Library of the Dead (6 page)

"I have been so instructed, Prime Minister."

Churchill put the cigar out in his old ashtray. "You're holding Atwood and his party down in Aldershot, correct?"

"That is correct. The professor believes he is being released."

"Released? No. Take him back to his people. I'll be in touch. This is a delicate matter. One can't be hasty."

The general peered at the portly man, clicked his heels together and saluted smartly.

Churchill gathered his coat and hat and without looking back slowly walked out of the War Rooms for the last time.

H
arry Truman looked small behind his enormous Oval Office desk. He was neat as a pin, his blue and white striped tie carefully knotted, his smoke-gray summer-weight suit fully buttoned, black wing-tips polished to a high gloss, every strand of thinning hair perfectly combed down.

Midway through his first term, the war was behind him. Not since Lincoln had a new President undergone such a trial by fire. The vagaries of history had catapulted him into an inconceivable position. No one, himself included, would have bet a plugged nickel that this plain, rather undistinguished man, would have ever risen to the White House. Not when he was selling silk shirts at Truman & Jacobson in downtown Kansas City twenty-five years earlier; not when he was a Jackson County judge, a pawn of boss Pendergast's Democratic machine; not when he was a U.S. Senator from Missouri, still a patronage puppet; not even when FDR picked him to be his running mate, a shocking compromise forged in the hot sticky back rooms of the 1944 Chicago convention.

But eighty-two days into his vice presidency Truman was summoned urgently to the White House to be informed that Roosevelt was dead. Overnight he was obligated to pick up the reins from a man to whom he had hardly spoken during the first three months of the term. He had been persona non grata in FDR's inner circle. He had been kept out of the loop of war planning. He had never heard of the Manhattan Project. "Boys, pray for me now," he told a gaggle of waiting reporters, and he'd meant it. Within four months the ex-haberdasher would authorize the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

By 1947 he had settled into the hard business of governing a new superpower in a chaotic world, but his methodical, decisive style was serving him well and he had hit his stride. The issues had come fast and furious--rebuilding Europe under the Marshall Plan, founding the United Nations, fighting communism with his National Security Act, jump-starting the domestic social agenda with his Fair Deal. I can do this job, he assured himself. Damn it, I'm up to this. Then something from way out of left field landed on his agenda. It was lying before him on his uncluttered desk next to his famous plaque,
THE BUCK STOPS HERE.

The manila folder was marked in red letters:
PROJECT VECTIS--ACCESS: ULTRA
.

Truman recalled the phone call he had received from London five months earlier, one of those vivid events that would remain permanently and exquisitely etched in memory. He remembered what he was wearing that day, the apple he was eating, what he was thinking the moments before and after the call from Winston Churchill.

"I'm pleased to hear your voice," he had said. "What a surprise!"

"Hello, Mr. President. I hope you are well."

"Never been better. What can I do for you?"

Despite the static on the transatlantic line, Truman could hear the constriction in Churchill's voice. "Mr. President, you can do a great deal. We have an extraordinary situation."

"I'll certainly help if I can. Is this an official call?"

"It is. I've been pulled in. There's a small island off our south coast, the Isle of Wight."

"I've heard of it."

"A team of archaeologists has found something there that is frankly too hot for us to handle. The discovery is vitally important but we are concerned we simply don't have the capacity to deal with it in our postwar condition. We can't take the risk of fumbling it. At best it would be a national distraction, at worst a national catastrophe."

Truman could imagine Churchill sitting there, leaning into the telephone, his large frame indistinct in a haze of cigar smoke. "Why don't you tell me what it is your fellows found?"

The unflappable little President listened, his pen poised to jot some notes. After a short while he let the pen fall away unused and began nervously drumming the desk with his free fingers. Suddenly his tie felt too tight and the job felt too big. He had reckoned that the atomic bomb was his trial of fire. Now it seemed like a warm-up to something larger.

Besides the President of the United States, only six other men in the government had Ultra Clearance, a security designation so guarded that its very name was Top Secret. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, had known of the Manhattan Project in its heyday, but only a half dozen were privy to Project Vectis. The only member of Truman's cabinet to have Ultra Clearance was James Forrestal. Truman liked Forrestal well enough personally, but he trusted him absolutely. This was a fellow, like him, who had been a businessman before committing to public service. He had been FDR's Secretary of the Navy, and Truman kept him on in that role.

