Kitabı oxu: «Alien Secrets»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Epilogue

About the Author

By Ian Douglas

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Germany may have recovered a flying saucer as early as 1939.

GENERAL JIMMY DOOLITTLE REPORTING ON SWEDISH “GHOST ROCKETS,” 1946

9 May 1945

HE HURRIED DOWN the tunnel, boots clicking on stone, a small mob of aides and adjutants close on his heels. He glanced at his watch. Damn … there wasn’t much time.

SS Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler had reason to hurry. The Eidechse was waiting for him … but more to the point, the damned Soviets were in Silesia and closing in fast. Their patrols had already been reported outside of Ludwidsdorf, and while Kammler doubted those reports were accurate, Czech partisans were definitely in the area.

The war had officially ended yesterday; it had been nine days since Der Führer’s death … but Kammler was under no illusions as to his fate if he were captured. The partisans were murderous bastards with a serious grudge against the SS. Farther east, the Soviets were rolling into Lower Silesia like swarming locusts.

There were the Americans, of course. Patton and his Third Army were reported to be heading directly toward Lower Silesia. If he could reach them, surrendering was at least an option. Dornberger and von Braun, he knew, had intended to go that route and avoid the tender mercies of the Communists. But though he did have extensive knowledge of Germany’s top secret wonder weapons, Kammler was little more than an engineer and an administrator … a very good administrator, but not someone who could offer his services to the enemy and hope to receive a hero’s welcome. Kammler’s résumé included such pearls as designing gas chambers, crematoriums, and the camp at Auschwitz, as well as using slave labor here to carve out der Riese, the enormous underground complex of tunnels and chambers housing the Reich’s most sensitive work. He would, he knew, face war crimes trials … and probable execution.

No … there would be no escape in that direction either.

An elevator took him and his entourage up three levels to a small shed with a wooden door opening into the night outside. Ahead, through the trees, a shimmering blue haze could just be seen, against which was silhouetted the towering bulk of the coolant tower.

“Stark, Sporrenberg, with me,” he said. “The rest of you stay here.”

Stark was carrying two black leather bags, like doctor’s satchels, heavy with the secrets they contained. “Thank you, all of you,” he told them. “Perhaps we’ll meet in happier days.”

“Herr General,” his driver said. “Those papers … they might buy us—buy you—safety with the Americans!”

“No, Prueck. I have too much blood behind me. And I will not be taken alive. I will not face some kangaroo court of so-called justice!”

He turned and strode toward the woods, Stark and Sporrenberg trailing just behind him.

“Herr General,” his adjutant said, urgency turning his voice ragged. “They—they’re right, sir! There are rumors, stories, that the Americans are looking for the Reich’s scientists. To snatch them before the Russians can reach them.”

“But I am not a scientist, Stark,” Kammler replied quietly. “Not like von Braun or those other cowards. No … this is the only way.” He stopped and turned. “You two shouldn’t come any closer. It’s dangerous, Die Glocke. I’ll take those.”

“I had no idea that Projekt Kronos would have such … practical applications, General,” Gruppenführer Jakob Sporrenberg said.

Stark hefted the two black cases he was holding. “I can manage, Herr General. And screw the danger.”

“No arguments! Give me the papers, Untersturmführer!”

“Jawohl, Herr General!”

Stark vanished back in the direction of the complex entrance, and Kammler and Sporrenberg proceeded through the eerily lit woods. On their left, the cooling tower blocked out much of the sky. Raised on an immense concrete support structure—a ring positioned on ten enormous pylons—the wooden tank contained thousands of liters of water used to cool the ranks of electrical generators buried in an underground chamber deep below. Nearby, power cables snaked up through heavy pipes and ran along the forest floor. The two generals followed the cables along a well-worn path. The bags were heavy—perhaps forty kilos’ worth in all—but, fortunately, there was not much farther to go.

Ahead, Die Glocke hovered half a meter off the ground, a metallic acorn shape four meters high and three wide, bathed in a blue-violet nimbus of its own generation. Six heavy power cables, each as thick as a man’s thigh, were connected to the device by means of ports around the swollen base. Several technicians stood off to the side, awaiting their final order. A hatch stood open in the thing’s side, spilling red light into the blue-lit night.

The two men hauled the leather bags up and began passing them through the hatch. For Kammler, it felt like swarms of ants were crawling on his skin, the effect of the enormous electrical charge bleeding into the air.

“You know what to do, Jakob,” he said. “The last of the slave workers … they are to be eliminated.”

“Ja. It will be done. Tonight.”

“And Damlier, Prueck, Stark, and the rest. They know far too much.”

“It’s already been arranged, Herr General.”

“Good. I knew I could count on you, Jakob.” Kammler cracked a rare smile. “And now, our guest is waiting for me!”

He turned again and clambered up and through the hatch.

Inside, strapped into a narrow wire framework, the Eidechse turned its bulbous head, looking at Kammler through those lustrous golden eyes. Kammler suppressed a shudder. The thing, man-shaped but utterly alien, was the ultimate in Untermenschen.

I might say the same of you, General.

Kammler heard the words in his head, but the creature’s lipless mouth did not move. How were you supposed to keep secrets from a damned thing that could read thoughts …

Strap in, General. We must leave this place.

“Ja … ja.”

Outside, the technicians were uncoupling the massive power cables. They, too, would not survive this night … even if they survived Die Glocke’s power field. Sporrenberg, too. His death had also been arranged.

There would be, there could be, no loose ends.

How far? the voice in his head asked.

Kammler took a deep breath. “I would say … about twenty years. That ought to be enough.”

He felt the power field building around him …

CHAPTER ONE

I was a Flight Security Supervisor (FSS) for the Minuteman missiles at Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota, from May 1973 until December 1978. We had an incident around 1977, when strange lights took over our missiles … I just wanted to confirm that these incidents were happening.

