Peaceful Sands

Six—maybe seven—decades ago I worked at Peaceful Sands Research Institute, out west in the high desert. We called it Peaceful, for short. It was a top secret government facility. We tested experimental aircraft and developed all sorts of weapons of mass destruction.

Many areas on the base were off-limits, required special clearance. Security and secrets came with the work I did and the agencies I worked for. But something felt wrong on this base. I was young, had a keen eye, an inquiring mind and not a lot of good sense. I took pictures. Hid the film from the world’s most ruthless security crew. Very risky, a good way to disappear into the desert. Permanently.

There were four or five others, can’t recall if they were scientists or engineers or technicians, who were on the job one day and gone the next. When I asked about it they told me those young men were flown out to other assignments. Just routine, they said. I was skeptical. Questions were unwelcome, so security kept a closer eye on me after that.

One day Bob Herickson and I were out riding our horses early in the morning like we sometimes did and ran across what we were sure had to be human graves, way out in a part of the desert that nobody usually went. That got our attention.

The Korean War kept me busy for a while. I forgot about the film for a long, long time.

***

A few months ago I turned ninety years old. It’s been a crazy journey and I’ve lost good friends along the way. Bob Herickson took a bow just last year, at eighty-eight. That’s okay, in the natural order of things, you know. Except someone helped Bob on his way out and that’s not okay.

Thirty years ago Tony Winsor and Bob and I put together this non-profit called Ancient Air. We bought and restored vintage aircraft, the kind we used to fly.

Trouble started a year ago when we bought this classic four-prop airliner, the kind that shuttled cargo and personnel between Peaceful Sands and the outside world. It had a special lock box, a super secure crash-proof safe for sensitive documents. No way in creation could anyone open it without a key.

But there was a key, stuck right in the lock, just waiting for us. We found documents in the box. Like someone wanted us to find them. Old documents. With dates and signatures.

One look at those documents sent me searching for the film I hid years earlier. Took a while, but I found it safe in a shoe box in the attic. Developed the film in my spare bedroom. Now, we had the photos and the documents. Together, the picture painted was uglier than we ever imagined.

Tony showed up dead in a bar in Sacramento not long after we opened that safe. Strange because Tony never drank much, never went to bars. He hated Sacramento.

Nobody gave much thought to Bob and Tony dying. They were, after all, at an age considered appropriate for a person to die. Being old was their fault, case closed.

I disagreed.  

After Bob and Tony, that left me. Not much time, I thought, before they’d be coming my way. 

***

I first met Bob and Tony when we worked for a private firm, a defense agency that hid behind a shell company known to the public as National Toys, which was a front for—of course—a clandestine operational unit in one of the government’s half-dozen intelligence services. We were pilots. The pay was better than good and the situation seemed to me at the time exotic, intriguing. The people who ran National Toys were very bad people. I knew that when I took the job. We all make choices and I chose money and adventure.

Peaceful Sands was a stone’s throw from where nuclear bombs were routinely detonated. Few people knew the facility existed. We were civilians, not military. We signed papers promising we would ignore what was going on around us. But we could not help seeing what we saw. What we saw was bad. Bad enough we could not ignore it.

***

I met Dr. Hubertus Struginheimer at Peaceful Sands in the middle of the nineteen-fifties. He was getting on to sixty years old then, if I had to guess. He seldom spoke in public. To Hubert, common people were objects. Some were useful.  

He was recruited from the wreckage of Germany in the closing days of the Second World War. As the Russians closed from the east and the Allies from the west, Nazi scientists were in high demand. Everybody in creation had a search team out there, dodging firefights and elbowing each other out of the way to recover documents and loot and scientists.

The Nazis were best in the world at shooting unguided missiles at other people and killing them. That was some sweet technology. We wanted it. So did the Russians.

Chemical and biomedical research ranked next on the list of stuff we wanted. This was Hubert Struginheimer’s specialty. His research was conveniently located at the busiest concentration camps, where he had a continuous source of human subjects.

Confirmed Nazis, especially those who showed up on the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, were not supposed to be recruited and brought to America. Hubert Struginheimer was high on that list. But his work on the physiology of pilot survival under extreme conditions caught the eye of important people stateside.

Hubert denied being a Nazi. He had money. He bribed his way into a new country, a new job with new purpose. It was all a great secret, because Nazi doctors were out of vogue in America at the time.

Harold Strong was another secret. He was Hubert’s son. He emigrated to America and changed his name, before Hitler was all the rage. He helped Papa Hubert get the bribes into the correct hands.

And then there was Jackson Strong, Hubert’s grandson, who became a significant power in American politics, riding on the back of Nazi loot, quietly breathing life into the shadows of the Nazi past.

The picture was coming together nicely for me. But I needed more. It was time to visit The Director.

***

“You are straying into places you really don’t want to go,” said The Director. “Go home. Enjoy whatever it is you do. Now that you are irrelevant. But leave this alone.”

I knew The Director well enough. He thought people who drank decaf coffee were straying into places they really didn’t want to go. Why was it important to him that I leave this alone?

“Leave what alone?” I said.

“Herickson. Winsor.” He grunted the names.

“Dead,” I said.

“Yes,” said The Director.

“Murdered,” I said.

“You don’t know that,” said The Director.

“Killing squads in the desert. Nazis. UFOs,” I said.

