5th May
‘Thank you for seeing us, Mr. President,’ said Robin Marsh.
The three men and one woman sat in comfortable armchairs, positioned on each side of a low coffee table, in front of the president’s desk in the Oval Office.
‘It’s important that we share information on a number of matters,’ President John Redman replied.
‘We’d like to start with the Reverend Christian Leadbetter,’ said Charlotte Goldman, the president’s national security advisor. ‘We understand that Mr. Morrison may be able to help on that point because the Reverend Leadbetter has some quasi-religious devotion to you.’
Charlotte Goldman looked at Paul Maple.
‘Please call me Swan,’ said Paul/Swan.
‘I think we can all use our first names,’ said the president.
‘Do you know where Leadbetter is at the moment?’ Charlotte Goldman asked Paul/Swan.
‘Frankly, I thought he was in your custody,’ Paul/Swan replied.
In reality, Paul/Swan was perfectly aware that Leadbetter was unconscious in intensive care at a Norfolk military hospital, having been lucky to survive a bullet that had skimmed across his right temple.
Joan had explained on an encrypted telephone link that the bullet had not entered Leadbetter’s skull. The glancing impact, however, had been sufficient to cause a brain haemorrhage, and he had not yet regained consciousness.
Joan, Robin and Paul had decided to keep Leadbetter’s whereabouts and health as a secret from the Americans – Joan was unsure who could be trusted and, as Leadbetter had been given no opportunity to reveal what he had learned, there remained many unanswered questions.
One of those questions was about how Leadbetter had got from American custody at Area 51 to Norfolk, England – airline checks had revealed that he had not arrived on a commercial aircraft.
Charlotte Goldman looked towards the president.
‘The fact is,’ the president said, ‘it’s rather embarrassing. We had custody of Leadbetter within Area 51 – he’d kidnapped Rycroft, and Special Forces at the base had captured both.’
The president paused as if searching for words.
‘What happened next?’ asked Robin.
‘No one gets in or out of that base without base security knowing about it,’ the president continued, ‘so security at the centre of the base is not at the highest level.’
John Redman paused once again as if hunting for further words. ‘He escaped by stealing a top secret aircraft.’
Paul/Swan looked puzzled. ‘Nothing I know about Leadbetter indicates that he knows how to fly a plane – especially some state of the art, black project craft.’
‘In a sense, that’s the problem,’ Charlotte Goldman replied. ‘No one can fly these planes anymore. They’re all flown by computers, and they’ve simplified the pilot interface to the point that …’ she also paused as if reluctant to say her final words, ‘to the point that the starcruisers could be flown by a five year old child – they’re easier to control than a bicycle.’
‘We’re pretty sure he flew to England,’ John Redman added. ‘Your newspapers and ours are full of that UFO sighting over London on the night before last. The eyewitnesses reports make it sound a hell of a lot like a starcruiser.’
‘Couldn’t you track it?’ said Robin.
‘No,’ replied Charlotte. ‘Leadbetter was almost impossibly lucky. The craft was about to have its stealth and security configurations set by one of our test pilots. The plane basically asked Leadbetter how trackable it should be, and he set it to maximum stealth. We can’t find it, and it will only respond to his commands.’
‘You’d better tell us all you can about that aircraft,’ said Robin. ‘It’s likely that Leadbetter will try to contact Swan, and it sounds as if finding Leadbetter will be the first step to getting your starcruiser back. After that, we may need to know about the craft.’
Charlotte passed a memory stick to Robin. ‘These are not the full specifications, but they’ll give you an idea of what you’re dealing with.’
‘What happened to Rycroft?’ asked Paul/Swan.
‘I’m afraid he’s dead,’ said Charlotte. ‘I understand that he had heart problems. The kidnap and rescue would have been very stressful – he had a fatal heart attack. For the moment, we’re maintaining that he has just disappeared.’
‘People will speculate that he drove to Area 51 from Vegas like many curious tourist do,’ explained John Redman. ‘Also, anything unusual that happens in the Nevada desert gets attributed to UFOs – that will help us in denying knowledge of his disappearance and also in claiming we know nothing about the Englishman who vanished from Ash Springs.’
‘I assume that Rycroft was genuinely visiting Area 51,’ said Robin. ‘Can I ask why he was doing that?’
