Prologue
Oakland Army Base, Oakland California
23 July, 2012
It was easy to miss the freeway exit for the Oakland Army Base since it appears immediately after the Bay Bridge toll plaza. So it was not until another fifteen minutes of backtracking had gone by that Lieutenant Colonel Derek Hungerford drove into the bewildering maze of buildings that comprised one of the U.S. Army’s remaining World War II storage and shipping depots.
The assignment to this base had been an accident. Derek had been on track for an assignment to Fort Bragg, North Carolina for another six-month tour at the Joseph McCarthy Special Warfare Center, but at the last moment the funding had not come through.
Instead his management officer at the St. Louis U.S. Army Reserve headquarters had offered him a three-month tour with an Intelligence and Security Battalion headquarters at the Presidio in San Francisco. Although it promised to involve nothing more exciting than routine staff operations, he had accepted. He liked San Francisco and had friends out there. As he observed to his wife Katrina, he knew she would not mind a brief respite from the New York weather.
The INSCOM headquarters building - an aging concrete bunker - appeared at first glance to be both unimpressive and uncomfortable. It did hold the distinction of being ‘the last building before Hawaii’, as the duty Captain who greeted him described it. “Glad to have you here, sir. Sometimes we think we’ve been forgotten, particularly now that PSF is slated for closure in the next year or so. Oh, and I was supposed to give you this when you checked in.”
This proved to be a faxed order reassigning Hungerford to a two-week temporary duty as Classified Storage Control Officer at the Oakland Army Base across the San Francisco Bay. Hungerford scowled, “For this they task a Lieutenant Colonel?”
The Captain looked at him uncomfortably. “I guess they couldn’t find anyone else on such short notice, sir. The way I understand it, there was a CWO over there that had to leave on a family emergency. A replacement’s coming, but until he gets here, someone with TS clearance is needed, and we got tasked, and the CO said…”
Hungerford cut him off with a nod. Give the Reservist the odd job. On the other hand, he mused, it might be a pleasant - and quiet - two weeks. Certainly this mournful concrete block on the seacliff didn't have much going for it. He finished his in-processing, then returned to his rented car and headed for the Bay Bridge.
He had never been to the OARB before, and as he drove slowly through it, he decided that he hadn’t missed much. Perhaps back around the time of World War II the base had been a center of activity. Now it was clearly a neglected installation, ready for the budgetary chopping-block. Its most striking feature was a row of seven very long warehouses, originally designed to store material from the nearby docks. Now the docks were little-used, and the giant warehouses, their paint peeling with age, appeared to be simply utilitarian: places to store furniture, old vehicles, and the like. Except, it seemed, for Warehouse Six.
Warehouse Six had a barbed-wire fence around it. The wire was old and rusty, but still quite serviceable. Metal warning signs, also brown with rust, appeared at regular intervals along its perimeter. Hungerford had seen such secure buildings many times in his career and they no longer held any magic or mystery for him.
He parked the car in a grassy lot with only one other vehicle in it, strolled over to the gate, and pressed the buzzer mounted on one of its side-posts.
After a moment or two a door in the warehouse creaked open and a Sergeant came out, walked over to the fence, saluted, examined Hungerford’s ID card through the wire and opened the gate. Hungerford followed him out of the glare of the sunshine into the building.
Suddenly it was cool and quiet. The only light came from a small, glass-windowed office to the right of the door. The rest of the warehouse, unlit, seemed to stretch off into infinite darkness. The Sergeant motioned him into the office and poured two cups of coffee from a small pot on a hotplate.
“What is this place?” Hungerford asked. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Deep storage, I guess you could call it,” the Sergeant said with a shrug of his shoulders. “I really don’t know what they’ve got in there - just that it’s old classified stuff. There’s an inventory binder over there,” he nodded at the shelf alongside the single desk, “if you’re curious. But it doesn’t say much, just box numbers mostly. And almost everything is in a box which, at least, will make the sign-over easier.” Plainly the Sergeant was not unhappy at the prospect of relinquishing the claustrophobia of the warehouse to someone else.
Ultimately it took the two of them three days to inventory the building’s contents. There were hundreds of crates, conexes, shrouded and banded pallets, along with assorted containers whose only common feature was a size too big to fit into a filing cabinet.
A few of the items were in fresh metal or plastic packaging, but most were in simple wooden boxes whose steel bandings were as rust-covered as the outside fence.
As the Sergeant had said, no contents were identifiable, Hungerford had hoped for at least one UFO tailfin poking through a boxtop. As he leaned back in the chair in what was now his office, he wondered what sort of hidden treasure he now guarded. Certainly nothing of contemporary importance.
This was obviously a repository for things forgotten or near-forgotten, protected from the incinerator or trash-heap only because some minor bureaucrat had once immortalized them with a security classification in the days before automatic downgrading had been instituted. Probably a good many of the container descriptions themselves, wherever they originated from, had long since been destroyed as unnecessary. He grimaced. He had seen a sight like this at the end of the film Secrets of the Lost Ark, but had never expected to encounter it in actuality.
Well, he mused with a chuckle, maybe I’ve got the real Ark in here somewhere. That at least would be something. He recalled idly that in the movie the Ark had been crated and assigned a serial number. He had picked up the paperback version of the story, perhaps the number was cited in there.
