Alien Hostiles Read online

  Dedication

  For the REAL Julia Ashley, the best RVer I know.

  And, as always, for Brea, who reads my mind like no other.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Ian Douglas

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  “We deal now, not with things of this world alone . . . [but] . . . of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy . . .”

  General Douglas MacArthur, 1962

  May 1951

  “On the money, Lieutenant!” PFC Francis P. Wall hugged the muddy ground, peering over the rim of the dugout at the village below. “That one was dead on!”

  Lieutenant Evans, crouched in the dugout next to Carloski, Easy Company’s radioman, nodded, then spoke into the radio handset pressed to his ear. “That’s it, Lucky Three,” he said. “You’re on ’em! Fire for effect!”

  The rumble in the distance, like approaching thunder, signaled incoming from the artillery battery planted on the other side of the mountain. Something, lots of somethings, whooshed and roared overhead like the rumble of a high-speed freight train . . . and then the village in the valley beneath the watching GIs erupted in pulses of light and geysers of black earth.

  Wall watched the barrage through his binoculars with a sharp thrill of excitement. Yeah, that would stop those bastards dead in their tracks!

  Muddy and tired, the small detachment of men drawn from “Easy” Company, 2nd Battalion, 27th Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, crouched in the shelter of their dugout on the mountainside as artillery rounds howled overhead. Below, sharply highlighted by the glare of drifting illumination flares, lay the tiny hamlet of Pukp’o-ri, less than three kilometers from Chorwan in a blot on the map called the Iron Triangle. Easy’s mission had been to establish an FOB, a forward observation base, in the ruins of an abandoned hillside bunker and call in artillery fire from a US battery a few miles away. After half a dozen ranging rounds, a shell had come down smack in the middle of the tiny grass airstrip north of the village, and now a full barrage was walking across the airfield, wrecking a pair of Russian-made Yak-9 fighters parked in the shelter of their camouflaged revetments. Chinese or North Korean maintenance personnel scattered for their bomb-proofs.

  “Shit, Lieutenant! Just look at those sons of bitches scamper!”

  “They won’t get far,” Evans, Easy Company’s CO, replied. “Lucky Three, Lucky Three! Ef-Oh-Be One! Pour it on, boys! You’ve got ’em on the run!”

  And the rounds kept coming.

  Just what the doctor ordered, Wall thought. A chance to hit back! Ever since the President had removed Lieutenant General MacArthur from command last month, morale in the front lines had been at rock bottom. Hell, morale had been low to begin with after the damned Chinese had swarmed south across the Yalu in October, and yanking his command out from under Mac had just made it worse. UN forces had finally stalled the Chinese advance and were starting to win back some hotly contested ground, but the outcome of this bloody little war—sorry, police action, as Truman had called it—was still very much in doubt.

  So getting a chance to hit the gooks where it hurt was good for the soul. . . .

  Off to the right, a solitary orange flare drifted down toward the town as if following the slope of the mountain. Probably an illumination round that had gone off short. . . .

  Minutes passed as the thunder of the barrage crashed through the valley.

  “Damn it, Wall!” PFC Matt Budrys said at Wall’s side. “What the hell is that?”

  “What? I don’t see anything.”

  “There!” Budrys pointed. “Over the airstrip!”

  Wall peered into the darkness. Some of the incoming shells had been set for airbursts in order to spray the ground with shrapnel, and he couldn’t see much of anything beyond the slow-drifting flares and the flash of exploding ordnance.

  “I see flares . . .”

  “Shit, Wall, are you blind? Look at that bright one! Look how it’s moving!”

  One flare, Wall saw, was brighter, the one he’d seen earlier over the mountain, glowing orange, looking a little like the gleam of a Halloween jack-o-lantern. It was still moving down, no longer, he now noticed, with the slow parachute’s drift of an illumination flare, but in sharp, short jerks, first here . . . now there . . . now over there. In moments it had moved directly into the area above the airfield where the arty rounds were going off.

  “What the hell?” Wall said. “How come the arty isn’t doing anything to it?” Somehow, it didn’t seem natural that a flare could be smack in the middle of blast after blast, and not go out. The parachute from which it was hanging should be shredded by now.

  Obviously, he thought, it wasn’t a flare.

  “Maybe it’s too quick,” Budrys suggested.

  “Okay, but what is it? It’s not a flare. Some kind of aircraft?”

  “Might be Russian,” PFC Allen said, guessing. He sounded doubtful. “Or Chinese . . .”

  “Hey, Lieutenant!” Wall called. “You seein’ this?”

  “I see it. It’s just a flare. . . .”

  But Wall didn’t believe that now, not the way it was moving around inside that kill zone. The men watched it for long minutes as the artillery barrage continued. As the explosions began dying away, the light remained, becoming brighter . . . and still brighter.

  “Hey, Lieutenant,” Carloski said. “I don’t like this.”

  “Yeah . . .” Evans said. “Yeah. What the hell is that thing?”

