Page 44 of Identity Unknown
“Maybe Sal Giordano’s connection to this place is related to what’s happened to him,” Marino suggests.
“Except you’d have to wonder how anybody unauthorized would know about this place to begin with,” I reply while wondering if Carrie Grethen does.
“It’s an important question,” Lucy replies. “And we should be prepared for some unfortunate possibilities. Such as what Sal Giordano might have been involved in that he hid from the rest of us.”
“I’m asking myself the same thing,” Marino adds.
“Let’s get going,” Lucy then says as if receiving a signal, and probably she has in her “smart” glasses.
The wind lightly gusts in fits and starts, the sharp scent of pine reminding me of Christmas and triggering an ambush of emotions. I’m grateful for the dark. Our feet are quiet along the cracked sidewalk, the three of us stopping now and then to knock off dried mud we’ve tracked here from Oz.
“Sal had the pi sign tattoo when I met him the summer I was teaching in Rome,” I tell Lucy and Marino. “If it was inspired by the SLAB, then he’s been coming here for decades.”
“Since he was in grad school,” she replies as we walk through a chiaroscuro of glaring lights and darkness. “He was instrumental in repurposing what you’re about to see, never imagining he’d end up here himself someday. Not like this. But the questions we have about what he might have been exposed to are the same ones he had in mind when helping design this place.”
It’s called Area One, and we won’t find it on any map, Lucy tells us. Most of what we’re seeing is used for storage. Some of the buildings are labs and workshops.
“Storing what?” Marino stares at the dozens of camouflage-painted blockhouses illuminated by floodlights up ahead.
“Mostly wreckage.”
“From what?”
“From wrecks,” she says blandly.
“Let me guess.” His wide eyes are everywhere. “In some of these blockhouses are the Chinese spy balloon, the Tic Tacs and other UFOs shot down that we never hear anything else about?” he asks, and Lucy doesn’t answer.
We reach the entrance of 3141, or the SLAB, as it’s called. A floodlight burns above the camouflage-painted double metal doors, the woods around us pitch dark, fireflies flickering. The stillness is broken by the grunting and barking of frogs, the chirping of crickets. An owl trills and whistles, raising the flesh on my arms, a chill touching the back of my neck.
“The Raptor jets are deployed from right here at Langley Air Force Base. It’s been all over the news when they’re sent to shoot down a UFO,” Marino says as we follow the sloped ramp, our shadows elongated on concrete. “So it makes sense the wreckage would be here. Which means it’s probably being reverse engineered here too.”
Lucy says nothing, scanning her right thumb in a biometric lock, opening the solid metal door. Inside the bright white tile receiving area, Tron waits for us. A stretcher is parked on top of the floor scale, a measuring stick propped against the wall, the receiving area similar to those in my district offices. The air is chilled with no trace of a foul odor, and I’m sure there are special ventilation systems.
But I have a feeling the SLAB hasn’t been used in recent memory. Used for what is the question. Instead of walk-in coolers and freezers, stainless steel drawers crowd walls like silverpost office boxes. There are at least sixty of them, each numbered and not big enough for a normal adult body. They don’t look like anything I’ve ever seen or heard about.
Each is maybe eighteen by eighteen inches with a digital glass panel and lights that are green. I can tell by the temperatures displayed that only a few of the drawers are set for refrigerated conditions, the rest showing minus-twenty-two degrees Celsius or minus-seven degrees Fahrenheit. Most of what’s stored here is frozen solid. I assume it’s military-related and top secret for some reason. But I’d be surprised if bodies or parts of them weren’t returned to families.
“When Area One was built during the early years of World War Two, there was no such thing as a National Transportation Safety Board to investigate aircraft crashes,” Lucy continues to explain. “Thirty-one-forty-one was a pathology lab for the examination of related biological materials or bio-hybrids.”
“As in the dead pilots?” Marino keeps pushing for answers.
“As in whatever required the special care Area One offers.” It’s Tron who replies.
“In those days, the military would have done the necessary autopsies.” Lucy is talking about the Armed Forces Medical Examiners I’ve worked with throughout my career. “It wasn’t generally known where some of these examinations took place or who performed them.”
“That much I’m aware of, but I didn’t know about the SLAB until now,” I reply.
“For the most part what’s been done here in recent years is necropsies,” Tron explains.
“For the most part?” Marino asks. “What else?”
“Typically, on animals launched into space,” Tron goes on as if she didn’t hear him.
“Like when John Glenn went up with the monkey that never got the credit he deserved,” Marino decides. “I forget what his name was.”
“It was a chimpanzee, and they didn’t go up together,” Lucy answers.
“I remember that after he came back from space and died, the body disappeared.” Marino stares at the steel drawers as if he might divine what’s inside them. “I’m betting the chimp ended up here in one of these.”