ALIEN SECRETS
SOLAR WARDEN, BOOK ONE
Ian Douglas

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © William H. Keith, Jr. 2020

Cover illustration © Gregory Bridges

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Ian Douglas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008288884

Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9780008288891

Version: 2020-03-23

Dedication

For Brea,

who turns chaotic ramblings

into polished prose.

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.”

“Sorry. Am I that obvious?”

“Yes! And it’s driving me nuts!”

He scanned the deep blue and empty sky overhead. Funny how he kept looking up, just in case …

“I just …” Damn. What could he tell her? That he was afraid government spooks were watching them, even out here?

They were getting an eyeful right now if they were.

“I just … I’m just having a bit of nerves,” he told her. “Where we were, what we did … it was really rugged. To get out, we hiked over thirty miles in rough terrain like you wouldn’t believe. Took us two days to do it, and that was just because we were really humping it. I’m still … I don’t know. Still getting my head together, I guess.”

She lightly caressed his leg. “If you want to talk about it,” she said. “You know I won’t tell a soul.”

He nodded. “I know, babe.”

He believed her. Last month, she’d taken him to meet her parents in La Mesa, and when her father asked them what he did for a living, she’d laughed and said, “Dad! He works in San Diego and he has a short haircut! What do you think he does?” About 30 percent of the working population in San Diego worked at the Coronado bases.

When her father pressed the issue, she’d told him, “He takes wonderfully good care of me! And that’s all that matters, right? Now quit pestering him about it!”

And there the matter dropped. By the end of the evening, her parents were assuming that he was Navy … but the SEALs were never even mentioned. She was good.

Yeah, Gerri could keep a secret.

But he wasn’t going to test it.

Instead, they lay down on the blanket and watched the sky—the blessedly empty sky—for almost an hour, as the sun slowly westered toward the horizon.

“Tell me something, babe.”

“Sure.”

“What’s your take on UFOs? Life on other planets?”

“Flying saucers?”

“I guess.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I believe there’s life out there. I mean, the universe is so big, right? There has to be other life … other intelligence. To assume anything else seems pretty damned arrogant.”

“Yeah …”

“But according to everything I’ve read, even the nearest stars are so awfully far away. You have to wonder how any of those races could make it all the way here. If you believe the saucer nuts, Earth must be like LAX, with thousands of UFOs zipping in from space every year. That just doesn’t sound very likely to me.”

“Yeah. That’s what I always thought.”

The words just slipped out. He’d intended them to mean simply that—that he’d long believed in extraterrestrial life, but not in UFOs. But the way he’d said it sounded more like, “I thought that before … but not now.”

“So … you saw a UFO?” she asked.

Damn. She was quick on the uptake. But one of the things Hunter liked about Gerri was how quick she was, how smart, so he wasn’t exactly surprised.

“I don’t know.” He didn’t like the idea of lying. Perhaps misdirection was the best way to go. “Remember, all UFO means is ‘unidentified flying object.’ Doesn’t necessarily mean spaceships. Lots of stuff in the sky could be unidentified, depending on circumstances.”

“Yes,” she pressed, “but you’re a trained observer, right? Disciplined. You know aircraft, especially military. You’re not going to mistake the planet Venus for a spacecraft.”

“Right now, babe, I don’t know what I believe.”

“Tell me about it?”

“Uh-uh. Not now. Just that I saw … something. But maybe I hallucinated everything.”

Hunter’s cell phone, tucked into a pocket of his shirt lying in the sand nearby, buzzed.

“Now, who the hell is calling you on your day off?”

“Don’t know,” he answered. “Unless they’re canceling liberties …”

He fished the phone out of the shirt and held it to his ear. “Hunter.”

“Well, well, well,” a voice said on the other end of the line. “Lieutenant Commander Hunter.”

“Yes …?”

“Right now, Commander, you are on thin ice. Very thin ice …”

Now, what the hell? “Who is this?”

“Never mind that. You should be more concerned about yourself. Or, if you’re not worried about being court-martialed, you might at least give some thought to the safety of that pretty little girl sitting next to you.”

“What the fuck!” He sat up, looking around, both nervous and angry.

And he was leaning toward “angry” more and more.

“Hey,” the voice continued, “we know you like Gerri Galanis. Pretty. Smart. An amazing dancer. And we know she’s fantastic in bed! We know. It would be such a shame if anything … unpleasant happened to her. Quite a waste.”

The threat, awful in its hackneyed melodrama, like something out of the pages of some cheap detective novel, left Hunter dumbfounded. He opened his mouth to reply—he had no idea what he was about to say—and then he realized the line had gone dead.

He lowered the phone, then glanced up at the bluffs over the beach. A solitary figure stood up there, silhouetted against the early evening sky.

The figure raised one hand … and waved.

Fuck!

“Mark!” Gerri cried with concern. “What’s the matter? You’re white as a sheet!”

He took a deep breath. “Never mind. C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”

“Why? Did they recall you?”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

He looked back up the bluff. The lone figure was gone.

They got dressed, gathered up the blanket, and started up the long and rugged trail back to the parking lot at the top of the bluff, the mood subdued. Behind them, in the distance, several naked people were playing volleyball while others watched, and a couple of wet-suited surfers cruised a thundering wave toward the shore.

Maybe, he thought, it would be best if he didn’t see Gerri for a while.

Hell, maybe it would be best if he never saw her again.

CHAPTER THREE

Decades ago, visitors from other planets warned us about the direction we were heading and offered to help. Instead, some of us interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after … Trillions … of dollars have been spent on black projects which both Congress and the Commander-in-Chief have been kept deliberately in the dark.

PAUL HELLYER, FORMER CANADIAN DEFENSE MINISTER, 2010

21 February 1954

PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. Eisenhower stood on the deck outside the control tower, looking out into the night across the endless salt flats and hard-packed sands of Muroc Air Force Base in California. He’d been on vacation at nearby Palm Springs when his aides had arrived that evening to usher him off to this godforsaken stretch of emptiness. Not that it didn’t have its own austere beauty. The sky in particular was brilliantly clear, strewn with stars.

It might have been nice if several searchlights hadn’t been switched on, their beams aiming up into the sky.

“I don’t see a damned thing,” Eisenhower said, testily. “Did they stand us up?”

An aide checked his watch. “It’s only a little past midnight, Mr. President. Let’s wait a few minutes yet and see.”

