Chapter 18
On the Tuesday morning following his confrontation with Colonel Walter Dolan, Scarborough rose early, packed some luggage, got in his Mercedes, and drove to Dulles International Airport. He parked in one of the satellite lots, not knowing how long he’d be away, and loathe to pay the premium prices for closer parking. He caught an 8:30 Eastern flight to Chicago O’Hare, where he caught the connection to the Iowa City Airport.
Waiting for him in the terminal, wearing his epauletted hunting jacket, jeans, a red-checked flannel shirt, a Met’s baseball cap, and a huge grin, was Captain Eric MacKenzie.
“Ev!” he cried, waving his hands wildly. “Ev, buddy! Am I glad to see you!”
The big, red-cheeked man caught up Scarborough in a bear-hug. People stopped, looked, and pointed at this amusing sight of two mature men acting like long-lost lovers, and Scarborough found it all slightly embarrassing. “Mac, uh, it’s not like I was lost at sea or anything,” he said, after getting a noseful of MacKenzie’s Old Spice aftershave.
MacKenzie’s expression turned suddenly mournful. “My friend, I’m just trying to show you how bad I feel about the way I acted the other night.”
“Mac, we already talked about that yesterday. We were both out of line. I’m sorry, you’re sorry—apologies accepted all around. And look ... here I am in Iowa, on the great UFO mystery hunt. No need for the histrionics.”
MacKenzie stepped away, but swung a big hand around to slap Scarborough on the back, a blow that almost put the scientist onto the floor. “That’s right. Heck, if you can’t yell at a friend, who can you yell at?”
Recovering his balance, Scarborough said, “You ever think of getting in the ring with Mike Tyson, Mac? You’ve got a pretty powerful right there.”
“Thanks, Ev. What say we go get your luggage, and head out for the old homestead?”
They got Scarborough’s bags. Mac insisted on carrying the Jordache luggage, and Scarborough did not object. The big man hefted the bags easily out into the parking lot, where he threw them in the back of a red Ford Bronco, complete with a gun rack and dried blood in the back.
“Deer,” explained Mac apologetically, “Needs a comprehensive cleaning. With the old lady gone, not everything gets scrubbed up as well as it used to. Take warning, Ev. Serious bachelor condition back at the ponderosa.”
Scarborough strapped his seat belt on. “Hop Sing’s on vacation?”
Mac gunned the engine and the four-wheeled vehicle jerked toward the exit. Mac smiled over at Scarborough. “Nope. Ran off with Hoss and Little Joe. Always thought those three were into weird sexual perversions.”
The big man paid his parking bill, then wheeled onto the highway toward his house on the outskirts of town.
Iowa City was a college town, and a quite nice one at that. The university was the shining jewel of a state famous for its high rate of literacy—one of the best schools in the nation. After he’d left the air force, Mac had decided that he’d get a Master’s Degree. He chose the U. of I. because of its famous writing program, and because of its access to open territory and fresh air—prerequisites for an outdoorsman like Eric MacKenzie. Privately, Scarborough had doubted that his friend would last out such literary boot camp, but he’d been proved wrong. MacKenzie had immediately scoped out the territory, found the kind of counseling he needed, and worked damn hard. He received a great deal of help, for example, from Professor David Morrell—who advanced soon to fame for creation of the Rambo character made famous by Sylvester Stallone. Before long, Mac could turn out quite serviceable prose. Even before he’d graduated, he’d sold his first men’s adventure book: The Eagle’s Claw. Morrell had helped him find an agent, and the agent found him instant work in the burgeoning field of guns—‘n’—guts action-adventures. “Blue-collar blood-porn,” Scarborough called it, but secretly he read absolutely every word that his friend wrote, astonished at the clumsiness of the prose, as well as the energy and vitality and fun it contained. At first, Scarborough had tried to encourage Mac to set his sights higher, but the man was having far too much fun pounding out his fifteen pages a day to think about reforming. Mac liked Iowa, and he liked the university, so he and his wife had settled nearby in a large house. He taught the occasional undergraduate course, chased the occasional undergraduate skirt, hunted in the Midwest fields and woods, and fished the freshwater streams. And he was a happy man—and even happier when his wife left him, unchaining him from a roller-coaster marriage.
