scope on the other Area 51 facility, a full three and a half miles away on the northeastern shore of the salt flat. At that distance, he couldn’t see much. Buildings, single story probably, no more than a dozen give or take. Guard tower. Fence.
It all looked eerily similar to where he and the other Variants were being kept.
“I think there’s other groups here,” Frank said quietly that night as the four of them sat eating in an otherwise sparsely populated mess hall.
“Other groups of what?” Maggie whispered, looking up from an Army manual on camouflage. She was always reading stuff like that — Frank thought she’d make a helluva soldier.
“People like us. Variants.”
That got everyone’s attention. Cal looked up from his Bible and Ellis stopped staring off out the window. Frank explained what he’d seen through the sniper scope, and how the camp was structured.