Other people in the select group stood in a huddle nearby: Edwin Nourse, who’d been Truman’s chief economic advisor; Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, current head of the Los Angeles Catholic Church; Franklin Allen, an eighty-year-old former reporter with the Hearst Group, leaning heavily on his cane; and perhaps fifteen others. Eisenhower’s aides had rounded them up that evening and driven them up to Muroc as “community leaders,” asking them to witness what promised to be a spectacular event—the dawn, perhaps, of a new era for Humanity.

“We’ve got incoming,” a voice inside the tower called over a loudspeaker. “From the north-northwest, range fifty miles.” Eisenhower turned to face that direction and raised his binoculars to his eyes. He had not, he decided, been this nervous since he’d waited out D-day in his command post, code-named “Sharpener,” in a Hampshire woods.

A star just above the horizon grew steadily brighter. “There it is, sir!” an aide called.

“I see it.”

The star swelled rapidly to a brilliant light, like an aircraft’s landing lights, and it was accompanied now by four other objects traveling behind it. Through the binoculars, Eisenhower could see that the craft was flat and circular, perhaps sixty yards across. Windows across the leading edge were the source of the light, too bright for him to see inside.

Utterly silent, the craft came to a stop, hovering two hundred yards out from the control tower, extended four landing legs, then gently settled onto the hard-packed desert floor. Light spilled onto the ground as a garage-sized hatch slid open, and a ramp extended in apparent welcome.

“Well,” the President said, “I guess it’s showtime.”

“I still don’t like this, Mr. President,” Sherman Adams said. Adams was Eisenhower’s chief of staff, the first man ever to hold that title. “Not one bit. We can’t help you in there if they’re hostile—”

“I’ll be fine, Sherman.”

“Sir, if this is an invasion, what’s the first thing they would do? Take down the target’s leadership! They could kidnap you, hold you hostage. Or—”

“Enough, Sherman! I am going to do this.” Eisenhower gave Adams a hard glare. His senior advisor already had a nickname among his opponents in Washington: The Abominable No Man. He was outspoken and direct, and not afraid to tell the President exactly what he thought.

Which was why the former Army five-star general appreciated him as much as he did.

But right now, Sherman was wrong. Still, Eisenhower relaxed the glare into a wry grin. “Let Dick know what happened if things go south.” Vice President Richard Nixon was back in DC, having been deliberately kept out of the loop. “But don’t worry. If they wanted me dead, they wouldn’t go to all of this trouble to arrange a meeting. They’d just vaporize the White House.

“It’s what I’d do, at least.”

Eisenhower handed Adams his binoculars, turned, and descended the metal steps from the control tower deck. A couple of Marine honor guards fell into step behind him.

It will be all right.

The meeting had been arranged by Project Sigma, a classified program signed into existence by Eisenhower when he took office. It worked under the direction of Truman’s shadowy MJ-12, the committee tasked with overseeing contact with the aliens, and the recovery of their spacecraft. Just last month, Sigma had detected large alien spacecraft in orbit around Earth, and soon established radio contact with them—in English, which suggested that these creatures had been observing Earth for some time. The aliens had asked to talk with Earth’s leadership; Sigma had suggested in return an initial meeting with the President of the United States, and specified a place for the encounter, far out in the desert away from reporters and an already anxious public. Just two years ago, large numbers of UFOs had overflown Washington DC, and while that had been hushed up, the country, already nervous about the global march of Communism and a Soviet hydrogen bomb, needed to be kept calm.

America had tested its first thermonuclear device on November 1, 1952. Less than a year later, just six months ago, the Russians had exploded their own weapon, known to US Intelligence as Joe-4 because it was the fourth known nuclear test carried out at the behest of Joseph Stalin. The iron curtain predicted by Churchill in 1946 had just become terrifyingly deadly. The so-called Cold War, emerging from the Truman Doctrine of 1947 which called for the containment of the Soviet Union, was on the point of turning hot.

One reason Eisenhower had agreed to this meeting was the chance that the extraterrestrials might be able to provide the United States with technologies, possibly weapons, that would help America stay secure in the face of Communist aggression. That, Eisenhower was the first to admit, was the longest of long shots, but any chance at all made the risk worthwhile.

He reached the bottom of the ramp. “Stay here, fellows,” he told the Marine bodyguards. “I’ll be back soon.”

“Sir—” one of the Marines began.

“It’s okay, son. They want just me.”

As if on cue, a figure was waiting for him, silhouetted against the light at the top of the ramp. Strange. The figure looked human: six feet tall, with long hair, and a raised hand with five fingers. Eisenhower had been expecting one of the short aliens, the “Extraterrestrial Biological Entities,” recovered from several crashed saucers. Those things gave him the creeps. So to see this new kind of being?

What the hell?

A long and anxious hour later, Eisenhower returned to the tower, looking white and shaken. “My God, Sherman,” he whispered. “My God in heaven.”

“What was it, Mr. President? What happened?”

“They offered … a trade,” Eisenhower told his aide. “A negotiated exchange. They offered to begin giving us technology. No weapons, but free energy and antigravity and …” He stopped, then shook his head. “Jesus Christ.”

“And what did they want in return, sir?”

“Nothing much. Unilateral nuclear disarmament. We get rid of our nukes, and they give us toys … trinkets, really. I felt like a South Seas island native being offered beads and baubles by the Europeans!”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them ‘no,’ and then I told them ‘hell no!’ of course.”

Adams seemed relieved. “That’s wise, Mr. President. If we lose our nuclear deterrent …”

“That’s what I told them. They were ready to sign a treaty with us, but I told them no. We will be staying in contact, though. Maybe we can still work something out.”

But privately, Eisenhower doubted that anything more would come out of this meeting in the desert. That disturbingly human alien had been adamant. Humans were on a deadly path which they must abandon … or face extinction. And while its English had been perfect, there was just the slightest hint of something foreign in the accent. Eisenhower, for his part, couldn’t help but wonder if these beings were in fact Germans, a Nazi remnant escaped from the collapse of their Reich, and somehow provided with advanced technology. There’d been rumors of just that scenario ever since Operation HighJump, in the Antarctic.

There was no way to confirm any of that, though. And so he would return to the hotel. His staff would concoct a story about him needing emergency dental surgery after he lost a crown at the fried chicken dinner last night. The whole incident would be kept hush-hush.

And he would go back to the mundane world of running a country, and do his best to forget those visitors and their trinkets.