Forrestal was a cold, demanding workaholic who shared the President's rabid anti-Communist views. Truman had been grooming him for a higher calling. In time Forrestal would assume a newly created position in government, Secretary of Defense, and Project Vectis would stay with him, all-consuming.

Truman cracked the folder's crimson wax seal, an ancient but effective privacy tool. Inside was a memo written by Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, another Ultra insider whom Truman would shortly name to be the first director in a new agency to be called the CIA. Truman read the memo then reached inside and removed a loose bundle of newspaper clippings.

Roswell Daily Record
:
RAAF CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER ON RANCH IN ROSWELL REGION
; and the following day:
GEN. RAMEY EMPTIES ROSWELL SAUCER
. Sacramento Bee:
ARMY REVEALS IT HAS FLYING DISC FOUND ON RANCH IN NEW MEXICO.
There were a few dozen other national AP and UP stories along the same lines.

Alia jacta est
, Truman thought, recalling his boyhood Latin. Caesar crossed the Rubicon declaring "the die is cast," and altered the course of history by defying the Senate and entering Rome with his legions. Truman uncapped his fountain pen and wrote a brief message to Hillenkoetter on a clean sheet of White House stationery. He placed his letter and the other papers back into the folder and retrieved his quaint brass sealing wax kit from the top right desk drawer. He flicked a Zippo, lit the wick of a small jar of kerosene, and began to slowly melt a stick of wax, drip by drip, onto the cardboard until there was a bloodred puddle. The die was cast.

On June 24, 1947, a private pilot flying near Mount Rainier in Washington State reported saucer-shaped objects flying erratically at great speed. Within days hundreds of people across the country had their own sightings and newspapers were awash with flying saucers. The pump was primed for Roswell.

Ten days later, on Independence Day during a fierce thunderstorm, the night sky over Roswell, New Mexico, was lit by a flaming blue object that fell to the earth north of town. Those who saw it swore it wasn't lightning--nothing like it.

The following morning, Mack Brazel, the foreman of the J.B. Foster Ranch, a sprawling sheep farm about seventy-five miles northwest of Roswell, was driving a flock to its watering hole when he discovered a large field scattered with pieces of metal, foil, and rubber. The debris was so dense in places that the sheep refused to traverse the pasture and had to be herded around the site.

Brazel, a sober man with weather-beaten skin, did a quick look-see and convinced himself this was not like the foil weather balloons he had found in the past. This was something much more substantial. On further inspection he spotted a crisscross of tire tracks leading up to and away from the debris field. Jeep treads, he thought. Who the hell has been on my land? He collected a few fragments of metal and finished his herding. Later that evening he called the Chavez County sheriff, George Wilcox, and told him matter-offactly, "George, you know all this talk about flying discs? Well, I think I got one splattered all over my land."

Wilcox was well-acquainted with Brazel and knew he wasn't a crank. If that's what Mack said, well, by God, he was going to take it seriously. He placed a call to the local army airfield, USAAF Roswell, the 509th Bomb Group, and got the base commander on the horn. Colonel William Blanchard, in turn, mobilized his two top intelligence officers, Jesse Marcel and Sheridan Cavitt, to head out to the ranch the next morning. Then he transmitted a message up the line to his superior officer at the Eighth Air Force in Fort Worth, Brigadier General Roger Ramey, who insisted on receiving a blow-by-blow from the field. The general was a firm believer in the adage, "the shit flows uphill," so he called Washington and gave a preliminary report to an aide to the Secretary of the Army. He stood by for a call-back.

Within minutes his aide informed him that Washington was on the line. "Secretary Patterson?" he asked.

"No, sir," came the reply. "It's the Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Forrestal."

The navy? What in Hades is going on? he wondered before picking up the line.

Sunday morning the heat was already baking the red clay when Mack Brazel met the two intelligence officers and a platoon of soldiers at the ranch entrance. The convoy followed his Ford truck over dusty trails to the scrubby hillside where most of the debris lay. The troops set up a perimeter and shuffled uncomfortably under the scorching sun while Major Marcel, a thoughtful young man, chain-smoked Pall Malls and poked through the wreckage. When Brazel pointed to the tire tracks and asked if the army had been there earlier, the major took a particularly deep drag and replied, "I sure wouldn't know about that, sir."