USAF TECHNICAL SERGEANT THOMAS E. JOHNSON (RET.), 2017

10 October 2017

A GROUP OF prisoners, clad in ragged black-and-white stripes, were being herded off the truck in the valley below. Guards screamed and shouted, their voices muted by the distance. Half a kilometer away, Navy lieutenant commander Mark Hunter crouched on the barren hillside, his form smothered by the shaggy folds of his ghillie suit.

“Bastards!” he whispered, pressing his high-tech binoculars against his camo-painted face. The binoculars, zoomed in twenty times, were recording 1080 HD video in 3-D stereoscopic mode, recording every detail of the North Korean test site below. A faint rumble, like distant thunder, sounded from the valley, and a dust cloud boiled from the open tunnel mouth. “Uh-oh,” Hunter added. “Thar she blows.”

Hunter and the other seven men of his squad were spread out along the slope, all of them invisible under their ghillies, all of them armed, but with four of them concentrating at the moment on several items of high-technology equipment. Sanders was monitoring the seismic recorder, Brunelli a radiation counter, Nielson was on the AN/PED-1, while Colby was using headphones to listen to a broadband radio scanner. Taylor, Kline, and Minkowski were on overwatch, alert for the approach of North Korean sentries.

They’d already scouted the area, photographing everything and uploading it all to an orbiting satellite. They’d collected soil samples; these would be tested back in Japan for the presence of certain isotopes, which would prove whether or not the recent bomb test had been of an ordinary atom bomb, or of a much larger and more deadly thermonuclear warhead. Right now the SEALs were just observing the activity in the valley below.

“Whatcha got, Sandy?” Hunter asked. The team members were linked by small, voice-activated radios with earplug receivers.

“A small quake … three … maybe 3.5. Might be subsidence of the main chamber, or maybe a tunnel collapse.”

“Brewski?”

“No new radiation, at least not yet. But the background count is still pretty high.”

“Copy that.”

Hunter felt exposed up here under a dull, overcast sky, and was still concerned that the NKs might have infrared sensors that could detect them despite the heat-masking effects of the ghillies. They’d been up here for hours already though, silent, unmoving, and there’d been no sign at all that the North Koreans were aware of their presence.

He glanced at the pile of rubble that was Nielson. If things went south, or if direct intervention was called for, they could call in a flight of Tomahawk cruise missiles from off the coast, and the AN/PED-1 LLDR, or lightweight laser designator rangefinder, would guide them in smack on-target.

He sincerely hoped that wouldn’t be necessary. He doubted that it would even do anything. That was a huge mountain over there.

The southern flank of Mantapsan—Mantap Mountain—was the site of North Korea’s lone nuclear test facility, an isolated and barren wilderness honeycombed with tunnels. The village of Punggye-ri lay twelve kilometers to the southeast, while just two kilometers to the east was the Hwasong concentration camp, the largest in North Korea and the source of the slave laborers who’d been forced to carve tunnels hundreds of meters long into the side of the granite mountain.

Pyongyang had set off six nuclear tests here, beginning in 2006. The last and biggest, estimated at between two hundred and three hundred kilotons—ten times the power of the weapon dropped on Hiroshima—had been detonated just five weeks ago, on September 3. The North Koreans had claimed that this had been their first test of a thermonuclear weapon—a hydrogen bomb—and it was to verify this claim that the squad—eight men out of SEAL DEVGRU—had been deployed, first to Yokosuka, Japan, then to the rugged coast of North Korea. They’d inserted by an MH-60 Blackhawk stealth helicopter, an aircraft identical to the ones used to take down bin Laden two hundred miles inside Pakistan. Flying nap-of-the-earth through the rugged mountain passes of eastern North Korea, they’d touched down in the middle of the night less than ten kilometers from their target. An overland trek through the roughest terrain imaginable had brought them here to this hillside, giving them a vantage point from which they could observe the base directly.

Satellite imaging could do only so much. Sometimes, when it was vitally important to get solid intel, ground truthing was necessary.

And the US Navy SEALs were very, very good at this sort of op.

“The background rads are not good, Skipper,” Brunelli whispered over Hunter’s earpiece. “We’re at ninety rads. I would suggest it’s time to get the hell out of Dodge.”

Hunter continued watching the tableau below. The prisoners were being forced into a line. One man struggled then fell, and was mercilessly beaten by two guards with truncheons.

They’d known they were going into a contaminated area. The reports from defectors coming out of North Korea over the past month had told of trees and vegetation dying near the test site, and of personnel from the test site not being allowed into the capital of Pyongyang because of the possibility of contamination. A couple of seismic tremors had jolted the mountain within minutes of the blast, and the Chinese had warned that the entire mountain could collapse, releasing a vast cloud of deadly radioactivity across the region.

The hillside on which the SEALs were hiding was as sere and blasted as the face of the Moon. Dead trees and dead grasses covered the slope, confirming the defectors’ reports. Their ghillies, rather than incorporating leaves and the greenery assorted with woods, were festooned with gray and brown knotted strips, making each of them resemble a pile of rock, even from close by. Hunter couldn’t see Brunelli even though the other SEAL was just a few meters away … and he knew where the man was.

Below, the prisoners were being led into the gloom of the open tunnel mouth. Satellite imagery had suggested that the North Koreans were using slave laborers from Hwasong to clear out collapsed tunnels. If the leaked radiation was bad up here, it must be ten times worse down there … a death sentence for men forced to work in those depths for more than an hour or two.

How, Hunter wondered, did they deal with the guards? Rotating them in shifts of perhaps fifteen minutes each? Or maybe they simply hadn’t told them that working in those tunnels was to be sentenced to a slow and very nasty death. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was not known for its concern for people.

“Got anything, Colby?” Hunter asked.

“Negative, Skipper. Chitchat between the command post and a forward bunker … Hold it. Someone’s yelling.”

Hunter’s spine prickled at that. Had they been discovered?

