ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

244 The Hunt for Zero Point
morning, as I journeyed up the coast to Santa Barbara, the scene of
several appointments with a number of defense electronics companies
that day, my mind was preoccupied with other things.
After Santa Barbara, I headed inland to Bakersfield, met up with
Amelia Lopez and proceeded to the site where the F-117A Stealth
Fighter had crashed in 1986, two years before it was unveiled. That the
security surrounding the plane had remained in place after the crash was
mainly down to the fast footwork of special Air Force crash-recovery
teams, whose policy included sieving the earth up to a thousand yards
from the crash site for pieces, then scattering bits of a '60s-vintage
Voodoo fighter prior to their departure to throw the curious off the scent.
To me, Bakersfield said two things. It said that the black world would
stop at nothing to prevent America's "quantum leap technologies" from
spilling into the public domain until its bright young colonels were
satisfied nothing more could be gained by holding the lid of secrecy in
place. And two, in scattering bits of Voodoo, an aircraft that hadn't been
flown actively for years, it wasn't averse to sending a signal.
When restrictions on the site were lifted, aircraft enthusiasts went into
the hills and picked over the site to see if they could find any evidence that
for the first time would point to the reality of the Stealth Fighter's
existence. When they brought back little pieces of aircraft and had them
analyzed, they knew exactly who'd been yanking the chain. The pieces of
Voodoo were the telltale flourish that anonymous artists leave to denote
the authorship of their work to cognoscenti of their talent.
It was in the canyon where the Stealth Fighter had gone down that I
saw the book again in a flickering moment of clarity. When Amelia Lopez
and I were clambering back across the rocks to our cars, the picture
steadied and I knew why Marckus had wanted me to read it. The book
was the key to everything, not least Marckus' role in all this. His fatalism,
humor, cynicism and cunning clicked neatly into place. It was so simple
yet overwhelming it almost took my breath away.
Fort Worth owes its very existence to the military, which in 1849
established a small outpost on the Clear Fork of the Trinity River some
30 miles to the west of Dallas.
A quarter of a century later, the coming of the railroad turned what
until then had been little more than a cluster of tents and wooden huts
into the biggest cattle railhead west of Chicago, a status it retained until
shortly after World War Two.
By the 1940s, Fort Worth had begun to profit from other industries
aside from cattle and oil, and as you drive out of the city, heading west, it