PHOENIX: (Projekt Saucer series) Read online

  Phoenix

  PROJEKT SAUCER: BOOK TWO

  W.A.Harbinson

  FOREWORD

  THE ULTIMATE CONSPIRACY CONTINUES… W.A.Harbinson first exposed the nightmarish truth about UFOs – a truth so terrifying that it could only be presented as fiction – in his international bestseller Genesis. Now he has taken the themes and many of the characters from that groundbreaking work and developed them into further dimensions of cosmic horror with other astounding novels in the PROJEKT SAUCER series. Phoenix, the second selfcontained Projekt Saucer epic, takes the story on from the end of the Second World War and through the postwar years of humankind’s first tentative explorations of space. During this historic period, the sinister earthly forces behind the UFO conspiracy begin to show their hand more openly –and start to exert a deadly stranglehold on the destiny of the whole Earth…

  PHOENIX: THE SECOND BOOK OF THE EPIC PROJEKT SAUCER SERIES.

  W.A.Harbinson was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1941. He left school at fourteen, studied mechanical engineering, then joined the Royal Australian Air Force. While serving in the RAAF he drafted his first novel, Instruments of Death. In 1980 he completed Genesis, the epic, bestseller novel that became the inspiration for the Projekt Saucer series. (Phoenix is chronologically the second novel in the series.) Harbinson has also written short stories, radio plays and non-fiction books. He presently divides his time between Paris, France, and West Cork, Ireland. Also by W.A.Harbinson

  Novels Projekt Saucer, Book 1: Inception Projekt Saucer, Book 2: Phoenix Projekt Saucer, Book 3: Genesis Projekt Saucer, Book 4: Millennium Projekt Saucer, Book 5: Resurrection

  Revelation

  Otherworld

  Eden

  The Lodestone Dream Maker

  The Crystal Skulls

  Non-fiction

  Projekt UFO: The Case for Man-Made Flying Saucers

  Copyright © 1995 W.A.Harbinson First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Hodder and Stoughton

  A division of Hodder Headline PLC

  E-book © 2003 W.A.Harbinson

  The right of W.A. Harbinson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The Author has asserted his moral rights. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Author, nor be otherwise circulated electronically or in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it had previously been published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this Work are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Phoenix Cover Artwork © Adam Webb

  Underdog Publications: http://www.underdog.fsworld.co.uk For

  Perrott & Irena Phillips &

  For Anna

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  SOCORRO, NEW MEXICO JULY 2, 1947 When that thing flew overhead Marlon Clarke could hardly believe what he was seeing. As he had been doing too often lately, he was sitting out on his porch, in his old rocking chair, slugging beer from the bottle, muttering under his breath and gazing out over the parched lands of his failed farm, flat and eerily desolate in moonlight. He was just a small farmer who’d had a bad few years and he liked to sit out there in the evenings, feeling bitter and murmuring angry words to himself, getting drunk enough to sleep without too much anxiety. Tired and thinking of bed, he had just glanced at his watch and noticed that it was ten-thirty when the whole porch shook a little, his last bottle of beer fell over, and he heard an exploding noise right overhead.

  Shocked back to the real world, his heart racing too fast, he looked up to see a glowing, saucer-shaped object screeching, wobbling, spinning and pouring steam or smoke as it flew at tremendous speed across the night sky on a descending trajectory.

  Before Marlon had a chance to get a grip on himself, the glowing object fell towards the Plain of San Augustin, between Magdalena and Socorro, about five miles from his farm, then turned into a growing fan of white and red flames in a billowing cloud of dust. The explosion came a second later, as the fan of flames grew bigger, illuminating the rising cloud of dust and obliterating the stars.

  The blast rocked Marlon’s house.

  Startled into a state of near sobriety, he got out of his rocking chair as the fan of flame shrank back to a tiny flickering that soon disappeared, letting the star-studded night sky return.