“Commander!” EN1 Taylor whispered with sharp urgency.

“Whatcha got, Taylor?”

“Sir! What in the everlasting fuck is that?”

Hunter rolled on his side, turning to look. Something was emerging from behind the crest of their hill. “Oh, my God …”

A flying saucer—there was no other term for the thing. At least sixty yards across, its surface gleaming silver with such a high polish that it was imperfectly reflecting the rocks and scree over which it soundlessly drifted, it hung in the leaden North Korean sky effortlessly and soundlessly, drifting slowly against the wind.

Hunter had been a Navy SEAL for twelve years, now. He knew intimately the aircraft both of the United States and of other countries, as well—from the new F-35 Lightning II fighters to the hush-hush SR-72 “Son of Blackbird” now being developed by the Skunk Works.

As for the DPRK, their air force still consisted of obsolete hand-me-downs from China and Russia, the Q-5, the Chengdu J-7, and the like. So this—this was something new.

The eerily silent movement of this thing reminded Hunter of a dirigible, like the Navy airships used to track incoming drug smugglers in the waters around Mexico. But this thing, this monster …

Hunter raised the binoculars and let the autofocus sharpen the image before pressing the trigger button for the high-def video. It was tough to get the entire craft in frame all at once. He zoomed back so that he was getting more than a vast, curved mirror floating overhead.

Video of a real, live, honest-to-God flying saucer! The boys back in Yokosuka weren’t going to believe this …

He saw something breaking the polished surface … a kind of window or transparency, wider than it was tall. There was white light spilling through …

Silhouettes.

They were backlit, and Hunter could see no details at all. No, that wasn’t true—one shadow looked distinctly human, though it was nothing more than a shadow. The other shapes were smaller, shorter, with large heads.

The human shape raised a hand … fuck!

It was waving at him!

Distantly, Hunter was aware of the guards in front of the tunnel shouting, followed by the sharp rattle of AKM automatic rifles. The saucer continued moving past the SEAL position and took up a stationary vantage point almost directly over the tunnel mouth. He held the binoculars steady while risking a quick glance away to see what was happening. A dozen DPRK guards stood in front of the tunnel, firing up at the intruder. When nothing happened, several dropped their weapons and ran. Hunter lowered the field of view on his binoculars to capture their reaction, as the remaining guards emptied their magazines into the sky. They then stood there, blank astonishment on their faces. Hunter brought the binoculars back up to the hovering craft.

And then the real earthquake began.

Hunter felt the vibration beneath his body, heard the growing rumble from the mountain in front of him. Again, he dropped the angle on his binoculars and zoomed farther back, trying to get the entire panorama into his field of view. An immense cloud of dust exploded from the tunnel mouth as the remaining guards fell flat on the ground.

Mantap Mountain was collapsing; Hunter could see the top of the mountain subsiding slightly, could see an avalanche of rock and soil cascading down the mountain’s southern flank. Above it all, the silvery UFO seemed to be silently taking it all in.

The quake subsided, as did the billowing dust.

And the UFO was … gone.

Hunter had not seen it go. His attention had been on the dust and the guards on the ground, and he’d missed its departure. It should be on the video he’d shot, though.

“Radiation levels are climbing, Skipper,” Brunelli said. It was, Hunter thought, a tribute to the man’s nerve that he’d continued monitoring his instruments throughout the encounter. His voice was shaking, though. He’d seen it, too.

Several prisoners stumbled out of the dust swirl filling the tunnel entrance. One staggered and fell, lying next to one of the guards sprawled in the dirt. An Army truck raced up, and more soldiers began piling out.

It was definitely time to leave.

One by one, they left their hides and inched back up the slope. It took another hour, but they managed to get over the top of the ridge without being spotted.

As Hunter crawled, flat on his belly and still shrouded by the tangled mess of his ghillie suit, all he could think about was that spaceship. Hell, that’s all it could be! Certainly, nothing like that had ever been constructed by any nation of Earth.

And what the hell had it done to the test site? He’d not seen any beams or missiles, nothing by which it could have attacked Mantap Mountain, but he was certain that it had done something to cause the mountain’s collapse.

A bigger question than how was why? Men had just died in those contaminated tunnels, of that much he was certain. Death in a cave-in, he supposed, was preferable to dying from radiation poisoning.

Still, he’d just watched a goddamned flying saucer kill an unknown number of people down there.

Hunter wasn’t sure what he thought about the whole topic of UFOs. For the most part, he didn’t think about them at all. He was willing to concede that there was other intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, sure, but he was highly skeptical that any of it had made it to Earth. After all, why would they? A civilization that powerful, that advanced—surely there was little they could learn from a planet full of squabbling, arrogant, noisy apes!

They wouldn’t be swarming around the planet like the place was Grand Central Station, if even half of the reported sightings were true.

But he’d just seen a flying saucer.

What else could it be?

It wasn’t a secret American aircraft. It wasn’t Russian or Chinese, and it sure as hell wasn’t North Korean.

So … aliens?

Like most Americans, he was quite familiar with the look of the iconic “Grays” so prevalent on book covers, TV shows, and movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The shapes he’d glimpsed had that look.

One of them, though, had looked human. And it had waved at him. It had seen him despite his camouflage and waved at him!

Mark Hunter’s world was trembling now, threatening to shatter and plunge him into an abyss of unreality, of dissociation, of insanity.

It had waved at him …

THAT THOUGHT followed him fifty-five kilometers overland, winding through deep valleys and along forested ridgetops, took them through the night, through the next day, and well into the following night. The plan originally had called for extraction by means of the stealth MH-60, but someone up the chain of command had decided that trying to sneak the aircraft into North Korea a second time—and this time with the North Korean military thoroughly aroused—was not the best of ideas. The SEALs would walk out, using GPS and darkness to thread their way along a route calculated to avoid all villages, hamlets, and military bases. Forty hours later, they reached the beach north of Hoemun-ri, an exhausting trek that pushed the eight SEALs to the absolute limits of their endurance and conditioning. As expected, a quartet of SEALs were waiting for them on the beach with a couple of CRRCs—combat rubber raiding craft. One SEAL scanned each of them with a Geiger counter, while another checked their personal dosimeters and logged the numbers. Their equipment, securely packed into backpacks, was stored on the boats.

