Crooked (9 page)

I walked a few more minutes without finding a break. I stumbled over a raised stone and almost fell across what turned out to be a long rectangle of low stones. I traced out a foundation, no telling how old. I stopped when I heard an engine, faint and far off, and saw the dim glow of headlights inside the fence’s perimeter. Indistinct voices drifted across the wintry space. Tires on a gravel road. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I saw the silhouette of a building in the cleared space beyond the wire fence. It was a compound of some kind.

I was cold and wet and was probably going to freeze to death at this rate. I had never been the kind of boy who climbed trees, even such as we had in dusty Yorba Linda, but I chose a tree, laid one hand on a low branch, and got a face full of snow. I heaved myself up and slowly, painfully, ascended, smearing sap across my expensive congressional-grade overcoat and getting a startling amount of snow down my collar. I crawled out on a thick branch that stretched over the fence, hung a moment, and then dropped heavily onto the frozen ground.

What now? I got up and stood there for a while in the dark, watching the small cluster of lights in the center of the cleared compound. Nothing much seemed to be happening there; I heard a few sleepy footfalls.

I walked along the inside of the fence until I found a gravel path and followed it toward the lights. I tried to stay quiet; I was just about invisible, and as no one was expecting a wave of congressmen to come pouring over the fence, as far as I knew, I pressed the advantage. The facility was settling in for the night. There were three or four low Quonset huts with barred windows and darkened interiors, and I peered through the windows. One was obviously a dormitory. In the next, a window looked into a room with an examination table, shelves of instruments, and labeled glass bottles. An infirmary or an autopsy lab. The table held sturdy restraints. Another window showed a room of metal bookshelves and filing cabinets crammed close together and seeming to fill almost the whole space. I skulked from one hut to the next with no clear idea what I was looking for.

I thought of Alger Hiss’s words:
The surveillance images at first seemed to show distorted human forms and cloudy architectural vistas. But on further study I marked the
correspondences with certain ancient texts I had encountered and with images copied from the deeper regions of the Lascaux cave complex, areas that were purposely collapsed by the original explorers. I have become convinced that these are images of real phenomena, evidence of a terrible militarization of an obscene and dangerous antiquarian knowledge.

A two-story farmhouse stood in the center of things. Lights were on on the second floor, and figures moved about inside. Looking upward as I walked, I stumbled down a flight of stone steps and into the doorway of a cellar, closed off by rusty metal bars, stingingly cold. The flashlight revealed nothing behind them but more stone steps leading farther down, and then—a shape that looked oddly like a bare foot. I looked again and saw nothing.

I turned to go and found myself staring straight into a blinding white light.

“Sir?” a young man’s voice called. “Sir? You ain’t supposed to be in there.”

I half lifted my arms in surrender.

“Don’t move,” he called. “Look away, okay? Please, I—I don’t want to see your face.” He sounded terrified.

“All right, all right. I can explain,” I gabbled, absolutely certain I could not. Where exactly would an explanation begin?

“Are you—you’re not one of them? From the diggings?”

“No. I’m Senator Richard Nixon.”

“Dick Nixon?”

“Yes…yes. That’s me,” I said.

“Well, I’ll be. Senator Nixon himself. I’m a hell of an admirer, sir.”

“Thanks, thanks. That’s me. Just inspecting the facilities.”

“I wasn’t told you’d be on base, sir. It’s an honor. You okay? You lost, maybe?”

I nodded. “Maybe a little. What’s your name, son?”

“Miller, sir. I thought maybe you was one of the things—well, I ain’t meant to say but I’m sure you know. Come on back to the farmhouse.”

I was hustled into the light and warmth of the main house and shook hands with a Colonel McAllister, Army Corps of Engineers, who didn’t seem particularly surprised to get a congressional visit at this hour. I tried to place his age but it was hard. He might have been a harried, weathered forty-five or a rugged, enduring sixty. His skin hung unusually loose on his face.

“Look, I understand why you’re here, Senator.”

“Ah, well, I’m glad of that.”

“You’re with, what, Armed Services? Intelligence?”

“Ah, no. Just routine oversight.”

