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In the spring of 1942, the United States Army became convinced that Fort Stockton, Texas, might be destroyed by the Japanese, which came as something of a surprise to Fort Stockton because most people in Fort Stockton had spent the previous eighty years trying to convince anybody at all that it was worth finding.

The concern centered on the Fort Stockton Consolidated Bomber Works, a sprawling collection of hangars, assembly sheds, machine shops, warehouses, fuel tanks, barracks and concrete aprons that had appeared southeast of town almost overnight after Pearl Harbor. Before the war, the acreage had been occupied primarily by mesquite, jackrabbits and a man named Woodrow Puckett, who ran seventeen head of cattle on it and claimed it was some of the finest grazing land in Pecos County despite ample testimony from the cattle to the contrary. By March of 1942 the place employed nearly four thousand men and women and produced a new four-engine heavy bomber every two hours and forty-seven minutes, assuming nobody dropped a wrench into anything important.

The factory was enormous.

That was the problem.

Seen from the air, there was almost no possible way to mistake it for anything except an enormous bomber factory.

Army Intelligence had received reports that the Japanese might establish temporary air operations somewhere in northern Mexico, fly across the border at night, bomb strategic American targets and return south before breakfast. Nobody could say precisely where in Mexico the airfield was supposed to be, what aircraft would be used, how they would be fueled, why Fort Stockton had been selected, or how Japanese pilots who had never seen Pecos County would locate it in the dark when people who lived there occasionally had trouble doing so in daylight.

Nevertheless, the Army took the matter seriously.

And when the United States Army took something seriously in 1942, it generally assigned a colonel, three captains, fourteen lieutenants, a warehouse full of equipment and somebody whose job description made everyone else nervous.

The nervous-making fellow sent to Fort Stockton was Omar Paxton.

His official title was Commander of American Mistruths and Fabrications.

Nobody knew what rank that was.

Omar himself was uncertain.

His orders bore the seal of the War Department, six signatures, two classifications of SECRET, one classification of EXTREMELY SECRET, and a handwritten notation in blue pencil reading, “Give this man whatever he asks for unless it’s unreasonable.”

No definition of unreasonable was provided.

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He arrived at the Cattle Baron Hotel on a Tuesday afternoon in an olive-drab 1942 Pontiac Torpedo military staff car, a great rounded six-cylinder machine that looked as though Detroit had designed a luxury automobile and the Army had subsequently arrested it. The graceful Pontiac chrome had been painted matte green. A white star occupied the rear door. Military markings marched across the hood. Blackout lamps and a searchlight flanked the handsome horizontal grille, and inside, beneath the tall beige headliner, were broad brown cloth bench seats, handsome wood trim, an Art Deco instrument panel, and enough painted-over brightwork to make a civilian car salesman weep.

Bolted to the dashboard was a telephone.

This became important.

Omar parked beneath the Cattle Baron awning, stepped out wearing khaki trousers, a white shirt, black tie, sunglasses and a battered fedora, and was immediately approached by hotel manager Milton Teague.

“You Army?”

“Approximately.”

Milton looked at the Pontiac.

“That an Army car?”

“Definitely.”

“Rank?”

“Complicated.”

“Long as you can pay for the room.”

“The United States government is paying.”

Milton considered this.

“You got cash?”

Thus began Operation Sombrero.

Omar spent his first morning driving around the bomber plant while plant superintendent Floyd Gaskins explained the obvious.

“You can see us from twenty miles away.”

“Thirty,” Omar corrected.

“You been up in an airplane?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know?”

“I’m in camouflage.”

There was very little answer available for that.

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Omar climbed onto the roof of the main assembly building and surveyed the complex. Below him stretched nearly a million square feet of war production. Bombers emerged from giant doors at the west end. Railcars brought aluminum, engines, tires and armament into the east side. Thousands of employees filled parking lots. Smokestacks rose above the plant. Fuel tanks gleamed in the sun. Concrete runways crossed the desert like gigantic white arrows pointing directly toward everything America hoped the enemy would not notice.

Omar removed his sunglasses.

“We hide it.”

Floyd looked around.

“The factory?”

“The factory.”

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

Floyd stared at him for a while.

