Robert Doherty: The Citadel

The second book in the Jim Vaughn series, 2007

Washington, D.C.,

24 September 1947

"You've got to be joking?" President Harry S Truman stared at the document on his desk with undisguised surprise. He looked up from it at the men gathered in the Oval Office and knew the situation at hand was no hoax, given the power that was concentrated in the room.

"Even the information about the atomic weapon-" Truman began. He stopped to gather his thoughts. After Roosevelt's sudden death on April 12, 1945, Truman had received numerous briefings on matters he had been kept ignorant of, the most shocking of which was the development of those terrible weapons he had subsequently made the decision to use against Japan. He'd told reporters that he "felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me."

Now it appeared they literally had.

Truman looked at the document once more. "July eighth? That was two months ago. Why wasn't I told earlier?"

"We've been evaluating," Sidney Souers said. He was the man Truman had appointed as the director of the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency. There were three other men scattered about the room: Dr. Vannevar Bush, Chairman of the Joint Research and Development Board; James Forrestal, the first man to fill the newly developed slot of Secretary of Defense; and General Vandenberg, now Chief of Staff of the Air Force, but Truman knew him better as Chief of Military Intelligence during the world war. The man who knew all the secrets. The man who had been part of the small group who shocked him with the news about the development of the atomic bomb shortly after Roosevelt 's passing.

"And your conclusion?" Truman demanded. He shook the folder. "You're telling me we have a damn craft of some sort that crashed in New Mexico, and it wasn't made by us, wasn't made by the Russians, indeed you say it was made by-" He peered through his reading glasses for the line. "-nonhuman, non-Earth entities. What the hell does that mean?"

Vandenberg's deep voice echoed through the Oval Office. "Aliens, Mr. President. Creatures from space. We believe this craft might have been on a reconnaissance mission. Small ship and a small crew numbering only three."

"Reconnaissance for what?" Truman asked.

"Invasion," Vandenberg simply said.

Forrestal cleared his throat. "Now, General, we don't have any evidence of that."

Vandenberg's large head swiveled toward his civilian superior. "What the hell else do you send a recon for?"

"To find out information," Forrestal said. "To explore."

Vandenberg's snort of derision indicated what he thought of that. "While this is the first craft with crew we've managed to recover, this alien activity is not an isolated incident, Mr. President. Throughout the war and several times since, Allied pilots-and from what our spies tell us, Russian pilots-were often trailed by alien craft."

Truman removed his reading glasses. "What kind of craft?"

"Small glowing balls, about three feet in diameter," Vandenberg said. "No visible propulsion system." He pulled a folder out of his briefcase and slid a photo out. "This was taken by a gun camera in a P-47 Thunderbolt in 1945 over the Rhine River in Germany. This is the only picture we have, but there are almost fifty other reports of pilots who saw something like it.

"The pilots nicknamed them 'foo fighters.' At first we thought they were German or Japanese. Secret weapons. And because they were suspected to be Japanese and German, all information concerning them was classified. The reports on these things started in late 1944. They were described as metallic spheres or balls of light. Since the aircrews that reported them were usually veterans, and a gun camera recorded one, giving factual support to those accounts, the reports were taken seriously."

Vandenberg took the photo back out of Truman's hands, which irritated the President. The Air Force general was like many others in Washington who saw him as an interloper, a poor replacement for the President who had led them through the war.

"It was serious," Vandenberg continued. "We lost eight aircraft to these things when they challenged them and fired at them. After the war we found out from going through their records that the Japanese and Germans had the same encounters and didn't know what the damn things were either. So we knew then that they didn't make them, which made us wonder who the hell did."

He slapped down another photo. Truman put his glasses on, and his eyes widened at what he saw.

"They did," Vandenberg said, tapping a finger on the alien body laid out on an autopsy table. The general leaned over the President's desk, putting both fists on it. The photo wasn't the clearest, but the gray figure on the table was obviously not human. "I don't think their intentions are good. When the Enola Gay flew the first atomic mission toward Hiroshima on August sixth, 1945, it was accompanied the entire way by a foo fighter. The mission was almost scrapped when the sphere appeared, but the commander on the ground at the departure airfield at Tinian decided to continue it. There was no hostile action by the foo fighters, and the situation was repeated several days later during the mission to Nagasaki."

"Why wasn't I informed?" Truman demanded.

The lack of any answer was insult enough.

"But you say they did nothing to stop the mission, so why do you believe their intentions are not good?" Truman asked.

"I'd ask the dead men who flew those eight planes the foo fighters took out that question, Mr. President," Vandenberg said.

Truman sighed and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes and putting more distance between himself and Vandenberg. "What now?"

Vandenberg backed off slightly, removing his fists from the desk. "We want to form a special committee to oversee everything to do with these aliens. And to prepare countermeasures and emergency plans in case of invasion. We want you to authorize the formation and the funding of this committee-which will have to be extensive, Mr. President. This might be the gravest threat mankind has ever faced."

Truman glanced over at Forrestal, the only man among the three facing him that he trusted. It was hard to judge the Secretary of Defense's face. "James?"

Forrestal looked left and right, at the other two men, and then nodded. "I think it makes sense, Mr. President. Always better to be prepared."

Truman turned back to Vandenberg. "What exactly are you talking about doing?"

The Air Force general pulled out a piece of paper. "This is an overview. We plan on calling the oversight group Majestic-12, composed of nine other men besides the three of us. Our headquarters will be set up in a very isolated site in the Nevada desert on the Nellis base range at a place called Area 51."

Truman was staring at the paper. "You're asking for six billion dollars?"

"Most of it will come from the Black Eagle Trust," Vandenberg said, "not the taxpayers.

What we need is authorization to use Defense Department assets to support this."

Truman scanned down the page. "What's this about a second base? And in Antarctica?"

Vandenberg glanced over his shoulder at Dr. Bush, who fielded the question. "Sir, we also think there is a need to establish an emergency base, sort of a bastion of last resort for the human race."

Truman looked up from the document. "My God, you really believe the threat is that serious?"

"It has the potential to be," Bush said. "If these aliens can travel across the stars, we have to assume they have incredible weapons, the likes of which we most likely can't even comprehend, never mind defeat. That is why we want to set up this Citadel in Antarctica."