“Mr. McKinney, do you see them?” Raleigh rested his right hand on his pistol.

The mayor didn’t answer for a moment.

“God help me, yes.”

“Miss Brown, are they what you saw?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “Before they attacked me.”

“Well, they’re not riders carrying torches, that’s for certain. Does anyone smell flowers?”

“Flowers?”

“Orchids.”

“I wouldn’t know what orchids smell like,” McKinney said.

“In the Philippines, there were hundreds of types of orchids,” Raleigh explained. “Amazing colors. Just like what I’m seeing now. In the night in the jungle, as I tried to sleep in my tent, the scent was thick. Orchids pollinated by bees had a perfume of cinnamon. That’s what I’m smelling now.”

“I smell rotting meat,” Dani said.

McKinney raised a hand to his mouth. “So do I.”

Raleigh remembered that the orchids in the Philippines didn’t al- ways smell like cinnamon. If they were pollinated by flies, sometimes they had the odor of a dead animal that the flies had sat on.

Abruptly the stench hit him, almost making him gag.

Like corpses after a battle, he thought.

Dani coughed. The reflexive reaction to the odor filled her chest with pain, causing her to wince.

“Something out there is dead,” she said.

A new German weapon? Raleigh wondered.

“How far do you suppose they are?” McKinney’s voice was unsteady.

“Without a method to triangulate the distance, it’s impossible to know,” Raleigh answered. “In the dark, our eyes play tricks on us. The lights could be miles away, or less than a hundred yards. The latter would explain how they reached you so quickly, Miss Brown.”

The odor of death became stronger.

We’re not prepared, Raleigh thought. Mindful of his responsibility for Dani’s safety, he kept his voice level. “Let’s go back to town.” Two days later, a detachment of cavalry arrived, their dust cloud visible from a distance. At sunset, Raleigh rode with them to the part of the road from which he’d seen the lights.

Their plan was to use surveyor’s instruments to get two separate bearings on the lights, plotting map coordinates that would allow them to determine how far away and where the lights were.

But the moment the lights appeared, the horses went crazy. Whinnying loudly, they kicked and bit one another. A trooper on foot, clinging to the reins of his mount, was dragged along the ground. A hoof fractured his skull. The other panicked horses galloped into the gloom, leaving the soldiers to make their cautious way back to town on foot, all the while ready with their rifles. A week later, eight Army biplanes flew to Rostov from Fort Bliss. The intervening time had given Raleigh the chance to choose a location for an airstrip and start supervising its construction. The rationale for the airstrip was that it provided an out-of-the-way place at which to secretly train pilots for America’s entry into the war.

The actual purpose, however, was to establish a location from which the biplanes could conduct aerial surveillance beyond the Mexican border, looking for a weapon that the Germans might be testing. When he wasn’t on duty, Raleigh found himself spending more and more time with Dani Marie Brown.

Part of the training for student pilots involved flying at night. He used the night instruction as an opportunity to send his students to try to determine the origin of the lights, but he was forced to discontinue those missions. As the trainees flew toward the lights, they diverted and attacked one another-with apparent deliberation, two planes actually collided, killing the instructor and student in each.

Thereafter training occurred only during daylight.

Fears about an invasion from Mexico were validated on March 9, 1916, when gunmen led by Pancho Villa staged a night attack on the New Mexican town of Columbus. Within two days, Congress voted to pursue Villa. “Black Jack” Pershing led five thousand soldiers into Mexico, where they remained for most of the year. Although they engaged in numerous battles with Mexican troops, they never located Villa, but that didn’t matter. The mission was largely a training exercise, allowing American soldiers to absorb battle experience.

In April 1917, America entered the war.

Raleigh participated in the Mexican campaign, using his biplane to scout for enemy positions. Afterward he returned to Rostov and married Dani Marie, but within weeks of his marriage, he was on a ship bound for France.

The lights and the possibility of a new German weapon being tested along the Mexican border were forgotten by the Army. There were too many tangible weapons to worry about, particularly mustard gas. But on many nights, as Captain Raleigh tried not to think about the next day’s combat, he longed for his wife and the son she’d given birth to.

After the war ended in November 1918, he returned home in time for Christmas. Snow fell-unusual but not impossible in that area of Texas. He had survived thirty-nine dogfights with German aviators and thanked God that he was able to be with his wife and son. But even though he was finally safe, he had nightmares. Not about the war, though. Instead his disturbing dreams made him experience the floating, drifting sensation of the lights. Each evening he went out to stare at them. In March 1919, he purchased a biplane that had been used in the war, many of which had become available at cheap prices because the military no longer needed them.

A week after he took possession of the plane, he took off at dusk from the now overgrown airstrip where he’d trained pilots three years earlier. As the darkness thickened, he flew toward the lights. The sound of his engine receded into the gloom.

Neither he nor the plane was ever seen again.

56

In the dank complex beneath the abandoned airbase, Col. Warren Raleigh remembered seeing photographs of a dashing young man in a uniform, a strong-looking woman next to him, a biplane in the background. He remembered hearing about the Rostov lights and his great-grandfather’s mysterious disappearance.

Raleigh’s great-grandmother had raised her son alone, demonstrating the strength that had drawn her husband to her. Her only show of emotion came each night. While her parents took care of the baby, she went out to the area where her husband had disappeared. She watched the lights, waiting for him to return.

Night after night, winter and spring, she stared at them.

Inexplicably, her face became red and swollen. Blisters developed. One night, when strands of her hair began to fall out, she finally did something she would never have imagined doing-she took her son, moved from the once reassuring area where she’d grown up, and rented an apartment in noisy, disturbing El Paso. There she learned to be a seamstress, sewing at home while looking after her son.

El Paso led to Denver, Chicago, and finally Boston as she tried to get farther and farther from the lights. Despite the passage of years, she never remarried.

She died from skin cancer.

A voice interrupted Raleigh’s thoughts.

“Sir, Fort… is… call… you.”

He peered up from his desk. His earplugs muffled sounds. “Say again, Lieutenant?”

“Fort Meade wants you on the phone. Scrambler code 2.”

As Raleigh reached for the phone on his desk, the lieutenant continued, “And even though it isn’t night yet, we’re getting extremely powerful readings.”

Raleigh nodded. This time he didn’t take the risk of removing an earplug as he pressed a button on his phone and engaged the scrambler.

“Colonel Raleigh here.”

“This is Borden,” a woman’s voice said faintly. She was the director of the weapons research team at Raleigh’s headquarters near the fortress-like National Security Agency in Maryland. “We’re receiving unusually strong readings from the observatory.”