  The light had changed, pulsing now, and shifting to a deep blue-green. Although Wall couldn’t see any shape behind the rapidly increasing glare, he had the distinct impression that the thing was approaching them . . . and fast.

  “Lieutenant?” Wall called. He shouldered his M-1 rifle. “Permission to fire, sir!”

  “Do it, Wall! All of you! Fire!”

  Wall was still working with the idea that he was seeing some sort of Russian aircraft. He’d heard about some new-fangled things that could hover called helicopters, though he’d never seen one, and he wondered if that was what he was seeing.

  Damn it was close! He couldn’t hear a sound, but he guessed that the range was down to a hundred yards. Taking aim, he squeezed the M-1’s trigger . . . and again . . . and again. . . .

  Some of the other guys were firing now as well, and Wall distinctly heard the sharp whang of bullets striking metal. The object’s reaction was immediate and startling. The light began pulsing faster, once going out completely, and the object was moving erratically from side to side. He heard a sound like diesel locomotives starting up.

  He wondered if it was going to crash.

  He wondered how it could be affected at all by armor-piercing rifle bullets if it could withstand the fury of an artillery barrage.

  He wondered—

  The beam hit him full-on, a bright white glare, like a searchlight. He instantly felt hot and tingling all over, felt it inside him, burning. . . .

  He held up his hand and stared at it in horror. He could see the bones of his hand and arm right through his skin!

  Wall was still screaming when Budrys dragged him inside the small concrete bunker off to their left, but the burning went on and on as Wall’s mind fogged and the nausea rose up, clogging his throat with fire. . . .

  The others in the detachment had been hit as well. Wall was convinced they all were going to die. Dragging himself up against the concrete wall of the bunker, he managed to peer through a firing slit, and caught sight of the . . . the thing vanishing upward at a forty-five-degree angle and winking out against the night.

  None of the men of Easy Company had ever seen or heard of anything like that glowing object, ever.

  And as they huddled in the bunker, vomiting and shaking, they agreed that, if they got out of this, they would never, never report it . . . because they knew if they told a soul, they would end up in jackets with extralong sleeves, locked away in a padded cell.

  And hell maybe, just maybe, that was exactly where they belonged. . . .

  Chapter One

  “We have, indeed, been contacted—perhaps even visited—by extraterrestrial beings, and the US government, in collusion with the other national powers of the Earth, is determined to keep this information from the general public.”

  Victor Marchetti, Special Assistant to the Executive Director of the CIA, 1979

  25 February 1942

  Colonel Frederick Caldwell stared up into the black Los Angeles sky and wondered what the hell was going on. Air-raid sirens wailed in the distance, and he could hear gunfire—both the chatter of machine guns, and the deep-throated
boom of heavy antiaircraft cannon. Close by, a 20-mm Oerlikon mount hammered away with a tooth-rattling thud-thud-thud, as the mount commander pointed with a baton at something overhead.

  This was insane. The Japanese couldn’t possibly have planes that could reach the West Coast of the United States, could they?

  It was just ten weeks since Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the US into a swiftly-expanding global war. The Japanese had hit Hawaii by slipping in close with a carrier task force consisting of at least six carriers and launching an estimated 360 aircraft in two waves, sinking or grounding eighteen ships, including five battleships.

  As head of Army Intelligence—G-2—for the Army’s Western Defense Command, Caldwell had been fully briefed on every aspect of the attack. The West Coast, he knew, was still jittery in the wake of Pearl Harbor, a condition made far worse by an actual attack on US soil just two days before. According to reports, a Japanese submarine had surfaced off the coast of Santa Barbara and lobbed something like a dozen shells from its deck gun at an oil refinery ashore. No damage had been done, thank God, and the military had been downplaying the whole incident, but the US public was expecting a Japanese invasion at any moment.

  Naval Intelligence had put out a report just a few hours ago instructing units on the West Coast to prepare for a potential attack. Where, Caldwell wondered, was their intel coming from? Had they tracked another Japanese carrier group all the way across the Pacific, bringing it within range? He doubted that. He doubted that their enemy’s military could have gotten past Hawaii with its thoroughly stirred-up beehive of scout planes, pickets, and that new-fangled radar to creep up to within a couple of hundred miles of Los Angeles itself.

  Still . . . something was up there. Shortly after 2:00 a.m. military radar had picked up an incoming target 120 miles west of Los Angeles. Shortly after 3:00 a.m., reports started coming in of an unidentified aircraft in the dark skies over Santa Monica. Antiaircraft guns and .50 caliber machine guns had opened up, as searchlights swept the skies. Whatever it was had moved on inland, coming under fire from the massed coastal defense batteries across the city, which by now was blacked out but thoroughly awake.

  The searchlights, he saw, were concentrating on . . . something. He squinted against the glare trying to see. Whatever it was . . . it was big—bigger than a plane. A barrage balloon, maybe? There’d been a report earlier of a blimp-shaped barrage balloon breaking free of its moorings at a defense plant up the coast. Coastal defense units had been releasing weather balloons, too, and nervous gunners might be shooting at those.

