Alien Secrets. Ian Douglas

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Data Laboratory created in 1942—the place where captured German aircraft had been shipped after the war to see what made them tick. Now they were being tasked with the same for whatever this thing was. Whether they would be able to make anything out of the debris remained to be seen.

      They also had several bodies from the crash on ice. Hillenkoetter shuddered at the memory. He’d seen them. Those creatures had not been human.

       A number of reports had come out of T-2 since July of that year, including the one Truman had just mentioned. The crash wreckage did not incorporate technology known to any nation or group on Earth, and was therefore almost certainly extraterrestrial in origin. Mars was the popularly assumed origin of the craft and its diminutive crew, though the planet Venus was sometimes bandied about as an alternative. In fact, nothing was known about the craft’s origins or capability, and that single, simple statement was terrifying in its implications. Somebody, no one knew who, was able to travel to Earth from God knew where, enter US airspace with impunity, and outrun or outmaneuver the best combat aircraft in the US inventory.

       What was even worse was the fact that these extraterrestrials had been here for years before 1947. The US government had even recovered wreckage from one after the so-called Battle of Los Angeles in early 1942, and from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the year before that.

      And there were rumors, originating with the German scientists of Operation Paperclip, that a ship had crashed in Germany back in 1936 or 1939—the stories differed—and that some of the amazing technology coming out of the Third Reich during the war had been due to back-engineering technology from recovered vehicles. Alien vehicles.

       “Okay, Roscoe,” Truman said. “According to this report you’ve just submitted, you want to create a kind of scientific committee to study these crashed saucers. That right?”

       “Yes, Mr. President.”

       “Who do you suggest we approach?”

       “There’s a list appended at the end, sir. Vannevar Bush, certainly. And the new secretary of defense.”

       “James Forrestal? Okay.”

       “General Vandenberg, of course.” Hoyt Vandenberg had been the second director of central intelligence before Hillenkoetter, and had been the duputy commander in chief for the US Army Air Forces.

       Truman leafed ahead to the list of suggested names. “Okay. I’ve got it. And the upshot of all this is to create a group to recover crashed saucers?”

      “In part, yes, sir. We know that these … people aren’t perfect. Sometimes their aircraft crash. One, maybe two in Germany before the war. One in New Mexico. One in Missouri. The one we shot down over Los Angeles in ’42. When they crash, we need to be able to dispatch teams to cordon off the area, and keep civilians out. We need to recover the wreckage, as we did at Roswell, and move it to a safe location. We need to have engineers and scientists, good engineers and scientists, who can learn all they can from the debris, and see how we can use it.”

       “You mean build our own flying saucers …”

      Hillenkoetter shrugged. “Maybe. We know the Germans were working on that.” He’d seen the drawings and schematics for the Nazi Haunebu I, II, and III. The Allies had come so damned close to losing, closer than any man on the street was aware.

       Some things simply had to be kept secret from the public.

       “We also need,” he continued, “to keep a lid on this whole thing. If we fail to maintain control over what the public knows about this, there could be real panic.”

       Truman grunted. “That damned radio show.”

      Hillenkoetter nodded. The War of the Worlds had panicked a good many people who’d heard it. In fact, the degree of panic had been grossly overstated by the newspapers—they were keen on pointing out the deficiencies of radio, their new competitor, as opposed to print media—but war jitters certainly had contributed to some small degree of panic, at the very least, especially in New Jersey where the Martians were supposed to have landed.

       “Yes, sir.”

       “I don’t mind telling you, Roscoe, that I don’t like the idea of deliberately deceiving the American public.”

       “Neither do I, Mr. President. But it’ll be necessary, at least for a time. And we don’t want the Soviets getting wind of this.”

       “No, we do not.” Truman considered the problem for a moment. “Okay. I’ll draw up an executive order.”

       “Thank you, sir.”

      “Don’t thank me. As director of Central Intelligence and director of the CIA, you’ve got yourself a spot on this committee, whether you like it or not. And I’ll expect you to keep me in the loop.”

       “Absolutely, Mr. President.”

      “I know the scientists think they got a wrecked spaceship out of the Pacific near LA, but I’ve always thought that whole incident was just war jitters, okay? That, or some kind of long-range Jap reconnaissance aircraft. We just don’t know. We can’t know.”

       “We know the Japanese didn’t have anything that could reach us at the time.”

       “Floatplanes off a submarine?”

       He shook his head. “They didn’t have anything like that in ’42. The I-400 class wasn’t in operation until ’44.”

      “Well, this whole thing sounds pretty damned iffy to me. But if we’re being invaded from out there, we need to know about it. And we need to be able to fight back if push comes to shove.”

       “Yes, Mr. President.”

      “Now get the hell out of here and let me get to some nice, safe, normal world problems. Like what Stalin is doing in Europe, and what we’ll do if he gets the bomb!”

      The bomb.

       Nuclear weapons were nothing compared to this. And as Hillenkoetter walked out of the Oval Office, he wondered how much the President knew about the Nazi Haunebu saucers, their atom bomb experiments, or their other secret, almost magical weapons … and how close the Allies had been to total annihilation.

      HUNTER WALKED up the sidewalk of the apartment complex on Witherspoon Way, located in the small and quiet Californian community of El Cajon just seventeen miles from downtown San Diego. At the door to the lobby, he stopped and looked up and down the street.

      Nothing. Damn, he thought. You’re getting way too paranoid.

      Of course, he remembered the old dictum: just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out СКАЧАТЬ