Chapter Forty-Eight
GENERAL SLAUGHTER
1
Time - 13.30-hours, Wednesday, September 23, 2015.
Location – Notel Motel, 3050 W. 63rd Ave., Denver Colorado.
Mission – ‘Gonna git me some pump-n-dump an no sonabitch, mofo, dipshit-loser, ninety-day wonder better rain on my parade today or I’ll feed their balls to my coonhound. Did you get that, Pike?’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘I didn’t hear you, Pike!’
‘Yes sir, sir,’ responded Corporal Pike at the top of his voice.
‘I don’t wanna hear a peep out of my phone unless we’re at least under nukular attack! Is that clear, Pike?’
‘Perfectly clear, General Slaughter. No calls.’
‘Because I really want there to be little Pikes one day, Pike.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Now git your ass off my phone an find yourself somethin to do.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Pike hung up the phone and wiped the perspiration from his brow.
2
Time – 14.45-hours, Wednesday, September 23, 2015.
Location – Notel Motel, Denver Colorado.
Slaughter’s phone rang. He called out from the shower,
‘Do you mind pickin that up, Miss Candy, and tellin em that I’m busy.’
Candy picked up the phone and put it to her ear.
‘Hello, this is Miss Floss and Poopsie is busy right now …’
‘Could you please ask the General to come to the phone please, Miss Floss.’
‘He won’t like it.’
‘Please, Miss Floss.’
‘They want to talk to you, Poopsie.’
Slaughter’s voice growled out of the bathroom,
‘Those sons of bitches got no respect for authority.’
He came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist and grabbed the phone.
‘I will have your gonads decoratin my Christmas tree, Pike, if there ain’t at least world war three goin on out there. Now what is it?’
‘Two bogeys, sir. We tracked them across the Pacific doing over 40,000 miles per hour at an altitude of about 350 miles, sir.’
‘That only saves one of your balls, Pike.’
‘They crossed the coast above Santa Barbara and flew east-north-east over Salt Lake City, sir.’
‘You’re still lookin at a transfer to the Vienna Boys Choir, Pike.’
‘They landed on top of a butte just to the east of a place called Green River, sir.’
‘Where the hell is Green River, Pike?’
‘Sir, it’s in Wyoming, sir.’
‘Wyoming? Are they still there?’
‘No, sir. They touched down at 14.05-hours, sir. They stayed there till 14.36-hours, then they launched and flew back across the Pacific, the same way they came, sir.’
‘Where did they go, Pike?’
‘We tracked them as far as New Caledonia, sir, then they disappeared.’
‘Are you tellin me that you lost my bogies, Pike?’
‘We think that they sped up to faster than what we could track them, sir. We think they were heading to Australia, the same place we think they came from, sir.’
Slaughter thought for a moment then growled down the phone,
‘Why don’t you git your nuts into a car, Pike, an come an pick me up.’
‘Sir, yes, sir. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes, sir.’
3
The matt-black Hummer, with black-tinted glass all around and black wheels, roared into the motel parking lot fifteen minutes later. Slaughter burst out of room 66, the secured one, and jumped in the passenger seat. Both men wore civilian clothes comprising of Hawaiian-style shirts, not tucked in, grey suit pants, black leather shoes, black wraparound sunglasses and narrow-brimmed, grey-coloured straw hats. They raced out of Denver and headed east towards Denver International Airport. They pulled up in the middle of a large, sparsely-utilised, parking lot, located just south of the main airport. They stepped out of the Hummer, walked over to a low, concrete blockhouse, up to a heavy, grey-painted, steel door. Pike briefly scanned the surroundings. He saw about two-hundred cars parked counter-intuitively around the lot. The cars were spread out all over the place, not clustered close to the exits as one would expect. Most of the cars were old and dirty and looked like they hadn’t been moved for many months. Some had flat tires. There were no people to be seen anywhere.
Pike produced a credit-card-sized, rectangular piece of black plastic and passed it in front of three small numbers that were stencilled on the concrete next to the door. The numbers were 666.
There was a clanking noise as the heavy, two-inch-thick door opened. They stepped inside. The heavy door slammed shut behind them, making a resounding metallic boom as it did so. They were in what looked like a concrete sarcophagus, which was dimly lit in red light by four globes located on the ceiling in the four corners. In front of them was another door, which was made of polished stainless steel. There was a keypad in the wall on the left side of the door. The keypad buttons glowed red. Pike keyed in a series of numbers. The buttons changed colour to green. He then keyed in another series of numbers. The stainless door slid sideways making a barely-audible shushing sound. They stepped into a lift. The door shut behind them. There was only one button on the wall. Pike pressed it and the lift began to descend into the bowels of the Earth. Not a word had been spoken between the two men since the phone call.
