by Ian Douglas
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 . . .
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.