“Behind what?”

“A neighborhood.”

And that was the moment the war effort in Fort Stockton turned peculiar.

Omar’s theory was simple. An enemy reconnaissance pilot flying fast and high did not need to be presented with reality. He merely needed to be presented with something that looked enough like reality to make him hesitate.

Three seconds of doubt at two hundred miles an hour could mean a mile of error.

Five seconds could mean two.

Ten seconds might send him to Alpine.

Nobody wished that on Alpine, but war was war.

Omar requisitioned painters from MGM, carpenters from Warner Brothers, set builders from Republic Pictures, landscape artists from Paramount and one fellow from Disney whose precise duties remained unclear but who could make a convincing sycamore tree out of chicken wire, furnace insulation and things nobody wanted identified.

They arrived in Fort Stockton aboard a special train.

The townspeople watched them unload.

There were forty-three men, nine women, twenty-seven crates of paint, eight truckloads of lumber, sixty rolls of camouflage netting, twelve thousand yards of burlap, several miles of cable, six motion-picture scenic backdrops, one stuffed mule and an industrial quantity of chicken feathers.

Woodrow Puckett, whose former ranch had become the bomber plant, examined the supplies.

“What are the feathers for?”

“Trees,” said Omar.

Woodrow nodded slowly.

“You ain’t from around here.”

Work began immediately.

The runways came first.

Painting actual houses across an active runway was impractical because even the Army recognized certain engineering limitations, so Omar’s crews painted neighborhoods directly onto the concrete. From ground level the results looked like somebody had given several hundred gallons of house paint to a child with strong opinions about geometry. From five thousand feet, however, the effect was remarkable.

Roads appeared.

Lawns emerged.

Backyards materialized.

Driveways crossed taxiways.

Six-inch-high concrete buildings were placed throughout the infield so they would cast tiny realistic shadows under aerial observation.

A lieutenant named Buford Sneed spent an entire afternoon arranging miniature garages.

At four o’clock Floyd found him lying on his stomach beside the runway carefully repositioning a six-inch Texaco station.

“What are you doing?”

“Gas pumps were facing north.”

“So?”

“Morning shadows were wrong.”

Floyd stared at the six-inch service station.

“There’s a war on, Buford.”

“That’s why I’m fixing it.”

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Meanwhile the factory itself disappeared beneath twenty-eight acres of camouflage netting elevated above the roof on scaffolds, cables and wooden supports. The netting formed an entirely new ground level roughly fifty feet above the actual plant. Across it went streets made from oil-darkened burlap, sidewalks laid over reinforced catwalks, fake lawns, gardens, sheds and fifty-eight houses.

The houses were life-size in length and width.

They were six feet tall.

From the air this did not matter.

From the ground it mattered considerably.

The first completed house had three windows, a front porch, a red roof and a chimney. It measured thirty feet across and stood approximately shoulder-high to a tall man.

Omar inspected it.

“Excellent.”

Floyd looked at him.

“Nobody can live in that.”

“Nobody will.”

“Then why’s it got a porch?”

“People expect porches.”

“People also expect ceilings.”

“Not from six thousand feet.”

That became Omar Paxton’s guiding principle.

Not from six thousand feet.

Wooden automobiles appeared next. They had rectangular frames covered with painted fabric, and although they bore little resemblance to the voluptuous Pontiacs, Buicks, Fords and Plymouths actually traveling American roads, from altitude they became perfectly convincing automobiles.

Somebody built a school.

Somebody else built a church.

A disagreement developed over denomination.

The Army settled it by removing the steeple.

Victory gardens sprouted beside the miniature houses. Laundry appeared on clotheslines. Fake shrubs covered ventilation equipment. One smokestack became a grain elevator. Another disappeared inside a water tower. Smaller vents were painted red and designated fire hydrants, creating the only known neighborhood in America with several fire hydrants twenty-three feet tall.

The artists constructed three hundred trees from lumber, chicken wire and green-painted feathers.

This worked beautifully until the first rain.

Fort Stockton did not receive much rain, but when it did the entire artificial neighborhood began smelling like a chicken coop had married a roofing crew.

Green feathers loosened from the trees and drifted into the assembly plant ventilation system.

