Concordance of Steel
Chapter 1
Bismark Bugle – Aug 29, 1953
Something strange happened in the sky over South Dakota during the night and early morning hours of August 5 and 6. At approximately 10:05 p.m. residents of Rapid City, South Dakota, reported seeing glowing lights over the city. Radar operators at the Air Force’s Bismarck Air Defense center detected blips on their radars in the vicinity of Rapid City on a heading that would take them over Blackhawk, South Dakota. Two F-84s conducting training maneuvers were dispatched to the area. Both pilots reported seeing three bright lights moving in a northwesterly direction. As the pilots attempted to close, the objects accelerated, outdistancing the fighters. The Bismarck air defense center tracked the objects until they moved off the center’s radar displays. At the time of reporting, the Air Force had no explanation for the event.
Kentucky Clarion – August 22, 1955
Investigations are ongoing today connected to the story of how a spaceship carrying twelve to fifteen little men landed near a Hopkinsville farmhouse early last week and battled the family living there. The most official probe is being conducted by the Air Force.
The Pentagon – October 13, 1955
The man sitting behind the desk wore the collar pins of a United States Navy vice admiral. The placard on his desk read, “Chief of Naval Intelligence.” At the moment, the admiral looked more like a homeless derelict than a senior naval officer- unshaven, bleary-eyed, and wearing a uniform that looked like he had slept in it. Empty paper coffee cups and half-eaten meals brought in from the Pentagon cafeteria littered his desk. A thick document marked Top Secret lay half-buried under the coffee cups and litter of food. A lieutenant wearing the aiguillette of an admiral’s aide stood at attention before the admiral. If anything, the aide seemed even more exhausted than his superior.
The admiral swept the empty cups off his desk onto the floor and picked up the document, handling it as though it might explode. “How many people know the contents of this report?”
“Only you, me, and my two analysts know the complete story, sir. My nephew and the other members of the Hopkinsville police found the craft and shot it out with the XTs. They’ll be able to put most of the pieces together. Some of the documents they found were in English. My recovery team can probably put all the pieces together. Besides the English documents, there were some in Russian.”
“Can we trust them to keep quiet? What about the officer who died when your nephew and the others found the craft? How did you explain his death?”
“All the family has is a glorified ghost story about silver gnomes. When my nephew and the others found the saucer and secured the site, they cordoned off the area, so no one else saw it. I convinced them their silence is a matter of national security.
“When he saw the source of some of the documents, he recommended I not show up as an ONI officer. My recovery team and I all wore Air Force uniforms when we arrived. I even gave a briefing to the local newspaper as an anonymous Air Force officer. As far as the town knows, the spaceship the farmers saw was an experimental Air Force bomber that crashed near the town. And the little men the families saw were monkeys used as test subjects aboard the aircraft. The officer who died in the fight was single, with no immediate family in the area. We sent the body back to his family with an explanation he died in a traffic accident.”
He pointed to the document. “Only you, me, and the analysts know about that. The Air Force must know or at least suspect something. Their Project Blue Book is a piece of fiction designed to make civilians feel safe and warm. And there are the incidents in New Mexico and South Dakota.”
“The Air Force knows something,” agreed the admiral. “Despite their claims, the Roswell incident wasn’t a weather balloon, but all they have is wreckage and a few dead bodies. They don’t know or are being kept in the dark about the big picture.”
At the aide’s look of surprise, the admiral allowed himself a brief chuckle. “One of the prime responsibilities of this job is learning what the other services are trying to keep secret. The flyboys are as bad as the Russians.”
“Are you going to tell the President about this?”
The admiral tapped the report. “There’s no one in the government I trust with this information. We don’t know who else is compromised or how high the rot goes. And who would he assign to investigate this if I did?”
“He’d have… Shit, they’re in this up to their necks. So who do we contact, sir? This is too big for us to handle by ourselves.”
“I’ve been up all night trying to decide who we can tell and came up with three names. You won’t like this; in fact, some people might call it treason, but the documents and the bodies you found confirm what we suspected. Being called a traitor is the least of my concerns. I want you to contact Vasily Goremykin in the Russian Ministry of State Security. He knows me from when we were naval attaches in London.”
The aide’s eyes widened in disbelief. “You’re going to tell the Russians but not the President?”
“Not the Russians, Vasily. I trust him to see what’s at stake here. Additionally, he has contacts in Asia I don’t have. We’re going to need all the help we can get. Contact Max Armbruster of Wesser Armaments. He’s doing interesting work with body armor and weaponry, but not getting much backing. Finally, contact Edward Levy from Harvard University’s psychology and neuroscience department. We need to learn why your nephew resisted mental domination when the rest of the police couldn’t.”
“Tell them we need to meet face-to-face. Work out someplace we can meet without it making it into the papers. Make a copy of this report for each one of them, then destroy everything you have on this. Every photo, transcript, and note you and your analysts wrote. Once you’re done as far as you and your analysts are concerned, this report doesn’t exist. I know it’s irregular, and if I knew who to trust in our own government, I’d be contacting them, but it would take time to determine who we can trust and time is of the essence here. I won’t order you to do this. If you do and the wrong people hear about it, you’ll be joining me in front of a firing squad.”
“I’ll contact them, sir. I saw the bodies of those poor souls those things captured earlier. Is there anything else?”
The chief of intelligence paused for a moment, then continued. “Are you a religious man, Steve? If you are, pray when I meet the others: that we come up with some response to what’s in this report.”