by Ian Douglas
Dedication
For Brea, who turns chaotic ramblings into polished prose.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
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
Also by Ian Douglas
Copyright
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.