Warm Welcome
by Bill Bowler
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
The next evening, the surface of the big egg sitting on the Mall, bathed in spotlights and surrounded by riot fencing and armed guards, began to waver and ripple. The egg dissolved and disappeared. As frantic sentries searched the area and reported to their superiors, the cloaked shuttle craft, without a sound, ascended vertically to a height of 500 feet and moved unseen to a stationary position over the White House.
Directly beneath the alien shuttle, in the White House Situation Room, the National Security Council was in emergency session.
General Spackle was yelling into the hotline. “What? What?! Dammit!!” He slammed down the phone and turned to the Council members seated around the table.
“The damn thing disappeared!” He took a deep breath to lower his blood pressure. “This whole mess is spinning out of control. We should have hit them while we could.”
“My God!” said President Dorfus. “These aliens could attack now at any moment. We’re completely defenseless!”
“Please, Mr. President,” said Jack Blunt, the Security Advisor, “We have plenty of cards to play. They have one ship and one shuttle craft. We have the full might of our armed forces, thousands of missiles, and our entire nuclear arsenal. We can make them pay.”
“Ralph?”
“He’s right, Elvin. We can inflict a lot of pain.” General Spackle leaned back in his chair and rubbed his hands together. “But circumstances dictate extreme caution. We play it safe and move you to the bunker for now while we proceed with planning for the operation. Step one is to locate the missing craft and remove the immediate threat. We have the ways and means to do that.”
“What about the hostage, the lizard man?” asked Jack.
“We hold him,” said General Spackle. “He’s our leverage, our strongest card.” General Spackle stood up from the table and turned to President Dorfus. “All right, Elvin. Let’s get started. My aide will escort you to the bunker. I’m going to the Pentagon to powwow with the General Staff. Jack, this is now a military operation. Best thing for you is to stand by and lay low. My staff will keep you updated. We have a lot of work to do.”
With that, the Council ended its emergency session. Jack emerged, worn and weary, out the side door onto the White House driveway. It was a beautiful, warm spring Washington evening. Jack looked up at the rising moon, breathed in the fresh spring air, and decided to walk to Georgetown on foot. It would clear his head, give him time to think. He dismissed his driver and started off down Pennsylvania Ave. The cloaked alien craft, hovering at 500 feet, silently followed him.
On board the shuttle craft, Darshak strapped the cloaking device on his wrist and switched it on. Nothing happened. Darshak shook his wrist and pushed the button again. Nothing. He muttered an imprecation.
“What’s wrong?” asked Vlas. “It’s not working?”
“The power’s drained. I forgot to recharge it. We’ll have to work without it for now.” He plugged it into the wall. “At least the ship is cloaked. That works off the main power supply.”
“Great,” said Vlas, “just great.”
Jack was feeling less stressed and depressed when he reached Georgetown and turned onto a dark, quiet and deserted Q Street. He climbed the steps of Sheila’s townhouse and knocked quietly on the door. Behind him, the cloaked alien craft descended to ground level. Sheila opened the door to see, over Jack’s shoulder, a huge lizard man who seemed to leap out of nowhere. Sheila screamed and Jack turned to see the seven-foot reptilian running towards them.
The lizard man was almost upon them, reaching towards Jack with his powerful claws. Instinctively, Jack grabbed Sheila by the shoulders, shoved her into the alien’s path, ducked into the house, and slammed the door. He heard Sheila scream again. Outside, Sheila struggled in the alien’s powerful grasp. Faces appeared in the windows of neighboring houses. A police squad car on patrol pulled around the corner of Q Street, lights flashing. Sirens could be heard in the distance.
Darshak lifted Sheila off the ground as if she were a feather, and carried her back into the shuttle. Jack watched from the window as the two of them seemed to vanish into thin air. The shuttle craft doors slid shut. With Vlas at the controls, the invisible craft ascended rapidly towards the orbiting mother ship. Back on Earth, the townhouse door slowly opened and Jack peered out to see if the coast was clear. The street and sidewalk were full of cops. Sheila and the alien were both gone.
* * *
Sheila lay sprawled in a brightly lit, metallic silver chamber with a smooth shining floor, walls and ceiling. She heard a faint hum and felt vibration coming through the floor. She climbed unsteadily to her feet and looked around the room. Through a transparent opening in one wall, she saw the surface of Earth far below. An invisible door slid silently open, and a lizard man entered. It didn’t seem to be the same one who had abducted her; he seemed smaller, but she couldn’t be sure. Sheila cowered back against the wall. The lizard man growled and hissed at her, but through the harsh sounds, she made out one word.