“How’d it go in there, Commander?” one of them, Master Chief Cagliostro, asked.

“You will never believe it, Master Chief,” Hunter replied. He was still shaking, still questioning his own reality. “Hell, I don’t believe it!”

“We saw a flying saucer, Master Chief!” Taylor said, excited. “A fuckin’ flying saucer!”

“Yeah?” TM1 Fullerton asked, grinning. “Don’t tell me—little green men from Mars? Were they helping you or the gooks?”

“Fuck you!” Nielson said. “We got video. Didn’t we, Skipper?”

“We got something.”

“Hop in the Zodiacs,” Cagliostro said, skepticism all over his face. “We’ll sort it all out later.”

The CRRCs took them back through the surf and out to a waiting submarine, a Virginia-class fast-attack submarine, the USS Illinois. The first Hunter saw of it was the gray vertical pipe of the boat’s photonics mast—not periscope—rising above the water in the near-darkness a few yards away.

According to the opplan, the sub was supposed to stay submerged, but would move in close when she picked up the approach of the CRRCs on sonar. Aboard each Zodiac were a couple of sets of diving gear—masks, tanks, belts, and flippers—and one of the beach SEALs would accompany each member of the recon team down to the Illinois’s airlock, taking them down two by two. That way, the sub did not have to surface and risk detection, and men who might be wounded and who certainly were exhausted could be sure of getting aboard.

Hunter was one of the first two SEALs to make the descent. He stepped out of the diver airlock, dripping, and requested permission to come aboard from the executive officer who greeted him.

“Absolutely, Commander,” the man said. “Welcome aboard. How’d it go?”

Hunter drew a deep breath. He wasn’t ready to talk about what he’d seen … not until the video had been uploaded. “It was … interesting, sir,” he said. “I don’t think the North Korean test site will be a problem anymore.”

Commander Rodriguez looked concerned. “Why? You didn’t call in a strike.”

“No, sir … but I think somebody did.”

Hunter noticed a man standing behind Rodriguez. He was wearing a jumper without rank insignia, so likely he was a civilian contractor of some sort. “Lieutenant Hunter?”

“Yes, sir?”

“I’m Walters.” He held up a small wallet, then flipped it shut, but Hunter was able to catch the letters CIA before they vanished. A spook.

“You and your men will be sequestered forward. Under no circumstances will you discuss your mission with the officers or men of this crew … understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I strongly recommend that you not discuss it with each other. I’ll want to talk to each of you, though you will be fully debriefed back at Yokosuka.” He pronounced the port’s name wrong—with four syllables—instead of the way the Navy traditionally pronounced it—Yo-KUS-ka. This clown was definitely a suit, not a sailor.

Brunelli came through the lock behind Hunter, and a sailor led them both forward to what normally was the torpedo room, but which served as quarters for SpecOps personnel like the SEALs during missions.

Hunter looked around the compartment, found a bunk, and sat down. He’d expected the Agency to show up sooner or later. Any op into North Korea would be an extraordinarily risky, extraordinarily sensitive move. The debriefing would grill Hunter and his men about everything they’d seen.

They wouldn’t have heard about the flying saucer, though, would they? They’d want to hear about the guards and the concentration camp prisoners, about the earthquakes and the radiation readings, but they couldn’t know about that huge silvery UFO.

Right?

He decided that it would be best if none of them mentioned what they’d seen in the gray skies over Mantapsan. He would discuss the incident with the others only to warn them to keep quiet about what they’d all seen.

That didn’t stop him from thinking about it, though. Because, the thing was, Mr. Walters, though wearing a blue jumpsuit and a ball cap with the Illinois logo emblazoned on its front, looked like he ought to be in a dark suit and sunglasses, maybe with a receiver earpiece in one ear. One of the quintessential Men in Black.

Hunter had heard the stories. Whispered rumors of conspiracies and secret government groups and agencies, of vast cover-ups concerning UFOs. He’d never believed any of them, of course. After all, this was the government they were talking about: How could anything concerning UFOs be kept secret by more than two people for more than fifteen minutes before the whole thing was leaked to the New York Times? No, all that conspiracy crap was utter bilge, pure and simple.

And yes, he’d read once about some papers from the Truman era purportedly establishing a secret agency or committee called—variously—Magic-12, MJ-12, Majestic-12, or even Majik-12. That had been when? Around 1984? He thought that was it. The story had been widely discredited since, though—a hoax, and, according to what he’d seen, not all that convincing of one.

No. It was all garbage.

An amusing thought occurred to Hunter then. Yeah, he would mention the UFO they’d seen—it had been part of their observation of the North Korean test site, after all—and he would see how Mr. Walters responded. If he didn’t seem interested, or didn’t believe it, or simply dismissed it, then Hunter would know he was right, and there were no secret-agency conspiracies, no MJ-12, none of that garbage. If Walters went all Hollywood on Hunter, however—don’t talk to anyone about this or you’re in big trouble—well, maybe there was something to it.

It would be amusing to find out … and even more amusing to yank Walters’s chain.

He was smiling as, two at a time, the rest of the team was ushered forward to the torpedo compartment. Then, once the recon team’s gear had been stored forward, the Illinois slipped beneath the waves and proceeded northeast. She would circle around the northern tip of Hokkaido, then bear southwest for the US naval base at Yokosuka, Japan.

And then, Hunter thought, no matter what happened with Walters, the shit would really hit the fan.

“LIEUTENANT COMMANDER? Have a seat.”

