Glenn Cooper: Book of Souls

Over the next hour Will lost track of their route. He was vaguely aware of moving through Times Square, Columbus Circle, passing the dark, sprawling Natural History Museum, looping through Central Park a few times, the wide tires of the bus sending showers of brittle leaves shooting through the night air. He was listening so hard the city almost disappeared.

At Princeton, Henry Spence had been a prodigy among prodigies, a teenager with an advanced case of precociousness. It was the early sixties, the Cold War in full bloom, and unlike many of his peers who applied their intellectual horsepower to the natural sciences, Henry immersed himself in foreign languages and politics. He mastered Mandarin and Japanese and had serviceable skills in Russian. He minored in international relations, and given his conservative Philadelphia Main Line roots, his earnestness and rectitude, he practically wore a flashing “recruit me” sign on his back, beckoning the local CIA man. The professor of Soviet Studies rubbed his hands in anticipation every time he saw the crew-cut young man smoking at the Ivy Club, his pale, intelligent face stuck in a book.

To this day, Spence remained the youngest recruit in CIA history and some of the old-timers still talked about this genius kid, prancing around Langley with his giant ego and enormous analytical powers. It was probably inevitable that in time, he would be approached by a nondescript man in a suit, pressing an unlikely business card into his hand bearing the insignia of the US Navy. Spence, of course, wanted to know what the navy wanted with him, and what he was told set his life on its current arc.

Will recalled the same puzzlement the day Mark Shackleton told him Area 51 was a naval operation. The military had its traditions, some of them stubbornly silly, and this was one of them.

As Will had learned, in 1947, President Truman tapped one of his most trusted aides, James Forrestal, to commission a new, ultrasecret military base at Groom Lake, Nevada, in a remote desert parcel bordering Yucca Flats. Carrying the cartographic designation, Nevada Test Site-51, the base came to be called Area 51 for short.

The Brits had found something extraordinarily troubling at an archaeological excavation on the Isle of Wight on the grounds of an ancient monastery, Vectis Abbey. They had opened their Pandora’s box a crack, then slammed it shut when they realized what they’d stepped into. Clement Atlee, the Prime Minister, recruited Winston Churchill to be the go-between with Truman to persuade the American President to take the trove of material off their hands, lest the postwar reconstruction of Britain be sidetracked by this monumental distraction.

Project Vectis was born.

Forrestal happened to be Secretary of the Navy when he got the assignment, and the project stuck to the Navy Department like paste, qualifying Area 51 as the driest, most land-locked naval base on the planet. The Project Vectis Working Group, personally chaired by Truman, hit upon an ingenious idea to shroud the Area 51 site in disinformation, a ruse that was still working after sixty years. They capitalized on the country’s mania about UFO sightings, orchestrated a staged little drama at Roswell, New Mexico, then spread the rumor that a brand-new base in Nevada might have something to do with alien spacecraft and the like. Area 51 got on with its real mission, the gullible public none the wiser.

The Secretary of the Navy in every administration was, by practice, the Pentagon’s point man on all matters related to the base and one of a small handful of officials who had the slightest idea what all the clandestine fuss was about. Recruiting Henry Spence from the rival CIA was considered enough of a coup that Spence was ushered into the Secretary’s office for a meet and greet shortly after he signed on. The jaw-dropping truth of his new assignment was so fresh that he stumbled through the meeting with little subsequent recollection of its substance.

Will listened intently as Spence described his first day in the Nevada desert, deep underground in the Truman Building, the main Area 51 complex. As a newbie, he was solemnly taken by his supervisor down to the Vault level and, flanked by humorless, armed guards, the watchers, led into the vast, quiet, chilled space, a high-tech cathedral of sorts, where he first laid eyes on seven hundred thousand ancient books.

The most singular and peculiar library on the planet.

“Mr. Spence, here is your data,” his supervisor had declared with a theatrical arm wave. “Few men are given the privilege. We’re expecting great things from you.”

And Spence began his new life.

Area 51 had found more than a talent-the organization had found a zealot. Every single day that he descended underground, for the better part of thirty years, Spence luxuriated in the privilege his old boss had described and the heady entitlement of being plugged into the most rarefied, secret institution in the world. His linguistic and analytical skills served him well, and in a few short years he was in charge of the China desk. Later, he would become the Director of Asian Affairs and would close out his career as the most decorated analyst in the history of the lab.

In the seventies, he pioneered a comprehensive approach to obtaining person-specific data utilizing available, albeit primitive, Chinese databases and rudimentary census reports, combined with a vast network of human intelligence he developed in cooperation with the CIA. Maoist purges and population dislocations often forced him to rely on statistical models, but his greatest coup early on was his prediction in 1974 of the July 28, 1976 natural disaster in northeast China, in the mining town of Tangshan, which killed 255,000 people. As soon as the earthquake struck, President Ford was in a position to offer premobilized disaster support to Premier Hua Guofeng, solidifying the post-Nixonian US-China thaw.

It was a heady time for Spence. He described, with morbid pride, the excitement he had felt when the first reports reached Nevada of the deadly earthquake, and when he saw the odd look on Will’s face, he added, “I mean, it wasn’t as if I’d caused the damned thing. I just predicted it.”

In his youth, Spence was a cocky, good-looker who enjoyed life as a single man in boomtown Vegas. But ultimately, blue-blooded WASP that he was, a fish out of water in a new-money, grasping town, he gravitated to birds of a feather. At his country club, he met Martha, a wealthy developer’s daughter, and the two of them married and had children, all of them now accomplished adults. He was a grandfather, but sadly, Martha passed had away from breast cancer before the first grandchild was born. “I never looked up her date,” Spence insisted. “Probably could have gotten away with it, but I didn’t.”

He left the lab when he hit the mandatory retirement age, shortly after 9/11. He probably would have stayed longer if they’d let him; it was his life. He had a voracious interest in Area 51 business and liked to insert himself into hot topics, even if they were off the Asia beat. During the summer of 2001, with retirement looming, he made a point to have lunch every day with folks from the US department, trading theories and predictions on the events that would soon kill three thousand people at the World Trade Center.

When he retired, he was physiologically old but extremely wealthy thanks to his wife’s family fortune. Her death took a heavy toll on his constitution, and his lifelong two-pack-a-day habit gave him worsening asthmatic emphysema. Steroids and a weakness for rich food made him fat. In time, he’d be scooter- and oxygen-dependent. His dual retirement passions, he confessed, were his grandchildren and the 2027 Club. This bus, dubbed the grandpamobile, was his ticket to mobility and his far-flung family.