4
One minute later, they stepped out of the lift. They were one mile deep, directly under the airport. Slaughter pulled a shiny gold badge from his shirt pocket and clipped it to the front of his shirt. It had three hexagrams of six stars and indicated to everyone in the facility that he was one of the top-ranking, Non-Terrestrial Officers, NTOs, in the New World Clandestine Service, NWCS. His existence, in fact the existence of the whole NWCS, was a total secret from everyone on the planet, including the President of the United States. The exception was a small, secret group of individuals that belonged to a powerful, international cabal, which was known to the NWCS as The Head. ‘The Head’ stood for the head of the snake and the NWCS was considered to be its fangs. The NWCS was funded by a multi-trillion-dollar black budget. It was an entity unto itself and was not allied with any military or government.
The Denver facility employed six-hundred and sixty-six people. All were sworn to secrecy and compartmentalised, so no one ever knew more than their immediate sector of responsibility. All employees of the NWCS had passed through a multi-stage recruitment process. All applicants were required to be single and misanthropic. If chosen, they were ‘ground through The Mincer’, which was a carefully-designed, psychological fragmentation of the individual. The process included the administration of powerful psychotropic drugs, which induced complete and permanent amnesia in the aspirant, converting him into a mumbling, weeping mess referred to as ‘Mince’. It was intended that ‘Mince’ could not even remember their mother’s name, their own name, where they came from, who they were or why they were there. The second stage of ‘The Process’ was the ‘moulding of the Mince’ into precisely what the NWCS wanted. They were given a name, a personality, a life, a job and an extremely addictive drug, called Joy. Joy was supplied to the employee as long as they performed up to expectation. If Joy was removed from the diet, the withdrawal symptom was death. All employees could ‘rise to Rank’ through loyalty and excellence in their work. Under the influence of Joy, the individual felt totally fulfilled and contented with his or her lot. Once the employee achieved the level of ‘Rank’, they were trained to interface with the outside world. One subdivision of ‘Ranks’ were the NTO’s. The highest ‘Ranks’ were the Generals and the highest of those were the ‘triple-six-stars’. Slaughter, being one of the triple-six-stars, received his orders from above, although he did not know from whom or from where. 5
Pike and Slaughter walked briskly through the vast underground labyrinth, which appeared not unlike a large mall, except instead of shops, most of the space was taken up by offices. There was no colour, no greenery and the whole complex was lit by an endless procession of ghostly fluorescent lights. The ceilings and walls were bare concrete and the floors were black and white, chequered ceramic tiles. Embedded in the tiles were endless fine strips of copper, which guided a fleet of electric carts to and from the various departments.
Everyone that saw Slaughter stopped on the spot, froze to attention, clicked their heels and gave the Nazi salute. The people who were riding in carts stopped their carts, got out and saluted the General in the same fashion as if Adolf Hitler himself had walked by. Slaughter completely ignored everyone as he strode past them.
They finally walked through a door into a large, hexagonal room. There were about ten personnel in it, all sitting behind large computer screens. Everyone rose and saluted the General. They walked up to one of the screens, which was manned by a man named Kirk, and proceeded to review the data.
‘Walk us through the dope, Kirk,’ said Pike.
‘Yes, sir.’
Kirk’s hands danced over the screen. The globe of the Earth appeared, rendered in full colour and definition. A time clock appeared in the upper right-hand corner.
‘As close as we can make it, they launched at 13.50-hours, Mountain time, somewhere in Australia, sir. We first picked them up on the PG about a thousand miles east of Brisbane.’
Two spots appeared on the screen. Text under the spots read PGSS, which stood for Pacific Geostationary Surveillance Satellite. The spots flew east-north-east trailing a record of their flight track. Above them, more numbers displayed their heading, altitude and speed.
‘Missile alert was activated and deactivated in five seconds, sir. We knew immediately that these bogeys weren’t conventional. Their flight trajectory had no relevance to gravity or orbital physics. They flew at a velocity of 40,000mph, 350 miles above the Pacific. They decelerated from that speed to 10,000mph, in less than a nanosecond, as they crossed the West Coast. We picked them up on ICU2 as they came to a stop at 14.01-hours, still at an altitude of 350 miles, sir.’
The image on the screen changed to a close-up, satellite-surveillance recording of two silver discs.
‘Bullshit!’ growled Slaughter.
‘Yes sir, no sir,’ replied Kirk nervously, then continued with his summary. ‘They descended and landed on top of a butte, about 1.8 miles east of Green River, at exactly 14.05-hours, sir.’