The Director was quiet now. He had a way of staring people down that never worked on me. Not then and not now.

“This is dangerous ground,” he said. “People end up—”

“Dead? Like Herickson and Winsor?”

“Hm,” said The Director.

“Nazi medicine, Experimental Cell Block Five. Genocide.” I paused, for effect. “Presidential candidate.”

“Quiet,” said The Director, clearly alarmed. He held his hands up, palms out, as if he could push the words back. 

“Bob and Tony were my friends. I know someone from your part of the world killed them. Someone powerful ordered it. Jackson Strong is my guess.”

“And…”

“Public office is no place for murderers and traitors and Nazis,” I said. “Public office is for liars, cheats and the deliberately ignorant.”

“So…you want?”

“Murderers punished. Politicians exposed.”

“Is that all?” The Director laughed. He had a dry, croaking laugh, like a parched crow. His eyes narrowed. “You were a good pilot—”

“I was a great pilot. So were Bob and Tony.”

“—a good pilot, but you are not an operative. Never were. This is not your skill set. You need to go fly a rocking chair.”

“Five missing people. Five graves in the desert. Murder. And worse.”

“Prove it,” said The Director.

“Okay,” I said.

Maybe it was because he knew me that well. Now he looked more interested than combative. And concerned. Lots of that.

“Okay,” said The Director.

“Signed agreements to employ a known war criminal. Approval to perform medical experiments on captive individuals, including children. Memos to dump bodies in the desert. Photos. Here, in America.” I didn’t elaborate on the photos. “Just to start the conversation.”  

He didn’t ask how I had this stuff. Curious, I thought. We sat for a very long time, just him staring at me. I got up, refilled my coffee. Not decaf, the real thing.

“Good coffee,” I said.

Still, he said nothing.

“Tell me everything,” he said, finally.

***

“There was this aircraft, back at Peaceful Sands,” I said. “Looked like a disc. A saucer. We flew it.” I topped off my coffee. Hot, black. Full-bodied. I shook my head, dismayed. “More Nazis. They built the prototype with the world crashing down around them. We got to them first. Shipped it to Peaceful Sands.”

“The Marten brothers,” said The Director.

“Correct,” I said. “Their design was inherently unstable. Wouldn’t be feasible until decades later, after fly by wire computer technology came on board. Conceptually very advanced though, aerodynamically.”

“Murder? Mayhem?” The Director wanted me to get to the point.

“We had the technology. The Russians did not. We wanted to keep it that way.”

“People saw it being test flown, right?”

“The public thought it was a UFO,” I said. “Important people decided that wasn’t so bad. Deflect people from the truth. But they had to make it convincing.”

“It was a matter of national security,” said The Director.

Now I knew The Director was neck deep in all of it.

“Aliens. They needed aliens to maximize the hype,” I said.

The look on The Director’s face told me the story was right.

“We had Struginheimer,” said The Director. “He had…a plan.”

“Peaceful Sands. Experimental Block Five,” I said. “Children—immigrant children—surgically modified to look like alien life forms.” The horror of it, the truth of it, overwhelmed me. I choked. “Killed. Buried in the desert when no longer useful.”

“And you have photos,” said The Director, with a shrug.

“Technicians stationed at Peaceful Sands helped, unwittingly. Afterward, they were murdered to contain the…situation.” I was still putting the pieces together. The story made sense, now. “Buried in the desert.” I smiled cynically. “Lot of that happening back then, right?”

“Let’s talk about today,” said The Director.

“Jackson Strong, front-runner for his party’s presidential primary, had this idea that being directly linked to Nazi medical experiments on children on American soil, by his own grandfather no less, might be a tricky public relations problem.” I spoke precisely. For clarity.

“Jackson is an active supporter of the cause.” The Director was filling in the gaps. Time was running short.

“How did you know we found the documents?”

“You bought that aircraft,” he said. “That concerned us. How did you open the lock box?”

“We managed.” I did not tell him the key was already in place.

“We couldn’t take the risk, you see?” He tried to look regretful.

“Jackson Strong ordered my friends murdered, yes?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“How much time now?”

“Any moment.” 

***

I never killed a human close up, personal. In Korea we bombed faceless targets going fast and high. Never saw the people who died. Other than that I was a test pilot. Looking a person in the eye to kill them was never my thing. Before now.

“Since time is short,” I said. “Just say the words. Tell me I’m right.”

The Director was an arrogant man. I counted on that. He considered me a problem to eliminate. He was sure it was about to be handled.

“Jackson Strong gave me orders to have Bob Herickson and Tony Winsor killed,” he said.

“Tony was the weapons guy,” I said. “He loved shooting. I used to tease him about it.”

“Interesting.” He yawned, glanced at his watch.

I shifted my weight, pulled Tony’s favorite handgun from under my shirt. I shot The Director right between the eyes.

Never too old to learn new things, I thought. I slipped out the back. Moved slow and steady. Just an old man on a walk. Nothing to see here.

At the next corner a truck, an express package delivery service, crossed in front of me. Took a left, headed downtown. I wondered if my package was on it.

Now I had some time to think. Who left that key for us? Who wanted us to find those documents? Was there a friend out there, pulling for me? Figured I’d find out, or not.

Lotta heads to cut off this beast, I thought. Best get on with it.