The next morning a brand-new bomber rolled out of Hangar Three with seventeen green feathers stuck to its fuselage.

The pilot pointed at them.

“What the hell are those?”

“Mesquite,” said Omar.

“Mesquite don’t have feathers.”

“Not from six thousand feet.”

The pilot left them on.

By June, the Fort Stockton Consolidated Bomber Works had vanished.

So had most of the airfield.

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From altitude, where an enemy pilot might see it, there appeared instead a quiet West Texas community of perhaps six hundred residents. Its streets wandered casually across the landscape. Houses rested beneath trees. Gardens filled vacant lots. Automobiles stood beside garages. A service station occupied one corner. Laundry stirred in the breeze.

Omar named it New Pecos.

From three miles away it was impressive.

From three hundred yards away it looked questionable.

From thirty feet away it looked like somebody had built a subdivision for extremely wide people with no interest in standing upright.

That did not prevent the Army from insisting it appear inhabited.

Two crews worked around the clock moving the wooden automobiles between houses. Laundry was rearranged every morning. Sheets disappeared on Mondays and returned Tuesdays. Shirts changed lines. One pair of enormous boxer shorts migrated through the neighborhood for six months.

A corporal eventually named them General MacArthur.

Nobody admitted this officially.

The gardens changed with the seasons. Houses were repainted. Trees were shifted. New roads were added. Fake automobiles were periodically rotated so an observant Japanese pilot would not notice that a dark blue sedan had remained outside the same house since Easter.

This led to the establishment of a traffic department.

It consisted of Private Elmer Dobbins.

Elmer took the assignment seriously.

He produced parking regulations.

He issued wooden automobiles citations.

He created a one-way street.

He eventually requested authority to install a stop sign.

Omar denied it.

“Too visible from the air.”

Elmer appealed.

His appeal went to Washington.

Washington approved the stop sign.

It was installed beside a six-foot house on a burlap street fifty-two feet above a bomber factory in Fort Stockton, Texas.

The war had acquired layers.

Omar lived throughout the project at the Cattle Baron Hotel, and every morning his Pontiac Torpedo waited beneath the awning. The big olive-drab car became familiar around town. Its broad nose could be seen at the plant gates, outside the depot, beside the hardware store and occasionally parked behind the hotel while Omar tried to eat lunch without being handed another problem involving artificial civilization.

The dashboard telephone ensured this never happened.

It rang everywhere.

It rang at the factory.

It rang on Main Street.

It rang while Omar was driving.

It once rang while Omar was standing beside the car talking to Floyd, causing both men to stare through the window until Omar finally opened the door and answered it.

“Paxton.”

Washington wanted to know whether New Pecos had a municipal water supply.

“It’s fake.”

There was a pause.

“Nevertheless.”

Omar looked toward the factory roof.

“Yes.”

“Capacity?”

Omar covered the receiver.

“Floyd, how much water does New Pecos have?”

“None.”

Omar uncovered it.

“Four hundred thousand gallons.”

“Excellent.”

“Anything else?”

“Does the town have adequate firefighting capability?”

Omar looked at the vast collection of burlap, plywood, lumber, tar, feathers and canvas stretched over one of the most valuable aircraft factories in the world.

That afternoon they installed one hundred working fire plugs, sixty-seven sprinklers and several concealed firefighting stations because nothing in military history would have been more embarrassing than successfully hiding a bomber plant from the Japanese and then accidentally burning it down with the fake town built to protect it.

By August, New Pecos had become so convincing from the air that American pilots began missing the field.

The first flew past, circled twice and radioed Odessa.

The second landed at Midland.

The third eventually found the runway but complained afterward that he had nearly put a four-engine bomber through somebody’s painted backyard.

Omar regarded this as proof of success.

Floyd regarded it as proof they had gone too far.

“We’ve hidden the airfield from our own Air Force.”

“Correct.”

“They’re the ones who need to use it.”

“Enemy can’t find it.”

“Neither can we.”

“Security always involves sacrifice.”

Floyd removed his hat.

“Omar, we are sacrificing the airport.”

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The ultimate test came one September afternoon when an Army reconnaissance aircraft arrived unannounced from California. Its job was to photograph the installation from altitude and determine whether Operation Sombrero could fool an experienced observer.