But he knew he would always wonder if he’d made the right decision.

HUNTER WASN’T sure what was in store for him now. That morning, he’d received a peremptory summons to the office of Captain Scott Mulvehill, the CO of the Coronado facility, and presumed that he would be receiving new orders.

He was still seething, though, over the phone call on the beach. How dare they threaten his girlfriend, a complete innocent, just to shut him up! Perhaps even worse, the timing of the call, and the call itself, strongly implied that he was under constant surveillance. That crack about Gerri being good in bed … He recognized that for what it was: a crude and blunt declaration that they were watching, or at least listening in on him, even when he was in Gerri’s apartment. Was her apartment bugged? It must be. And the intrusion left him furious.

And clearly they’d been listening in on them at the beach. It hadn’t been a bug, a tiny microphone planted on him at one of the interviews. He knew that much. He hadn’t been wearing anything on the nude beach … and he’d been in uniform during the interviews. Or …

Now there was a thought. There were, he knew, ways to activate a cell phone from a remote location, and turn the device into a live mic even when it was switched off.

For that matter, a simple shotgun mic from the top of those bluffs might have been able to listen in on their conversation.

No matter how they’d done it, the blatant intrusion, the violation of his right to privacy had him boiling mad.

It also had him more paranoid than before, and terribly concerned for Gerri’s safety. If he was about to get new orders—like back to Virginia, or even another overseas deployment—then breaking things off with her might be the very best thing for both of them.

He wondered, though, if unseen voyeur spooks were going to be dogging him and all of his girlfriends from now on. His friends. His family. Or would they just arrange for a quick, simple accident, and shut him (and them) up permanently?

Damn it all!

He checked in with Mulvehill’s secretary and walked into the office. To his surprise, Mulvehill wasn’t there. Instead, it was a two-striper admiral, a rear admiral, who was waiting for him.

“Commander Hunter? Have a seat.”

“Sir! Thank you, sir.”

“I’m Rear Admiral Kelsey. I’m with … let’s just say I work for JSOC.”

JSOC was the Joint Special Operations Command, the multiple-service umbrella under which all of the US special ops groups served. JSOC’s command umbrella included DEVGRU, along with the 75th Rangers, Delta Force, and others.

“Yes, sir.” More important, to Hunter’s way of thinking, was the big, gaudy Budweiser pinned to the upper left of Kelsey’s blue uniform jacket.

The man was a SEAL. Or, rather, he might have been an active SEAL years ago, but been promoted up to senior management. As with the Marines, however, once a SEAL, always a SEAL.

There were no ex-SEALs.

What the hell is this about? Did I really fuck things up even loosely talking to Gerri?

Fuck.

Because, the thing was, rear admirals did not, in the normal course of duty, have anything to do with mere lieutenant commanders.

“I’m authorized to offer you a new billet—a very special billet. And a rather extraordinary deployment.”

That didn’t sound like he was in trouble. In fact, that sounded interesting. He perked up—if such a thing was possible when in the ramrod straight posture any SEAL would affect in front of top brass.

“Yes, sir. Where are you sending me?”

“I can’t tell you that, not yet. What I can say is that it will be a long deployment—probably in excess of two years. And it involves travel. A lot of travel.”

Hunter considered this. One very real possibility he’d been considering was the classic Navy response to a fuckup, which was to ship him out to someplace remote. So maybe he wasn’t out of the woods yet. “Counting penguins in Antarctica” was how such a duty change was phrased in a typical barracks bull session. And while that specific scenario didn’t seem very likely, the Navy did have a facility on the island of Adak, in the Aleutians—very remote, and very cold.

No, wait a sec. NAVFAC Adak had been closed in ’97. So what else was there?

Kelsey continued. “This assignment will be strictly on a voluntary basis. It will be dangerous, and it may involve combat, though we don’t know that for certain at this time.”

“I see, sir.” Combat was no problem. And danger was already in the job description. It was the secrecy that made Hunter a little cautious—there’d been too much of that in his life recently, and he couldn’t help but wonder if the events in North Korea were related to this new assignment. “And you can’t tell me about it unless I volunteer, is that it?”

“That’s it in a nutshell, Commander.”

“Two years?”

“At least—I can’t guarantee it won’t be longer. I should tell you this, as well: we have already approached several of your men. Two have refused the assignment. Both of them are married, so that’s completely understandable and it’s no reflection on them. The others say they will volunteer, but only if you sign on as well, as their CO.” Kelsey gave Hunter a wry near-grin. “It seems that you inspire considerable loyalty in your people, Commander.”

Hunter was thunderstruck at that. His squad was close and tight-knit, but he hadn’t realized that his men felt that strongly about it. “I … I’ll have to think about this, Admiral.”

“Of course, of course. Take all the time you want … just so long as I have an answer by 0900 hours tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow!”

“If you say yes, you’ll be shipping out for training tomorrow afternoon.”

“What kind of training?”

“Again, I’m not at liberty to say, Commander. It will be extensive and it will be tough, though. Might make SEAL training seem easy in comparison.” Hunter shuddered when he heard this, and Kelsey seemed to be at least a bit sympathetic—as sympathetic as a rear admiral could be with a grunt. “That’s all you need to know.”

“I see. And if I say yes and then wash out?”

“My recommendation? Don’t.” He seemed amused by the look on Hunter’s face. “Don’t worry. I have every confidence in you.”

“Thank you, sir. Question, Admiral?”

“Shoot.”

“Does this have anything to do with the spaceship my men and I saw in North Korea?”

Hunter had expected a neutral or negative answer—something like “Spaceship? What spaceship?” But that was not Kelsey’s response.

Instead, he scowled, his expression darkening like a thunderstorm. “Don’t you ever, ever ask me something like that again, Commander! You are completely out of line!”

“So you know what we saw over there?”

“I’m not at liberty to speak about it, and neither are you. I advise you to keep your thoughts on the subject to yourself. Do not make me regret asking you for this assignment.”

But the anger inside Hunter surged up and out in a furious blast. “Sir! Someone phoned me yesterday and threatened the life of my girlfriend. That was what was out of line!” He was shouting, and it was with a bit of struggle that he caught himself and dialed it back. “I’m sorry, sir. But ever since our return from Korea, I have been the subject of rather intensive surveillance, including, evidently, in bed! If my oath isn’t enough for you—”

Kelsey was mad, but it didn’t seem like it was solely at Hunter’s outburst. “Who made the threat? Who did you talk to?”