Scarborough had to admit, Iowa City and its environs were very pleasant. As they rolled along toward Mac’s home, Scarborough again admired the Hawkeye State’s wealth of fields. The most fertile state in the Union, 95 percent of its land was farmable. This was Grant Wood territory, the home of American Gothic, the simple, clean lines of farm houses and barns rising up from the gently rolling or flat land, like natural growths of the green and brown land, not architecture.
Mac and Scarborough chatted affably as the Bronco ate up the twenty or so miles to Mac’s house, making small talk before they had to tackle the larger task before them.
“I’m just tickled pink you’re going to go down to Kansas, too, and check up on Diane,” said Mac, downshifting and turning off the highway, driving onto a dirt road upgrade toward wooded hills. “She’s a good girl. She may have a few screws loose—“
“But they’re quality screws, right, Mac?”
“You betcha.”
The Bronco rumbled up a hill, then turned onto a private road, rattling over a loose gravel driveway.
“Well, she’s part mine, so I guess I’m responsible.” Scarborough sighed heavily, “I’ve just got a dreadful feeling about it, that’s all.”
Mac pulled up in front of a two-car garage so filled with junk and gadgets that there was no room for a car. He stopped the Bronco beside the house, a large two-story brick affair covered with ivy and surrounded by hedges and gardens and rich green grass—all Iowa rarities, but specifically introduced by Mac, who liked green overgrowth.
“Don’t you worry your little pointed head,” said Mac, getting out and going to the back to collect the bags. “We’ll call the little darling later. Shit, you’re helping me with this file business—maybe I’ll take you down to Kansas myself, help you dig up the facts.”
“Thanks, Mac,” said Scarborough. “We’ll see what happens.”
Eric MacKenzie’s house was not exactly a wreck. It was clean enough, thought Scarborough, just disheveled. Clothing lay strewn all over the early American furniture. Books and magazines were propped precariously on the dining room table and the TV. Packages and cans of food lay all over the place.
However, there were no dirty dishes in the sink, the bathroom was clean enough and smelled of Comet cleanser. And Mac’s study, which he devoted to his sports, fairly sparkled with wax and polish. The guns and fishing rods were stacked neatly, the bookcases ordered, the trophies on the mantle-piece bright and dusted.
“Not bad, Mac,” said Scarborough after depositing his bags in one of the guest rooms. “Better than when I was here last year.”
“Yeah! I guess it is. But say, it’s about lunchtime. How about a sandwich and a brew, and then we can dig into the dirt.”
Mac made sandwiches that would cause Dagwood to drool, so Scarborough, who’d refused the plane snack, readily agreed. Old MacKenzie couldn’t fry an egg, but he could make a mean sandwich. The jolly man first set a big bottle of Grolsch beer in front of Scarborough, then pulled out several Tupperware containers from the fridge, along with a section of bread and a tray of condiments.
“Any particular combination you favor today, Ev?” The burly man waved a hand over a deli’s worth of supplies. Fresh-cut ham and lebanon bologna, tongue and roast beef, turkey, chicken, mortadella, salami, summer sausage ... And the cheeses! There must have been twenty kinds to choose from, and not just Midwestern bland stuff, but European camembert and brie, English stilton and cheddar—and real Swiss cheese.
“I think I’ll just take the chef’s special.”
“You got it. We got some fresh rolls this morning. Man, since you were here last year, they opened a wonderful place in Iowa City. Combination bakery and deli. One-stop shopping for old MacKenzie! Rye rolls, with caraway seeds. How’s that sound, Ev?”
Scarborough just drank his Grolsch and smiled.
