Amelia Lopez sat on a rock and slowly removed her mirror shades before pouring bottled springwater over her face. I felt her eyes follow me as I moved between clumps of vegetation, kicking over rocks and sifting the sand, even though there was nothing to see.
Lopez bent down and ran her fingers through the soil. "I read they sieved the dirt for a thousand yards out from the impact point," she said. "Those guys were damned thorough. A few weeks after they left it was like nothing ever happened here." She paused a moment before adding: "You being an expert, I imagine you knew that."
It was framed as a question and I grappled for something to say, con scious that she'd brought me here for any insight I could provide into the events ofthat night.
I said nothing, so she turned to me and said: "Are you gonna tell me what is really going on here?"
Overhead, an eagle cried. As I watched it wheel on the updrafts I hoped that she wouldn't press me for an answer, because I didn't know what to tell her.
Standing here in this place, I was filled with the old feeling. It was almost impossible to articulate, but it left you with a taste in the mouth, some innate sense, that however far you dug, however many people you interviewed or questioned, you were simply scratching the surface of the sprawling U.S. defense-industrial base. What had happened here, the events that had imprinted themselves onto the landscape in a moment or two of madness a decade or so earlier, were almost tangible, even though there was no physical evidence — no fragments amidst the thin soil and the rocks — to suggest anything out of the ordinary had occurred.
These people were thorough; Lopez herself had said it. But they left something behind, something you couldn't see or touch — and it was that trace, that echo of past deeds, that had brought me here.
The Stealth Fighter was real enough. As a reporter, I'd covered it from the inside out. Yet as a piece of technology it was more than two decades xii Prologue old, almost every detail of it in the open now. But strip away the facts and the feeling persisted.
I got it when I went to U.S. government defense laboratories and on empty windblown hangar floors in parched, little-known corners of the country. I got it at press conferences in power-soaked corridors of the Pentagon. But most of all I got it when I stared into the eyes of the people who worked on those programs.
What I got back was a look. Individually, it said nothing, but collec tively it told me there was a secret out there and that it was so big no one person held all the pieces. I knew, too, that whatever it was, the secret had a dark heart, because I could sense the fear that held it in place.
It was impossible to tell Lopez any of this, of course, because it was simply a feeling. But as I headed back for the car, I knew the trip hadn't been a waste. At long last, the secret had an outline. Through half-closed eyes, I could almost reach out and touch it.
Chapter 1
From the heavy-handed style of the prose and the faint handwritten "1956" scrawled in pencil along the top of the first page, the photocopied pages had obviously come from some long-forgotten schlock popular science journal.
I had stepped away from my desk only for a few moments and somehow in the interim the article had appeared. The headline ran: "The G-Engines Are Coming!"
I glanced around the office, wondering who had put it there and if this was someone's idea of a joke. The copier had cut off the top of the first page and the title of the publication with it, but it was the drawing above the headline that was the giveaway. It depicted an aircraft, if you could call it that, hovering a few feet above a dry lakebed, a ladder extending from the fuselage and a crewmember making his way down the steps dressed in a U.S.-style flight suit and flying helmet — standard garb for that era. The aircraft had no wings and no visible means of propulsion.
I gave the office another quick scan. The magazine's operations were set on the first floor. The whole building was open-plan. To my left, the business editor was head-down over a proof-page checking copy. To her right was the naval editor, a guy who was good for a windup, but who was currently deep into a phone conversation and looked like he had been for hours.
I was reminded of a technology piece I'd penned a couple of years earlier about the search for scientific breakthroughs in U.S. aerospace and defense research. In a journal not noted for its exploration of the fringes of paranormality, nor for its humor, I'd inserted a tongue-incheek reference to gravity — or rather to antigravity, a subject beloved of science-fiction writers.
"For some U.S. aerospace engineers," I'd said, "an antigravity pro pulsion system remains the ultimate quantum leap in aircraft design." The implication was that antigravity was the aerospace equivalent of the holy graiclass="underline" something longed for, dreamed about, but beyond reach — and likely always to remain so.
Somehow the reference had escaped the sub-editors and, as a result, amongst my peers, other aerospace and defense writers on the circuit, I'd taken some flak for it. For Jane's, the publishing empire founded on one man's obsession with the detailed specifications of ships and aircraft almost a century earlier, technology wasn't something you joked about.
The magazine I wrote — and still write — for, Jane 's Defence Weekly, documented the day-to-day dealings of the multibillion-dollar defense business. JDW, as we called it, is but one of a portfolio of products detailing the ins and outs of the global aerospace and defense industry. If you want to know about the thrust-to-weight ratio of a Chinese combat aircraft engine or the pulse repetition frequency of a particular radar system, somewhere in the Jane's portfolio of products there is a publication that has the answers. In short, Jane's was, and always has been, about facts. Its motto is: Authoritative, Accurate, Impartial.
It was a huge commercial intelligence-gathering operation; and pro vided they had the money, anyone could buy into its vast knowledge base.
I cast a glance at the bank of sub-editors' work-stations over in the far corner of the office, but nobody appeared remotely interested in what was happening at my desk. If the subs had nothing to do with it, and usually they were the first to know about a piece of piss-taking that was going down in the office, I figured whoever had put it there was from one of the dozens of other departments in the building and on a different floor. Perhaps my anonymous benefactor had felt embarrassed about passing it on to me? I studied the piece again. The strapline below the headline proclaimed: "By far the most potent source of energy is gravity. Using it as power, future aircraft will attain the speed of light." It was written by one Michael Gladych and began: "Nuclear-powered aircraft are yet to be built, but there are research projects already under way that will make the super-planes obsolete before they are test-flown. For in the United States and Canada, research centers, scientists, designers and engineers are perfecting a way to control gravity — a force infinitely more powerful than the mighty atom. The result of their labors will be antigravity engines working without fuelweightless airliners and space ships able to travel at 170,000 miles per second."
On any other day, that would have been the moment I'd have consigned it for recycling. But something in the following paragraph caught my eye. The gravity research, it said, had been supported by the Glenn L.
Martin Aircraft Company, Bell Aircraft, Lear "and several other Ameri can aircraft manufacturers who would not spend millions of dollars on science fiction." It quoted Lawrence D. Bell, the founder of the planemaker that was first to beat the sound barrier. "We're already working on nuclear fuels and equipment to cancel out gravity." George S. Trimble, head of Advanced Programs and "Vice President in charge of the G-Project at Martin Aircraft," added that the conquest of gravity "could be done in about the time it took to build the first atom bomb."