“The place where I keep all my pain to remind me of the task at hand,” Marsh continued.
Overhead lights had snapped on upon their entry, cued by some sensor. The floor before them, looking to be about half a football field in size and stretching up two stories, was lined with regularly spaced museum-like objects, one of which was instantly identifiable: the wreckage of what looked like an aircraft, a sleek fighter of a kind he’d never seen before. Its reassembled remnants looked similar to a much scaled down version of the old B-52 Flying Fortress, the massive sentinels that had protected the U. S. against surprise attack for generations.
“Recognize it, Colonel?” Marsh asked as they approached the display, which resembled a funeral pyre more than an artifact of military history.
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“That’s because there’s no record of its existence. This is one of only three prototypes of the design ever manufactured as part of Project Blue Book.”
“Project Blue Book?”
“Goes back to 1947, Colonel. My father was a World War Two fighter pilot assigned to an experimental division in White Sands, New Mexico.” Marsh stretched a hand out as if to touch the wreckage, then pulled it back sharply. “He was flying this craft when it was shot down.”
“In 1947? Two years after the war was over?” asked a befuddled Rathman.
“Only that war,” Marsh told him. “My father’s division was scrambled. Three of these went up and one managed to shoot down the craft that destroyed my father’s plane with a kind of pulse weapon that would still be cutting-edge today.”
“I’ve never heard of any of this, sir.”
“Of course you haven’t. It took place in July of 1947 over Roswell, not far from the site of what would become Area Fifty-one.” Marsh hesitated, holding Rathman’s tightly focused stare. “My father wasn’t killed by the Germans or Japanese, Colonel. His plane was shot down by aliens.”
*
“That’s who the war I’ve been fighting for years is against,” Marsh resumed. “If you don’t believe in the cause, then you’re the wrong man for the job.” He hesitated. “I know that the enemy is among us, impossible to identify visually because they look exactly like us. Do you believe me?”
“I don’t need to believe you or in anything, sir. I just need to be given something to kill.”
Marsh’s lips flirted with a smile. Yes, Rathman was the right man for the job, all right, carefully culled from dozens of candidates. The one common denominator those candidates held was death, lots of it by their own making. Men who were not only no strangers to killing but had become intimately familiar with the act to the point where no degree of it would trouble them.
Like Rathman.
Marsh stopped before the remnants of his father’s plane and ran his hand in tender fashion along it. The steel wasn’t just cold, it was frigid. Though Marsh knew this always to be a trick of imagination, he let that same imagination conjure up visions of some alien weapon leaving its icy residue forever embedded in the jagged wreckage.
Explosions were traditionally thought of as hot, searing. But maybe alien explosions were the exact opposite, icy cold. Who knew what their air was like, after all? Their entire world could, likely did, operate on different principles.
“They’ve been among us since the very dawn of civilization,” Marsh told Rathman, not bothering to gauge the level of the man’s skepticism. All his troops started out that way and each arrived at their ultimate moment of realization in their own time. “But there is reason to believe plans are being laid for an invasion. Call it a surprise attack, an intergalactic Pearl Harbor.”
Marsh held on to the tip of what was left of a single wing of the fighter in which his father had died. It felt like the bottom of an ice cube tray. He thought for an instant if he squeezed his hand, the steel would compress in his grasp, all spongy and soft, the molecular composition altered by whatever weapon the aliens had used to down it. But he shook off the illusion as quickly as it had formed in his mind.
“I call them Zarim,” Marsh said, exaggerating the reem syllable as he swung around abruptly enough to almost draw a rise from Rathman. “Have you heard the term before?”
“No, sir.”
“It’s biblical. The general translation is ‘outsiders’ or ‘strangers.’ But another interpretation refers to the Zarim more like creditors or criminals known for seizing the possessions of others. Usurping their worlds, swallowing their identities. That’s what will happen to us, to our world, Colonel, if we don’t act. So we hunt them down. We hunt the Zarim down and kill them before they can kill us. Does that concern you at all? Do my words make you rethink your presence here?”
Rathman seemed to ponder that briefly. “These Zarem—”
“Za-reem.”
“—do they bleed when you kill them?”
“They do indeed. Just like us. Strangely. They look just as we do. It’s how they’ve managed to walk among us undetected for so long.”