“Damned if I know. He didn’t leave me his fucking name and number.”

Kelsey seemed to consider this for a moment, then sighed. “Commander … let’s play a game of hypotheticals.”

Hunter was about to reply that he didn’t play games, but stopped the words before they came out of his mouth. This was a damned good time to keep his trap shut. “I’m listening, sir.”

“I’m not saying there are, but let’s pretend for a moment that there are aliens, okay? They’ve known about humans, have been visiting us, watching us, maybe even interfering with us for a long, long time.”

“I’m with you so far, sir.”

“Now, just hypothetically, let’s say that there are more than one group of aliens out there. Like in Star Trek. You have the Federation of good guys. You’ve got Vulcans, you’ve got humans, you’ve got … I don’t know. Lots of other good guys. But you have others that aren’t so good.”

“Okay …”

“Now, just suppose for the sake of argument, that the bad guys are trying to take over Earth. It’s an invasion, but they’re being sneaky about it. You see, there aren’t many of them, a few million, maybe, but there are seven billion of us. They might have really wizard superweapons, but they’re outnumbered at least a thousand to one.”

Hunter wasn’t ready to admit that a mere difference in numbers would stop aliens who had the technology to cross interstellar distances. “They wouldn’t need to be sneaky about it, sir. They just trot out the Death Star and obliterate the planet!”

“That’s Star Wars, Commander, not Star Trek. Your point is taken, though. With the technology they have, just about anything is possible. But let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that they want to take over the Earth, but they want to have the planet intact. Maybe they want us as slaves. Or, hell, I don’t know. For food.”

“Sounds like your typical scenario for a 1950s sci-fi B movie, Admiral.”

Kelsey nodded. “It does, doesn’t it? Again, this is all conjecture. But back to our bad guy aliens. They want to invade, but they don’t want to kill everyone, and they don’t want to blast the entire planet into space rubble, okay? So how would they go about taking over the Earth?”

“Well, if they looked like us, I guess they could infiltrate the government. Infiltrate all the governments of the world.”

“And if they didn’t look like us?”

“I don’t know, Admiral. Too many variables. Could they disguise themselves? Or infiltrate with a few key humans they’ve brainwashed or something? Use them as Manchurian candidates and slip them in to positions of power, but have them working for the aliens?”

“Bang on the money, Commander.”

“But … this is all hypothetical, right?”

“Completely. I just want you to understand that not everyone in the government is on our side. There are … elements, let’s say, perfectly capable of what you described. Eavesdropping. Blackmail. Strong-arm tactics. Threats. Threats to kill you or your girl or other people close to you. Even actual murder. Make people disappear.”

“And might these elements be aligned with various intelligence services?”

“CIA, FBI, DIA—you name it. A lot of our alphabet soup of current government agencies might have been compromised. Hypothetically speaking, of course. It wouldn’t take much. A few key people at the top, giving the orders.”

“Of course.”

“So what do you say, Commander?”

“I still need some time to think about it, sir.”

“Okay. But I do need your answer ASAP.”

“Oh-nine-hundred tomorrow. Yes, sir.”

He left, his mind whirling.

HE SPENT the night with Gerri.

“But where are they sending you, Mark?”

They were having dinner together at Top of the Market, a seafood and wine restaurant right on the bay with a fantastic view out over the water. Hunter’s paycheck didn’t normally stretch to include fine dining—not this fine—but he figured he owed a really special night to the girl he was about to dump.

For some reason, the food didn’t taste quite as good as he’d expected.

He’d left his cell phone at home, and made a point of asking her to do so, as well. He wasn’t going to spill any secrets, but, just in case, he didn’t want their dinner interrupted by unpleasant threats or bombast.

He didn’t think They could have bugged every damned table in every restaurant in San Diego.

“Can’t tell you, babe. Because they haven’t told me.”

They’d finished their dinner and were talking over the last of their wine—a good ’08 Merlot recommended by the waiter. Hunter had always thought you ordered white wine with fish, but apparently a red wine with their seared tuna was the exception to the rule.

“Isn’t that kind of strange?” Gerri asked. “I mean, is it usual to send people off and not tell them where they’re being sent?”

“Not really. But, well, in my line of work, it does happen. Look, you knew this could happen when you hooked up with me, right?”

“That doesn’t make this easy, Mark,” she said, irritated at his trying to turn this on her.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“And you don’t know how long you’ll be gone?”

“Uh-uh. But it might be a long time. Gerri …” He took a deep breath. “I guess what I’m trying to say … this evening is kind of a good-bye.”

“I got that. But you make it sound like good-bye forever!”

He swallowed. “It is. I’m sorry … but I’m not going to string you along. I don’t know when I’ll come back. I don’t know if I’ll be back.” He shrugged. “That’s just the way it is. I’m … sorry.”

Her lip quivered, and her eyes were luminous with tears, but she didn’t cry, not yet. She dabbed at one eye with her napkin. “I thought …”

“What? What did you think?”

“That we had something really special together, you and me.”

“We do.” He’d almost said “we did,” but he changed the tense from past to present at the last moment because he thought the same thing. “Gerr … you’ll just have to trust me. I really do care for you and—”

“I love you.”

For two months they’d been dancing around the concept of being in love like, well, like the way Gerri danced around her pole. This was the first time she’d said those words, and it hit Mark like a blow to the sternum.

“And I love you.” And he meant it, staggered by both that revelation and by what he was truly giving up by saying good-bye. “But I do not want you waiting for me.”

“Why not? You’re worth waiting for!”

He smiled. “I’m glad you think so. But, well … you deserve the best, the very best. Remember, my wife dumped me because I kept getting deployed overseas. I spent Christmas of ’09 sitting on top of a mountain in Afghanistan. The Christmas after that I was helping to train Kurds to kill ISIS bastards in Iraq. You deserve a hell of a lot better than that!”

“So you’re afraid I’ll treat you like your bitch of an ex?” The almost-tears were fading, replaced by anger.

“I’m afraid I won’t be around enough to treat you the way you should be treated.”

He didn’t add, “And I don’t want to be around if that means you might be killed.”

But he also didn’t tell her that he had a choice. He could tell Kelsey tomorrow that he didn’t want to go. But the outcome, he knew, would be the same so far as he and Gerri were concerned. He would be shipped off to the equivalent of Adak. There was some secret stuff going on in Uzbekistan right now, and there were SEALs over there taking part in the fun and games. And even if he just went back to Virginia, he would be gone.