Hunter had been led aft to a small office—Captain Magruder’s office, in fact, which had been set aside for the interview. It was, like the offices of COs since the beginnings of submariner history, painted puke green, cramped, and with just barely enough room for a chair, a fold-down desk, and a bunk. Hunter took the proffered bunk.

They were one day out from Yokosuka, and Walters had interviewed each of Hunter’s men in turn. It was … disquieting. Each man had been led back to the forward torpedo room, somber, tight-lipped, and unwilling to discuss what had gone on with the Agency spook.

They were equally unwilling to discuss the encounter with the UFO, even Minkowski, who’d seemed positively ebullient about that enigmatic thing in the sky. Had they been threatened?

The idea that this might be the case did not sit well with Hunter. That this civilian had evidently come down hard on the men, on his men—the SEAL was now furious. No one did that with Hunter’s team members and fucking got away with it.

Walters took up a clipboard with papers on it, then pressed a switch on a small box which he set conspicuously on the desk in front of him. “Lieutenant. We’re recording this conversation, all right?” Without waiting for a reply, he looked down at his clipboard. “What is your name, rank, and service number?”

“Mark Francis Hunter,” Hunter replied. “Lieutenant commander.” The Navy had used Social Security numbers for identification since 1972. He gave it.

“Place of birth?”

“Dayton, Ohio.”

“Date you entered the service?”

“Eight March 2006. Look, what the hell—”

“I will ask the questions, if you please, Commander. Date of birth?”

“Oh-five, oh-nine, nineteen eighty-six. Sir.”

Walters glanced up at the small note of defiance in Hunter’s voice, then looked back at his clipboard. “Education?”

“Bachelor of science, Virginia Tech University. And then Annapolis. And I will not answer any more questions until you tell me what you said to my men. Sir.”

Walters sighed, and leaned back in the chair. “I said nothing to them that I will not be saying to you, Commander. Your full cooperation in this debriefing is very much appreciated. Okay?”

“Sir.”

He reached forward and picked up the minirecorder. “Now tell me about the mission. From the beginning, please.”

Hunter compressed his lips, then leaned forward and gave a small shrug. “Yes, sir.”

And he began talking, starting with the squad being told of the op, flown from SEAL Team One headquarters at the Amphibious Warfare HQ on Coronado, in San Diego, to the Navy base at Yokosuka; he made a point of pronouncing the city’s name right.

He continued with their nighttime insertion by parachute off of a specially rigged MH-60 Blackhawk, their landing, their brutal overland trek, and their positioning above the Mantap Mountain base.

He talked about what they’d seen: their survey of the base, the dead vegetation, the NK guards and slave laborers, the slight seismic quakes, the high background radioactivity.

“We were about to pack it in, get out of Dodge,” Hunter continued, “when EN1 Taylor said—”

Walters switched off the recorder. “We don’t need to talk about what happened next.”

“Sir?”

“The first man I interviewed, Master Chief … ah …” He consulted his clipboard. “Minkowski. He told me all about it. That portion of the record has been erased. And you, Commander, will erase everything that you think you saw in there from your mind. Do you understand?”

Hunter felt a sharp chill at that. Walters was acting more and more like the Men in Black, or what Hunter believed those mythical personages were supposed to be like, by the moment.

“I said, do you understand?”

“Or what?”

Walters blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“Or what? What happens if I don’t forget?” Or if I can’t forget …

“Mr. Hunter, may I remind you that when you were inducted into the SEALs, you signed nondisclosure papers and took an oath of secrecy. If you were to divulge any information which has been determined to be classified as confidential or above, you would be subject to the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, specifically Articles 92, 104, 106a, and 134 …”

Hunter suppressed a chuckle. The UCMJ laid out what offenses were subject to court-martial; 92 was about failure to obey a lawful order, 106a had to do with espionage, 104 was aiding the enemy, and 134 was the military’s catchall: “conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline.” How the hell was his story of a UFO violating any of those articles?

Well, he’d been ordered not to talk about things declared secret, yeah. They could get him on Article 92. And 134 was always there to catch anything not listed in the rest of the UCMJ.

“However,” Walters said, after running through those articles as well as several points from the Military Rules of Procedure and the Classified Information Procedures Act, “in all probability the case would not even come to trial. If it did, you would get a dishonorable discharge and at least twenty years in Portsmouth. If you were lucky. But people have also been known to … disappear.”

Hunter’s eyebrows jumped up on his forehead. “You’re threatening to kill me?”

“Let’s just say, Commander, that we know where you live, where your family lives, and leave it at that. If you say anything about what you think you saw, we will come down on you like one hundred tons of concrete blocks, and I doubt very much if anyone will hear anything you might wish to say. Some … gentlemen from DC will be along to talk to you about this, but you will discuss it with no one else. Do we understand one another?”

Hunter didn’t reply at first. He was still digesting Walters’s threat …

… and what that meant for the whole idea of government UFO conspiracies and cover-ups.

My God, he thought. It’s real. All of it.

And I saw a man, a human, on board that craft … and it waved at me.

“I said, Commander, do we understand one another?”

It was all real. The UFO. The conspiracies.

The threats.

“Sir. Yes, sir,” Hunter replied.

There was no option but to play along.

CHAPTER TWO

I can assure you the flying saucers, given that they exist, are not constructed by any power on Earth.

PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN, 1950

22 September 1947

HE RATTLED THE papers in his hand. “This is horseshit, Roscoe!”

“Maybe so, Mr. President,” Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter replied. “But it’s damned critical horseshit. We need to know what’s happening here.”

“Yes, but … flying saucers? Little green men from Mars?” He dropped the report dismissively on his desk. “Show me! I’m from Missouri.”

“So am I, Mr. President. And you’ve seen the reports out of Wright Field.”

