Star Trek The Original Series From History's Shadow (8 page)

Wainwright sighed, chastising himself for the breach in military bearing in the presence of a junior officer. “Sorry, Lieutenant. I guess I’m still tired from the last trip. We just got home last night.”

Never mind the empty house
.

“Understood, sir,” Benjamin said. “For what it’s worth, the captain mentioned that very thing when he handed me the file. He told me to tell you he apologizes for sending you out again so soon, but . . .” The younger man’s expression turned sheepish. “You know how it is, sir.”

Nodding, Wainwright forced a small smile. “Yep. That’s how it is, all right.” He spent a brief moment scanning the report’s top sheet before flipping to the supplemental pages, looking for certain key phrases that Blue Book liaison officers at other bases had been instructed to use when taking statements from witnesses. So far as he could tell, the accounts as provided by the Yuma base personnel were detailed, lacking the sort of embellishment he long ago had come to associate with reports submitted by less-credible observers. For
a moment, his inner cynic—cultivated after years of taking reports of alleged sightings from people just looking for attention or validation from the government or society at large—wondered if the witnesses had worked together to arrive at a consistent story to tell the Yuma liaison officer. The questionnaire developed by Captain Ruppelt for use when interviewing those making such reports was designed to detect such collusion, but experience had taught Wainwright that the process was not foolproof. He knew he would not be able to judge the veracity of this report until he had a chance to question the observers for himself.

Guess I should start packing. Again
.

SEVEN

Yuma Test Station, Yuma, Arizona

April 22, 1952

“Well, considering this is my first time here,” Wainwright said, guiding the Jeep down the narrow, dusty service road, “it’s definitely everything I hoped it’d be.”

As she held on to the dashboard from where she sat in the passenger seat, Marshall’s laugh carried over the sound of the vehicle’s engine. “Just once, why can’t they send us to Florida, or Paris?”

Wainwright did not reply, opting instead to swerve the Jeep so as to avoid a large rut in the unpaved road, which had appeared after the vehicle he was following also dodged to miss it. He still managed to catch the furrow with the Jeep’s rear tire, sending him and Marshall bouncing in their seats and Wainwright’s head brushing against the Jeep’s canvas top.

“I think I just broke my tailbone,” Marshall said, recovering her grip on the dashboard. “Are we sure this road isn’t part of the actual bombing range?”

“Might be,” Wainwright said, both hands on the wheel in what he hoped was not a vain attempt to keep the vehicle from swerving into the ditch on either side of the road. The sun was dropping lower on the horizon, and he wanted to be back at the base’s main garrison area, rather than driving out
here in what promised to be near-total darkness with nothing but the Jeep’s dim headlights to guide the way.

Located in southwestern Arizona near the borders of California and Mexico, most of the land designated to the Yuma Test Station was uninhabited; nearly two thousand square miles of harsh, desolate desert landscape. Wainwright knew that the army had first established a presence at Fort Yuma before the Civil War and that the testing range now accounting for the immense size of the current base made it one of the largest military installations in the country if not the world. It had been used during World War II for testing various weapons and mechanized infantry equipment, and similar work had continued after the war’s end and even now as the current conflict raged in Korea.

“I hope we can get back without blowing a tire,” Marshall said after Wainwright failed to miss another bump in the road, “or one of my kidneys. Didn’t you hit that one on the way out?”

Chuckling, Wainwright replied, “This is nothing. In France, I actually broke the axle off a Jeep when I ran it into a crater made by one of our bombers. I thought the colonel I was driving back to his command post was going to kill me right there on the road.”

“That bad, huh?” Marshall asked, around what Wainwright thought might be a suppressed giggle.

“Yep. I couldn’t wait to get back to my unit. At least then, the only ones to be scared of were the Germans.”

A flickering light from somewhere behind him reflected off the Jeep’s metal dashboard and Wainwright glanced over his right shoulder to look for the source. “I think you left the Geiger counter on,” he said, returning his attention to the road.

Shifting in her seat, Marshall attempted to reach for the unit, which they had brought with them from Wright-Patterson. The device, along with their jackets and other items, lay just beyond her fingers. When the Jeep hit another rut, she turned back around in her seat. “Sorry about that, sir. I thought I’d turned it off.”

