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THE LAST OF THE TOKKOTAI  /  Book Four - ROSWELL

 

[July 17, 1947.]

 

   In the morning, Colonel Duryea and Captain Koan were escorted to the conference room where Colonel Trax sat waiting.

   “Have a seat, Gentlemen.”

   They sat across from the colonel and waited for him to say what he had to say.

   “After your little visit last evening, Colonel, I made some telephone calls. I have been ordered to let you in.”

   “Let us in?” Duryea questioned.

   There was a light knock at the door and Lieutenant Colonel Exon entered the room followed by a man in a brown suit.

   “Gentlemen,” Trax said. “This is Dr. Wernher von Braun. He is here to study the ship that crashed in New Mexico. Doctor, this is Colonel Duryea and Captain Koan. They are interpreters. They are here to talk with our little friend.”

   “Gentlemen,” von Braun said in greeting.

   “Dr. von Braun was brought to America with several hundred of his fellow scientists at the end of the war. He was working on V-2 rockets for the Nazis and now he is helping us with our rocketry program. Isn’t that right, Doctor?” Trax said.

   “I am a scientist,” von Braun said, his German accent more pronounced the more he spoke. “Politics does not interest me. I view it as a giant game of, how do you call it, King of ze Hill. I prefer to fly over ze hill.” He smiled at his own joke.

Colonel Duryea smiled as well, but he was thinking that room had to be left somewhere for national allegiance. Von Braun and the rest of them were turncoats in his eyes, no matter what kind of science they practiced. America had offered them a chance to surrender with respect, but something about using the enemy’s technology so blatantly had an unsavory air about it.

   “Tell us about the ship,” Trax said.

   “Ah yes, ze ship. We have reconstructed it as best we can. There is still more debris to be found in New Mexico, scraps of the thin foil like film mostly. I suspect people who found some are hording it… pieces of a flying saucer.” He laughed.

   “You say you have reconstructed the ship,” Duryea said. “Can we see it?” He was truly curious.

   “I have no objections,” von Braun replied, looking at Trax.

   “Why not,” Trax said. It meant these two interpreters would be seeing more of the facility, but photographs would hardly provide a working knowledge of the flying machine and its construction.

   They rose and were escorted through the subterranean maze of hallways to a door where two armed MP’s stood guard. The MP’s moved aside for Trax, allowing the party to enter through the doorway.

   Immediately Duryea and Tobe were struck dumb by the enormity of the room beyond the door. Their voices and footfalls echoed in the concrete cavern, the extremities of which remained dark and forbidding. High up in the ceiling, carbon arc lights shed a dull light across the vast floor before them.

   The room was cubic in shape, and they had entered at the mid-point of one of the walls. The nearest corners were fully one hundred yards in either direction. No system of pillars or columns held the ceiling above them, making the floor a single plane without the obstruction of support posts. High above behind the bright spots of the arc lights enormous concrete beams stretched from wall to wall holding up the fantastic weight of earth and another whole hangar on the surface.

   The floor space of the vast hangar was cluttered with airplane parts. Engines mounted on racks stood free of the planes that had housed them. One craft, a Messerschmitt fighter had all of its outer metal skin removed to reveal its inner workings. Other aircraft from the war stood around them, some whole, some dismantled. Most of the designs were foreign to Colonel Duryea’s eyes. Several held the mark of the rising sun while others bore the insignia of the Third Reich. Still others were marked with the hammer and sickle and even the Union Jack. Fighter planes with large tubular jet engines at the tips of their wings and large fuselages with a cylindrical jet engine mounted on either side near the tail were being torn down and examined by an army of scientists dressed in white lab coats and white cloth surgical hats, some of whom looked up as von Braun led the party across the floor.

   Colonel Duryea carefully took note of the number of doors along the wall through which they had come, and as they walked out into the midst of the room, new doors came into view on the far wall. There was more of this fantastic place beyond. On the far wall of the underground hangar were a set of hangar doors, easily a hundred feet tall. But what pleased him the most was the appearance of another set of stainless steel elevator doors in the far wall.

   In one corner of the hangar to the right, he could now see, were four enormous steel columns, eye beams of fantastic proportion, each fitted with a round threaded steel pole in the inner recesses of the beam. The floor in the space created by these beams was a cavity, a square perhaps two hundred feet at the sides. Colonel Duryea recognized it as a monstrous freight elevator, capable of lowering entire transport planes down into the hangar below from the hangar above.

   “This is some fete of engineering,” Duryea said offhand, but was ignored by Trax.

   Tobe, for his part, simply gawked, craning his neck at the scope of the construction below the ground.

   “Shall we bring out our little toy?” von Braun asked rhetorically.