“Jesus, all right. You ain’t puissant, are you?”

“What?”

“Forget it, forget it.”

“Well,” I said, “we’ve got a right to know what you’re up to. It’s only common sense. Just here to see the taxpayers’ money is being put to good use.”

He ran a hand through thinning hair. “Money, Jesus. You’d think we were—well, listen, forget it. Senator, we’re keeping America safe best way we know how. I understand the situation’s serious. But we’ve got attrition rates, we’ve got material we just don’t know what to do with yet. It’ll take time.”

“How much time, do you think?” I said. What did he mean?

“We got the material, we’re going to see results. You’ll see.”

I was shown to guest quarters in what looked like a New England bed-and-breakfast and fell asleep reading excerpts from Bradford’s history of the colonies, some battle or other in King Philip’s War.
As ever Captain John Morton had fought his way to the very thick of the fraye and was the first to enter that dredful space beneath the Pawtuxet hillside. Fourteen men followed after, white men and Naragansett, and for a space of nearly an hour there was silence untill Morton emerged alone nor he wd not speke of what he witnesed therein…

I was awakened just before dawn by a frantic lowing among the cattle that lasted maybe fifteen minutes, and I didn’t sleep again after that.

In daylight nothing looked quite so worrisome. The temperature climbed above freezing just long enough for a miserable bout of rain, which rang off rectangular buildings of corrugated metal slumped in a desultory arrangement on a piece of farmland. They looked temporary but had clearly been there over a decade.

Miller took me on a walking tour of what might have been the world’s shabbiest research institute. A library, rows of bookshelves and a sharp musty smell, books with pages swelling from the damp. I looked at a few, a mix of early American history, theology, and the latest in behavioral psychology. A few were written in dense Gothic script I couldn’t decipher.

The next building was divided into classrooms and offices. In one office, a group of four Germans looked up from a heated discussion over coffee. In the next room, a darkly bearded man angrily moved to block my view of a blackboard and waved us on. The room after that was quite large, almost a third of the building’s floor area, and empty except for a wall-size map of Europe and Asia densely inscribed with notes and studded with pushpins.

The next building was a storehouse of architectural debris: chunks of pillars, gargoyles, weathered stone blocks crowded together. Mixed in were odder items—a field artillery piece that might have seen action in the Franco-Prussian War, tapestries, carved wooden furniture. The next building stood entirely empty except for large scorch marks on the concrete floor.

Miller told me the areas of the base I was advised not to go near: four bunkers standing in a precise row and a blunt gray concrete pyramid surrounded by a low moat with water at the bottom that hadn’t frozen. A cooling tower? In one far corner there was a small cemetery marked with old, old granite stones. Pawtuxet Farm looked small and snowbound and sad.

I was, frankly, a little bored. What was happening here? I’d seen plenty of books in Arabic script, so I conjectured it was a kind of applied anthropology center for political hot spots.

The only unusual thing about it was the level of everyday unease on display. No one seemed to be getting much sleep. I passed a lavatory and heard the sound of vomiting. There were no women at all on the base, or at least none that I saw.

I went back to the stone steps once but there was nothing to indicate they ever saw any use. I looked up to see a figure watching me from the farmhouse’s upper floor; it stared at me for long moments until I walked off, and the curtains closed.

That night in McAllister’s office, I played the only card I could think of to play.

“Colonel, about these results—”

“What is it, Nixon? Is the general not satisfied?”

“Frankly, there’s talk of suspending funding.”

“You can’t possibly—” He seemed, all at once, terrified.

“That’s right, Colonel. If we don’t see results soon—”

“You Washington people really don’t know the situation.” He had turned a startling yellowish white. “There’s things we’ve started here that you’d best not stop.”

“Well, Colonel, I’m not seeing the results I’d hoped for.”

“Results.” He giggled to himself and shook his head. “You’d see some results if you shut this place down, that’s for damn sure.”

“Well, I’ve come all the way up here, I’m going to need something to put in my report. To the general.”

An orderly poked his head in. “Sir? Sorry to bust in. There’s been an arrival.”

“What’ve we got? American?”

“Yes, sir.”

The colonel rose and shrugged his coat on.