He could imagine her asking to come along. She would be willing to pull up stakes and move across the country to stay with him; he could sense that in her now.

But he suspected that both of them would be looking over their shoulders all the time, half expecting a sniper’s bullet … or a mysterious brake failure … something that would take them both out of the way.

Hunter had been thinking about Kelsey’s Star Trek analogy. The bad guys, it seemed, both human and alien, played for keeps.

There was more to it than simple self-preservation, too, or protecting Gerri. Kelsey hadn’t been able to say much, but what he had said opened up some startling doors.

Hunter had seen a spaceship. His debriefing interviews, the way they’d treated him, convinced him that there was not a nice, simple, and purely terrestrial answer to the puzzle. He couldn’t prove it, but he’d seen a real spaceship, aliens were here, and they meant business.

And now, Kelsey’s talk about Star Trek politics suggested that the aliens were not friendly, did not come in peace, that they were interfering in human activities in a big way, and they were ruthless in how they were going about their business. This was no bunch of interstellar tourists stopping by to point and look at the funny humans. They meant to take over.

An invasion …

“Well … I don’t care what you say,” she told him. “When you come back Stateside, you look me up, okay? We can pick up where we left off.”

He bit back his first answer, then gave a reluctant nod. “Okay. But when I look you up, I’ll expect to find you with a husband and six kids, okay?”

“Stripping and cocktailing with six kids? That’ll be the day!”

“Not a stripper, remember? An ecdysiast.”

“Bastard. When do you ship out?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

“Damn! So soon? Who the hell did you fuck over to catch this shit?”

“Only you, I think.”

And then she cried.

CHAPTER FOUR

We should think of the craft in the New Mexico desert as more of a time machine than a spacecraft.

DR. HERMANN J. OBERTH [ATTRIBUTED], 1974

9 December 1965

SMOKE FILLED THE tiny cabin as the vibration increased. Die Glocke was reentering Earth’s atmosphere at high velocity, falling with the swollen, bottom end of The Bell facing in the direction of travel, which meant that General Kammler was being pressed back in his narrow seat by what felt like the weight of several people lying on top of him.

Ssarsk lay strapped into its rack just above him. “What’s happening?” Kammler yelled, trying to be heard above the thunder filling the cabin. “What’s wrong?”

Nothing wrong. The words formed silently in his head. Slowing to atmospheric velocity.

Kammler wished that there was a window in The Bell so that he could see out. Flying blind like this, locked into a claustrophobic tin can—it was a nightmare.

They’d left der Riese, the secret complex in the Silesian woods, only moments before. At first, there’d been no sensation of movement at all, no sense of acceleration, no noise or vibration. The Bell, though, Ssarsk had told him, was already above the atmosphere and preparing to land.

Then they’d plunged into the atmosphere, and into a nightmare of heat and smoke, of raw noise and unendurable vibration. Would they break up? Burn up? He didn’t know. He couldn’t trust the alien pilot to tell him what was actually going on. The Eidechse were emotionally remote and inscrutable. The name was German for “lizards,” and they did possess a cold, reptilian aspect that Kammler found disturbing.

Or, to be honest, quite frightening.

He tried to distract himself. Twenty years into the future! What would life be like, what would technology be like in that far-off age of 1965? Antigravity? Flying cars? The important thing was that people might have forgotten the excesses of the Third Reich. Not that wiping out the Jews was a bad thing, but the rest of the world simply didn’t understand.

Nullifiers inoperational, the pilot thought at him. Brace yourself.

Brace yourself? In God’s name, how?

The weight crushing him increased sharply, then fell away. It felt as though the craft had just changed its heading somewhat, slightly to the left. He wished he understood more about The Bell’s technology.

He wished he could see.

He tried to remember everything he could about The Bell. Ssarsk and several of its compatriots had been helping the Nazis for almost a decade. An alien craft had come down in a wooded Bavarian valley in 1936. Of the pilots—bulb-headed, skinny, just over a meter high, with enormous black eyes with no hint of white to them at all—only one had survived, but Ssarsk’s compatriots, a different species, had shown up soon thereafter. The Reich was already in the process of studying the wreckage, which was largely complete, hoping to back-engineer the craft.

The Eidechse had offered to help.

And all they’d asked in return was to become silent partners, as it were, in the world government the Reich planned to create.

The Eidechse had contributed incredible levels of knowledge to the Reich’s scientists. Von Braun’s rocket designs at Peenemünde, the disk-shaped craft being tested at Hauneberg, the new superbomb developed by Kurt Diebner—progress on all of them had been tremendously advanced by the Eidechse visitors. It was one of the brutal ironies of war that the Reich had collapsed mere months before the most powerful of those weapons could be deployed on the battlefield.

The machine referred to by the code name Die Glocke—“The Bell”—had started as an experiment in true antigravity, but the Eidechse had revealed a key fact of long-range space travel: traveling faster than light was also traveling in time. The Jew physicist Einstein had supposedly demonstrated that space and time were the same thing, that translation in one of four dimensions could be turned into translation in another. The Bell, it seemed, was proof of this, despite the fact that Reich science had been working for years to repudiate the theories of Jewish physics.

Ssarsk had piloted the prototype craft into space, made what it called a dimensional translation, and brought the craft back into Earth’s atmosphere.

The only question now was whether they could survive the landing.

That, and what year it would be when they landed.

Another course change, the pilot thought at him. Acceleration surged, and again there was a sharp sensation, this time to the right.

The vibration had largely faded away now, and Kammler could hear a rushing sound that he took to be the sound of wind whipping past the hull outside. Smoke continued to fill the compartment, however, and he realized that something must be burning inside the craft.

The Bell slowed almost to a stop, then made a broad, sweeping turn. We land. Brace yourself.

They hit something hard and the vibration returned, the noise a shrill thunder as if the craft was plowing backward through dirt. And then …

The stillness, the silence, were eerie. The craft’s internal illumination was gone, and they sat there in pitch-black darkness.

We arrive.

“Did we make it?” Kammler started coughing, and finally managed to add, “Did we go through time?”

Unknown. I will find out. The hatch opened, and cold air spilled inside, clearing the smoke. There was a little light, as well; he saw that it was dark outside, but he could make out the shapes of trees against an overcast sky. It looked as though they’d come down in a wooded area. There were patches of snow on the ground.

