MJ-12: Endgame

15

Hoyt Vandenberg grimaced with every jolt of the C-47 Skytrain as it cruised over the Northern Rockies. The transport wasn’t particularly well suited for comfort — Vandenberg was traveling below the radar, hence a seat on one of the Air Force’s mainstay troop and cargo transports. But each jostle sent a wave of pain through the lower core of his body, a reminder of the sentence he’d been given months ago.

Cancer.

And not just any cancer — prostate cancer, which he felt was the worst goddamn sentence he could’ve gotten. Every trip to the bathroom was an ordeal. Sitting down had to be managed very carefully, and standing up almost as much. He’d gotten good at wearing a poker face through the pain, but every now and then his body would come up with some new stab of agony, or some additional indignity that required him to change his habits or limit his activities. He missed golf like you wouldn’t believe, but the last swing he took with his driver had him doubled over in pain for a good ten minutes.

He wasn’t going to give up the Scotch, though, despite what the docs at Walter Reed said about mixing booze with meds. It was the only goddamn thing that let him sleep at night. He wished he had a flask with him now, but Vandenberg had spent thirty years in the military without taking a drink on duty, and he was going to hold on to that distinction until he retired.

That day was probably coming soon. He hated admitting it, but the pain was getting unmanageable some days. The docs gave him maybe six months if he stayed in uniform and kept trying to do his job, maybe a year or two if he gave in and retired. But what the hell would happen then? Bedridden and drugged? Vandenberg had flown combat over Africa and Italy during the war. He wanted a better end than that. He probably wouldn’t get it, though.

And the kid flying this bird seemed to have a natural affinity for finding turbulence. The pilot looked to be all of seventeen, blond-haired and freckled like the boys on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. Sure, he was a first lieutenant and probably ten years older than that. But Vandenberg knew his appraisal was shaded by his own mortality.

With a sigh and a wince of pain, Vandenberg pulled a folder from his bag and began reading. The Russia op wasn’t a bust, per se, but it sure as hell wasn’t going according to plan. Wallace had reported on Frank Lodge’s exploits as if they were all part of the plan, and suggested Maggie Dubinsky was playing double agent. How much of this was true, and how much of it was to help cover a massive snafu, Vandenberg couldn’t say. But he knew Wallace was inherently cautious — a trait which made him an excellent field operative. What was going on now was far too cowboy for Wallace. Lodge, sure. Lodge could rely on the expertise, skills, and memories of, at last count, forty-three different people. But Wallace was the commander on the scene, and Lodge would have to go through him — unless he went off on his own.

What a mess. And now Wallace wanted to smuggle the three captured Soviet Variants out of the country and back to the U.S. for study, to see if Beria’s assertion of changes in Variant abilities was indeed true. And since the NKVD and MGB were now on lockdown — the Lubyanka was completely off limits, as was the Kremlin — Wallace wanted to send Lodge and Sorensen to East Germany, of all places, on the recommendation of Rose Stevens, in order to drum up dissent and try to give Beria another black eye.

Oh, and to top it all off, three Variants were missing in action in the Korean theater.

President Eisenhower had been spitting bullets when they’d briefed him a few days ago. Publicly, Ike was a model of Midwestern restraint and moderation, but the President could deploy his rage like a tank column hitting the breach. Vandenberg and Dulles had gotten an earful yesterday, culminating in an ultimatum — figure out what’s going on with the Variants, fix the Russia op and get Beria out of there, or else the MAJESTIC-12 program would be shut down for good.

Dulles was managing the Russia end of things, and seemed to be settling in for the long game. CIA would start drawing up plans to try to get the Soviet Variants out from behind the Iron Curtain, and the director was leaning toward approving the East German op, if only to get some of the Variants out of the Soviet Union for a while to let things cool down.

Vandenberg — the most senior official remaining in the MAJESTIC-12 program — had been tasked with getting to the bottom of the potential changes in Variant Enhancements, hence the trip to Idaho aboard a rust-bucket cargo plane now on its final approach to Mountain Home Air Force Base, blessedly beyond the mountains.

Of course, the kid at the controls jostled the landing, causing Vandenberg to nearly cry out in pain as his body bounced off the seat. Sure, the crosswinds over the high prairie were pretty intense sometimes, but what the hell were they teaching those kids before giving them their wings? He hoped the new Air Force Academy, once it opened, would do a better job. And he hoped he’d get to see it opened some day.

Vandenberg packed up his things, got up, and headed for the hatch, pausing to shake the pilot’s hand and give him a little advice on the wind. He was tempted to rip the kid’s head off, but knew that wouldn’t really teach him anything, so he opted for magnanimous paternal advice and hoped it would pay off. Heading down the stairs, he saw Detlev Bronk waiting for him next to a jeep, carrying a briefcase.