“You got it! Listen, you ever try Bermuda onion on a sandwich? I’ve been reading this Lawrence Sanders guy. He’s got a hero in the ‘Deadly Sin’ books after my own heart. Makes some nice sandwiches, and then eats ‘em over the sink. Can you imagine? How’s he gonna read and eat, over a sink?” The stack of magazines and books on the table testified to MacKenzie’s own solitary eating habits. “Anyway, this guy, Captain Edward X. Deleney—he likes to put Bermuda onions on his sandwiches. It’s pretty good. You wanna slice?”
Scarborough agreed, and watched as his friend built him a truly magnificent sandwich of sliced Danish ham, Swiss cheese, some pepperoni, a smear of braunswieger, a touch of caviar, a feathering of alfalfa sprouts, a slice of Bermuda and a generous ladling of imported Dijon mustard.
“Sorry,” he said. “I forgot the tomatoes yesterday.”
“Curses. I guess I just can’t eat it then, Mac.”
Mac sliced it in half and presented it to his friend on clean china. “Choke it down, bud.”
He got himself a Grolsch and then made himself a similar sandwich. “So, old Ironpants won’t cop to stealing your files, huh?” he said finally, after half the big stuffed roll had been wolfed.
“He probably didn’t do it. Who’s to say? Good sandwich.”
“Thanks.” Mac thoughtfully munched on his for a couple of moments. “So I can’t figure it,” he said, dripping green-and-brown flecks of sprouts and mustard onto his plate. “Why would Dolan and the air force change the facts we turned in—and then want to destroy the evidence of the truth?”
Ev put down his sandwich. “Whoa. Just a minute—I definitely think something odd is going on, but I’m not ready to go whole hog and buy the conspiracy theory like some silly UFOol. You seem all ready to jump on that bandwagon.”
“Scarborough! What you want them to do, kick you in the head with a fifty megaton bomb? Wake up! We worked for a corrupt government! Old Dolan’s ‘bout as straight as a Confederate three-dollar bill. Now, I don’t know what’s going on, but I do wanna find out!”
Scarborough shook his head. He pushed his sandwich away. He wasn’t hungry anymore. “No, I really can’t buy that. That gives the air force too much credit for intelligence.” He leaned forward toward his friend. A burp brought up the taste of pepperoni to his mouth. He covered his mouth and excused himself. “What started off all the secrecy with Dulles’s CIA and the Air Force was legitimate concern, in the late forties and early fifties that the UFO sightings were caused by the Russians. That’s why everything was classified—and continued to be. I’ve read the documents. Those old Geezers knew they’d be starting up some paranoia, but you gotta also remember, those guys weren’t stupid either, they were veterans of the biggest war of this century. They were in a new world, filled with new technology and strange fears, and so they had to be careful. Who knows, the way the military and government works, all this business with the files might just be following some kind of obscure rules or codes. Names were mentioned that shouldn’t have been mentioned. There are reasons for top-secret and classified materials, you know. I’ll give you an example. You know that Stanton Friedman guy, right?”
“Sure, the UFO investigator who’s the physicist.”
“Now, I like Stanton, although we’ve locked horns a few times. I hear that he’s trooping around the UFO conferences with a copy of a government document about UFOs he dug out, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act. He holds it up and says, ‘Take a look at these pages and tell me that the CIA isn’t covering something up.’ Then he shows a document that’s largely blotted out with black magic marker. And looks smug and pronounced Q.E.D!”
“Sounds pretty damning to me!”
“Mac! Mac! Fools jump in! Can’t you see this is the kind of jump-to-conclusions thinking that has spawned the whole UFO lore! You know as well as I do about the codes on these documents. Just because something is blacked out doesn’t mean that it’s covering up a record of President Truman playing Parcheezi with beings from Betelgeuse! There could be records of an agent’s dealings that could be deleted because he officially did not work for the CIA then! Or because he was using a secret kind of ballpoint pen! That whole business in the 70s, with the disclosures of those documents that went through court? Did you see the stuff the CIA wanted to keep out, due to their classified nature? Weird stuff, harmless stuff, odd stuff. You read it, and you say, why did they care? I’ll tell you—because the whole thing’s a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies are far stranger than flying saucers.”