Omar, Floyd and half the camouflage crew stood outside headquarters waiting.

The plane appeared high overhead.

It crossed once.

Then again.

Then disappeared east.

Everybody waited.

The dashboard telephone in the Pontiac rang.

Omar answered.

“Paxton.”

A voice from the regional command asked, “Where’s the factory?”

Omar smiled.

“Exactly.”

There was silence on the line.

Then the voice said, “No, seriously. The pilot can’t find it.”

Omar looked at Floyd.

Floyd slowly grinned.

For the first time since April, the absurdity and the achievement became the same thing.

They had done it.

They had hidden a million-square-foot bomber plant beneath a neighborhood nobody could live in, streets nobody could drive on, gardens nobody could eat from, trees made from chicken feathers and houses tall enough for children but too short for their parents.

They had disguised runways as lawns.

Vent stacks as hydrants.

Chimneys as farm buildings.

Parking lots as subdivisions.

They had created a town above a town beside a town.

And from six thousand feet, it was perfect.

The Japanese attack never came.

As American forces pushed farther across the Pacific, the likelihood diminished month by month. By 1944, nobody seriously expected enemy bombers over Pecos County anymore, although the Army maintained New Pecos because dismantling it required paperwork and paperwork was considered a greater strategic threat than Japan.

Omar remained at the Cattle Baron until May 1945.

On his final morning he packed two suitcases, paid Milton Teague with an actual government voucher that Milton held to the window to make sure it was real, and loaded the Pontiac.

Milton followed him outside.

“So what exactly did you do here?”

“Nothing.”

“I watched truckloads of lumber go through town for three years.”

“No idea what you’re talking about.”

“I been on top of that plant.”

“You have?”

“Once.”

Omar stopped.

“You signed the secrecy form?”

“Seventeen pages.”

“Then you’ve never been on top of that plant.”

Milton considered this.

“I don’t believe I have.”

“Good man.”

Omar climbed behind the Torpedo’s enormous steering wheel. The six-cylinder engine caught almost immediately and settled into its quiet idle. Morning light entered through the windshield and touched the brown dashboard, the Art Deco gauges and the telephone that had interrupted approximately half of Omar’s meals since 1942.

The telephone rang.

Omar stared at it.

Milton stared at it.

It rang again.

Omar picked up the receiver.

“Paxton.”

Washington informed him that his assignment in Fort Stockton had been completed successfully.

“I know.”

He listened.

“No.”

Another pause.

“No, sir.”

Milton watched Omar’s face.

Omar removed his hat.

“What?”

He listened for another fifteen seconds.

Then he closed his eyes.

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

He hung up.

Milton leaned through the open window.

“What do they want?”

Omar put his hat back on.

“They want me in New Mexico.”

“What for?”

Omar shifted the Pontiac into gear.

“Apparently there’s something they don’t want anybody to see.”

He drove away.

Two months later the government finally allowed the camouflage project to become public knowledge. Photographs appeared showing the impossible neighborhood stretched across the bomber plant. People stared at pictures of tiny houses, wooden cars, painted streets, netting, false trees and rooftop laundry and marveled that such an elaborate deception had ever been attempted.

By then New Pecos was already being dismantled.

The houses came down.

The burlap streets were rolled up.

The wooden automobiles disappeared.

The chicken-feather trees were burned, an event that produced a smell remembered by everybody downwind and denied by the United States Army.

The real Fort Stockton emerged again beneath it all.

Within a few years, almost nothing remained to show that for three wartime summers there had been another town hovering fifty feet above a bomber factory in the West Texas sun.

Almost nothing.

Because during demolition, workers discovered one object that nobody could explain.

At the intersection of two burlap streets, nailed to a wooden post beside what had once been a six-foot-tall house, stood Private Elmer Dobbins’ stop sign.

Attached to it were twenty-three parking citations.

All issued to the same wooden automobile.

All unpaid.

The Army forwarded them to Washington.

Washington returned them three weeks later.

Stamped across the envelope were four words:

NO SUCH TOWN EXISTS.

Which was technically true.

But only from six thousand feet.

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