“How was the flight, General?” Bronk asked after a handshake.

“Bumpy. How do things look here?”

The lanky scientist just scowled. “Let’s get you to a secure area.”

Bronk took the general’s duffel and threw it into the jeep, hopping into the driver’s side. The biophysicist wasn’t full-time at Mountain Home anymore, having accepted a position at Johns Hopkins. Rumor had it that he’d soon be running the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Bronk was a smart guy, and cleared for everything related to MAJESTIC-12, so it was perfectly natural to bring him back for an audit.

Within minutes, the jeep pulled up to a large prefab hangar, notable only for the multiple layers of barbed wire around it and the squadron of MPs at the gate. Both men had their credentials reviewed three times, and were searched thoroughly enough to make Vandenberg wince again, before they finally entered the building itself. Inside was a cramped conference room, where Bronk flipped a switch on a small metal box on the table — an electronic jammer designed to confound listening devices.

“We have a problem,” Bronk began. “I thought you said you’d have your best minds working on this project.”

Vandenberg was taken aback. “We do. Or we did. We assigned Lloyd Berkner and Don Wenzel to the project after you left. What happened?”

Bronk snorted as he took a seat, leaning back and folding his arms across his body. “I’ve met them. Fine men, sure. But their background is in engineering and radiation, not biology or the kind of physics we need to really study this thing.”

“Not everybody can get themselves a TOP SECRET clearance these days, what with McCarthy and all the paranoia,” Vandenberg replied with a shrug. “So what did they miss?”

“A little too much. For one, the study of the Variants themselves is almost completely lacking now. Any new Variants are brought in and assessed for their Enhancements, then sent off to training. They’re establishing a baseline, sure, but there’s no further testing. And neither of those men trusts Rose Stevens enough to let her in on it, so the greatest mind we have available to us is being purposefully left out of the loop.”

Vandenberg scowled. “I know. Same with Wallace. That’s a direct order from Truman after what happened in ’49, and Eisenhower agreed to keep it that way. The vortex study and Variant assessments aren’t part of their purview now.”

“Well, that’s dumb, Hoyt. Between the two of them, they’re the sum total of the institutional knowledge around this project, aside from me.” Bronk opened his briefcase and started pulling out files. “I have them doing follow-ups on the Variants we have left here now, mostly new recruits, to see if there’s any changes in their Enhancements, as well as their physical and psychological profiles. Probably won’t have anything for a few more days yet, but already I’m starting to see evidence that some of their abilities have changed. Nothing big, but a few of them have taken on some new side effects, and we already have one — you know the Spanish girl who can fly? She can now go supersonic, whereas she couldn’t before.”

“That’s handy,” Vandenberg said.

“Not really. For one, she needs a special flight suit now, otherwise she’ll hurt herself due to the pressure and friction. She still can’t carry anything or anyone with her, and she’ll really do a number on herself if she collides with anything. She can just fly really fast now.”

“All right. So their Enhancements are changing. What else?”

Bronk pulled out a series of readouts and charts. “We’re still using the same monitoring equipment that Kurt Schreiber put in place back in ’48. There’s better equipment out there now. I suppose, to their credit, Berkner and Wenzel tried to get better gear, but the Defense Department budget’s been constrained over the past few years, what with Korea. They’re in limbo. But I made a few calls to some friends at General Electric, and we got new monitors up and running yesterday. These are the results.”

Vandenberg looked at the squiggly lines and series of numbers and immediately gave up. “What am I looking at?”

With a smile and a sigh, Bronk circled three similar-looking patterns of lines on one page, then found others on subsequent pages, followed by groupings of numbers throughout. “We know that the vortex simply churns out low levels of nonionized radiation as it sits there and spins and defies physics,” Bronk said. “When it creates a new Variant, it sends out a huge pulse, directionally. Between that and Wallace, we’re usually able to track down the new Variant and get them in here before too long.”

“Right. So?”

“These patterns are similar in wavelength and frequency, but they’re happening at the extreme ends of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is why our gear couldn’t detect them. They’re also happening a lot. These are just the instances we’ve had over the past twenty-four hours, since we got our new detectors up and running. Twenty-seven transmissions.”

“And these are new?”

“Not entirely. There’s a tiny bit of this pattern that could be picked up on our old gear, just a fraction. I had the boys here look back over the data to find spikes in that piece of the EM spectrum. We’ve had hits like that going back to ’46, but it looks like background noise against everything else — except for this.”