“Sorry.”
“Why have you taken me?”
“Mistake.”
“What are you going to do with me?”
The alien said nothing, turned, and left the room.
* * *
Jack did not report Sheila’s abduction to the police. There were too many sensitive national security issues to risk going public. Instead, he informed President Dorfus and General Spackle.
Ralph Spackle was unequivocal. “It’s time to shoot down the mother ship! We can’t let them escape and report back to their home base. They’ll call for reinforcement. We have to strike now, fast and hard.”
“But what about Sheila?”
“I’m sorry, Jack, but she is expendable.”
“Can’t we negotiate?” asked Dorfus. “Stall for time? Find a workaround?”
A presidential aide entered the room. Dorfus looked up, annoyed. “What is it?”
“Message received from the alien ship, Mr. President.”
The room fell quiet.
“Well, put it up on screen, for Chrissake!” shouted Dorfus.
A reptilian face with yellow eyes appeared on screen, speaking in harsh, mangled English: “Truce. Prisoner... exchange.”
“I don’t trust them for a minute!” said General Spackle. “They’re up to something. They’ll stab us in the back first chance they get. We can’t let our guard down.”
“What about the hostage?” asked Jack.
Spackle replied, “He’s a unique source of intelligence. We have to hold him. He’s too valuable to let go.”
“I meant Sheila.”
President Dorfus spoke up, “Well, of course we have to try and get her back. How about a rescue mission?”
General Spackle slammed his fist on the tabletop. “Goddammit, Elvin, there’s just no time. You have to break some eggs to make an omelet! Jack, I know you’re attached to that woman, but there are bigger things at stake. We can’t compromise our national security for the sake of one individual. And we can not, under any circumstances, release the alien! He’s seen too much, knows too much. It would represent the threat of a tremendous security breach. The fate of Earth hangs in the balance, our values, our entire civilization.”
“Then what the hell do we do?” shouted Dorfus.
“We play along, lull them into complacency, and then hit them hard when we have an opening. Sorry, Jack. But we do have one shot at saving her. We agree to the prisoner exchange, but we’re not going to let Lizard Boy go, at least not back to their home planet. They’d only return in force. We pretend to go along with it, complete the exchange, and once we have our national back, safe and sound, we open fire and blow them and their ship to smithereens.”
“That’s good, Ralph, real good,” said President Dorfus. “It’s ugly, but it just might work. What do you think, Jack?”
“I guess we have no choice.”
The meeting broke. After Jack had left, General Spackle stopped at the door, closed it, and turned to President Dorfus. “You know, Elvin, the enemy will be most vulnerable when they descend to the surface. We could take them out by hitting the shuttle craft on the way down, before the exchange, and be done with it, clean and simple.”
“Right. Sure. But what about the mother ship?”
“We have to hit them, too. At the same time. With all we’ve got.”
“And the woman?”
Ralph shook his head. “Collateral damage. But it lowers our risk close to zero as far as the success of the operation.”
“I hear you. Yeah, hard to argue with that when you look at the big picture. But we better not mention it to Jack. He’s too personally involved. He’s lost his professional distance, his objectivity.”
General Spackle agreed. “Right, we better keep him out of the loop.”
* * *
On board the saucer, Sheila sat on the polished floor of the small chamber, leaning back against the smooth metallic wall. She was thinking what a piece of scum, what a lowlife, back-stabbing, abject coward Jack had turned out to be, wishing she could get her hands on him, and wondering what the aliens were going to do with her. She was in the middle of a fantasy about shoving Jack off a cliff onto the rocks below, when the doors in the smooth wall slid silently open and the smaller alien entered the chamber.
It was very difficult to make out what the lizard man was struggling to say to her, as it sounded like growling and gargling. But with some difficulty, she made out the word:
“Come.”
Sheila stood up. “Why? Where are we going?”
“Home.”
Sheila followed the alien out through the sliding door. The bigger alien joined them and led them down the corridor.
The exchange was arranged to take place on the helicopter landing pad on the roof of the Pentagon. A contingent of military and government officials gathered at the agreed-upon time. Heavily armed guards kept their weapons trained on the alien prisoner, who was handcuffed, shackled, gagged and blindfolded. Anti-aircraft missile launch batteries in Virginia and on the Moon were on high alert, warheads deployed, awaiting command to launch.
