Chapter Thirty-Two

March 1969

I waited to enter last, just the way Eisenhower used to do. It used to enrage me as a piece of petty one-upmanship but now it seemed the only possible way to play it if you were the president. The opinion polling for the week had just come in: Approve: 62 percent; Disapprove: 10 percent; No Opinion: 27 percent. Stay on top, a little voice told me. Keep them down.

I came in to find them seated around the broad circular table I had had installed in one of the wide empty chambers below the White House. There’s a surprising amount of space down there and after a while you get tired of being disappointed that there isn’t a cavernous secret room with a circular table and a giant map with blinking lights on it that you can go to for discussions like this, so I had one built. It’s sealed now, silent and cold and forgotten, the access stairway bricked up, my lost architectural legacy. Every president has left his own stamp on the White House. Rutherford B. Hayes installed the first telephone. Chester A. Arthur had Louis Tiffany redecorate the interior, his work now tragically lost. Truman gave us the Truman Balcony; Edith Wilson, the China Room. What I’m remembered for is giving the White House its second bowling alley. Not even the first one—Truman’s was first. So I fucked that up too.

They were mostly military types at this meeting. Senators with an interest in defense and intelligence. Melvin Laird, secretary of defense. William Rogers, secretary of state. Alexander Haig, a four-star general, advising on defense. Hard faces, gray suits, military insignia I’d never learned to read, racks of medals brought to the party. I tried to repress the instinctive helplessness and deference that a civilian feels toward senior people in the armed forces. They all knew, and I knew, that I’d gotten to be their commander in chief by winning a very dubiously certified popularity contest.

But there I was in the center seat. At the last minute, I’d added two cherry-red telephones that might plausibly have been linked to something interesting. In fact, they connected to a number that told the correct time.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “I have asked you here so you can receive a briefing by our national security adviser, the distinguished Dr. Kissinger, formerly of Harvard University, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the RAND Corporation.” (Translation: The dubious-popularity-contest winner is here to introduce you to his even more dubious friend, who is going to tell you your business.)

Most of the military guys looked frankly bored to be sent back to school at nine a.m. on a Monday. Kissinger stood in the corner like a talent-show competitor waiting to be introduced. He was doing a weird thing with his fingers, touching all the tips together in order, and I wanted to tell him to cut it out.

“Now—now, just a minute,” someone said. Senator Kennedy. “Before we get started I’m going to need to talk about Operation Menu, and, yes, I know about it. We’ve got B Fifty-Twos over Cambodia now? Who authorized this?” There was a rising murmur behind him. He was not the only one here who wanted to talk about this. The bombings in Laos and Cambodia were intended to destroy ammunition supplies, although the fact that there were reports of Gregor’s presence in the area was not incidental.

“I want you to understand,” I went on, “that Dr. Kissinger has my full confidence in all such matters. Dr. Kissinger will inform you of a national security crisis of which you may not presently be aware. Dr. Kissinger? The floor is yours.”

Sensing a challenge, the military men shifted in their seats, square heads swiveling back and forth in confusion, harrumphing into their little microphones.

Henry could not have looked more pleased, there in the center of the room, evidently unaware that my administration’s credibility was resting on his wide flabby shoulders.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “I wish to begin by reminding you that this meeting is classified top secret ultra, a new clearance level applying only to the people in this room. Also that there are lawyers at work developing new penalties that will be applied should you ever speak of what I am about to discuss. I trust we understand this? Good, then.”

“Mr. Kissinger, really,” one of the senators said.

“Nein—excuse me—I will ask you to please hold questions for the moment,” he said. His singsong accent seemed borrowed from a German burlesque show: hissed sibilants, misplaced emphases, whip-cracked t’s and k’s. With his voice and his slight stoop, he was like a figure from a fairy tale, a quaint little tinker passing from town to town, peddling his magical wares. The setting seemed to fill itself in behind him: rustic houses and churches leaning in over narrow streets, peaked roofs shadowing the town at all hours. Little Heinz Alfred Kissinger playing barefoot on the cobblestones, collecting firewood, learning Latin and Greek from Papa Kissinger’s modest library. One day, perhaps, discovering an old volume carelessly left out, beginning to read the forbidden words, the words to his horrible songs. And then comes National Socialism, and the war, and an American soldier—Eisenhower?—who sees Kissinger’s value, and then the long chain of deeds and ambition that brought him here. Was that how it happened?

“You are all familiar with the small trickle of anomalous intelligence that arrives from various fronts of our prolonged global rivalry. Fringe reports that may strike you as impossible or the product of battle fatigue. Accounts of anomalous biological samples. Friendly units destroyed or subverted en masse without explanation. Sickening and dying, perhaps? Wounds of unidentifiable source, without visible origin. Does this sound familiar? You have many of you been in the field yourselves. Seen things that cannot be perhaps explained away so easily.” Why was he smiling? No one could tell why he was smiling.