“Wait!” he called as Ssarsk slipped through the open hatch. He struggled with his harness, but couldn’t find the clip. “Don’t leave me!”

Remain here, the alien thought at him. I will be back. And the hatch hissed shut.

“I don’t know how to operate the hatch mechanism!” Kammler shouted, but there was no mental response.

Damn!

The Bell had been reconstructed by the SS and by slave workers, but the actual design of the shell and power plant and drive had been alien, and most of the mechanisms and the secrets of how it worked were understood, if at all, by only a few humans—none of whom were Kammler. The aliens had operated it during tests, and it required an alien pilot. Kammler was only now realizing just how dependent he was on the Eidechse’s goodwill. He was locked in, with no way out that he could find. Some of the craft’s mechanisms, he knew, were actually controlled by thought; Ssarsk had worn a slender circlet around his head that, he presumed, let him operate the craft.

He waited there in the dark for hours.

Something thumped against the outer hull.

He jerked awake. Had he fallen asleep? More thumps and bumps sounded from outside. What was that?

“Ssarsk?” he called.

Now he could hear voices. Physical voices, not the mental transmissions of the alien.

He couldn’t make them out, but he could tell from the tone and the lack of gutturals that they were not speaking German.

Was that English? He spoke a little …

The hatch banged open, again admitting the dim light from outside, blinding after hours in the dark. A shape—a human shape—blocked the entryway as someone leaned inside.

“General Hans Kammler?” the shape said. “Willkommen in Pennsylvania! Und in der Zukunft! Wir haben dich erwartet!”

“Welcome to Pennsylvania and the future! We’ve been expecting you!”

“Mein Gott! Ich habe es gemacht!”

He’d made it.

THE NEXT afternoon they flew Hunter and five of his men out to Wright-Patt.

The so-called Hangar 18, he was told, was something of a fixture in UFO legend, the place where the Air Force stored crashed saucers and the bodies of diminutive gray aliens. In fact, that was a myth. There was no Hangar 18 at the sprawling US Air Force base just outside of Dayton, Ohio.

There was, however, something called “Complex-1B,” a sprawling underground facility accessed through a three-story office building and layer upon layer of security checkpoints. And within the complex was “the Blue Room,” where some of America’s most important secrets were kept hidden from the public eye.

Air Force master sergeant Donald Gilroy was the source of this revelation. Hunter was seated next to the man in the C-17—the same aircraft that had brought him from Japan, in fact—as it droned its way east.

“So, aren’t you going to get into trouble talking to us about this?” Hunter asked.

“Nah,” Gilroy replied. “You people have all been cleared up to USAP, right?” Unacknowledged Special Access Programs. “You’re gonna be hearing a lot of hush-hush stuff at Wright-Patt. I’m just laying the groundwork for you.”

In the normal scheme of things, Hunter knew, there were just six levels of security clearance for American military personnel: Restricted, Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret, plus two special classifications—Special Compartmented Information and USAP. There wasn’t supposed to be anything above Top Secret, and the UFO whistle-blowers claiming to reveal stuff at “above Top Secret” or higher didn’t understand how the US government security classification system worked.

Top Secret, however, had been given a great many subcategories, each higher than the one before. Top Secret Crypto encompassed twenty-eight separate levels; the President of the United States, reportedly, was only at level seventeen. And there were higher classifications above TS Crypto 28.

Gilroy wouldn’t tell them what his security classification level was. He did tell them that a USAP clearance did not normally allow access to information about UFOs. Special allowances were made, he said, for personnel who were being checked out for higher clearances, a process that would take time.

So during that time, however, Hunter and his five companions would be given some information, with the promise of more to follow.

“What you’re telling us,” Hunter said slowly, “is that UFOs are real? Roswell and all of that?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Gilroy replied. “You didn’t think otherwise, did you? After what you saw in Korea?”

“No. Not really. There was still some doubt, though.”

“That’s right,” Minkowski said. “There’s always room for doubt. We could have all been on our way to a Section Eight!”

Several of the SEALs laughed. Section Eight meant being discharged from the service because you were crazy.

“I promise you that all of you are completely sane,” Gilroy told them. “The question is whether you’ll still be sane after you get a tour of Complex-1B.”

“Why?” Taylor asked. “What’re we going to see?”

“Ha! You’ll find out.” But he’d say no more about the facility.

Gilroy did tell them a story, though, about something that had supposedly happened back in the midsixties. Then Senator Barry Goldwater, who’d been the Republican nominee for president in 1964, had had a long-standing fascination for UFOs. A major general in the USAF, a senator from Arizona, and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he’d repeatedly tried to gain access to the Blue Room.

In 1994, Goldwater appeared on Larry King Live to talk about UFOs. According to him, he’d asked no less a personage than the chief of staff for the US Air Force, General Curtis LeMay, for help in getting into the Blue Room. According to Goldwater, LeMay had gone ballistic. Furiously angry, madder than Goldwater had ever seen him, he’d cussed the senator out, then told him, “Don’t you ever ask me that question again!”

Someone—quite probably someone not in the regular chain of command—took secrecy about UFOs very seriously indeed. It seemed that not even the President was told everything … and often he was told nothing.

They touched down at Wright-Patterson and were driven to a nondescript office building somewhere in the middle of a forest of hangars, offices, and storage sheds. They were met in the lobby, just inside an initial security checkpoint, by an Air Force major named Frank Benedict, who took a clipboard from Gilroy, signed something on it, and handed it back. It was, Hunter thought, very much like the chain-of-custody receipt required when prisoners were transferred from one keeper to another.

Were they prisoners? It was distinctly possible. Hunter did not imagine for a moment that he could tell Benedict “so long!” then turn on his heel and walk away.

Benedict took his time looking through a sheaf of orders that had been transmitted to his command. “Lieutenant Commander Mark Hunter?” he asked, looking up.

“Yes, sir.”

“Master Chief Arnold Minkowski.”

“Present, sir!”

“Chief Roger Brunelli.”

“Here, sir.”

“EN1 Thomas Taylor.”

“Yes, sir.”

“RM1 Ralph Colby.”

“Yes, sir.”

“… and TM1 Frank Nielson.”

“Yessir.”