“The way we’re bouncing around here, the switch could’ve hit the side or something,” Wainwright said. “Wasn’t worth bringing along, anyway.”

Upon their arrival at the testing station, Wainwright and Marshall, accompanied by Lieutenant Brian Pearce, the Blue Book liaison officer from Luke Air Force Base near Glendale, Arizona, had visited with each of the witnesses to the previous week’s sighting. Each witness’s report was consistent with the others, without sounding as though the accounts had been rehearsed or coordinated. Further, their statements along with his own gut feelings told Wainwright the witnesses were being straight with him, and he believed they had seen an unidentified craft in the skies above the testing range where they had been carrying out a series of weapons-fire exercises.

A visit to the area where the sightings had taken place had proven to be a near-total waste of time through no fault of the witnesses, owing to the fact that there simply was nothing remarkable about the terrain making up ninety-eight percent of the Yuma Test Station. Still, he preferred to study the area with his own eyes, to get a sense of what the witnesses had seen. The vast expanses of undeveloped land and the surrounding mountains would seem the ideal place for a craft to fly in near seclusion, whether a product of top-secret military research or otherworldly origin. An examination of the ground over which the unknown object had been seen
had yielded nothing in the way of physical evidence, and the sweeps Marshall had conducted with the Geiger counter also turned up nothing.

The Jeep ahead of his, which was carrying Lieutenant Pearce and driven by the on-duty range safety officer, slowed as both vehicles rounded a bend in the road and approached a quartet of small buildings. They had passed the buildings on their way out to the area where the sightings had been reported, and there had been no sign of occupancy. Now, however, a five-ton cargo truck sat before the largest of the structures.

“Wonder what’s going on?” Wainwright asked, guiding the Jeep to follow the lead vehicle off the road and onto the patch of gravel that served as a parking lot in front of the buildings. On the other side of the truck was another Jeep, which, unlike theirs, had no top. “They weren’t here before, right?”

Marshall shook her head. “No, sir.”

“Maybe they’re dropping off supplies for an upcoming exercise.”

Three of the buildings were Quonset huts; long, single-story structures fashioned from sheets of corrugated steel bent over a curved metal frame with a plywood façade covering each end of the resulting shelter. The fourth building was a larger, two-story warehouse. According to the safety officer—an army captain named David Cardillo—the buildings were staging areas for equipment and personnel assigned to training exercises in this area of the installation, and similar arrangements were scattered across the base. In and of itself, the outpost was unremarkable, as was the cargo truck and the trio of soldiers standing near its back end at the warehouse’s entrance.

Shutting off the Jeep’s engine, Wainwright watched Captain Cardillo and Lieutenant Pearce emerge from the passenger side of their vehicle. Cardillo, though of average height, possessed the brawny frame of a boxer or wrestler, his tan uniform tailored to his muscular frame almost like a second skin. Pearce, dressed in an Air Force blue duty uniform, was of slighter build, looking almost boyish standing next to the more imposing Cardillo. The enlisted soldier acting as their driver remained behind the wheel, though he was not visible through the rear window due to the fading sunlight. As the safety officer walked toward the soldiers and their truck, the threesome all came to positions of attention and rendered salutes.

The safety officer returned the salutes, and Wainwright heard him ask, “What are you boys doing out here?”

“Guard duty, sir,” one of the soldiers, a corporal, replied. They were dressed in typical field gear, including helmets and sidearms in black leather holsters suspended from the green cartridge belts around their waists. One of the troopers carried an M1 carbine rifle slung from his left shoulder. “The rest of our unit’s due here tomorrow at sunup.”

“Due here for what, Corporal?” Cardillo asked.

“Weapons training, sir,” the soldier replied. “We’re getting ready for our annual requalifications.”

From his seat in the Jeep, Wainwright was able to see the frown on Cardillo’s face as the captain asked, “Really? I don’t know anything about that.”

Behind Wainwright, the Geiger counter squawked.

“What the hell?” he asked, frowning as he looked over his shoulder. The illuminated gauge on the unit’s face allowed him to see the indicator needle twitching. It was just a few ticks away from the gauge’s zero mark, but the reading was steady.

