Free The Day After Roswell by Philip J. Corso

like a bad penny, it turned up
again. I heard footsteps outside my door and caught my breath. There
were always sounds in the Pentagon at night because the building was
never empty. Somewhere, in some office, in parts of the building most
people don’t even know about, some group is planning for a
war we hope we will never fight. Therefore, more than any other
building except for the White House, the Pentagon is a place where
someone is always walking around after something.
    General Trudeau peeked his head around the door.
    “Look inside?” he asked.
    “What’d you do to me, General?”
I said. “I thought we were friends. ”
    “That’s why I gave you this, Phil,
” he said, but he wasn’t laughing, wasn’t
even smiling. “You know how valuable this property is? You
know what any of the other agencies would do to get this into their
hands?‘
    “They’d probably kill me, ” I
said.
    “They probably want to kill you anyway, but this
makes them even more rabid. The air force wants it because they think
it belongs to them. The navy wants it because they want anything the
air force wants. The CIA wants it so they can give it to the Russians.
”
    “What do you want me to do, General?” I
asked. I couldn’t figure out what he was thinking unless he
thought I should just bury the stuff and leave it at that.
    “I need a plan from you, ” he said.
“Not simply what this property is, but what we can do with
it. Something that keeps it out of play until we know what we have and
what use we can make of it. ”
    This had all the makings of a plot, pure and simple.
    “Look, who’s our biggest
problem?” I asked, but it was a proforma question because I
already knew the answer.
    “The same people who lost Korea for us and who you
had to fight over at the White House, ” he said.
“You know exactly who I mean. We got to keep
whatever’s valuable here from falling into the wrong hands
because as sure as we’re standing in this Pentagon,
it’ll find its way right to the Kremlin. ”
    There were people floating around Washington right at that
very moment who, even out of the most well meaning intentions they
could muster, would have shipped this Roswell file over to Russia while
patting President Kennedy on the back and congratulating him for
contributing to world peace. Just as there were people who would have
cut Trudeau’s and my throat and left us right on the rug to
bleed to death while they packed that file away. Either way, Trudeau
didn’t have to quote me chapter and verse to explain that he
was handing me one of the most important assignments I would ever
receive from him. He was giving me the keys to a whole new kingdom, but
neither he nor I knew what in the world we could do with this stuff,
short of keeping it out of the hands of the Russians. At the very
least, that was a start.
    “We have to know what we have first, ” I
said.
    “Then that’s your job right away. What do
we have? Anything usable here? Put together people you can trust from
the specialists we have and go over the contacts at our defense
contractor lists. And this is only part of the property we have.
There’s some more of it downstairs in the file basement that
the other intelligence agencies don’t know anything about.
Came here from New Mexico instead of going out to Ohio. Don’t
ask me why. It’s coming up to you right now in boxes. Just
put everything together, take some time, and evaluate this for me.
”
    “Anybody know I have this?” I asked.
    “Everybody knows that if you’re poking
around something it’s got to be important, ” he
said. “So don’t act like the cat that ate the
canary. They’re watching you as much as they’re
watching me. ” Then he walked to the doorway, looked down
both ends of the hall, and turned back to me. “But move this
thing along, because we could be out of this office in under a year and
I don’t want to have to worry about running out of time on
this. ”
    And he was gone