“Okay. You men have received USAP clearance levels, and I have been directed to show you what is popularly known as ‘the Blue Room.’ I will remind you that all of you have signed security paperwork in which you’ve promised not to divulge anything that you see here … right?”

A chorus of “yessirs” sounded from the Navy personnel.

“You breathe a word about any of this and you’ll be out on your ears so fast your heads will spin. You’ll lose your pensions, your reputations, and even your identities, so no one will believe a thing you say. And then you’ll spend a minimum of twenty years in Portsmouth for violating the Secrets Act. You all hear me?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Just so that’s clear.”

Benedict then ushered them down a series of halls, through various twists and turns, with stops at each of an additional five security checkpoints. During the journey, the six men were scanned for metal, photographed, fingerprinted, had their retinas examined, and gave voice prints. Finally, they took an elevator down; Hunter couldn’t begin to guess how far down, but it was quite a way. The descent took almost a full minute.

The elevator stopped, the doors slid open, and Hunter and the other SEALs stepped into another passageway with another checkpoint. Here they had their palms scanned and their retinas checked again, before a massive steel door hissed open …

… and Hunter wondered just how far down the rabbit hole they’d gone.

“TIME TRAVEL,” Dr. Lawrence Brody said with an air of utter dismissal, “is bunk.”

“Physics says that, does it?” Navy captain Frederick Groton said.

“Exactly. Where would causality be if we could zip back in time and kill our own grandfathers?”

Brody and Groton were in the mess hall of a facility so secret that the government had only recently even admitted that the place existed—despite ample evidence from satellite photos and the unwinking gaze of Google Earth. Area 51 was very, very real. And actively being used.

“My understanding,” Groton said slowly, “is that if we changed history somehow, we would simply move over to an alternate time line, one where we had never been born. No paradox. The universe—the multiverse, I should say—would never allow that.”

“An entire universe—hundreds of billions of galaxies, quintillions of stars, worlds and civilizations without number, all of it identical to this one, down to the smallest detail except for my existence—created in an instant just because I shot dear old Gramps before my father was conceived? The universe is wasteful, Captain, but not that wasteful. It certainly doesn’t create an entire universe around the absence of one man.”

“That, as I understand it, is the basic theory behind the many-universe concept.”

“Captain … do you have a degree in astrophysics? In cosmology? In quantum dynamics?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, I do—all three! And I’m telling you that quantum theory does not support so absurd a statement about the nature of the cosmos. How do you summon an entire universe out of nothing? Where does all that matter come from in the blink of an eye? Where is the energy, man?”

“I believe the idea,” Groton said, “is that this other universe already exists. That, in fact, every universe that could possibly exist does exist—including one where your grandfather was regrettably killed as a young man. Not an infinite number, certainly, but a very, very, very large number of them. Rather than creating a new universe, a better way to say it might be that you simply step from one reality to another.”

“Yes, Captain, I know. You needn’t lecture me on cosmology.”

“That was not my intent, Doctor. But I am telling you that time travel is possible. We know it to be true because we’ve done it.”

“Bullshit! Where’s your proof?”

Groton melodramatically patted his white uniform jacket. “Damn. I must have left it in my other coat.”

“Very funny.”

A woman approached the table, holding a tray of food. “Hello, Captain,” she said. “May I join you?”

“Of course!” He rose, gesturing to a chair, and Brody managed to get to his feet a moment later. The woman was, simply put, impossibly gorgeous. There was no other word for it. Brody was fifty-five years old, but his hormones were kicking in with all the force and red-faced stammer of a sixteen-year-old adolescent boy. The woman was tall and slender with large and startlingly blue eyes; long silver hair, though her face looked like she was only in her twenties; and a silver jumper or suit of some sort that Brody was prepared to swear was spray painted onto her body.

“Please sit, gentlemen,” this vision told them.

“Elanna,” Groton said, “this is Dr. Brody, our professor of astrophysics on the Big-H. Dr. Brody? Elanna.”

“A pleasure, Doctor.” She extended one slender hand.

Somehow, Brody managed to take the hand, and felt her give it a squeeze.

“We were just discussing time travel, Elanna,” Groton said. “Dr. Brody was explaining to me why time travel is impossible.”

She laughed. “Really? Do tell me!”

Brody’s face burned. He had the distinct feeling that both of them were making fun of him. “Well, according to current theory …” he began.

“Don’t even go there, Professor,” Groton told Brody. “You’ll lose.”

“What do you mean?” He couldn’t look away from the silvery beauty sitting next to him.

“Doctor …” Groton said, and then he hesitated. There was so much Brody still didn’t know, and it was entirely possible that some of it he would never know, never accept, if only because his brain was too old and inflexible to wrap itself around some of this stuff. “Dr. Brody,” he tried again. “You’ve been through indoctrination. You know the truth, or a large part of it. You’ve seen some things that, for most people, would be very hard to believe.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve seen the Grays—”

“Yes, yes! Horrible things! What’s your point?”

“Elanna here is …” He paused, trying to find the right way to explain it. He settled on, “A kind of alien. Alien to us, at any rate.”

“But she’s human!”

“Indeed. I’m as human as you are, Doctor,” the woman said. She smiled, and Brody felt the rush of hormones once more.

“Elanna,” Groton continued, “is human, but she’s from the future. She’s from roughly eleven thousand years in the future, in fact.”

“My God!” And the shock jolted him backward and knocked him out of his chair.

“A SPACESHIP!” Taylor said with an edge of sheer reverence in his voice. “A fucking alien spaceship!”

“Actually,” Benedict said, “it’s one of ours.”

Hunter gave Benedict a sharp look. “So we do have advanced spacecraft?”

“For a good many years, Commander, yes. That is a TR-3B, and it’s one reason we no longer have a space shuttle.”

The craft was large—at least twenty-five yards wide, and it was shaped like an equilateral triangle with slightly rounded tips. Three landing legs held it a couple of yards above the concrete flooring of the immense room, and there were several technicians working on, around, and under the ship’s body. Cables as thick as a man’s leg snaked across the floor and vanished into ports on the thing’s belly, while light spilled from an open hatch at the top of a long ramp. Three red lights glowed with sullen brilliance on the underside, one within each of the triangle’s corners. A larger light was nestled into a recession at the underside’s center, but it was not on at the moment. The hull had a matte finish, like black rubber. Hunter wondered why it wasn’t polished silver, like the disk he’d seen.

