The Gemini Divergence (29 page)

They were returning from a sampling mission
over the Pacific and had just taken off from a brief stay at
Moffett AFB in California, to drop off samples, and were now headed
for Carswell AFB in Texas.

Gus was looking for landmarks like he usually
did to pass the time during flights.

He knew that they were going to pass over
Davis-Monthan AFB soon, so he was looking for the seemingly endless
rows of scrap aircraft that were parked at the Air Force bone yard
located at Davis-Monthan.

*~*

On the ground at Davis-Monthan, the base
intelligence/UFO officer, Major Stone, was sitting on a park bench
behind his office building with a group of airmen.

All of them were taking a smoke break,
talking about the usual topics, when one of them broke the dull
murmur with, “Look at that, in the sky!”

Major Stone put his hands over his forehead
like a visor, to shield the sun, as he scanned the sky in the
direction the airman was pointing.

At first he could only see the contrail of a
B-36 flying high over the base.

What the hell is all the commotion over a
simple bomber
, he mentally asked himself?

Then he saw them… two silver discs were
approaching the bomber from the rear and pulling up into formation
with it.

What the hell are those
, he thought to
himself, as he felt a shiver of fear run down his back?

Then, he realized that he must do his job, so
he quickly discarded his cigarette and started running across the
grassless desert ground towards the field tower.

*~*

Gus was mildly excited that he had sighted
the base on the ground, so he told Jack, “Hey, there’s the bone
yard, I can see it,” then suddenly his tone changed in mid sentence
to “Holy Shit!, I can see something else too. Jack, forget the
game, come here.”

Jack knew that Gus didn’t get excited like
that unless there was something to see, so he threw his cards down
and picked up his money in a hurry as he moved over towards
Gus.

“Look there! It’s those damn things again!”
as he pointed out of the blister window towards the saucers
approaching from their lower 5:00.

Jack answered excitedly as he saw them right
away, “Why the hell do we keep seeing those guys?”

“Yeah, it almost seems like they might be
looking for us,” answered Gus.

“Holy shit is right, Martians,” exclaimed one
of the other men, who had abandoned their game to come see what the
excitement was about.

“I’ll tell the captain,” yelled another as he
crawled into the tube that led over the bomb bay to the forward
compartments.

The saucers actually got so close this time
that they could see the human pilots through the windows, as well
as the strange markings on the sides of the saucers. The
Raumsfahrtwaffe had evolved their markings and writing to something
that was not as easily discernable to the curious airmen.

Gus decided,
what the hell,
and waved
at them to see what the response would be.

To everyone’s shock the pilot of the closest
saucer waved back at them.

They stood there staring at each other for a
few minutes, everyone was pondering out loud, “Who were they? Where
did they come from? What kind of aircraft were those? What language
are those damn markings?”

Suddenly in a joking gesture, and a visible
smile, the pilot of the closest saucer put up both of his fists in
a gesture, miming that he was shooting a machine gun at them.

“Whooa,” shouted one of the crew.

“I’ll show him,” laughed Jack as he pulled
down the gun sight arm and sighted the saucer.

Even though the guns had been removed, the
gun turrets of the bomber still rotated in response to Jack’s use
of the gun sight.

The pilot of the closest saucer saw the
turrets turn to point at him and immediately put out his hands in a
quick silent gesture to say,
Whooa, I was just kidding.

Then the saucer quickly banked and flew under
the bomber to escape; the other followed soon after in
formation.

Gus and the others quickly ran to the blister
on the other side of the plane and looked at the saucers moving
away to their 10:00 and then turning to fly ahead on the same
bearing as the bomber, but at a much greater speed.

“What the hell were those?” pleaded one of
the gunners.

“I don’t know,” answered Gus in a disgusted
tone, “but I am getting very angry that somebody may know, and is
keeping it to themselves.”

Then the captain came over their headsets,
“We have just been ordered by the Davis-Monthan UFO officer to turn
around and land so that we may brief him on our sighting, so buckle
up, we are going to land very soon.”

*~*

The crew had been detained in the briefing
room for more agonizing hours than they had expected.

Major Stone had been questioning them
relentlessly about their sighting, making sure to write down every
last thing that they said or saw.

The captain spoke out in obvious disgust,
“Major, can we please go? We still have to fly to Carswell and do a
debriefing there.

“We won’t get home till midnight or later,
and if Lemay gets wind of this we will have to start all over
again.”

Major Stone answered, “In due time, captain,
anyway, I have already alerted the general’s office as well as
every commander in the chain of command between him and me.”

Then the debriefing room door opened and a
secretary popped her head in and said, “Excuse me for interrupting
major but General Lemay is on the phone.”

Major Stone froze with his mouth open in
shock and disbelief as he stuttered at first, “F-F-F- For m-me,
General Lemay wants to talk to me?”

“No, sorry Major Stone,” answered the
secretary, “the general asked to speak to a Sergeant Danuser”

Gus swallowed hard when he heard, then he
watched everyone at the tables eyes turn towards him.

The secretary continued, “The General also
wants to talk to him in private on a protected line, so he asked
the ‘DO’ if he could use his office for the call.”

Major Stone, surprised again, inquired, “The
DO is ok with that?”

“Yes sir, he thought that it was a perfect
excuse to step out and have a smoke,” replied the secretary, as she
turned her attention to Gus, whom she assumed was Sergeant Danuser,
because everybody looked at him when she mentioned his name, “Would
you follow me please, sergeant.”

As Gus followed her down the hall, he felt
like he was back in grade school, taking the long walk to the
principle’s office.