   He pressed a button on another electrical wall panel beside the great hangar doors, and the sound of electric motors sprang to life echoing through the chamber as the hangar doors began to slide back on themselves opening the hangar within. Before them, reflecting the light washing into the dark recess of the next room, sat a strange vehicle, a platform perhaps five feet above the floor resting on wide tank tracks made of rubber, as though the treads of enormous tractor tires had been stretched around frameworks of guiding wheels. The platform had a series of guard chains to keep anyone from simply stepping off of its edge. Something was on the platform, something angular and dark and silvery.

“Wait here,” von Braun said. He walked over to the platform and operated some controls, causing the tank tracks to move.

   The entire platform crept out into the larger hanger, and Colonel Duryea observed how the moving platform could easily fit aboard the freight elevator in the corner of the room. Beyond the platform in the recesses of the far room, strange shapes and glints of metal hid from view in the darkness. Colonel Duryea strained to see what lay hidden inside, but as soon as the platform vehicle cleared the hangar doors, the lieutenant colonel threw a switch and they closed with an electrical whir.

   Each corner of the platform vehicle was outfitted with a set of steps, and von Braun climbed up onto the platform, inviting the others with a wave of his hand. As they climbed the steps and approached the odd looking craft it held, the presence of foul odors became evident. First and foremost, Colonel Duryea noted, this was not a flier, not the likes of the ones in Antarctica, or at least what he remembered and from the grainy still photos in the file the President had provided.

   Dr. von Braun walked around the platform describing the vehicle.

   “Zis is ze vehicle zat crashed outside of Roswell New Mexico several weeks ago. Zis is ze famous flying saucer.” He smiled with mirth. “As you can see, it is somewhat saucer shaped. Zis angular central pod made of flat trapezoidal plates does indeed resemble ze description of two bowls placed mouth to mouth. But instead of being joined together, zis elaborate framework of struts and spars protrudes out from ze central plane of ze pod, dividing it into two halves, upper and lower. Zese spars were affixed with zis silvery foil. Two thirds of ze spars were bent or broken in ze crash, and zeir corresponding sails ripped or torn away. Ze other third of ze spar system has survived ze crash. Zerefore we can postulate zat all of ze spars were identical in design to zese survivors.”

   Duryea and Tobe as well as Colonel Trax and Lieutenant Colonel Exon walked silently behind Dr. von Braun as he described the flying pinwheel.

   “Now, as to ze pod itself. Ze lower half, below ze sail frame houses ze machinery. Zere is a hollow pipe at ze axis of ze pod zat allows control of ze machinery from ze upper half. Ze center of ze sail frame is anchored to a common roller bearing like from a truck, for instance. It allows ze frame to turn freely.”

   “You call them sails, Doctor,” Duryea said.

   “Ja, I did.”

   “What kind of engine powers this thing, Doctor?” Colonel Trax asked. “I don’t see any exhaust pipes of access panels for putting in fuel.”

   Von Braun stopped and smiled, then spread his hands.

   “Ze engine? You are looking at it! Zis sail frame and ze sails are ze engine!”

   “What?” Trax was amazed.

   Von Braun laughed.

   “Ja! At first sight, I thought zat zis vehicle was ze same design as ze Flugkreisel”

   “The Flug-what?” Tobe asked.

   “Flugkreisel, a circular aircraft invented by Schreiver in Germany. It has a diesel motor and spinning vanes zat make it fly… very noisy and smoky. Ach! And it stinks!” He paused and looked from one to the other of his listeners with a twinkle in his eye. “We have one here. Do you want to see it?”

   “No!” Trax shouted.

   “Ah, Colonel Trax. You are so mistrusting. Zese people are here to help. Zey need to know everyzing.”

   Trax continued to protest, but von Braun had descended the steps onto the hangar floor and thrown the switch to open the large hangar doors to the next room. He quickly disappeared into the hangar and threw another switch to turn on the next room’s arc lights.

   The assembly climbed from the crawler and walked to the hangar doors followed painfully by Colonel Duryea.

Reaching the doors, Colonel Duryea could not believe his eyes. The second hangar was equally as large a cavity as the one in which they stood. Inside was a collection of the oddest machines. They could only be described as flying saucers. One of them was like the flier in the files President Truman had supplied. A photograph of Colonel Duryea being unceremoniously offloaded into the snow surprised him when he had seen it. This flier before them looked to be in bad repair. A shell had undoubtedly torn through the body of the craft which now lay twisted on the floor, never again to fly. Several other designs Colonel Duryea did not recognize sat posed under the penumbras created by the arc lights above. All of them were circular in shape, although some had domes with windows, some had spikes at their pinnacles, and others were sleek without any apparent way of seeing through the hull. Still others were perfectly spherical and mirror like in appearance, reminding Duryea of enormous Christmas decorations.

 

Publication Date: July-2015.

 

Book Four - ROSWELL and all of D.F. Huettner's published novels are available at the Amazon.com Kindle Store.

 

   

   

 

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