Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11 (19 page)

“They’re launching rockets over there,” Kaufmann was saying. “Real Flash Gordon stuff. Revamped V-2s. Trying to see how high they can shoot the sumbitches, trying to be more accurate, go further, carry a bigger payload of explosives. Sometimes, instead of TNT, they’re loadin’ up the noses with photographic equipment, and X-ray, and mice, and even monkeys.”

“What for?”

“The Nazis say we’re goin’ to the moon, someday. Outer space. They talk about it like it’s their goddamn religion.”

This guy was clearly insane—yet another candidate for the suite next to Forrestal’s; I was starting to wish Blanchard had sent me with the MPs, instead. Roswell was looming up ahead, and I was relieved.

And yet I was curious enough to ask: “Why are you telling me this, Frank? This sounds like classified material, to me….”

Kaufmann shrugged, and one eye under one wild eyebrow winked at me. “Some of it is. What the hell, one civilian to another … one
veteran
to another. Thought you might like to know what your government’s capable of. What our military’s willing to go along with. Jesus Christ, goddamn
Nazis!
Hell, I’m of German heritage myself, and it sickens me…. You’re a Jewish fella, aren’t you?”

“That’s part of
my
German heritage.”

“Well, how do
you
like the idea, Uncle Sam in bed with fuckin’ Nazis?” Kaufmann shook his head, sighed heavily. “I’m sure as hell glad this is my last week.”

“Of what?”

“Of working out at the base. I’ve had all I can stomach of the postwar Air Force. Anyway, I got offered a better job.”

“Yeah?”

His expression turned proud. “I’m gonna head up the Roswell Chamber of Commerce.”

All that smoothing over had paid off.

“Where you staying, Mr. Heller?”

“Don’t you know? You seem to know everything else.”

Kaufmann grinned at me, a big wide grin, maybe not as winning as Blanchard’s but much more real. “You think I’m a bag of wind, don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you something you probably will believe—Jesse Marcel called me and asked me to talk to you.”

“… You weren’t on the list.”

He shrugged a shoulder. “I turned Jess down, at first. Didn’t want to compromise my job.”

“But now you have another job.”

“That’s part of it,” Kaufmann admitted, and this time it was the wild eyebrows that shrugged. “Another part is thinkin’ about what a fool they made out of a good man like Jesse. And another is thinkin’ about what a fool they’re makin’ out of all of us … the great unwashed American people.”

I pointed. “I’m at the El Capitan.”

The hotel, just around the corner from Roswell Drug on Main Street, was just up ahead.

Kaufmann gave me his sliest look yet. “I can drop you there … unless, of course, you’d like me to take you out to the crash site, first.”

“What?” Now the son of a bitch really had my attention. “The Brazel ranch, you mean?”

Making a face, he said, “Hell no, not there; too long a drive, and anyway, there’s nothin’ to see, all that debris got picked up—they
vacuumed
that damn pasture! I’m talkin’ about the saucer … and the little bodies.”

“Saucer. Bodies.”

Kaufmann pulled over, double-parking the jeep in front of the drugstore, turning to grin at me. “Well, here we are, Mr. Heller—Hotel Capitan. Nice meetin’ you.”

I grinned back at him. “Pretty cute, aren’t you, Kaufmann? How far is it?”

“Just about a half hour. You think what I told you so far was good? Wait’ll you hear this….”

As we headed north, on the concrete ribbon of 285, into a mostly brown, occasionally green landscape of scrub brush and cactus and sand, under a sky as infinite and wide as the blue eyes of a child, Kaufmann told me a yarn that had me laughing in wonder, even as I wrote it down in my spiral notebook. He was, it seemed to me, one of the following: a raving lunatic; an outrageous bullshit artist; or the witness to something truly extraordinary.

On July 2, 1947, Brigadier General Scanlon of Air Defense Command had dispatched Kaufmann to White Sands Proving Ground at Alamogordo, where radar had detected strange movements, indicating an unidentified object flying over southwestern New Mexico, violating the restricted airspace. With orders to report directly to the general, Kaufmann and two others had, in shifts around the clock, charted the object.

“The blips were just dancin’ from one end of the screen to the other,” Kaufmann said. “Now, we’d had similar blips back at Roswell, but intermittent—the thing showing up only when it was above the Capitan Mountains. We kept up watch for almost two days. Then late on the night of July Fourth, God decided to serve up His own fireworks show, by way of one incredible lightning storm.”