‘This is where it gets good, sir,’ said Pike.
A helicopter suddenly flew into the scene from the west. It came to a hover and appeared to observe three individuals exit the two discs. Then a hang glider flew up the west face of the butte and began to circle around the two discs.
‘I think that is one of those hang gliders with an engine, sir,’ commented Pike.
‘Look, there’s another one!’ exclaimed Slaughter. ‘It’s like a fucking convention down there.’
A second powered hang glider appeared. It began to fly passes above the heads of the three occupants of the discs. Slaughter noticed it immediately.
‘Are those sons of bitches wavin to each other, Pike?’
‘It would appear so, sir.’
The satellite camera zoomed in for a close-up.
‘The freaks got no faces, Pike.’
‘No, sir.’
‘What’s with the waving? Are those people friends with freaks that can fly around at 40,000mph, Pike, and we don’t know anything about them?’
‘Er, that is inconclusive, sir.’
Slaughter screamed at the top of his voice,
‘Inconclusive? Inconclusive? Well get your ass conclusive, Pike. The freaks had a welcoming committee waiting for them and you didn’t even know they were coming.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Look,’ Slaughter pointed at the screen, ‘they’re all backing away and the freaks are getting back into the discs.’
They watched the two discs launch and rapidly fly off in a west-south-west direction. The image on the screen reverted to the PGSS. It tracked the discs as far as New Caledonia where they disappeared off the screen.
‘They’re gone, Pike. Where the fuck have my freaks gone?’
‘Sir, we don’t know, sir.’
Slaughter growled,
‘You don’t know, Pike? You are paid to know.’
‘Sir, we believe they either accelerated to light speed … or …’
‘Or what, Pike?’
‘Er … or they dematerialised into another dimension, sir.’
Slaughter glared at Pike,
‘Your balls are gonna dematerialise into another dimension, Pike, if you don’t find my freaks.’
‘Er … yes sir. … Sir, we extrapolated their trans-Pacific track, sir. Kirk …’
Kirk’s fingers nervously tap-danced over the screen. A new line appeared. It represented a hypothetical extension of the saucers’ flight path from the point of their disappearance. Pike continued,
‘The hypothetical track crosses only one town in all of Australia, sir. It’s a small town on the east coast called Noosa Heads. Can you zoom in on the town, Kirk, although there is no guarantee that they went there, sir.’
Slaughter thought for a moment then said,
‘Yeah, that’s true, but it’s all we got.’ He looked Pike directly into his eyes and sighed, ‘Sixty-eight fucking years, Pike. We’ve been chasing the freaks for sixty-eight years, since fucking Roswell, and what have we got? Sweet fuck all.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I want that technology, Pike. I want it so bad I can taste it. Another chance has presented itself to us and I don’t intend to waste it.’
‘We’ll try again, sir.’
‘Who is that new guy? The ace. What’s his name?’
‘Drek, sir.’
‘Drek? What the fuck kind of name is Drek?’
‘I don’t know, sir. I think it’s foreign, but …’
‘Should we go with just Drek? What about Beck? Shouldn’t we send in both of them?’
‘I don’t think Drek is that kind of operative, sir. Beck would just get in his way. Drek is the new wave. He and his ilk have been constructed as soloists. The Head believes that we have a better chance at acquiring the technology with a more affable approach. I think they want Drek to try to make friends with the ETs, sir, without the ETs knowing who he is. Drek has had very advanced mind training, sir, since he was a small child. I believe that he is a natural psychic-intuitive. Apparently, he has the ability to stop all thought processes and become an EHSP.’
‘Refresh my memory, Pike.’
‘An extra highly sensitive person. We are entering the realms of telepathic warfare with agents like Drek, sir.’
‘Telepathic warfare? What will they think of next, Pike?’
‘We don’t know for sure if the ETs are telepathic, sir, but if they are, we feel that we are ready for them.’
‘OK, Pike, let’s get a brief together for this Drek and then have a meeting with him. I think we’ll send him to … what was the name of that place again?’
‘Noosa Heads, sir.’
‘Yeah, Noosa Heads, and let’s find out who was in the chopper and those hang gliders, and what the hell they were doing there, but let’s not give them any clues to the fact that they’ll be under surveillance. I want to see what they do next.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Pike …’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Why don’t you organise us a trip to Noosa Heads, you and me, commercial, and well scout the place out before we send Drek in, OK?’
‘On it, sir.’
Slaughter smiled,
‘You get to keep your cojones for a little longer, Pike.’ ‘Thank you, sir.’
…….