What the hell is right
.

“Where’s it coming from?” Marshall asked, and they both looked to the warehouse before which Wainwright had parked the Jeep. “They wouldn’t store nuclear weapons out here, would they?”

Shaking his head, Wainwright replied, “Not likely, and not without a damned sight more than three guards. Wait here.” He pushed himself from the driver’s seat, making his way to where Cardillo was still talking to the soldier while Pearce stood nearby. The safety officer’s voice now had taken on an edge of irritation.

“Well, nobody informed the safety office of any exercise,” Cardillo was saying. “I’ll need to check this out.” Then, his voice softened a bit as he regarded the soldier. “Probably just a screwup. You boys grab a smoke while I call back to garrison and get it straightened out.”

Wainwright was the first to see one of the soldiers reach for his sidearm.

“Gun!” he shouted, his right hand already moving for the holstered .45 caliber pistol on his hip. With no time to brandish his own weapon, Cardillo charged the other man, throwing his body at the corporal and sending both men slamming into the side of the truck. Pearce, though unarmed, still moved forward to help but then he turned and dove for cover as the soldier with the M1 rifle brought that weapon to bear.

“Look out!”

Wainwright heard Marshall’s warning from inside the Jeep an instant before sharp cracks split the air, the rifle’s reports echoing off the nearby buildings as bullets tore into the side of the cargo truck. Ignoring his flight cap as it fell from his head, Wainwright ducked behind the side of the Jeep, hearing Marshall yell something he did not understand.
He ignored her, pulling back on the .45’s slide and chambering the first round from its magazine before rising up from behind the Jeep. Eyes widening in shock, he saw Lieutenant Pearce lying facedown on the gravel lot. Cardillo still was scuffling with one soldier, whereas a second one was no longer in his field of vision. That left the third trooper, the one with the M1, and Wainwright looked up in time to see that soldier leveling the rifle at him. Ducking back down, he heard the snap of the weapon just before a round slammed through the Jeep’s windshield. He saw that a spiderweb had appeared across the glass, radiating outward from the single hole on the driver’s side of the window. He started to rise from his crouch, hoping to locate the remaining soldier.

“I said to stay down, damn it!” Marshall yelled, scrambling from the Jeep and throwing herself down to the ground. Wainwright noted that she had discarded her black service shoes—impractical as the heels might be for a firefight—before the sound of more weapons fire made him flinch.

Peering over the Jeep’s hood, he caught sight of Cardillo’s driver emerging from his vehicle, .45 in hand. He moved to his left, aiming the pistol at the trooper with the rifle. He fired twice and struck the side of the cargo truck near the other soldier, who ducked but did not move for cover. Instead he turned and aimed his rifle at the driver, firing a single shot that struck the soldier in the chest. He pitched forward, falling against the hood of his Jeep and sliding to the ground.

Wainwright ducked again as the trooper swung the rifle in his direction, hearing the sound of another shot. The encroaching darkness was making it more difficult to see their adversaries. Already the shadows were starting to blend together, the weak illumination offered by single bulbs above the doors to the buildings only exacerbating the worsening
visibility problem. Leaning around the front of his Jeep, Wainwright fired one frantic shot, hoping to force the other shooter to seek cover. From his vantage point he saw Cardillo delivering a roundhouse punch to the corporal, sending the other man tumbling to the ground. The soldier started pulling himself to his feet but Cardillo had retrieved the other man’s fallen pistol, backpedaling to give himself room and cover as the trooper with the rifle stepped around the truck and gave chase. Wainwright aimed his .45 at the soldier and fired two quick shots. Both rounds found their mark, striking the soldier in the chest and sending him stumbling into the side of the truck. Despite the pair of direct hits, Wainwright was stunned when the man moved, rolling onto his side.

Huh?

Another pistol fired from his left, and Wainwright felt something whip past his cheek. Recoiling away from the near miss, he dropped to one knee as he caught sight of the third soldier. He was near the front of the cargo truck, using it for cover. Cardillo, his attention focused on the trooper with the rifle, did not see the new threat behind him.