‘That’s a very good question,’ remarked the president. ‘I knew nothing of it until Rycroft’s disappearance broke in the press.
‘I don’t believe in UFOs, and certainly there have never been any near Area 51. Anyone who vanishes within a few miles of Area 51 will usually have been picked up by Special Forces from the base. The base commander, Colonel John Hawker, said that Rycroft had driven onto the base by mistake and security had just stopped his car and turned him around – but that doesn’t sound right to me.’
‘Why would they try to rescue him from a kidnapper if he had nothing to do with them?’ said Paul/Swan.
‘Exactly,’ replied the president. ‘Hawker says that the visit to the base and the kidnap, taken together, implied that something unusual was going on. For security reasons, he wanted to find out what that was about by mounting a rescue. Personally, I think there’s more to it than that.’
‘It almost sounds as if the base isn’t fully under your control, Mr. President … er, John,’ Paul/Swan ventured.
‘The cold war produced a peculiar security infrastructure in the US, Swan,’ said the president. ‘There was so much paranoia about communism and spies that nobody ended up trusting anyone.’
Charlotte continued the explanation. ‘There are secret government organisations within secret government organisations in this country. I’m the president’s national security advisor, and I have strong suspicions that there’s a lot going on that neither I nor the president know about.’
‘Even within facilities like Area 51, there may well be secret groups operating with their own agendas,’ the president added. ‘That’s presumably why fundamentalist religious sects in the UK can end up with launch data for our nuclear weapons!’
‘Do you have any idea how that information reached Sam Collins?’ Robin asked.
‘No,’ said Charlotte, ‘nor how Arkangel got what we assume is the current PAL that he gave to Paulov – the launch code that’s changed every five months.’
‘We wouldn’t have even known about that leak,’ added the president, ‘if MI5 hadn’t found those photographs and recordings in Walt Cooper’s van.’
‘Wasn’t Walt Cooper one of your agents then?’ Paul/Swan asked. ‘He and his partner had American diplomatic passports.’
‘That’s what I mean about secret government organisations within secret government organisations,’ replied Charlotte with a sigh. ‘We’ve no idea who Walt Cooper is. He may work for one of those secret groups like A51H or Python – and they’re just two that we happen to know the names of!’
‘What are A51H and Python?’ asked Robin.
‘We know very little about them,’ Charlotte answered. ‘They’re two of those super-secret, quasi-government organisations that even the president can’t find out about. The name A51H is designed to be ironic: the characters stand for “Area 51 and a half”. We guess it’s related to Area 51, but we don’t know how.’
‘Can we talk about the asteroid?’ asked Robin, concluding that the president and Charlotte were simply sharing their ignorance.
‘After you told us about it,’ said John Redman, ‘we ran some calculations of our own. Those calculations supported yours. A team from NASA and the US Air Force have been looking at strategies to deal with the asteroid.’
‘Can you destroy it?’ asked Paul/Swan.
‘Apparently, we can’t just blow it up,’ Charlotte answered. ‘The experts say that would just create a shower of smaller asteroids that would be equally destructive.
‘NASA and the US military have been developing for many years a way to deflect asteroids. There are special missiles at Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota with warheads that are designed to explode in the path an asteroid with a directional blast. That’s designed to deflect the body, rather than destroy it. We’re the only country on Earth with that technology.’
The president spoke again: ‘I agree with your people that the existence of the asteroid has to remain secret,’ he stressed. ‘There would be global political instability if it became known. It’s fortunate that, even if the asteroid does exist, astronomers will probably not spot it until the last moment on the thirteenth of September. Everything will be over, one way or another, before anyone has time to panic.’
‘You’re the guys with the best chance of dealing with this,’ said Robin, almost to himself. ‘What the hell’s Arkangel playing at?’
‘He can’t be trying to deflect the asteroid,’ replied Charlotte. ‘As you say, why bother to take control of our missiles to do something that we were planning to do anyway. The only explanation we can imagine is that he wants to disrupt our attempt.’
‘Why?’ said Paul/Swan.
‘Again, that’s a tricky one,’ Charlotte replied. ‘He’s the head of a fundamentalist religious sect called ARK, isn’t he?’
‘That’s right,’ Paul/Swan replied.
‘Suppose,’ Charlotte Goldman continued, ‘that he and ARK saw the asteroid as a judgement from God. Suppose they wanted to leave its outcome to their God.’