Bronk pulled out a hand-drawn bar chart, with each bar labelled annually. The bars were pretty small — until 1952, which rose considerably. The bar for 1953 was even larger — and it was only May. “So you think that this activity’s increased,” Vandenberg said. “Is it creating new Variants? Maybe different kinds of Variants?”

“We don’t think so. If it were, then we just had twenty-seven new comic book superheroes created in the last day, and there’s no way in hell you could cover that up,” Bronk said with a smile. “Unless I’m not cleared for that sort of information.”

Vandenberg wasn’t laughing. “So what is it, then?”

“We don’t know.”

“Theories? Shot in the dark?”

“Dan Wallace confirmed that there’s some kind of intelligence behind all this, but we’ve been unable to communicate with it,” Bronk said. “What if these patterns are communication? What if the vortex is communicating with our Variants? Variants all over the world?”

Leaning back, Vandenberg closed his eyes and counted to three — a tic he used to calm himself when under stress. And this was a doozy. “What are they saying?”

“I don’t even know if we have the gear to interpret it, if it’s really communication at all,” Bronk said. “It could be anything. We can’t even say for certain if it’s related to the variability we’re seeing in Enhancements, and we’re still trying to nail down the vectors, since the signals are so weak. But this,” he added, stabbing the stack of papers with his finger for emphasis, “is a real, material change in this phenomenon, and we need to make it a priority to get to the bottom of it.”

“Yes, you do,” Vandenberg said. “What do you need from me?”

Bronk pulled another piece of paper from his briefcase and handed it over. Vandenberg scanned it and realized he’d have to do some serious budgetary and logistical maneuvering to get everything squared.

Then he got to the last item.

“Schreiber? Really?”

Kurt Schreiber was a former Nazi scientist who’d conducted early research into paranormal abilities as part of Hitler’s Übermensch drive. He had been brought over as part of Operation PAPERCLIP after the war, and had been attached to MAJESTIC-12 until 1949—when he’d tried to ally with a captured Soviet Variant and sell out the program to the Russians, but had gotten caught up in a sting orchestrated by Wallace.

Schreiber’d spilled everything he knew, eventually, thanks to Maggie Dubinsky’s sometimes brutal emotional manipulation. But the interrogations had left him a complete basket case, and the former Nazi had spent the last four years in lockdown right there at Mountain Home, monitored by the psych staff and generally ignored by everyone else.

Until now.

“I know he’s round the bend, Hoyt, and we wouldn’t let him anywhere near the vortex. But if he has some insights into any of this, no matter how cracked, I think we need to use him. I mean, if Danny’s right about the changes he’s seeing and what Beria’s telling them, this could spiral out of control fast.”

Vandenberg leaned back in his seat and winced through the pain that shot through his body. Do we use an insane Nazi to figure out if some kind of alien intelligence is trying to manipulate our agents through a freakish hole in the fabric of space?

Retirement was starting to look better by the second. This was a horrible way to spend one’s remaining days.

At first glance, the room looked normal, if Spartan. The bed looked comfortable, with a homemade quilt giving it a homey touch. The writing table didn’t have drawers, but it did have a radio and lamp, and the chair was padded leather. There were shelves, though lacking in the usual knickknacks beyond a handful of paperback books, copies of the Idaho Statesman, and some old photographs — without frames, oddly enough. The bureau had the usual collection of men’s clothing, all neatly folded, and the wooden floor was covered by a knock-off Persian-style rug.

But the walls were completely bare, and if you looked closely, you’d find the radio and lamp were bolted to the table — which in turn was bolted to the floor, as was the chair. The bed, too, was firmly fixed to the floorboards. Open the drawers, and you’d see no belts or suspenders, and the corners of the furniture were all rounded.

The man in the room didn’t seem to notice or care, busy as he was writing in pencil on a legal pad, covering the paper with mathematical formulae, sketches, notations, and a jumble of words in several languages. There were four other legal pads next to him, all filled. That was just yesterday’s output.

There was a knock on the door, but the man didn’t stop his work, only began to write faster, more frenetically and sloppier, a rush to finish his thought before the next thing happened. Already, his mind jumped ahead — it was not meal time, nor bathroom time, nor was he scheduled for an exam or evaluation. It was a Tuesday, and nothing was supposed to happen on a Tuesday. That and Sunday were the days he could truly be productive, so whatever was coming was going to be new.

New was in such short supply these days.

Finally, the man stopped writing and turned to see who interrupted him — and smiled. New, indeed.

“I can only imagine one plausible reason for your visit. Let’s get to work, then, shall we?” Kurt Schreiber said.

Detlev Bronk just scowled.