  ‘Kee-rist!’ Marlon exclaimed softly. Instantly, on an impulse, both fearful and curious, he grabbed a bottle of whisky from the floor of the porch, hurried down the steps, clambered unsteadily into his battered old truck, and tore off towards the scene of the crash.

  As he drove across the moonlit plain, through pale moonlight and the shadows of cacti and sagebrush, he controlled the steering wheel with one hand, held the bottle in the other, drank too quickly and felt his heart racing. It was the whisky, he guessed, but it was also what he had seen: that glowing, saucer-shaped flying object of the kind he'd heard so much about lately.

  ‘Jesus!’ he whispered to himself as the old, battered truck growled and rattled across the flat, windblown plain. ‘Jesus H... I don’t believe...’

  He kept glancing outside the truck, growing more apprehensive, half expecting to see another of those objects gliding under the moonlight. He even thought of turning back, but his curiosity kept him going, and he convinced himself, even as his fear was growing, that it had just been an airplane.

  He was wrong.

  On the broad, flat plain near the town of Magdalena, about halfway between the road and the distant Black Mountain, he saw a dark pile of still smouldering debris. Driving off the road, he bounced over the rough, sage-strewn plain until he came to the location of the crash. Stopping the truck, he had another drink of whisky, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, then looked out at the smouldering debris.

  It was the wreckage of a large, saucer-shaped craft, about half of it smashed to hell, the remainder a dull grey in the moonlight.

  What looked like three scorched corpses were still strapped into the central cockpit of the crashed object.

  ‘Lord Almighty!’ Marlon exclaimed softly.

  He was too scared to get out, but he had a good look, making sure that his eyes were not deceiving him. The object was round all right, shaped like two plates, one inverted and placed on top of the other. It was about twenty-five to thirty feet in diameter, obviously made of a metallic substance, and had smooth sides that rose gracefully, seamlessly to a smashed-up, transparent, domed cockpit. The charred bodies were still strapped to their seats.

  That's when Marlon grew really scared. Blinking, rubbing his eyes, he looked out again.

  The three corpses were burned beyond recognition. They were wearing greycoloured one-piece suits, or coveralls, which were charred black, in tatters and still smouldering like the pieces of metal scattered widely around the broken, circular craft.

  Nauseated by the smell of roasted flesh, Marlon looked beyond the crashed object to the distant mountain range. It was black in the night, but covered with stars, its sides streaked with moonlight that also fell across the flat Plain of Magdalena. Marlon looked around him, expecting to see something else, but there was nothing out there but empty land and the wind's constant whispering.

  Taking a final look at the charred bodies in the crashed flying saucer, he shivered with revulsion and fear, then turned the truck around and burned back to his ranch.
>
  When the men from the Roswell Army Air Base came to see him, Marlon was surprised by how many there were. They arrived in a jeep and troop truck as the sun was rising over the horizon to flood the flat plain with light. Marlon was still sitting in his rocking chair, more drunk than ever, when the armed troops jumped out of the truck to form a semi-circle around the yard, some with their backs turned to the house, others facing the empty plain, all holding their weapons at the ready.

  More frightened than he had been by the sight of the crashed saucer, Marlon was wiping his dry lips with the back of his hand when a man in a plain grey suit, accompanied by a uniformed Air Force officer and two others in plain clothes, descended from the jeep and approached him. Stepping up onto the porch, the two in plain clothes hurried past Marlon and entered his house without his permission, slamming the mesh-wire door behind them. As Marlon was about to get out of his rocking chair and protest, the Air Force officer removed his peaked cap, revealing stark black hair and warm brown eyes in a slightly plump, friendly face. He offered a natural, easy smile.

  ‘Mr Clarke?’

  ‘Darn right,’ Marlon said. ‘And when I called, I didn't expect...’ He nodded back over his shoulder, indicating the two men who could now be heard noisily searching his home.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Clarke, but it’s necessary. I’m First Lieutenant William B.Harris of the Eighth Air Force, stationed at Roswell Army Air Base. The two men in your house are members of the intelligence team of the 509th Bomb Group, also at Roswell. And this… ‘ he indicated the unsmiling man in the plain grey suit... ‘is CIA agent, Jack Fuller, who’s flown here all the way from Langley, Virginia.’