At around eleven-twenty p.m., with the storm at its height, the object on the radar screen stopped flitting, began pulsating, growing larger; finally the object blossomed in “a white flash,” then shrank to its original size, dove down and winked out. The assumption was the craft—if that’s what it was—had been struck by lightning and possibly exploded, or crash-landed.

“Two other sites—Roswell and Kirtland—were tracking the thing, so the Army techs were able to roughly triangulate the location of what we took to be a crash.”

The consensus was that the object had fallen somewhere northwest of Roswell. By a little after two in the morning, Kaufmann had returned to the base, reporting in to Colonel Blanchard, who assembled a small military convoy—the base was undermanned, due to the long holiday weekend—of three jeeps, four trucks, one of them a flatbed, one a crane.

“We took along some of those radiation suits,” Kaufmann said, “but we knew it couldn’t be what we call a ‘broken arrow’—a downed plane with an atom bomb aboard—’cause we had all the planes and the bombs! So radioactivity wasn’t really a major concern.”

The convoy had headed out 285, which was exactly what Kaufmann and I in his jeep were doing; his story and our location converged, as—near Mile Marker 132—he turned west off the highway onto “an old ranch road,” a hard-dirt path, the jeep kicking up a small dust storm.

“Hardest part was,” Kaufmann said, “not gettin’ stuck—ground was pretty soft, after the rain … but these jeeps can drive outa anything.”

Soon Kaufmann turned again, near an abandoned ranch house, onto no road at all this time, and suddenly we were cutting across country. At this point, he halted his story to navigate, saying, “Explain the rest when we get there—be easier that way.” The jeep jostled along and at one point Kaufmann stopped, climbed out, snipped a barbed-wire fence with cutters, piled back in, and off we went again, driving over the downed fence, bouncing over some fairly rough terrain, making no attempt to avoid rocks, heavy tangled brush or cactus, crushing or burying everything in our wake.

I held on to the side of the jeep, my teeth rattling as I said, “Are you telling me you drove this at night? Braving gullies and barbed-wire fences? How did you know where to go?”

“We followed the glow,” he said. “It was a halo of light, beamin’ out against the sky. Closer we got, the more the glow seemed to ebb, and fade….”

The jeep was making its way down a gentle slope that gradually became a ravine; then up ahead, perhaps one hundred yards, a forty-foot cliff rose from an arroyo, scrubby green below, thinning to clumps above in a rocky slope that became brown stony ridges.

My guide stopped his jeep and got out.

“Let’s walk on down there,” Kaufmann said, with a motioning wave, “and I’ll show you exactly where the craft was wedged…. Look out for snakes.”

I was halfway out of the vehicle. “What do you mean, look out for snakes?”

“Rattlesnakes tend to get riled when you step on ’em, is all I’m sayin’.”

“I think the jeep could make it down this slope,” I offered.

“Just walk careful.” Kaufmann was laughing, gently. City folks.

I walked careful. “Had the glow died down by the time you got here?”

“Yes, it pretty much had, but we could see the metal glistening, and we knew then and there it wasn’t a plane or a V-2 rocket…. When we got here, we actually came out up there, at the edge of the ravine—damn near went over and crashed into the damn crash! But we circled around to where we are now…. This is it.”

Kaufmann was pointing to a gouge in the sandy ground.

“This is where the craft was embedded—kinda slammed into the sand, got its nose crumpled in the side of the cliff, here. Right off, Colonel Blanchard sent a man in, in a protective suit, to check the craft and the area for signs of radiation. We waited around for the all clear, maybe fifteen minutes, smoking cigarettes and asking each other questions none of us could answer.”

“What did this craft look like, Frank?”

“Oh, six feet high maybe, twenty, twenty-five feet long, probably fifteen feet wide. It sure as hell wasn’t no damn saucer.”

“You said it was.”

Kaufmann made a face, waved a dismissive hand. “That was just to get your attention—it’s the common usage…. This thing was shaped more like a wedge, somewhere between a V and a delta. It had this wraparound window at the front, and the whole thing was split in half, along its side, horizontally, maybe where it got blown open … maybe that was where that scattered junk Brazel found come from. Of course, I always thought there was a possibility the Air Force mighta loaded up some of the wreckage here, and carted it over to the Foster ranch, to scatter it around and confuse things, draw the attention away, onto a bogus site.”