Mac shrugged. “Too true. But how does that explain your missing files, to say nothing of the discrepancies?”
“The colonel could be right. I might have misplaced them. They could have also been stolen, true—but that doesn’t mean that it was because of some cover-up. See what I mean? Let’s not jump in too far. This could all be explained.”
“I don’t understand. If you think that, then why did you blow your stack at Dolan? Why’d you come out here?”
“I demand accuracy, Mac. I demand facts. Facts are the soul of any religion I serve. Facts are the basis of my existence. Facts are the rocks I kick, like Dr. Johnson when the illusory nature of reality was presented to him. ‘Thus I refute thee,’ he said, and thus I refute the believers. But if my facts are wrong, I need to straighten them out. Just because facts need to be straightened out, just because ‘old Ironpants’ Dolan is not being cooperative, and maybe just because there are things they don’t want me to know, does not mean that the saucers have landed!”
MacKenzie pursed his lips. “Yep. Got me, pal. But you are going to help me check this stuff out, aren’t you?”
“I said I would, and I will, Mac. And you know that I’m a man of my word.”
“You bet I do.” MacKenzie got up and hauled out two more bottles of Grolsch. He handed one to Scarborough. “So you’ve been fed and watered. Come on up to my den of iniquity. There’s work to be done.”
Mac’s office was on the second floor. Two months after his wife, Tama, had left him, he’d had a weekend-long party to which he had invited Scarborough, as well as other male friends from around the country, and male friends from the town and the university. Student crashers were welcome. During this party, Mac produced gallons of booze and played Charlie Parker records nonstop—Tama had hated jazz. At the height of the bacchanalia, he’d revealed to the attendees his plan. With their help, they’d dragged the king-size nuptial bed of the MacKenzie’s, mattresses and sheets and all, into the backyard. The guests were then charged to scour the premises. Anything they found remotely feminine—perfume, scented toilet paper, tampons, makeup, etcetera—was tossed onto the bed. At midnight, Mac doused the bed and its occupants with gasoline, and a lit wooden match was tossed into its center, producing a marvelous bonfire.
The next day, the remaining guests helped move Mac’s typewriter, desk, filing cabinets, and chairs into the master bedroom. “My writing is my life,” he’d said that day, as they toasted the new digs with a magnum of champagne. “And now it’s my wife!”
He immediately broke his new office in by writing one of Scarborough’s favorites, The Immolator #53: Death to the Matchmakers, in which Harry Diggs, the detective-cum-mercenary—cum—vigilante, uncovers a crooked dating service operated by the Mafia and the KGB, and firebombs an entire New York City skyscraper’s floor that’s filled with adulterous wives.
“Hey,” said Mac, “since you were here last, I’ve got myself a new rug.” He ushered his friend in and pointed toward the floor, where a lovely maroon-and-blue-and-gold Persian rug lay, supporting most of the room’s furniture. “From India! Hand woven!”
“Quite nice,” said Scarborough, admiring the weave and the intricate almost mandala-like patterns.
Mac’s office was unquestionably the most comfortable room in the house—and certainly the neatest. It was the place, after all, where he spent most of his time and energy. The big bay windows afforded a pleasant view of the countryside, framed by tasteful drapes Tama had bought, which had somehow survived the purge. A couch and two Eames chairs sat on the rug, surrounded by filing cabinets, a desk, and, of course, Mac’s new pride and joy, the latest-model IBM PC, which he used almost entirely as a word processer, along with a Hewlett-Packard laser printer. Against the walls were bookshelves overflowing with books, both hard- and soft-bound. One whole case was devoted to Mac’s work. Above this was an acrylic portrait by Boris Vallejo of Harry Diggs, The Immolator himself, a trademark flamethrower in his hand, his Clint Eastwood teeth clenched around a cigar, his veins popping from bare traps and delts, and a face in profile so that only a hint of the spider-web burns which covered half his face could be seen.
