Chupacabra: A Novella
room asked the question almost simultaneously, with puzzled looks from the men to one another, then turning their hopes for an explanation to the radio astronomer.
“Now look, guys. I stumbled on a mystery in El Campo, Puerto Rico that was just like the one we suffered at home on Trinidad-Tobago. I didn’t think there was much I could do to help. I just wanted to learn as much as I could so that I could compare it with what we knew back where I was from.” It was almost a protest of innocence, as if in the few moments she had been embroiled in the confrontation with the Chupacabra that she had failed to reveal the reason for it all.
“It wasn’t until I started getting closer to an old military base in the hills above El Campo, which I discovered to be anything but abandoned, that I began to be stonewalled, followed, wiretapped and vandalized by the goons of the U.S. military that now conveniently show up to ‘protect us’. I know little more about the creature than any of you, I swear. Except, perhaps, that it is real and the government knows about it.”
“Which is quite enough,” the general explained, as much to agree with her assessment as to silence Odessa, before she gave away any of her understanding to the disbelieving men she had only just met. “I suppose if we’re to get your cooperation, we’ll have to either threaten or arrest you. The choice is yours, gentlemen, but please, time is of the essence and I’ll need your decision quickly.”
“Why do you need us?” Jacobs asked, drawing up to eye level with the general, who waved off the burly soldiers who bristled at the challenge. “You keep talking as if this thing isn’t over. If you don’t want to explain what’s going on here and your part in it, you can just take us away of lock us up. But that’s not what you want us to do. Unless I miss my guess,” Jacobs said as if searching for answers in the other man’s poker gaze, “you need us as bait in whatever you’ve got planned. If we decide not to go along, you’d have to stake us out somewhere that we’d be found.”
“Very good,” the general said, with genuine satisfaction. “It makes me wonder why you ever left behind a detective’s badge in New Orleans. You have a natural gift at ferreting out information, Deputy Roth Jacobs. Oh yes, I know all about you. As a matter of fact, your life history and that of your companions here is available to me at whatever level of detail I require. At my discretion, I could make it impossible for any of you to seek employment in any God-fearing nation on this earth again. Do I make myself clear?”
“Not at all!” Oscarson fumed, pulling out of David Klein’s restraining grip. “How dare you come in here and threaten us after all we’ve been through. I, for one, will not go along with any scheme you have in mind for us, without some answers as to why you’re here and what this all means.”
His fellow pathologist, the deputy and the radio astronomer all nodded in agreement.
The general sighed heavily and asked for a few moments of privacy with the four, at which the young corporal and his team reluctantly withdrew from the coroner’s office out into the parking lot. The general walked to a side window and pulled up the blinds in the darkened room. Outside, there was a flurry of activity, a mobile laboratory, an APC or armored personnel carrier and a black staff limousine with a lieutenant driver. There were easily a dozen men with two-thirds in military dress. The remaining four were dressed in white smocks and lab coats as they consulted with one another on the steps of the mobile lab.
“My name is Brigadier General Randall Wilkes. I have been involved with army intelligence for the past seventeen years as an adjutant to the army chief of staff. Holders of that position have changed with public whim and White House political party affiliations, but I have remained to safeguard national secrets that it are best kept with a few, steadfast individuals.”
“You must understand that if you elect, at some later point in time, to disclose what I am about to tell you, not only will your government disavow the information, but you will suffer every censure and loss of rights as an American citizen over which I have control. Is that clear to you all?”
“You can’t do that,” Emil scoffed. I know my rights as a sworn American citizen.”
“Not only can he,” Jacobs said in resignation, “he just did.”
“Thank you, again, for your perceptive nature,” General Wilkes complimented the deputy, then added for the benefit of the others, “he’s quite right, you know. Your futures were placed in my capable hands the moment I was dispatched with my men to seek you out, along with the creature you apprehended. My only regret is that I was too late to save it from the cowboy shootout with the good deputy here.”
Jacobs bristled, but remained silent. How was he to know the cavalry was about to show up?