Roscoe Hillenkoetter had been the director of the Central Intelligence Group since May of this year … before that he’d been the director of Central Intelligence, as well. And as of four days ago, with the National Security Act and the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, he was the director of that, too, the Central Intelligence Agency’s very first.

For Hillenkoetter, the world had become a very different place in the last few months, much more uncertain, much stranger, much scarier ever since something had crashed in the desert outside of a town called Roswell, New Mexico. He’d only been head of the CIG for two months at that point.

What a hell of a way to kick things off.

But he was one of the few men who’d been in the know almost from the beginning—not to mention one of the men who’d been trying to shut down the rampant rumors and speculation coming out of New Mexico since early July.

“Yes,” Truman said. “But I don’t like it. Who are these things, these creatures anyway? What are they doing in our airspace? Why the hell are they here? Is it an invasion?”

“Mr. President, I just wish to hell I knew.”

The wreckage from the desert crash site had been gathered up and shipped to Wright Field outside of Dayton, Ohio. Wright Field was the location of the Air Force’s T-2 Intelligence Department—formerly the Technical Data Laboratory created in 1942—the place where captured German aircraft had been shipped after the war to see what made them tick. Now they were being tasked with the same for whatever this thing was. Whether they would be able to make anything out of the debris remained to be seen.

They also had several bodies from the crash on ice. Hillenkoetter shuddered at the memory. He’d seen them. Those creatures had not been human.

A number of reports had come out of T-2 since July of that year, including the one Truman had just mentioned. The crash wreckage did not incorporate technology known to any nation or group on Earth, and was therefore almost certainly extraterrestrial in origin. Mars was the popularly assumed origin of the craft and its diminutive crew, though the planet Venus was sometimes bandied about as an alternative. In fact, nothing was known about the craft’s origins or capability, and that single, simple statement was terrifying in its implications. Somebody, no one knew who, was able to travel to Earth from God knew where, enter US airspace with impunity, and outrun or outmaneuver the best combat aircraft in the US inventory.

What was even worse was the fact that these extraterrestrials had been here for years before 1947. The US government had even recovered wreckage from one after the so-called Battle of Los Angeles in early 1942, and from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the year before that.

And there were rumors, originating with the German scientists of Operation Paperclip, that a ship had crashed in Germany back in 1936 or 1939—the stories differed—and that some of the amazing technology coming out of the Third Reich during the war had been due to back-engineering technology from recovered vehicles. Alien vehicles.

“Okay, Roscoe,” Truman said. “According to this report you’ve just submitted, you want to create a kind of scientific committee to study these crashed saucers. That right?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Who do you suggest we approach?”

“There’s a list appended at the end, sir. Vannevar Bush, certainly. And the new secretary of defense.”

“James Forrestal? Okay.”

“General Vandenberg, of course.” Hoyt Vandenberg had been the second director of central intelligence before Hillenkoetter, and had been the duputy commander in chief for the US Army Air Forces.

Truman leafed ahead to the list of suggested names. “Okay. I’ve got it. And the upshot of all this is to create a group to recover crashed saucers?”

“In part, yes, sir. We know that these … people aren’t perfect. Sometimes their aircraft crash. One, maybe two in Germany before the war. One in New Mexico. One in Missouri. The one we shot down over Los Angeles in ’42. When they crash, we need to be able to dispatch teams to cordon off the area, and keep civilians out. We need to recover the wreckage, as we did at Roswell, and move it to a safe location. We need to have engineers and scientists, good engineers and scientists, who can learn all they can from the debris, and see how we can use it.”

“You mean build our own flying saucers …”

Hillenkoetter shrugged. “Maybe. We know the Germans were working on that.” He’d seen the drawings and schematics for the Nazi Haunebu I, II, and III. The Allies had come so damned close to losing, closer than any man on the street was aware.

Some things simply had to be kept secret from the public.

“We also need,” he continued, “to keep a lid on this whole thing. If we fail to maintain control over what the public knows about this, there could be real panic.”

Truman grunted. “That damned radio show.”

Hillenkoetter nodded. The War of the Worlds had panicked a good many people who’d heard it. In fact, the degree of panic had been grossly overstated by the newspapers—they were keen on pointing out the deficiencies of radio, their new competitor, as opposed to print media—but war jitters certainly had contributed to some small degree of panic, at the very least, especially in New Jersey where the Martians were supposed to have landed.

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t mind telling you, Roscoe, that I don’t like the idea of deliberately deceiving the American public.”

“Neither do I, Mr. President. But it’ll be necessary, at least for a time. And we don’t want the Soviets getting wind of this.”

“No, we do not.” Truman considered the problem for a moment. “Okay. I’ll draw up an executive order.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me. As director of Central Intelligence and director of the CIA, you’ve got yourself a spot on this committee, whether you like it or not. And I’ll expect you to keep me in the loop.”

“Absolutely, Mr. President.”

“I know the scientists think they got a wrecked spaceship out of the Pacific near LA, but I’ve always thought that whole incident was just war jitters, okay? That, or some kind of long-range Jap reconnaissance aircraft. We just don’t know. We can’t know.”

“We know the Japanese didn’t have anything that could reach us at the time.”

“Floatplanes off a submarine?”

He shook his head. “They didn’t have anything like that in ’42. The I-400 class wasn’t in operation until ’44.”

“Well, this whole thing sounds pretty damned iffy to me. But if we’re being invaded from out there, we need to know about it. And we need to be able to fight back if push comes to shove.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Now get the hell out of here and let me get to some nice, safe, normal world problems. Like what Stalin is doing in Europe, and what we’ll do if he gets the bomb!”

The bomb.

Nuclear weapons were nothing compared to this. And as Hillenkoetter walked out of the Oval Office, he wondered how much the President knew about the Nazi Haunebu saucers, their atom bomb experiments, or their other secret, almost magical weapons … and how close the Allies had been to total annihilation.