On board the orbiting spacecraft, Vlas and Darshak escorted Sheila along a metallic corridor. They took a swift, silent elevator down to the pod bay, led her out on a broad truss to a dock where the shuttle craft was tethered. Darshak steadied her as she clambered down through the top hatch of the egg-shaped vehicle that dangled from the truss like a piece of fruit on a branch.
At the moment that Vlas and Darshak were climbing down into the shuttle behind Sheila, a twitchy young Guardian of the rank of major, on duty at the Space Force Command and Control Center in Arlington, was startled by a pop-up on his computer screen and accidentally touched a red button on his console, firing a missile at the orbiting saucer before the command was given. Thus commenced Operation Eagle’s Talon. A salvo of missiles followed.
The saucer lurched from the initial impact. Then a series of violent explosions shook the spacecraft. Smoke filled the pod bay as flames crackled from scorched electronics in the walls. The crippled saucer began to spin and lost orbital velocity. Vlas pulled the hatch shut, launched the shuttle craft, engaged the cloak, and flew out through the open pod bay doors, down, towards the surface of Earth.
The rest of the crew on board the saucer raced to abandon ship. They left their stations, rushed to the bay and climbed into the emergency escape pods which fell down on Washington, DC and Virginia like giant drops of rain.
Earth forces, waiting with open arms, opened fire on the falling pods with small arms and light weapons. U.S. military personnel rounded up the survivors as the pods hit the ground, neutralizing some of the lizard men and taking the rest prisoner.
The shuttle craft with Vlas, Darshak and Sheila, was hit by a Javelin X-model handheld heat-seeking missile that blew a hole in the side of the shuttle and short-circuited the cloaking device. U.S. troops on the ground watched as the small craft, in smoke and flames, spiraled down and crash-landed in Fairfax. When Sheila and her alien captors, bruised and battered, crawled from the smoking wreckage, they were surrounded by U.S. Special Forces. Vlas and Darshak were clubbed unconscious by rifle butts, handcuffed, and taken into custody.
Sheila, in shock and bleeding, screamed at the SWAT team: “What are you doing?! They’ve done nothing! They’ve harmed no one. You’re out of your minds!”
She was taken along with the aliens to a CIA black site for questioning.
* * *
The President and the top brass had gathered for a small reception in the lobby of the West Wing. Operation Eagle’s Talon had gotten off on the wrong foot, so to speak, had almost gone awry, but ended with complete success, all enemies killed or captured, and no American casualties. It was a tremendous achievement and a festive mood reigned in the White House.
General Spackle slapped President Dorfus on the back. “I told you so, Elvin. Our boys are the best in the world. Those dumbass lizards never had a chance. The situation is now under complete control.”
Elvin Dorfus smiled sheepishly. He was immensely relieved that things had not gone completely to Hell.
“But what about Sheila?” asked Jack. “Where is she? What are you going to do with her? When can I see her?”
“I’m sorry, Blunt,” said General Spackle, lowering his voice. “But just how well do you know her? Some questions have come up. She made incriminating statements at the operation site. We don’t know what happened to her on board the alien craft, what they might have done to her. They may have brainwashed her or done some kind of mind-altering surgery or procedure or something worse that we don’t have a clue about. Or she may just be some kind of radical peacenik who went over to the other side. A collaborator. To tell you the truth, she’s talking like a traitor. It doesn’t look good. We have to hold her for debriefing. Indefinite detention until we sort this out. We may need to depose you, as well.”
“Me?” said Jack, thinking as fast as he could and trying to sort out his best move. He wanted to avoid personal trouble at all cost. He had his career to think about. “Sure. Don’t worry about me. I totally get it. We’re on the same team.”
“Then let’s celebrate,” said General Spackle. “This is a great day. A historic day. Let’s crack a bottle of champagne!”
White House service staff, dressed in white with white gloves, carried in the bottles and champagne flutes on silver trays. Spackle and Dorfus popped the corks and poured the bubbly. President Dorfus raised his glass.
“Let this be a warning to our enemies, whoever they are, wherever they may be. We are strong, we are vigilant, we are just, and we shall prevail. To peace on Earth, to mankind, and to victory!”
“Here, here! To victory!” Glasses clinked and the buzz of conversation filled the room.
A door flew open and a Pentagon aide rushed in, breathless.
“What is it, Major?” asked General Spackle, lowering his glass, annoyed at the interruption.
“Sir! Moon Base radar has picked up a second alien saucer approaching Earth.”
The room fell silent.
Copyright © 2022 by Bill Bowler