I wiped the back of my hand across my sweaty forehead under the brim of my straw fedora. “Wouldn’t you have known about that?”

“Hell no. I wasn’t in charge! Blanchard was. Now, I could see inside the craft—there was control panels and some hieroglyphic-type writing. As for how the thing flew, I didn’t see any propulsion system, just a series of cells on the underbelly, quartz-type cells, octagon-shaped, like a beehive. I didn’t get that good a look—it was still before dawn, we musta got out here about three a.m.—and we had searchlights from jeeps shinin’ down from on top of the cliff. The colonel wanted us to get that craft onto the flatbed and back to the base before dawn, muy pronto; daylight, somebody else could stumble onto this mess. Then, of course, we had casualties to deal with.”

I was cleaning my sunglasses on my shirt. “The craft’s crew, you mean? The ‘little bodies’?”

Kaufmann nodded, shook his head, his eyes distant. “There were five of these beings…. You know, you see somethin’ out of this world, it shakes you up; we were just kind of stunned, kinda stupefied, not saying a word, just staring. Then finally we snapped out of it.” He pointed. “One body was tossed up against the wall of the arroyo, flung there; another was half in, half out of the craft. I saw one sitting inside, slumped over in his seat, dead as hell. They found another one inside there, later, the men that loaded the bodies in those lead-lined body bags.”

“That’s four—you said there were five.”

“Sorry, I’m … I mean, I haven’t been out here since that night. It’s all kinda … rushin’ back. I didn’t mention the one that was still breathing?”

“There was a survivor?”

“Yup. Wasn’t in bad shape, neither. He was just sittin’ on a rock … right over there, that boulder by the cliff, there. At first he was kinda cowering, then—when he saw we were trying to help, he got the god-damnedest look on his mug … almost serene. Like he didn’t have a care in the world.”

“This world, anyway. What did they look like, Frank?”

The wild eyebrows lifted. “Not like you see in the funnies or the movies. No horns or spiny fingers, and they sure weren’t green.”

So Mac Brazel had said.

“… They were slim, pale, smooth-looking individuals, hairless, fine skin, silver-type uniforms. Five four, five six … fine features, small nose, heads kinda too big for their bodies.”

“Big eyes?”

“Bigger than yours or mine—kinda slanty, Oriental type….” Kaufmann, hands on his hips, was slowly scanning the landscape; his expression was somewhere between sickened and haunted. “Tell ya what, Nate my friend, I think I had enough of this place. Let’s head out. I’ll tell you the rest of it on the way back.”

That was a good suggestion; the afternoon was fading, shadows starting to lengthen, and on the highway I got treated to one of New Mexico’s glorious yellow-red-orange-blue sunsets.

Kaufmann told me that there was concern about the condition of the bodies—one was showing signs of deterioration—and Blanchard’s first stop had been the base hospital. A second team had already been dispatched to further clean up and cordon off the crash site. At the base, each of the eight men who—with Blanchard—had been involved close-up with the operation were ushered into the briefing room, one at a time; Kaufmann assumed his instructions from the colonel—that the “retrieval” was “classified at the highest levels”—mirrored that of the others.

Though his participation had come to an end, Kaufmann understood that Hangar 84 at the airfield became the base of operations, housing both the corpses—and the survivor—and the captured crashed craft. Then the craft went on the back of a truck under a tarp to Wright Airfield in Ohio; the bodies—and presumably the survivor—on a flight, first to Andrews Air Force Base at Washington, D.C., then to Wright.

“Why the stop in D.C.?” I asked. Roswell was up ahead.

“Rumor has it, top-ranking Army and Air Force personnel requested a look at the bodies. Also, Truman and Army Chief of Staff Eisenhower … oh, and the Defense Secretary.”

“Forrestal?”

“Yeah. Isn’t he the guy that had the nervous breakdown? I read about that in Drew Pearson.”

“Mental problems can afflict the best of us, Frank.”

Kaufmann grinned at me. “Is that your way of sayin’ maybe I’m nuts? Maybe I am.”

“Maybe you’re still working intelligence and are feeding me … what’s the word? Disinformation?”

“Why would I do that?”

“You wouldn’t. But maybe Blanchard would. To throw me off the scent.”

“The scent of what?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? You got any proof, Frank? Any pieces of indestructible tinfoil? Photo of a dead spaceman, maybe? One of their silver suits?”