On a whim he picked up the phone, requested an outside line, and made a collect call to his home in Syracuse where his wife, Major Katrina Hungerford, would now have arrived home from her office.
Katrina chuckled sympathetically as Derek told her of his surprise assignment, and then asked him to hold on while she went into the next room to rummage in the bookcase. A few minutes later she was back on the line. “Here it is,” she said. “Let’s see ... O.K., here on the last page - Got something to write with?”
Hungerford jotted down what she recited to him: TOP SECRET, ARMY INTEL, 2859301, DO NOT OPEN. “Doesn’t sound very promising,” he commented with a sigh. “MI used to be ‘Army Intelligence and Security’, which was ‘AIS’, not ‘Army Intel’. On the other hand, I do have a number of entries in the log with seven-digit numbers. I will let you know if I come across anything that hums or glows in the dark.”
“If you do,” she remarked, “don’t open it, it’s probably one of the Manhattan Project’s early failures.” He laughed, gave her a telephonic kiss, hung up, and turned to the binder.
The number was there. Next to it, however, was the phrase “Lockheed P-38 components (exp).”
Hungerford looked again, just to be certain. He started to call Katrina back, then hesitated and replaced the receiver on the cradle. Better take a look at the container first before calling her back.
He ran his finger over the chart showing the number sequence breakdown by location, then threw on the light switches for the warehouse and walked out into the central aisle and down the seventh branch aisle to the left. He peered down into the dusty stacks of containers. And there it was: 2859301. It was an aging wooden crate about ten feet long by four feet wide and high.
There was additional stenciling on the crate, partially obscured by the surrounding clutter. Hungerford tugged three other boxes aside, grimacing at the cloud of dust raised in the process. He brushed off the lettering with a hand and read: WARNING-VIBRATION SENSITIVE and, on the top, ONLY THIS SIDE UP.
Hungerford stared at the crate for a few moments then walked back to the office. He made himself a cup of coffee and thought about what he had found. Then he dialed the number of Steven Simonson in Oakland.
Simonson was home. He listened without interruption while Hungerford told him about the crate. “This is weird,” He finally said. “What are you going to do now?”
“Any ideas?”
Simonson thought about it for a moment. “Well... I guess we could try to find out whether there’s anything factual about the Secrets story. Why don’t I do a little research and maybe meet you for lunch somewhere?”
“Treasure Island Officers Club? How about twelve-thirty?”
“You got it.”
***
By one o’clock Derek Hungerford had dispensed with two Perrier’s and several handfuls of popcorn before Steven Simonson strode into the O-Club’s bar and threw himself into the next chair. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I’ve been on the phone, more-or-less, constantly since we spoke.”
Hungerford signaled the waitress and ordered fruit salads for them both. Then he turned back to Simonson. “So… find out anything?”
“Yes and no. Call Kingsfilm and start asking questions about ‘Secrets’ and they quickly decide that you’re just another kooky fan. Then they refer you to fan clubs and such. On the third call I got a different operator and told her that I was a grad student at Berkeley doing research on Hollywood imagery. That got me to another lady who had apparently worked as an assistant to the ‘Secrets’ screenwriter.
“First thing she told me was that ‘Secrets’ was wholly and purely fictional. She said that the basic plot had been brainstormed by Lawrence King and Carl Kaiser in Hawaii in 1987. Then the screenwriter - Carter, I think his name was - made up most of the names and fleshed out the scenes. King had a dog named Johnny, and the character was originally going to be ‘John Smith’. Someone pointed out that was too close to ‘Nevada Smith’, so ‘Smith’ became ‘DeShane’.”
“Did King have a relative named John, or DeShane?”
“No.”
“So why did he name the dog Johnny?”
Simonson shrugged. Then he took the point. “You think that there might be a real John DeShane somewhere, someone whom King had in mind as a model for the film?”
“Let me think this through. Now... almost certainly there’s not going to be a real person by that name, or the press would have picked up on it at some time during the publicity for the four movies. But let’s suppose that ‘Johnny’ is a nickname. Suppose that there’s an actual professor of archaeology somewhere named ‘DeShane’. Suppose that there’s some truth to the story and that he told it to King at some point and said that it was O.K. to use it as the basis for a film as long as his privacy was preserved.”
“So what now? You can’t very well call every college in the country asking for ‘Johnny DeShane’.”
“I won’t have to. Still have a card for the UC library? Good. They can access the National Technical Information Service database link there. Get them to do a name search by campus for anyone named ‘DeShane’ in an archaeology department.
“Archaeology is a small field; not too many places have a department like that. We can rough out his age bracket as being, um, perhaps 65-80. We might take a chance cross-referencing with ‘Cathy’ as a wife’s name, assuming that he might indeed be married to the Cathy Talley of the film.”
“Not much hope there, if he ever existed he is probably dead by now, from old age,” Simonson said with a sigh. “Kingsfilm said that ‘Cathy Talley’ was the name of Carter’s grandmother-in-law. But I’m going to Berkeley later on today, so I’ll drop by the library and run the other stuff. Call you tomorrow if I get anything.”
They turned their attention to the salads they had waiting.