  ‘You called about a crashed saucer, I believe,’ Fuller said in an oddly threatening tone of voice.

  ‘Right. It crashed last night, about ten. I was expecting you people a lot sooner. I’ve bin sittin’ here all night.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ First Lieutenant Harris said, ‘but I had to wait for Mr Fuller to arrive.’

  ‘All the way from Langley, Virginia,’ Marlon said, glancing at the unsmiling Fuller who was, he noted, still under thirty, but had eyes as grey and wintry as Antarctica. ‘You musta taken me serious.’

  ‘It’s strictly routine,’ Fuller informed him, sounding as cold as he looked. ‘It’s just one of the rules. All the flying saucer scares we’ve had since last month – ’

  ‘The Kenneth Arnold sightings.’

  ‘Right. They’re mostly false alarms, but they have to be checked out. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘This is no false alarm.’

  ‘You actually saw the saucer?’

  ‘Sure did. It’s out there on the Plain of Magdalena with three dead bodies in it.’

  Fuller glanced at Harris, then down at Marlon’s whisky bottle. ‘Have you been drinking, Mr Clarke?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think you were drinking last night - you have a reputation for it - and just imagined you saw those dead bodies. I think you saw a crashed weather balloon, related it to all the flying saucer stories that have been in the papers since the Kenneth Arnold sightings, and let your imagination get the better of you.’

  ‘The hell with that,’ Marlon said, outraged. ‘I know what I saw there last night - and it wasn’t any goddamned weather balloon. It was big and made of metal and had three dead bodies in it. They were burnt all to hell.’

  ‘Come with us, Mr Clarke.’

  Before Marlon could protest, Fuller took him by the shoulder and tugged him to his feet. Marlon jerked his head around, indicating the noisy search still going on in his shack, but Harris told him not to worry and walked at his other side as Fuller led him between the armed troops to the jeep and coaxed him up into the rear seat. Fuller sat beside him, Harris sat up front, then the driver took off along the road that ran as straight as an arrow across the flatlands, towards Magdalena.

  Marlon's stomach was churning. The sight of the armed troops had scared him, the people searching his house more so, and now he was confused as well as frightened, not too sure if he had done the right thing in making that phone call. Jack Fuller, the CIA agent seated beside him, was only half Marlon’s age, but had a cold-eyed, obscurely threatening manner, never smiling, just watching. He was making Marlon feel as guilty as hell, though he didn't know what for. He had simply tried to behave like a responsible citizen - reporting the crash and what he had seen - and now this Fuller was making him feel like a criminal, or even a madman. Thinking of all the stories he'd read about UFOs in the past few weeks (ever since the June sightings by Kenneth Arnold, the papers were full of them), he started wondering if he had imagined the whole thing.

  Marlon desperately wanted another stiff shot of whisky, but the bottle was back on the porch where it could do him no good.

  They covered the five miles in about ten minutes and soon were bumping over the flatlands, towards the crash site, which was, Marlon noted, now surrounded by armed troops just like his house. The sun was up and the heat made Marlon sweat; he was also sweating with nervous tension when the jeep braked to a halt, its wheels churning up a cloud of dust that spiralled around him and the others to be carried away on the moaning wind.

  Marlon didn’t have to get out of the jeep to express his surprise.

  Fuller turned unyielding eyes upon him. ‘Is this what you saw, Mr Clarke?’

  It was not. Now, in the centre of that large circle of armed troops, where the flying saucer with the three dead bodies had been, Marlon saw only some white-smocked technicians picking up a thin scattering of silver-foil and narrow balsa-wood beams. There was no sign of the large flying saucers. No dead bodies. No ambulance.

