Fade Out (18 page)

Connors had a hard time remembering all their names the first time around. One thing, however, was clear. They all knew Arnold very well, and they all seemed to have known each other for a long time. That in itself was hardly surprising. What intrigued Connors was their reaction to Crusoe's arrival. Somehow, he had imagined they would have been more excited, more surprised. Amazed, even. But, as they talked to him, he couldn't help feeling like an outsider who had blundered into a carefully prepared private reception for a long-awaited guest.

Once he'd met everybody, Connors took a private coffee break with Wedderkind.

‘The Air Force shot some more infrared film early yesterday and early this morning,' said Wedderkind. ‘The heat source is still directly under the crater but it's a lot cooler than it was on Saturday.' He showed Connors the prints.

‘If there is something buried down there, why is there a hole instead of a heap of earth?'

‘You're looking at it the wrong way,' said Wedderkind. ‘The earth is heaped up around the point of entry. That's what makes it look like a hole. Look. I'll show you.'

Wedderkind picked up a polished steel ball. It was a little bit smaller than a table-tennis ball. ‘The shape, of course, we can only guess at.' He took the sugar bowl from the coffee tray and shook it till the surface of the sugar was flat. He then pressed the steel ball into the sugar, twisting it left and right until it became completely
buried. The displaced sugar formed the rim of a shallow crater within the bowl.

Wedderkind handed the bowl to Connors. ‘That's one explanation.'

‘And the heat?'

‘Probably generated through boring its way underground. It all ties in with the other moves it has made to protect its arrival into a possibly hostile environment.'

‘And how do you propose to make contact?'

Wedderkind shrugged. ‘The President told me to dig it out.'

At lunch, they were joined by two of Wedderkind's closest associates, Phil Brecetti, one of the physicists, from Berkeley, and Alan Wetherby, a geographer from the University of Chicago. When Wedderkind had made the first round of introductions, Connors questioned the usefulness of a geographer on the project. Wedderkind replied, ‘He's fun to have around. If we're going to be cooped up for weeks on Crow Ridge, I want to be with people I enjoy talking to.'

Wetherby, who was from England, was an expert on the origins of the ancient Chinese village. His books on the subject, which he claimed nobody read, were as thick as New York City telephone directories. He also had an encyclopedic knowledge of almost every other subject Connors cared to mention – including flying.

Wedderkind pointed a fork at Brecetti. ‘Phil was up on Crow Ridge with me last week.'

‘When you checked the cutout zone?'

‘Attempted to,' said Brecetti. ‘Until that field is neutralized, I don't see how we can carry out any serious research.'

‘You mean without electricity?'

‘Yes,' said Brecetti. ‘It's a real body blow.'

‘You may already know this,' said Wedderkind. ‘But
the fact is, despite the really fantastic advances in scientific knowledge over the past seventy years, the related phenomena of magnetism and electricity are still not fully understood. We can detect their presence, we know what properties they possess, and we can recreate them in the laboratory and in industry, but the
how
and
why
still elude us. The Earth, for instance, possesses a vast magnetic field, but it occurs without any of the complex mechanical systems we would need to reproduce a field just a fraction of that size. We've tracked down electricity and magnetism as far as the basic particle of matter – the atom. That is composed of electrically charged particles, and it also possesses what we call a magnetic moment. And we now know that smaller units exist beyond the electron and neutron of the atom. That's Phil's field – particle physics – and that takes us to the extreme edge of scientific knowledge.'

‘To the point where science becomes philosophy,' said Brecetti.

Connors toyed with the potatoes on his plate, then weakened and ate some of them. ‘Why do you think Crusoe chose to land in America?'

‘It could be because of the theory you put forward,' said Wedderkind.

‘Which one was that?'

‘Homing in on radio and TV transmissions. After a week orbiting the entire world, he would be able to pinpoint North America as the biggest single source of radio and TV traffic. With the proper optical equipment he could also see the buildup of cities and roads, the cultivated areas. Western Europe would have some of the same characteristics, but lumped together as a single land mass with Asia it wouldn't look so active. Africa would have minimal radio traffic, and so would South America and Australia.'