HUNTER WALKED up the sidewalk of the apartment complex on Witherspoon Way, located in the small and quiet Californian community of El Cajon just seventeen miles from downtown San Diego. At the door to the lobby, he stopped and looked up and down the street.

Nothing. Damn, he thought. You’re getting way too paranoid.

Of course, he remembered the old dictum: just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you!

His debriefing at Yokosuka had been a lot less exciting than the interview with Walters on board the Illinois, at least to start with. They’d put him in a room with a bunk, desk and chairs, and its own head. He presumed the other SEALs in the squad had been sequestered this way as well, but he never saw them while he was on the base and so didn’t know for sure.

The next day, a couple of suits with badges identifying them as DIA—the Defense Intelligence Agency—had received him in a small and dingy office and questioned him about the mission. They’d asked him about what he and the others had seen, but when he told them truthfully they’d just nodded and jotted down something in their notebooks.

As he’d stood up to leave, however, one of them had stopped him. “I would keep your, ah, sighting quiet, if I were you, Lieutenant,” he’d said. “There are folks here who really, really don’t want you spreading wild stories about spaceships, y’know? Especially if you’ve been ordered to keep your mouth shut.”

“I saw what I saw,” Hunter said, his voice almost a growl. “I have video to prove it!”

The other DIA man had given him a tight-lipped grin. “Not anymore, you don’t.”

Of course. Everything they’d brought back from the mission—video, seismic and radiation readings, isotope sample—it all had been taken off the submarine at Yokosuka. Hunter was positive he wouldn’t see or hear of those recordings again.

“So—are you certain of what you saw?” the other agent said.

“Of course I am! Are you calling me a liar?”

“Absolutely not. But … well … your eyes could have been playing tricks. Or … just maybe … what you saw was some sort of very secret US aircraft. You know we have massive black projects going. Maybe someone way up the chain of command decided to send one in to have a look around.”

Hunter did know about black budgets and black projects. As a Navy SEAL, he operated in and around those shadows himself.

“What I saw,” he said, angry and stubborn, “was technology that must have been centuries ahead of anything we have now! Okay?”

“But how do you know that, Lieutenant? I understand they have some really spooky things going down back in Nevada. Real Star Wars stuff! Hey, you told us yourself you saw a human through that porthole, right? What would a human be doing on a spaceship if it was from another planet?”

The other agent nodded. “And you know … if you’re so certain it wasn’t an American secret aircraft … I don’t know. Maybe it was Chinese! Beijing was extremely concerned about the possibility of radiation leakage from that test site. And they could have some supersecret black-ops assets as well, stuff we don’t even know about.”

“Then God help us all,” Hunter had told them. “That thing we saw would fly rings around the Lightning II or anything else in our inventory!”

“Well … so you believe.” The agent opened a briefcase and handed Hunter several documents.

“What are these?”

“An oath of secrecy. You’ll swear not to tell anyone about what you saw.”

“But I’m already under oath. When I got my security clearance. I never de-oathed!”

“I know. But if you would, please.”

“Wasn’t my promise to Walters enough?”

“Who is Walters?”

“The CIA man—”

“There is no Walters.”

Hunter had looked at the two agents warily. They were serious about this fiction they were making him participate in. Serious enough to go to all this trouble.

The agent seemed to pretend the last part of their conversation hadn’t even happened, pulling out more papers. “And these are documents informing you of the national security aspects of this mission, and of the penalties you face if you divulge any information to anyone. We need you to read and sign them.”

With a sigh, Hunter had glanced through the papers … then signed.

“And initial here, please. And here. And here …”

Hunter had done as he’d been told, grumbling to himself a bit ungraciously, but obviously he would get nowhere with these people. They were nicer than Walters had been, certainly, but just as determined to enforce his cooperation.

The SEALs were reunited again when they were given orders to return by first-available military transport. Twelve and a half hours later, they’d touched down at Naval Air Station North Island and the complex of naval bases at Coronado, the Silver Strand just across the bay from San Diego.

And once again, he and his men had been separated, given solitary quartering, and interviewed by both military and civilian personnel. No one had even alluded to the UFO this time, and he just played ball to get it all over with. He read and signed more nondisclosure papers, and was reminded again both of the importance of national security interests, and of the severity of the penalties should any service member violate his oaths.

By this time, Hunter knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that whatever he and his men had seen out there at Mantapsan, it had been real—real as in a genuine spacecraft from some other world. Everyone who questioned him insisted that it might have been something out of some secret American program, something so secret it would be devastating to national security if he revealed it.

“Everyone knows,” one guy with FBI credentials had told him, “that the military has cooked up some pretty strange stuff. You know … Area 51, and all that.”

That secret base in the Nevada desert was notorious as the place where alien spacecraft were reverse engineered and tested, but it was also well-known as the site of flight tests of top secret human aircraft. The SR-71 Blackbird and the F-117 Nighthawk, the so-called Stealth Fighter, had been tested there, and scuttlebutt had it that there were other, newer, even more radically advanced aircraft there now.

“Maybe,” said the man who’d flashed a DIA card at him, “you saw a SAD/SOG op.”

Hunter scowled at that. The Special Activities Division/Special Operations Group was a highly secret organization working under CIA direction responsible for covert ops in which the US government wanted to maintain plausible deniability.

His interviewers had done their best to plant seeds of doubt in his mind. Had he really seen an alien spaceship? He couldn’t know … not for certain.

But although he said nothing, Hunter was by now certain that what he’d seen had not been built or deployed by any nation on Earth. Why would the government, which had deployed the SEALs in the first place—and deployed numerous high-value assets in support, including a USAF SpecOps transport and a Virginia-class submarine—turn around and send in that whatever-it-was to yank the rug out from under the people they already had on the ground? It made no sense!

Of course, Hunter was always more than ready to accept the fact that the government was a misnomer. The term implied a monolithic whole that always knew what it was doing. Bullshit! Hunter knew well that all too often, not only did the left hand not know what the right was doing, but the head didn’t know what either was doing, and the hands were wrestling with each other over interservice and interdepartmental turf wars.