“You will accept it when I offer as plausible that just as the Manhattan Project was developed in secret, so were other equally destructive avenues of research. You all know the Third Reich had its paranormal inquiries, yes? In our country these took place under the rubric of Blue Ox, officially disavowed and forbidden under classified UN agreement of 1946. Yes? No? You do not.”

“Mr. Kissinger—” Kennedy again.

“Doctor.”

“Doctor, then. I’ve gotta ask you what this little talk is about. How much of this do you really expect us to believe?”

“I am not speaking on matters of faith, Senator Kennedy. I am here to demonstrate to you that recent shifts in the Soviet high command reflect a heightened commitment to this strategic modality, the deployment of weaponized supernatural forces.

“Our principal opponent, the Soviet Union, has many forms of xeno-, exo-, and cryptobiological ordnance to draw upon. Some that emanate from the distant Precambrian past, and some from the far-distant apocalyptic future. Those that lie sleeping, and those that do not sleep and are ever vigilant.”

“Mr. Kissinger!” It was Alexander Haig. “You are asking a great deal of us right now. Most of us are military men. Many of us are scientifically trained.”

“It is Dr. Kissinger, please. And I understand, and do bear with me as I come to the point.”

“Please do.”

“If I may? We display the film now. It is ready, yes?” He nodded, and a waiting projector I hadn’t noticed was pushed to the center of the room and threw a small square of color on the far wall.

The image was of a small room with a window looking into another room or cell. An observation area, I realized, with one-way glass through which one could see a small test chamber. On our side of the glass, two young technicians in white shirts and military haircuts looked into the other room.

The test chamber had two occupants. The young man had a cocky, nervous, eager manner, like a star athlete fresh from high school waiting to show the college coaches what he could do, knowing they’d never seen anything like him. He had a couple of electrodes taped to him, wires leading to a small box on a table. An older man stood over him. It was Colonel McAllister.

“You know what we’re asking you to do, son?” the colonel said.

“Yes, sir.” He nodded crisply.

“You know what Blue Ox is.”

“They told me it’s some kind of weapons research program, sir. Like the A-bomb? I’ve got a master’s in aeronautical engineering; they said that was a plus.”

“Good man. I can see you’ll do fine. First thing we do is a little test of your eyesight, okay?”

“Fine, sir, but it’s been tested, on day one. I’m twenty-ten; they say you can’t do any better.”

“That’s all right, son, that’s real good, but we’ve got to follow procedure. So you’re going to read what’s on this paper here.” He opened a folder liberally stamped with classified warnings and brought out a single typewritten sheet of paper.

“Kinda funny writing. Is that…do I say it ‘Yogso—’”

“Well, Jesus, son, not yet!” The colonel cut him off. For some reason the two techs watching were half out of their seats, but we couldn’t hear what they were saying; there was no microphone. “Wait till I give the goddamn word.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Just count ten seconds after I shut the door and then start. I’m going to be in the next room, right next door, okay?” the colonel said, backing away. “We’ll be watching over the closed circuit. We’ll see the whole thing.”

None of the text was in English. Standing behind the one-way glass, McAllister and the techs watched the young man read it, slowly and clearly, stumbling over the unfamiliar syllables. In a couple of places the audio cut right out, although his mouth kept moving. The two technicians flinched in unison at a few key passages. During one of those, the glass window rippled a little, as if bowed inward by a change in air pressure. After two minutes the boy finished and lifted his head expectantly.

“That all right?” he said, not sure where to look. The colonel pressed the intercom button.

“That’s just fine, son. Real good. We’ll be in in a second.”

Here there was a rushing sound like a jet engine revving, cutting in and out. The recruit didn’t seem to hear, just waited, staring forward curiously. I couldn’t see the techs anymore, or the colonel. The camera lurched as someone nudged the tripod.

“Sir—” the recruit said just as an alarm klaxon began far off in the distance. “Sir, what’s happening?”

There was a loud bang as something heavy hit the metal door of the test room.

“Sir?” The bang came again. “You locked out, sir?”

The recruit reached for the doorknob but the film skipped, and then, without warning, it was over, leaving only an afterimage of its final frame, the door standing open and what was visible on the other side. In the darkness, Henry spoke.

“What you have seen here is film recovered from the Pawtuxet Farm facility several years after it ceased to become operational.”

Henry paused, perhaps waiting for a question that didn’t come.

“The Soviet program, which has been in place much longer, has met with considerably more success. We have limited information about their progress but I would like to share with you a few slides. As you know, on March fifteenth, there was an altercation across the Sino-Soviet border at the Ussuri River—”

“We know.” Haig spoke now, interrupting, shaking off the mood. “We all have access to the relevant briefing materials. The matter’s closed.”