‘We've been listing the characteristics of the landing site,' said Wetherby. ‘But at the moment, they don't enable us to draw any conclusions.' He ticked off the points on his fingers. ‘One, it is situated midway between the Rocky Mountains and the plains of the Middle West. Two, this point is roughly in the middle of the North American continent. It depends on the criteria you use, but it's just about the visual centre of gravity. That at least points to a tidy mind. Three, it's a sparsely populated area, but four, it's an area that is rich in minerals, including uranium. Five, it's old. The surface rocks are from the Cretaceous period, that's the last third of the Mesozoic era, when pterodactyls, dinosaurs, and other large reptiles flourished.'

‘And it's the period during which they were all mysteriously wiped out,' said Wedderkind.

‘It's also near one of the oldest-known geological areas in the United States. The Black Hills of Dakota contain rocks over six hundred million years old.'

‘What would be the point of landing in a spot like that?' asked Connors.

‘Well – it depends on the purpose of your visit,' said Wetherby. ‘Our exploration of similar areas on the moon was to find out more about its origins – and evolution. The results exploded the long-held theory that the moon once formed part of the Earth. It didn't. But they probably came into existence at about the same time. To anyone who's interested, this area contains a big chunk of geological time for them to study.' Wetherby smiled. ‘On the other hand, they may have
been
here six hundred million years ago.'

‘And they've come back for their umbrella,' said Connors.

‘Yes – or to check up on what has happened since. Or maybe to meet somebody.' Wetherby paused to pour
chocolate sauce over his ice cream. ‘Don't forget that, historically, this is Kiowa-Apache country. With the recent backdating of Man's appearance in North America, their ancestors go back a long way.'

‘We're lucky Crusoe didn't land in one of the Indian reservations,' said Wedderkind. ‘A few more minutes in the air and he'd have ended up south of the Yellowstone, in the Crow reservation on the Little Bighorn.'

‘That would have made a nice legal problem,' said Wetherby.

‘Yeah…' Connors looked at Wedderkind. ‘Weissmann would have probably ended up getting scalped.'

‘Who's Weissmann?' asked Brecetti.

‘Nobody,' said Connors. ‘Forget it.'

Just after midday, Bodell and his wife were photographed on the lawn of the White House with the President standing between them. They then went inside to have lunch with the President and his wife Anne. Jerry Silvermann, the White House Press Secretary, and Marion Wilson, the President's private secretary, were on hand to lighten the occasion, but the Bodells were so overawed they could hardly lift a fork.

Mrs Bodell was then given the short tour around the residential rooms by the First Lady, while the President took Bodell into the Oval Office and, after a short preamble, asked him to serve, once again, ‘the highest interest of the nation'. On the desk was a document prepared by Weissmann that assigned his land to the Mineral Research and Development Corporation. Bodell asked to be able to keep his shack and garden, and the President, who'd been a lawyer, amended the document
in longhand. Bodell signed on the dotted line. The whole thing from the hello to the good-bye handshake took just under an hour and a half.

Weissmann, who had kept well out of Bodell's way, phoned the news to Connors, who was still in Ohio. ‘I'll file all the necessary papers, but as from now we're at gostatus.'

‘Where are they now?' asked Connors.

‘Who?'

‘The Bodells.'

‘On their way to Disneyworld.'

‘Did they get a good deal?'

‘They did all right.' Weissmann obviously found it hard to part with money, even when it wasn't his own.

‘Well, don't lose any sleep over it,' said Connors. ‘Just send us the bill for a new car.'

The 707 bringing Connors, Wedderkind, and the research group from Ohio landed at Glasgow just after midday. An aircrew bus took them over to the officer's mess for lunch. Greg Mitchell was there, packed and ready to ride the 707 back to Washington. He told Connors that Allbright's group was on the Ridge and that the CIA ‘front office' operation was already in position on Highway 22.