Harry Diggs was a Vietnam vet, who’d been burned by napalm in the war. With no more Vietcong to fight when he returned, he turned to fighting other bad guys, book by book, when he returned to civilian life. These conflagrations were the subject matter that Mac dealt with or plotted—he didn’t write all the Immolators, he farmed some out to other writers—in a series that had lasted a dozen years and spanned over a hundred titles. Oh, Mac wrote other books, but “Ol’ Firebug” Diggs was his bread and butter. Scarborough kept and read only the ones that Mac had written himself—autographed of course—a stockpile of them on the back of his commode for toilet reading. They were entertaining little hunks of mayhem, their garish covers depicted explosions and weapons amidst running screaming men, with Diggs in the foreground, puffing on his stogie. Smoke and flame were usually in the ilIo somewhere—indeed, with the new string of re-issues, the graphics proclaiming the words The Immolator sprouted tiny fires themselves.
Appropriately, Mac kept his pipe collection, matches, and tobacco atop his Immolator books. It was to this that he repaired immediately, taking down a fairly new briar and stuffing it with fragrant leaf. “Park your butt over there,” he said, nodding at the couch. “I’ll haul down the stuff in just a minute.” He struck a safety match and puffed, sending the aromatic smoke pluming into the room.
Scarborough noticed the pile of quality paper stacked on a shelf near the IBM. He examined the title page—Until The Dawn, it said, by Eric Landon MacKenzie. Most of the times that Mac used his own name, he just kept it to Mac MacKenzie. But Dawn was special—he’d started it two years ago, with Scarborough’s assistance. It was going to be his “quality breakout” book, a carefully written book based on his experiences in the Air Force as a young man. Scarborough was gratified to see that it was thicker than when he’d last seen it. He desperately wanted to read it, but Mac insisted that he had to finish the whole thing first, before he let anybody read it. He returned to the sitting area, not wanting Mac to know that he was snooping.
Scarborough recapped his Grolsch and set the bottle on top of the copy of Guns and Ammo that lay atop a carved Spanish coffee table. Copies of Soldier of Fortune peeked out from gun catalogues and almanacs, all part of Mac’s steady stream of research material, most of which he kept on a bookshelf close to his word processor. He could just scoot his wheeled chair over on a whim, and pull down a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica or a copy of Jane’s Ships. “Hardware!” the big man had growled once. “My readers demand hardware. They want to know the details right down to the millimeter measurement of the slugs that rip through the viscera of the bad guys and spray gouts of blood across the walls!”
“You have a discerning readership,” Scarborough had commented.
“Naw, not really. It all has something to do with men’s penises, did you know that? This gun stuff.”
Scarborough had grinned. “No!”
Now, he watched as his friend went to the bank of stolen file cabinets, opened a drawer, searched for a moment, ahh-ed, and pulled out several tattered folders jammed with documents and notes. “Here we go, pilgrim,” he said, putting the stuff on the coffee table. “We just have to cross Red River here, and get the cattle safe to Dodge City.”
“You’ve got the copy of the Blue?” asked Scarborough.
“I sure enough do, partner.” Mac feigned a bowlegged, spur-jangling walk to a bookcase. He pulled out a dog-eared copy of the Government Printing Office’s edition of The Abridged Report on Project Blue Book and plopped it onto the table beside the files. “A yellow copy of the Blue Book,” said Mac. He sat down beside his guest, and opened the file. He lifted his oversized beer bottle, bubbled it, and then put it down again. “I was looking over this stuff last night, Ev, and some other interesting stuff came up about that Iowa farm we investigated in ‘68.”
“I’m all ears, Mac,” said Scarborough, ready to dig in and work.