“There are a few items I did not think should be shared but which I now present to you,” Henry said, grinning as if withholding intelligence from the Defense Department were a cute idea of his. “These photographs came off one of the KH satellites.”

There was a pause while a slide projector was set up. He showed us a view of a forested hillside with a road cutting across it, a line of vehicles ascending, and then the same scene apparently following a mudslide or fire.

“The effect recorded happened inside a four-hour window during the conflict. The Chinese attributed it to a chemical agent but I have other theories based on firsthand accounts of the event.”

The blurry image of a horned humanoid figure against the tree line, the scale disturbingly ambiguous.

“But the important thing is the Soviet division present at the scene, the Thirty-First Army Engineers.”

Another slide: a group of men and women standing at attention outdoors while a line of enormous military trucks passed behind them. A May Day parade. The people were notable only for being older and thinner than the typical Soviet paragons on display, more like the graduating class of a doctoral program in medieval history. They stared straight ahead, perhaps twenty of them, assembled behind their unit’s banner, which showed a circle with a wobbly five-sided polygon within.

“What is that—is that a constellation?” somebody asked.

“That is correct,” Henry said. “A configuration of stars, but a curious one indeed. If you were to wait another million years you might see it in the skies over the Southern Hemisphere. But I do not think you would enjoy the ambience.” He chuckled, evidently at a private joke.

One final image. A bearded Caucasian man, shirtless and smiling, posed by a half-track next to two smaller Asian men flourishing AK-47s. The half-track was painted with the same unit insignia. The man was unmistakably the one who’d been shot five times in a shabby little office in Manhattan twenty-one years ago.

“Taken in Laos in the past year. Elements of the Thirty-First are deployed in the Southeast Asian theater, embedded with NVA divisions. I do not—quite—understand their capabilities. They might summon inhuman intelligences, or cooperate with them in some fashion, or perhaps they have been hybridized in that regard.”

“Why the hell would the Russians do a thing like that?” Haig said. “Even supposing it’s real. This is thin, Dr. Kissinger, awful thin.”

“This Cold War involves far more horrific ideas than the nuclear bomb and radioactive fallout, General. It is only what we ourselves wished to do. But without Eisenhower to direct them, our domestic programs failed or destroyed themselves, yes? That is what took place.”

“I don’t believe it. Any of it. This is bullshit.” This was John Mitchell, attorney general.

“John, let him finish,” I told him.

“You can’t seriously—is this a training exercise? I don’t understand how we can be sitting here discussing this.”

“To think so is not unusual,” Kissinger said. “I quite understand. You do not know the world as I do. You do not picture a time of strange and mighty races that voyaged between the stars, or a tragic war that shattered and changed them and confined them to Earth. You have not seen certain tombs in the sub-Saharan regions, or certain caves in the mountains of Antarctica, or the stars above Grand Carcosa, as I have. I have a limited understanding of such matters myself but—”

“I’m leaving, Mr. President.” Mitchell was on his feet now.

“John—”

“Respectfully, I’m not a scientist or a military man but I’ve heard enough.”

“Please keep your seat, Mr. Mitchell,” Henry said, but Mitchell was already walking away, and a few others had risen to join him.

Henry barked out a three-syllable word that afterward none of us could remember and they all stopped, perplexed. He said it again, louder, then raised a hand for silence. And in the silence we began to hear something that sounded like a human voice, a panicked wail or scream that went on and on; we waited for it to take a breath, but it didn’t.

“What sort of trick is this?” Haig growled.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Henry?”

“Let them see, Mr. President,” Henry said. “Let them see who waits for them on the other side. Let them consider the strategic implications.”

A cold wind blew a spattering of droplets into the room. The wailing sound grew—not as if it were getting louder but as if it were approaching or falling toward us from a direction none of us could see.

About half the people had already risen to their feet and were moving toward the door. There was a shadow being cast in the room now—we couldn’t see where it was coming from but it, too, was growing. A big man pulled at the door handle with increasing urgency but it wouldn’t open. Somebody in a uniform retched. I stayed in my seat. So did Haig. Kissinger waited calmly in the center of the room. Both of the red telephones began, impossibly, to ring.

“Stop it!” Haig said. Kissinger didn’t answer. It didn’t seem like the sound could get much closer without its being on top of us. I forced myself not to move.

“Stop it. I’m begging you!” Haig said.

“Stop it, Henry,” I said.

The sound and the wind and all of it cut off abruptly.

“The meeting is over,” I said. “I hope you will remember this demonstration. I may brief some of you individually beyond this. All I ask of you at this time is to be aware that we are responding to nontraditional strategic exigencies. And that you follow my and Dr. Kissinger’s instructions when asked.”

They filed out, one by one, until it was just me and Henry, who was bobbing in place and trying to suppress a smile.

“Henry, what the fuck was that?”

“You know? I did not think that it would go half so well,” he said.