  But Caldwell raised his binoculars to his eyes and peered at the something pinned against the sky by searchlights. Not a plane . . . not a balloon . . .

  What the hell was it?

  Something unknown . . . but in wartime LA you had to assume it was hostile.

  The Present Day

  Lieutenant Commander Mark Hunter, US Navy, was feeling distinctly ill-at-ease as he walked up to the familiar apartment door, 2D, and knocked. He’d been here before, when a grumpy old man had opened the door and grumbled something unintelligible at him. Hunter was determined to try again.

  After a long pause, he knocked again . . . and finally the door opened just a crack. He could see a Hispanic woman’s face behind the chain.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” Hunter said. “I wonder if you could tell me—”

  “No hablo inglesa,” the woman said, and started to shut the door.

  “Por favor,” Hunter said, blocking the door with his shoe. “Lo siento,” the woman said. “No se nada.”

  Hunter removed his foot and the door slammed. Well he’d really not expected them to know the previous tenant’s whereabouts. . . .

  Maybe, he thought, it was the uniform. He was wearing his dress blues, complete with fruit salad and Budweiser. Neither the colorful board of ribbons and decorations on his left breast nor the clunky-looking emblem of the Navy SEALs pinned above it suggested the immigration service, but Latinos living this close to the border might well be afraid of any uniform. He’d worn his blues in order to impress the old guy who’d opened the door before, but maybe he’d guessed wrong and scared them instead.

  Gerri Galanis, his Greek-American girlfriend, had been very much on his mind since his return from space. She was missing—gone without a trace, not even a note, an address, or anything.

  And he was very much afraid that he knew what had happened to her.

  He intended to find her if he had to knock on every door in the town of El Cajon.

  He stepped into the baking air in front of the apartment complex. It was winter, but a Santa Ana was blowing, the hot, dry wind out of the highlands across Southern California to the coast, bringing a sweltering return to August for San Diego and its suburbs. Witherspoon Way was all but deserted, with little traffic. He turned right on the sidewalk and started toward his car.

  They were watching him from an impressive-looking Cadillac parked at the curb across the street. The car was black, naturally, with government plates guaranteed to be false. The two men inside wearing identical dark suits, dark fedoras, and sunglasses that rendered them stereotypically anonymous.

  The Men in Black. Hunter had been wondering when they would make an appearance.

  Instead of continuing to his car, Hunter stepped out into the street and jaywalked across to the Caddy. The windows were up, and he hammered at the driver’s-side window with the bottom of his tightly balled fist.

  Reluctantly, the window hummed down. “What?” the driver demanded.

  “Where’s Gerri?” Hunter demanded. “What have you done with her?”

  “I really have no idea what you’re talking about,” the man said. He had a faint accent Hunter couldn’t place.

  “Look, I know you’re following me, and I know you had Gerri Galanis abducted! If you harm her, I swear—”

  The man pulled a badge folder from an inside jacket pocket and flashed it. US Department of . . . something. He didn’t hold it still long enough for Hunter to read it all. “We are not following you, sir, and we don’t know about your woman. We are here on official business, and you are making a public disturbance.”

  Hunter took a step back into the street, jolted. “I thought—”

  “I suggest that you go home and sleep it off, Commander. Otherwise we’ll have to take you in . . . and that would not sit well with your superiors.”

  The man started the car and pulled out of the parking space, forcing Hunter back another couple of steps. He stared after their taillights as they vanished around the curve of Witherspoon Way, headed toward Chatham Street. Damn!

  Had the events of the past few months made him so paranoid that he was seeing aliens and Men in Black everywhere? Maybe it was time for him to see a shrink.

  Then he played back what the guy in the car had said. “And we don’t know about your woman.” The phrasing was . . . odd, especially in this society and its political correctness. Hunter hated how the idea of owning a person was so ingrained in the language—my girlfriend, my woman, my spouse. . . .

  Besides, how the hell had that guy known that Gerri was Hunter’s woman in any sense of the phrase?

  It was a stretch, but it was enough to confirm that those two had been watching him—or watching Gerri’s apartment building, which was much the same thing. They knew who he was, and they knew of his relationship with Gerri.

  He’d been dating Gerri for several months and they were close, very close. She knew nothing of Hunter’s current assignment with America’s secret space force . . . nothing about secret bases on the far side of the Moon, or treaties with aliens, or starships exploring nearby solar systems. But when he’d returned from Zeta Reticuli, she’d been gone, with no word or hint as to where she might be. And he was determined to find her.

  He’d already checked with the apartment’s rental office, but they could only tell him that “a well-dressed gentleman in sunglasses” had paid her rent in full and informed them that Gerri was moving. He’d checked at her place of employment—the Highballer Club in San Diego’s Gaslight District—and they didn’t know a thing. She simply hadn’t shown up for work one day, with no word of where she was going. Talking to the people who’d rented her apartment had been his last throw of the dice, and they either knew nothing, or they weren’t talking to guys in a Navy officer’s uniform.