Within a few hours the troops had picked through the site, loaded a bunch of debris onto their tarp-covered trucks, and driven off. Brazel watched the convoy disappear over the horizon and took a piece of metal out of his pocket. It was as thin as the tinfoil in a pack of cigarettes and just as light. but there was something strange about it. He was a strong man with hands like vises, but as hard as he tried, he couldn't bend it at all.

Over the next two days, Brazel observed army personnel shuttling back and forth to the crash site. He was told to keep his distance. On Tuesday morning he was sure he spotted the star of a brigadier general hurtling by in a jeep. Inevitably, most of the town knew that something was going on up at the Foster Ranch, and by Tuesday afternoon the army couldn't keep a lid on the story any longer. Colonel Blanchard issued an official USAAF press release acknowledging that a local rancher had found a flying disc. It had been recovered by the base Intelligence Office and transferred to a higher headquarters. The
Roswell Daily Record
blasted out a special edition that evening and the media frenzy was on.

Curiously, within an hour of Blanchard's official release, General Ramey was on the phone with United Press changing the story. It wasn't a flying disc or anything like it. It was an ordinary weather balloon with a radar reflector, nothing to get excited about. Could the press take pictures of the debris? Well, he replied, Washington had clamped a security lid on the whole thing but he'd see what he could do to help them out. In short order he invited photographers into his office in Texas to snap shots of an ordinary foil weather balloon laid out on his carpet. "Here it is, gentlemen. This is what all the fuss was about."

Within a week the story would lose its national legs. Yet, in Roswell, there were persistent rumblings about strange happenings in the early hours and days after the crash. It was said that the army had indeed been at the crash site before Brazel arrived; there was a disc, largely intact; and that five small nonhuman bodies were recovered early that morning and autopsies conducted at the base.

An army nurse present at the autopsies later talked to a mortician friend in Roswell, sketching drawings on a napkin of spindly beings with elongated heads and massive eyes. The army took Mack Brazel into custody for a while, and afterward he was considerably less talkative. In the days that followed, virtually every witness to the crash and recovery either changed their stories, clammed up completely, or were transferred away from Roswell, some never to be heard from again.

Truman answered his secretary's line. "Mr. President, the Secretary of the Navy is here to see you."

"All right, send him in."

Forrestal, a dapper man whose large ears were his most prominent feature, sat before Truman, his spine ramrod straight, looking every bit the pin-striped banker he had been.

"Jim, I'd like an update on Vectis," Truman began, eschewing small talk. That was fine with Forrestal, a man who used as few words as possible to make a point.

"I'd say things are going to plan, Mr. President."

"The situation down in Roswell--how's that doing?"

"We're keeping the pot stirred just the right amount, in my opinion."

Truman nodded vigorously. "That's my impression from the press clippings. Say, how're the army guys taking to getting their marching orders from the Secretary of the Navy?" Truman chuckled.

"They are not best pleased, Mr. President."

"No, I'll bet they're not! I went for the right man--you. It's a navy operation now so folks'll just have to get used to it. Now tell me about this place in Nevada. How're we doing over there?"

"Groom Lake. I visited the locale last week. It is not hospitable. The so-called lake has been dry for centuries, I would think. It is remote--it borders our test site at Yucca Flats. We will not have a problem with visitors but even if someone purposely sought it out, it is well-defensible geographically, with multiple surrounding hills and mountains. The Army Corps of Engineers is making excellent progress. They are very much on schedule. A good runway has been constructed, there are hangars and rudimentary barracks."

Truman clasped his hands behind his neck, relaxing at the good news. "That's fine, go on."

"Excavation has been completed for the underground facility. Concrete is being poured and the ventilation and electrical work will commence shortly. I am confident the facility can be fully operational within our projected time frame."

Truman looked satisfied. His man was getting the job done. "How's it feel to be general contractor to the world's most secret building project?" he asked.

Forrestal reflected on the question. "I once built a house in Westchester County. This project is somewhat less taxing."