Maybe …

No. He didn’t buy it. With technology like that, people very high up the ladder within the government would damn well know what it was doing … and who else was on the ground at the time.

So … aliens. By the time he left Naval Base Coronado on liberty, he was feeling distinctly paranoid. Renting a car, he drove east to El Cajon, frequently checking the rearview mirror for signs of a tail. Gerri lived in an apartment complex on Witherspoon. He parked on Chatham Street two blocks south from the place and walked, just so he could check and see if he was being followed.

Now he was there, and though he still hadn’t seen anyone out of the ordinary, he was almost certain he was being followed. But with no proof, there was nothing to do but go in.

Gerri Galanis lived on the second floor, Apartment 2D, and she was waiting for him when he buzzed from the lobby. “Mark!” she cried, opening the door. She was tall, brunette, and stunning in a microscopic bikini. “I thought you’d never get here!”

“Had to work late at the office, hon,” he replied, keeping his voice nonchalant. He’d phoned her when he’d arrived at Coronado two days ago, but had not been able to wrangle liberty until this afternoon. He’d called her again a couple of hours ago, and they’d made plans to go to the beach—hence the bikini.

Hunter was just glad they’d seen fit to issue him a pass. He’d seriously questioned whether they would ever allow him off base after the multiple grillings he’d received. His relief was palpable as he looked at the gorgeous woman before him, and he took Gerri in his arms and gave her a deep and thorough kiss.

Hunter had been divorced by his wife a year ago, and he was still wrestling with that. Eve had said it was because he was never home … though, damn it, she’d known he was in the Navy when she’d married him, and knew what it meant to be a Navy wife. Privately, he still wondered if she’d found someone else, but he also could admit that the role of Navy spouse was not for everyone. And the deployment schedules for the SEALs were worse than most, and DEVGRU—what used to be called SEAL Team Six—was the worst of all. You never knew when the phone would ring in the middle of the night, and twenty-four hours later you would be squelching through the mud in a swamp somewhere in Venezuela, or freezing your ass off on top of a mountain in Afghanistan.

Or dodging flying saucers in North Korea.

He’d picked Gerri up at a bar just two months ago. She was cute and she was fun and she didn’t ask too many questions. She cocktailed at the Kitten Klub downtown, with occasional gigs working the pole onstage. Hunter didn’t mind at all the idea of her displaying her body in front of noisy men; she actually liked what she did and she was good at it.

Just like Hunter.

“Ready for the beach?” he asked her.

“Well …” Her hand wandered on his torso and she kissed him again. “Maybe in a minute … or two.” Her grin was infectious.

Sex with Gerri was always fantastic, but even better was the relaxation, the decompression that Hunter had learned most to appreciate. Though he wouldn’t admit it even to himself, he was sore as hell from the brutal hike up and down those North Korean mountain slopes, and still felt washed out and rag-doll limp inside.

She made him feel alive once more.

After a long and pleasant interlude, they lay together in her bed, bare legs entangled, thoroughly wrapped in one another’s arms. “So, Mr. SEAL,” she said, playfully stroking him. “Can you tell me anything about where you’ve been this past week?”

“Uh-uh,” he said. With one finger, he stroked the curve of hair and skin just behind her left ear. She shivered, and cuddled closer.

“Mmmm. Not even where you’ve been?”

“Sorry, babe. You know I can’t.”

Especially this time!

He pushed the urgent thought away. He’d been trying not to think about … that.

Normally, the secrecy imposed on members of the SEAL teams wasn’t that big a deal. You simply didn’t talk about what you did at all—just said you were in the Navy. She’d seen him in uniform months before, though, and noticed the huge and clunky “Budweiser” badge that declared him to be a Navy SEAL. So she knew that much, at least.

Even so, that was all she would know. SEALs didn’t talk about their missions, even when they weren’t classified. The barflies who claimed to be Navy SEALs to any and all who would listen were fucking liars, every damned one of them.

“It’s just I worry about you,” she said.

“And if you knew where I was and what I was doing, that wouldn’t help one little bit, now, would it?”

She sighed. “I guess not.”

“So …” He gave her butt a stinging slap. “Let’s go to the beach!”

“Ummm …” She was working her way down his chest with kisses … then down his stomach. “In a minute,” she told him. “In just a minute …”

It took considerably longer than a minute, but eventually they worked their way down the steep slope and onto the sand at Black’s Beach, a tough-to-reach stretch of coastline just north of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute and Torrey Pines bluffs.

Gerri had brought him here a month ago. Divided between the city of San Diego and Torrey Pines State Park, the northern part of the beach had long been a secluded gathering place for naturists. Technically, public nudity was illegal in California, and the city of San Diego had banned nude sunbathing on the southern part of the beach in the ’70s, but the part of Black’s Beach belonging to the park was still clothing optional, unofficially at least. Gerri and Hunter found a good spot, put down a blanket, and peeled out of their shirts and swimsuits.

In the middle of October there weren’t many other people in evidence, either clothed or nude. The air was cool for Southern California—sixty-two degrees with a strong, offshore breeze—and the powerful surf pounded on the rocks. An underwater canyon out there funneled the incoming waves, and made the southern part of the beach a mecca for experienced surfers. A couple of surfers were out there now, riding in on a big roller.

Hunter glanced up at the sky … then back to the bluffs looming over the beach.

No one.

“Mark?” his companion asked. “What’s worrying you?”

“What makes you think anything is worrying me?”

“You asked me to drive in my car. You never do that. During the drive here, you kept checking behind us, like you thought we were being followed. In the parking lot you took your time checking out everything: the people on the deck over at Scripps, the other cars in the lot, even the sky. When we came down the trail, you kept looking back over your shoulder. And now you’re doing it again.”