Why on earth, does he want to talk to
me,
thought Gus.

When they reached the office the secretary
opened the door and smiled back at him, as she gestured him through
the door.

Once he was inside, she closed it.

Gus looked at the phone on the desk, sitting
off the hook, and walked over to it, and after a moment, finally
picked it up.

“Sergeant Danuser speaking.”

The voice on the other end was not Lemay, but
an aid that replied, “Oh, good sergeant. I will get the general,
and let him know that you are on the Line. Hold on a minute
please.”

After a few moments that seemed like hours,
Gus could hear the sound of footsteps approaching the other phone,
then the sound of somebody picking up the receiver.

The unmistakable voice and tone of General
Lemay then said, “Are you alone on the DO’s phone, sergeant?”

“Yes sir,”

“Sergeant, I know that I usually talk to Mr.
Volmer when I track your crew down, but he is not with you today.
So tell me, please, what did you guys run into up there today?”

Gus answered, “Well General sir, it was a
couple of those things that we saw in the air at Holloman, and
cleaned up at Roswell.”

“How close did they get to you?”

“Close enough for me to see the color of the
pilot’s eyes, and the pimple on his cheek, sir.”

“Did you communicate with them at all?”

“Only waves and hand gestures, sir.”

“What kind of gestures son?”

Gus didn’t know if the general would be mad
so he reluctantly answered, “First we waved at each other, but then
he gestured like he was pretending to shoot at us, as a joke, so we
turned the gun turrets on him, and he ran.”

Gus was anticipating a scolding but instead
the general roared with laughter, “Good job, I’ll bet he soiled his
pants,” then Lemay returned to being serious and continued, “but I
need to know, did everybody see the markings on the saucers?”

“Yes sir.”

“Shit,” remarked Lemay facetiously, “that’s
just great.”

Gus thinking quickly responded, “But General
Sir, you may want to know that the markings that we saw today
didn’t look anything like markings any of us have ever seen before,
and they were certainly not the markings like the ones we found at
Roswell, you know, that only you, Mr. Volmer and I know about
sir.”

Lemay’s tone changed to a more curious and
pleasant one, “Is that a fact? What did they look like?”

“Like Martian writing, or ancient Egyptian
writing, it didn’t look like anything that I have ever seen on a
plane Sir.”

Lemay started thinking out loud, “I wonder
why they would do something like that?”

Gus, in a brave moment, fell into the same
mind games that he would play with Jack and rhetorically suggested,
“You mean the Germans, sir?”

Lemay started to answer, “Yeah… Hey! Damn
it!” as he realized that he had been fooled.

Gus waited for Lemay’s next response. He
never could tell what Lemay would do next.

Lemay started chuckling and said, “I guess
Mr. Volmer is right, maybe you are bright enough for higher rank…
Look, you can’t tell this to anybody else there, especially that
Major Stone, because he will rush right out and tell Captain
Ruppelt; then I’ll never get that fat ugly damn genie back in the
bottle.”

“Oh, I promise sir.”

“Don’t even tell your own people, you can
only talk with Volmer and me about this. Got it?”

“Yes sir, I have it.”

“Do you think that they knew that you were in
the same plane that discovered their Antarctic base?”

Gus was blown away for a moment, because he
had never put it together that what they flew over in Antarctica
was a Nazi base.

He then felt sick to his stomach thinking
about horror stories from bomber crews from the war as he realized
again that he flew right over a Nazi base.”

“Cat got your tongue, son?” interrupted
Lemay.

“Oh, no sir,” responded Gus as he came out of
his daze and answered, “I can’t say sir, they didn’t signal in any
way that they knew who we where… but now that you mention it, we
did have the sinking feeling that they were following us, because
they keep showing up on Jack and I.”

Lemay suggested, “Maybe we need to put the
guns back on those turrets.”

Gus replied, “Well sir, they could have
actually shot us down very easily, if that was their actual
intention. I don’t think they would have joked around with us if
there was any real animosity.”

Lemay blew it off, as he came back with, “Oh,
they pulled that shit during the war all the time. They are big
into that flying knights, or aviator’s honor mumbo jumbo.

“They think that even though Air Forces may
be enemies, that all aviators are best buds and brothers, and a
higher walk of life than other military people.

“That’s why they wouldn’t even mix our downed
aviators with the rest of the prisoners of war, and they even had
their Luftwaffe run the special prisoner of war camps for the
aviators.

“They really believe that bull crap. It’s
something right out of the middle ages, chivalry and that kind of
horse droppings.”

Then, Lemay must have realized that he was
rambling, because he quickly changed the subject, “Listen,
sergeant, I need you to not tell anyone else what we talked about…
Just tell them that I was giving you a confidential message to
relay to Volmer, and then send that pin head Stone in to talk with
me about today’s incident, and tell him to hurry his ass up and not
waist any more of my damn time, and please quote me verbatim on
that last comment.”

~~~**^**~~~

The
Cold War / Lights Over The Capital

“I am sorry Herr General, but I just don’t
believe that this barrage of buzzing the American’s Air Force is
doing anything but feeding the American public’s thirst for alien
fever,” insisted Schwerig, “Their own military is explaining it
away as hogwash to its own ranks.”

“Yes… perhaps you’re right,” responded
Kreutztrager as he watched from Schwerig’s new office window as
workers hurriedly constructed the first and second stations, “What
do you propose that we do?”

“I think that we need to inflict a limited
strike on a strategic target. That will bring them to realize that
we are a force to be reckoned with.”