“Well, come on, Mr. Nixon. This is what you wanted.”

I hurried after him, out into the cold and bright stars, followed him between buildings at a half trot, and then I was back in the map room. Seven or eight uniformed men stood uncomfortably against the walls. The only light was what spilled in from the hallway. The room was as empty as before except for a folding chair in the very center of it where a man sat, his face in shadow. Everyone spoke in whispers in the semidarkness.

I took my hat off without knowing why. There was something sad and solemn in the occasion.

The man in the chair stirred.

“Sir? I’ve—I think there’s something wrong with my eyes, sir,” he said. The voice had a thin, whistling quality that made it a little unpleasant, as if something were wrong with his mouth.

“You’re okay, son,” McAllister said. “Now, listen, I’m with the military and I have a few questions for you. What can you see right now?”

“I—I don’t understand. Where’s the captain? The flight plan—” the man said. He sounded young.

“You’re back in the States now. You’re home.”

“Where am I? You’re—did we crash or something? Am I in a hospital? I don’t like this.”

“This isn’t working,” somebody growled.

“What was the flight plan?”

“I don’t know. We were over water. The Adriatic. Then east, Turkey. Just trying to bait ’em. I do ECM—jamming and stuff.”

One of the uniformed men began sketching on the map.

“Try the words,” said a second voice.

“Proctor, you do it,” McAllister snapped. Rustle of a piece of paper changing hands. Proctor squinted in the dim light.

“‘By the Ninth’—what does this say?” He started again, louder. “‘By the Ninth Article, Section Seven, of the United States Constitution, I do compel and require you to answer all questions put to you by order of a duly sworn representative of the executive branch. By such articles of the ruling covenant as shall not be mentioned in this place.’”

“Now, tell me, son, what can you see?” McAllister said.

“There’s a—a hill, I think. And a house in the distance. There’s a sun but it don’t look right, it’s orange. How can that be? I don’t like this at all.”

“Is there anyone else with you?”

“There’s a—in the distance. A man getting closer. And he’s—why does he look like that? Is he all right?” he said. “I—I still can’t remember what happened. How did we get off course? My memory…”

His voice got more and more whispery, then trailed off into nothing.

“Hit the lights,” Proctor said. The fluorescents flickered on and we all blinked as at the end of a play. The chair was empty.

“Waste of time,” McAllister said. He walked slowly to the center of the room and put his hand on the chair wonderingly. The others filed out, grumbling. I heard two men arguing in German, their voices fading into the night.

“Blue Ox initiative. One of our less successful nights,” McAllister said finally.

“I don’t understand. Who was in the chair?”

“Tentative ID, Tech Sergeant John Bowman. ECM specialist, crewed on a modified C Ninety-Seven out of Wiesbaden last year. Four hours out they realized he wasn’t on the plane anymore. We’ve had him a couple of times now. He never knows shit.”

“Where—where did he go?”

McAllister sighed. He looked tired. “One of the mandates for Blue Ox is intelligence gathering,” he said. “But we’ve still got nothing behind the Iron Curtain.

“Ever since the last of the Romanovs bled out, it’s been batshit in there. For forty-five years, from the Polish border to the Sea of Japan, it’s been open season. We don’t even have good maps of the place. At the end of World War Two we had all those guys in place, ready to stick it to the Sovs, be our eyes on the ground. Tough guys who’d fought the Nazis. And the NKVD rolled ’em right up, every one.

“We did what we could, started picking up German POWs who got let out of the gulags and repatriated. Bits and pieces. Railway lines, airfields, mines. A couple whole cities we didn’t know about. You can think of this as the logical next step. There’s more than one way out of the Soviet Union. So you tell the big man we’re making progress.”

“Big man?”

“Ike. None of this happens without him.”

I lay awake the rest of the night, watching the cold light filter back through the curtains. I had never spent much time in New England and the cold was new to me, and the pitiless trackless forests. I wondered that anyone had thought to try to live here. I wondered about the Pilgrims making their way here, grim and God-haunted, scraping at the iron soil, and about what they would or wouldn’t do to survive. Were they in any sense American? What did that actually mean?