The general ignored the look the half-Cajun deputy gave him, rounded the empty receptionist’s desk and took a seat. “Get comfortable, all of you. This may take some time and we only have until nightfall to get ready.”
“Ready?” Odessa said, as if she already knew and feared the answer.
“Really, Ms. Davis. I’d have thought that, after all this time, you would know that these creatures are nocturnal, at least. Apparently, there is a great deal that you truly do not understand about them. I presumed too much in having you sequestered and finally removed from your position, public funding for the Phoenix Project aside. Do you really suppose that the government of the United States has lost all interest in space exploration or life out there, should it exist?”
All four took up chairs or leaned against short cabinets and end tables in the office.
“In the late 1940’s, our nation entered the atomic age. We did so by smuggling out the German scientists that were instructing the Nazis about jet-powered flight and the means to use that access to wipe out its enemies. Had Germany not been stopped, there were plans on the books of the Nazi Third Reich to use a high altitude, delta-winged jet bomber to deliver an atomic bomb to the city of New York on April 13, 1946.”
“Delta-winged. You mean like the B2 bomber and the F-117A stealth aircraft?” Jacobs asked.
“Precisely like those craft, and interesting that you should mention them, deputy. But the acquisition of the German scientists' knowledgeable in the field of physics and aeronautics was only half of the equation. There were also those who experimented, during the war, with the first rudimentary genetic engineering. The Nazis were hoping that if they weren’t truly the Aryan race, that they could manufacture one. Unfortunately, those upon whom they experimented were anything but the blonde hair, blue-eyed giants they hoped to create. I will say no more on that matter.”
“At the end of World War Two, our unreliable Russian allies took it upon themselves to develop into the next super power, since they had nothing more to fear from the Germans or the Japanese. What scientists we could not entice with democracy and freedom opted to cast in their lots with the Soviet communists. Some did not go willingly, and many ended up in Siberian gulags, or worse.”
“A race was on in the development and amassing of weapons throughout the 1950s, when both nations looked to the heavens as the next frontier to dominate. The Space Race was born. All our technology toward this end was moved out to an area 90 miles north of Las Vegas called Groom Lake in 1954 where the U-2 spy plane was developed to fly reconnaissance missions over the Soviet Union.”
“Area 51?” Odessa interrupted for the benefit of the listeners. The general nodded reluctantly.
“Since that time, the base was also used to build and test the SR-71 Blackbird, the A-12 Avenger, YF-22 Advanced Tactical Fighter and the D-21 drone, used so effectively during the war with Iraq. All were essentially stealth technology aircraft at the time. But I digress. The important thing for you to know is that part of our interest turned to the Russian scientists who learned about gene splicing through experimentation. We felt the ability would give them an unfair advantage in the race to dominate the planets closest to our own. Once inhabited, the moon could have been used as a base of operation to wipe out the enemies of the nation that first planted its flag.”
/> “Is that why President Kennedy predicted an American on the moon by the end of the 1960s?”
Roth Jacobs was leaning forward on his chair now, hands folded at the knuckles. He was the grandson of a career military man and a Jacobs family heritage of serving their country back to the Battle of 1812 when his French ancestors first defected to the American cause. The deputy was beginning to understand the role the U.S. played in the balance of power during the Cold War. It still did not explain the creature he had only twenty minutes earlier shot with both barrels of an over and under shotgun at close range.
He said as much to the general, who cautioned that he was getting to the heart of the matter.
“With the Russians trying to adapt soldiers for outer space, or so we believed, they already had a man in orbit while we were saddled with a monkey. They’d beaten us, or so it seemed. President Truman had ordered that we maintain vigilance as to the breech of our national air space by craft terrestrial as well as extra-terrestrial. He, as you’ll recall, was president not only at the time of the decision to drop the atomic bomb, but oversaw the first retrieval of a downed alien craft in Roswell, New Mexico. It was the site of nuclear testing and the B-29 bomber wing group which dropped