  ‘This isn’t what I saw,’ Marlon said. ‘What I saw was – ’

  ‘This is what we found,’ Fuller told him. ‘The remains of a crashed Rawin weather balloon. Easily mistaken for flying saucers, Mr Clarke. We sometimes see what we want to see.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  Fuller glanced at First Lieutenant Harris. ‘One of the worst lightning storms we’ve had in a long time,’ Harris explained with a gentle smile, ‘took place about seventyfive miles south-west of here last night, about the same time as this weather balloon crashed. Since then, we’ve had lots of reports of unidentified flying objects in the vicinity. Most turned out to be natural phenomena caused by the storm. In other words, false alarms.’

  Marlon felt more confused, but he knew what he had witnessed. No way were those pieces of silver-foil and balsa wood part of what he had seen here last night.

  ‘That thing I saw last night was big - very big - and it had dead bodies in it.’

  ‘It was night,’ Fuller told him. ‘You were drinking. You saw what you expected to see. Did you get out of your truck?’

  ‘No, but...’

  ‘So you’d been sitting out on your porch, drinking half the evening, then you saw this saucer-shaped object falling from the night sky about five miles away. Remembering all the stories you’d read in the papers this past few weeks, about socalled flying saucers, you assumed that’s what you’d seen, drove out here to find it, and maybe got scared when you did find it and imagined the rest.’

  ‘With all due respect, sir, that’s bullshit. I know what I saw.’

  ‘You were drunk and frightened.’

  ‘I’m more drunk now than I was last night, but that don’t mean I’m imagining all this.’ Marlon waved his hand to indicate the ring of armed troops and the whitesmocked men picking up pieces of silver-foil and balsa beams to load them into the army truck nearby. ‘And I’m telling you that what I saw last night was no weather balloon. It was at least twenty-five feet wide and had – ’

  ‘Dead bodies in it.’ Fuller sighed. ‘So where are the dead bodies, Mr Clarke? Where’s the large, presumably metallic, flying saucer?’

  ‘That’s right. It was metallic.’

  Fuller smiled in a mocking way and pointed to the men carrying the debris of the weather balloon. �
��Silver-foil,’ he said. ‘It would look metallic in the dark. The moonlight, the drifting dust, your state of mind, the drink, combined could have made you see all the rest. Enough said, I think.’

  ‘Well, maybe...’ Marlon felt confused and nervous, no longer sure of his senses, and wished he could have a stiff drink to put his thoughts in some order. Okay, so he was drunk, but he wasn’t that dumb... and when he noticed a lot of tyre tracks leading away from just beyond this much smaller area of wreckage, heading towards Roswell, he was convinced that another team of men from the Roswell Army Air Base had cleared away the real wreckage and taken it back to the base.

  Frightened, he decided to keep his nose clean and get involved no further. After wiping his dry lips with the back of his hand, he deliberately shook his head from side to side, as if chastising himself. ‘Dammit, I guess you must be right. I sure as hell hung one on last night. I guess that could explain it.' He glanced again at the tyre tracks that started beyond the perimeter of armed troops, then at the truck into which the white-smocked men were putting the last of the debris from the weather balloon. ‘A weather balloon?’ Harris nodded and smiled at him. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ Marlon said like a real country yokel. ‘It’s amazin’ what a man sees when he’s drunk. I feel a right goddamned fool now.’

  ‘No need,’ Harris said, raising the peak of his Air Force cap to offer a genuine, friendly smile. ‘You’d be surprised at what people think they see at nights - and these weather balloons, they fool a lot of people.’

  ‘Sure fooled me. Say, you haven’t got a drink in that there jeep?’

  Harris smiled more broadly. ‘Nope, I’m afraid not. But you’ve still got that bottle on the porch and we’re going back now.’

  ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’ Pretending to be more drunk and tired than he was, Marlon glanced at the CIA agent, Jack Fuller, whose grey gaze was coolly searching, then at the white-smocked men who were still placing pieces of debris into the truck. Comparing the size of the craft he had seen last night and the much wider area of scattered debris with what he was seeing now, he was more convinced than ever that his senses had not deceived him as Fuller had suggested.