Ian Douglas - Alien Secrets

Unknown. I will find out. The hatch opened, and cold air spilled inside, clearing the smoke. There was a little light, as well; he saw that it was dark outside, but he could make out the shapes of trees against an overcast sky. It looked as though they’d come down in a wooded area. There were patches of snow on the ground.

“Wait!” he called as Ssarsk slipped through the open hatch. He struggled with his harness, but couldn’t find the clip. “Don’t leave me!”

Remain here , the alien thought at him. I will be back. And the hatch hissed shut.

“I don’t know how to operate the hatch mechanism!” Kammler shouted, but there was no mental response.

Damn!

The Bell had been reconstructed by the SS and by slave workers, but the actual design of the shell and power plant and drive had been alien, and most of the mechanisms and the secrets of how it worked were understood, if at all, by only a few humans—none of whom were Kammler. The aliens had operated it during tests, and it required an alien pilot. Kammler was only now realizing just how dependent he was on the Eidechse’s goodwill. He was locked in, with no way out that he could find. Some of the craft’s mechanisms, he knew, were actually controlled by thought; Ssarsk had worn a slender circlet around his head that, he presumed, let him operate the craft.

He waited there in the dark for hours.

Something thumped against the outer hull.

He jerked awake. Had he fallen asleep? More thumps and bumps sounded from outside. What was that?

“Ssarsk?” he called.

Now he could hear voices. Physical voices, not the mental transmissions of the alien.

He couldn’t make them out, but he could tell from the tone and the lack of gutturals that they were not speaking German.

Was that English? He spoke a little …

The hatch banged open, again admitting the dim light from outside, blinding after hours in the dark. A shape—a human shape—blocked the entryway as someone leaned inside.

“ General Hans Kammler? ” the shape said. “ Willkommen in Pennsylvania! Und in der Zukunft! Wir haben dich erwartet! ”

“Welcome to Pennsylvania and the future! We’ve been expecting you!”

“Mein Gott! Ich habe es gemacht!”

He’d made it.

THE NEXT afternoon they flew Hunter and five of his men out to Wright-Patt.

The so-called Hangar 18, he was told, was something of a fixture in UFO legend, the place where the Air Force stored crashed saucers and the bodies of diminutive gray aliens. In fact, that was a myth. There was no Hangar 18 at the sprawling US Air Force base just outside of Dayton, Ohio.

There was, however, something called “Complex-1B,” a sprawling underground facility accessed through a three-story office building and layer upon layer of security checkpoints. And within the complex was “the Blue Room,” where some of America’s most important secrets were kept hidden from the public eye.

Air Force master sergeant Donald Gilroy was the source of this revelation. Hunter was seated next to the man in the C-17—the same aircraft that had brought him from Japan, in fact—as it droned its way east.

“So, aren’t you going to get into trouble talking to us about this?” Hunter asked.

“Nah,” Gilroy replied. “You people have all been cleared up to USAP, right?” Unacknowledged Special Access Programs. “You’re gonna be hearing a lot of hush-hush stuff at Wright-Patt. I’m just laying the groundwork for you.”

In the normal scheme of things, Hunter knew, there were just six levels of security clearance for American military personnel: Restricted, Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret, plus two special classifications—Special Compartmented Information and USAP. There wasn’t supposed to be anything above Top Secret, and the UFO whistle-blowers claiming to reveal stuff at “above Top Secret” or higher didn’t understand how the US government security classification system worked.

Top Secret, however, had been given a great many subcategories, each higher than the one before. Top Secret Crypto encompassed twenty-eight separate levels; the President of the United States, reportedly, was only at level seventeen. And there were higher classifications above TS Crypto 28.

Gilroy wouldn’t tell them what his security classification level was. He did tell them that a USAP clearance did not normally allow access to information about UFOs. Special allowances were made, he said, for personnel who were being checked out for higher clearances, a process that would take time.

So during that time, however, Hunter and his five companions would be given some information, with the promise of more to follow.

“What you’re telling us,” Hunter said slowly, “is that UFOs are real ? Roswell and all of that?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Gilroy replied. “You didn’t think otherwise, did you? After what you saw in Korea?”

“No. Not really. There was still some doubt, though.”

“That’s right,” Minkowski said. “There’s always room for doubt. We could have all been on our way to a Section Eight!”

Several of the SEALs laughed. Section Eight meant being discharged from the service because you were crazy.

“I promise you that all of you are completely sane,” Gilroy told them. “The question is whether you’ll still be sane after you get a tour of Complex-1B.”

“Why?” Taylor asked. “What’re we going to see?”

“Ha! You’ll find out.” But he’d say no more about the facility.

Gilroy did tell them a story, though, about something that had supposedly happened back in the midsixties. Then Senator Barry Goldwater, who’d been the Republican nominee for president in 1964, had had a long-standing fascination for UFOs. A major general in the USAF, a senator from Arizona, and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he’d repeatedly tried to gain access to the Blue Room.

In 1994, Goldwater appeared on Larry King Live to talk about UFOs. According to him, he’d asked no less a personage than the chief of staff for the US Air Force, General Curtis LeMay, for help in getting into the Blue Room. According to Goldwater, LeMay had gone ballistic. Furiously angry, madder than Goldwater had ever seen him, he’d cussed the senator out, then told him, “Don’t you ever ask me that question again!”

Someone—quite probably someone not in the regular chain of command—took secrecy about UFOs very seriously indeed. It seemed that not even the President was told everything … and often he was told nothing.

They touched down at Wright-Patterson and were driven to a nondescript office building somewhere in the middle of a forest of hangars, offices, and storage sheds. They were met in the lobby, just inside an initial security checkpoint, by an Air Force major named Frank Benedict, who took a clipboard from Gilroy, signed something on it, and handed it back. It was, Hunter thought, very much like the chain-of-custody receipt required when prisoners were transferred from one keeper to another.

Were they prisoners? It was distinctly possible. Hunter did not imagine for a moment that he could tell Benedict “so long!” then turn on his heel and walk away.

Benedict took his time looking through a sheaf of orders that had been transmitted to his command. “Lieutenant Commander Mark Hunter?” he asked, looking up.

“Yes, sir.”

“Master Chief Arnold Minkowski.”

“Present, sir!”

“Chief Roger Brunelli.”

“Here, sir.”

“EN1 Thomas Taylor.”