Benedict led them past the looming spacecraft, though Hunter was itching to go on board. “A good many years,” Benedict had said. How many years? How long had these things been flying?

“Some of you gentlemen might remember a flurry of UFO cases back in 1989, 1990, in Belgium, and out over the North Sea? Big black triangles like this one. That was us.”

At least twenty-five, then. Jesus.

There were other craft stored in that subterranean hangar.

On the southern edge of Wright-Patt, Hunter knew, was the National Museum of the US Air Force. Born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, Hunter had practically lived in the place when he was growing up. This hangar was like that … huge and open and filled with artifacts straight out of the history of flight. The biggest difference seemed to be that this museum was not open to the public … and the fact that it seemed to be devoted to alien spacecraft recovered from around the world.

The craft came in all shapes and sizes, though most were saucer shaped, with silvery hulls. Many were in fragments and might have been anything. Small tags on display stands identified each. The one labeled “Roswell, New Mexico, July 1947” had had its hemispherical undercarriage shredded into fragments, many of which were spread out on several nearby tables.

“I didn’t think you’d have these things on display,” Hunter said.

“They’re not, really. We keep them here so that our technicians and xenotech people have ready access to them. We’ve been collecting these things for decades, and we’re still learning from them. You’ve heard of Roswell, of course …” He stopped, then gestured at a battered, burned, and rusty-brown-looking craft in one corner. It was an acorn shape, perhaps twelve feet wide and fifteen high.

“That’s from the Roswell crash, sir?” Minkowski asked.

“No. Roswell is over there. This one is a particularly interesting craft called Die Glocke—‘The Bell.’ It was being constructed in Nazi Germany at the end of the war, when it mysteriously vanished, along with an SS officer named Hans Kammler, who was heading the research team. We recovered it outside of a small town in Pennsylvania twenty years later.”

“Kecksburg!” Nielson exclaimed. “I read about that.”

Benedict nodded.

“What’s this writing around the base?” Brunelli asked. The swollen base of the craft showed a continuous line of angular markings—triangles and circles and straight lines and a wealth of other geometric figures crowded together one after another.

“Alien writing, of course. We’re still trying to decipher it.”

“So the Germans didn’t build it?” Taylor asked.

“They reconstructed it,” Benedict said. “We think it was from a crash they retrieved in Bavaria back in the late thirties. We also think they had some help in the reconstruction. Alien help.”

Hunter was doing some math in his head, and it didn’t add up. “You’re saying,” he said, “that the Nazis had time travel?”

“Yup. At least they managed to send this pod twenty years into the future, where it crashed a second time. We had an idea that it was coming, though, and we had a special response team ready to go in and pick it up.”

“Yeah, but time travel?” Minkowski said. “That’s wild-assed Hollywood stuff.”

“Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. You see, gentlemen, it turns out that if you have the technology to travel between the stars, you also have the ability to travel in time. Einstein pointed that out. Space and time are part of the same thing—what Einstein called ‘space-time.’ Bend and twist one, and you bend and twist the other. So, apparently, the Galaxy is brimming over with life and civilizations that have spread out to fill space … and time.”

“That’s … incredible,” Hunter said. He took a closer look at The Bell. A hatch in the side was open—it looked like it had been pried open with brute force. Inside there were two wire-frame seats with canvas straps, one considerably larger than the other. “Two passengers?”

Benedict nodded. “Hans Kammler … and another.”

“What happened to them?”

“I’m not at liberty to say, Commander.”

Hunter nodded understanding, but privately suspected that Benedict didn’t know himself. The information would be more highly classified than USAP clearance, and might even be beyond Benedict’s reach.

“Sir …” Hunter began, then stopped. He wasn’t sure how to formulate the question.

“Go ahead. If I can tell you, I will.”

“Yes, sir. Why all the secrecy? Why not just tell people that we have time travelers from space … and have known about them for years? I mean, people have been seeing them since God knows when. The public knows. Why try to keep it hidden?”

“Good question, Commander, but one with a very complicated answer. Back in January of 1953, the Intelligence Advisory Committee commissioned the Robertson Panel, which looked into the problem of UFOs. Were they really alien? More, were they a threat? There’d been a nasty scare the previous July, when hundreds of unidentified targets were tracked in the skies above Washington DC. The Robertson Panel concluded that UFOs posed no immediate threat to the US, but did warn that public sightings might cause military communications networks to be overwhelmed. They also warned that full disclosure might have dire consequences. Religions might collapse, once people learned that these alien visitors had had a hand in creating Homo sapiens. The stock market might collapse, people might riot in the streets, or succumb to mass hysteria, people would lose faith in government. Basically, civilization itself might fall.”

“Orson Welles,” Hunter said. “War of the Worlds.”

“Precisely. So the panel suggested that the public not be told more, that the government push educational programs aimed at defusing the situation: discrediting people who claimed they saw them, trotting out skeptical experts to debunk sightings, that sort of thing. The whole issue was put under a very tight lid of not just secrecy, but compartmentalized secrecy. Even if you knew all about ‘A,’ if you didn’t have a serious need to know about ‘B,’ you didn’t hear about ‘B.’ Period.”

“Ha!” Nielson said. “I knew there was something fishy about all the official denials.”

“Weather balloons and swamp gas,” Taylor added. “Ri-i-i-i-ight …”

“I still don’t see why things are still classified, though,” Hunter insisted. “I mean … in the 1950s, sure. We didn’t know if the Russians might be snooping with some sort of high-tech aircraft, or whatever. Better to keep stuff like that under wraps. But today? People are used to the idea of aliens and spaceships, and they’re mostly cool with it! Star Trek, and all of that …”

“The Robertson Panel did recommend a slow process toward eventual disclosure. Certain government agencies were tasked with making certain that only pieces, only safe pieces, were released, a little at a time. There were some movies that came out in the ’80s designed to accustom the public to benevolent, odd-looking aliens, for instance. That was actually quite deliberate. More recently, you have documentary-style programs talking about ancient aliens possibly tinkering with the human genome …”

“The guy with the hair,” Minkowski said.

“Among others. The point was to gradually acclimate the public to the idea of aliens. In any case, it wasn’t just the notion that there were space-traveling aliens to worry about that was being suppressed. It was something far more deadly.”

“What would that be?” Hunter asked.

“The knowledge that many of those aliens—many, but not all—weren’t aliens at all.”

“Come again?”

“They are humans—time-traveling humans—humans from our own remote future.”

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