‘It couldn't be better,' Greg concluded. ‘On a busy day, you get all of two cars an hour going past the front door. The only security problem you're likely to get is from the few light planes in the area. There's a dirt strip
at Jordan, and an air-taxi outfit based at the Miles City airport. I think they do some control work for the State Fish and Game Department.'

‘Well, you have a three and a half hour trip ahead of you,' said Connors. ‘See if you can come up with some ideas before you get to Washington. Have you met Allbright?'

‘Yes,' said Greg. ‘Before he rose to be head of SAC, he commanded one of the B-52 wings that carpet-bombed Cambodia for Nixon and dear old Henry K.'

‘While pretending to be elsewhere…'

‘That's right. The Menu raids.'

Connors gave Greg a raised-eyebrow look as the details of this shabby, and ultimately futile, venture flashed through his mind.

The Viet Cong had been using the cross-border trails to bring supplies and reinforcements down from the north. They'd also set up bases on Cambodian territory from which attacks were launched against South Vietnam. It was a clear violation of Cambodia's neutrality but the government in Phnom Penh, lacking the political will and the military muscle to throw its unwelcome visitors out, turned a blind eye to what was going on.

Code-named Menu, the raids were designed to deny the VC sanctuary by destroying these bases and supply lines but Nixon knew that any extension of the war into Cambodia would trigger a new storm of protest from the domestic anti-war lobby and fellow-travellers the world over. To get around this, the Air Force was ordered to cover its tracks with an impenetrable layer of fake paperwork. The bombing, which began in February 1969, continued under a cloud of secrecy and a barrage of denials from the White House until April 1970 when units of the US and South Vietnamese army staged an abortive invasion.

Once again, American technology and firepower failed to halt the rice-bowl and bicycle battalions of Hanoi. South Vietnam collapsed in disarray as the US of A finally decided to cut its losses and sailed for home while next door, the blank-eyed teen-age killers of the Khmer Rouge came out of the jungle and took over the smoking ruins of Cambodia.

An unknown number of Cambodians had died in the raids; upwards of three million more perished when Pol Pot's regime turned back the clock to Year Zero and proceeded to impose their homicidally-insane brand of Marxism upon the luckless population. An entire country was transformed into one vast concentration camp as a direct result of a ‘let's go bomb the hell out of them' cry from a frustrated US President.

And an embarrassed world had looked the other way.

Greg read Connors' mind and smiled, tongue in cheek. ‘I know. Not exactly your kind of person. But his record shows he's a man who does what he's told and knows how to keep a secret. And as the head of SAC, he's obviously a man who can be relied on to keep a cool head when the chips are down. What more could you ask?'

‘What more, indeed,' said Connors. ‘Have a nice day.'

After lunch, Connors, Wedderkind, Wetherby, and Brecetti left the base in a rented car. Two miles down the road towards the town of Glasgow, a yellow MRDC helicopter was parked on an empty stretch of ground. They climbed aboard and headed south towards the Fort Peck reservoir.

As they crossed the huge expanse of water, Wetherby tapped Connors on the shoulder and pointed downward out of the window.

‘Did you know this is still the largest earth-fill dam in the world?'

Connors nodded. Tremendous… He decided that next time he would ask the pilot to take the long way around.

About thirty minutes later, they landed on a bare patch of ground at the junction of Highway 22 and the dirt road that led up to Crow Ridge. It had been decided not to risk any landings nearer the Ridge until the full extent of the cutout zone had been carefully charted.

Behind a sign which read ‘MRDC – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY' four of the base camp's prefabricated shacks had already been positioned on Bodell's land, a short distance from the road.

On the other side of the highway a lineman was busy at the top of a telephone pole.

One of Allbright's cadets from Colorado Springs was waiting with a yellow four-door jeep. He wore a blue hard hat and had the name LARSEN stencilled on the breast tag of his olive-drab fatigues. He handed out four yellow hard hats. Connors got into the front seat of the station wagon. The others got into the back.

‘Has General Allbright arived?' asked Connors.