Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  This book is dedicated to my children, Ava and Jonas, as we are all trying to build a better world for the next generation.

  TOM’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

  I WOULD NOT BE HERE PRESENTING THIS HUGE WORK OF art if it wasn’t for my beautiful wife Jennifer supporting me and believing in my infinite madness—

  To our adventure together and beyond.

  A.J.’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND THANKS

  THOUGH THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION IT IS GROUNDED AS much as possible in real places and events. As a result, a tremendous amount of research had to go into writing the book and I couldn’t have done it without a lot of expert opinion from the armed services and intelligence community, some of which, for obvious reasons, must remain anonymous. I can thank Marine pilots Janine Spendlove and “Timmy” Hurst; Gray Rinehart on spaceflight engineering; Chris Hartley on satellites and other orbiting tech; and Peter Levenda on Operation Paperclip and Nazi research. Any errors of fact or judgment in the book are entirely mine. My thanks always to the team at To The Stars, to my editor Peter Nelson, to David Wilk, to my agent, Stacey Glick, and to my family who indulge my work beyond all reasonable expectations. I am deeply grateful to you all and to those whose names I can’t reveal here. Lastly, a special thanks to Tom DeLonge without whom this book would not have been written, and whose creative vision and yearning for answers was the origin of this novel.

  FOREWORD

  FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER, I HAVE SOUGHT ANSWERS. That search led me to the escape of music, expressing thoughts through my lyrics, voice, and guitar. But it was only one thread of the search. Time saw other paths emerging as family and businesses and hobbies. But I found no challenge for that which was understood—I had a need to find answers to the unexplainable, knowing that the odds of success were even less than that of a kid becoming a rock star. We humans are creation engines, both in thought and physical objects. When my thoughts are challenged by consistent unknowns, I need answers to allow me to see the effects of those unknowns, hoping one day to stumble upon a clue as to their source.

  UFOs became one of those journeys. UFOs—a vision consistent in mankind’s journey from past to present while evading explanation. We have pondered, “What are those things in the night sky whose movements defy gravity and explanation?” Combine that with the physical world of mankind’s amazing creations—harnessing science and technology to advance health, productivity, comfort, convenience, and security—to make answers that fall short of complete. And then there are the others that complicate the question—fame hounds, lunatics, and intellectuals polluting the search with distractions. I knew, and know, there has to be an answer. And it will be a simple answer once we hear it. But right now, that answer evades our understanding. It is like trying to understand the description of a color we have never seen.

  As my search grew, opportunities arose—some as a result of that search, but others by fortunate circumstance. And so, it was an unusual summer morning in 2015 when I got the call from an old friend who worked at one of the largest and most elite defense contractors in United States. Even though he had recently retired, he told me for the first time his company was having an Open House: a day when relatives of employees can come and celebrate with their significant others (husbands, wives, mothers, fathers) in what they do on any given day under the guise of absolute secrecy. He asked me if I would be willing to introduce their “Lead Executive,” the head of their advanced programs division (“The BossMan,” as I call him to people who don’t need to know the details of his identity) to the crowd. I instantly said yes, but said only if I can sit with him for a few minutes. I wasn’t sure why I said that, I just knew that was an opportunity I needed to take advantage of.

  When the meeting came, I took the bull by the horns, and I pitched him an idea, mostly about a benign idea I had for a project that could help the youth lose their cynical views of the Government and the Department of Defense. In many ways Sekret Machines was just that … and a few other things as well.

  The meeting went well to say the least, and he said I could come up and give him more details at a second meeting.

  That next meeting was the time I entered four layers of security; Guns, electronic code entry systems, hallways with speakers lining nondescript ceilings (playing “white noise” so nobody could hear each other’s conversations), and a series of solid doors flanking my view, each with rotary locks and not a single window in sight. Maybe because all that was out there was … nothing … and that nothing was surrounding many miles of secret airspace directly above.

  By the time I got into the half-assed pitch, I had way more than I bargained for, including two top engineering executives of the company, and another who, unfortunately, had done quite a bit of research on me. I talked about a lot of things, but I did NOT talk about UFOs. I was smarter than that. The issue was, that Exec knew that I was quite into that taboo subject. So she asked me point-blank: “What are your intentions with the … conspiracy stuff?”

  I tried to dodge the question (knowing I’d just been caught long before ever leaving the damn runway), and by the grace of God I was saved by someone new walking in. The BossMan decided to attend. I thanked him for coming, he looked to the side, then back to my fish-out-of-water eyes and said, “We cannot be involved in any type of project whatsoever that has this topic associated with it, specifically because there’s never been any evidence whatsoever that this stuff even exists.” I thought: Holy shit, I’m in trouble. Were they monitoring my stress level? Did they know I was shitting my pants? I hadn’t even pleaded my case yet.

  The only thing I could think to say at that exact moment was this: “If Edgar Allan Mitchell—the sixth man to walk on the moon—is out telling every kid in the world that this topic is real, then we have a problem. But that’s okay, we don’t need to talk about this subject, or include this information, we just need to address these credibility issues at some point. But give me your time, please, to hear me out.”

  And then I went for a Hail Mary. “Sir, can I speak to you alone for five minutes?”

  Everybody looked around at each other, baffled. Then, he said: “Sure.”

  Now, I cannot tell you what I said to this man in that meeting, and I cannot tell you about the hour-long conversation I had with the other two executives right afterward. But I can say that over the next few months things started to go light-speed for this project. I was no longer alone to offer a vision, an inspiration, a piece of art to provoke one’s mind with possibilities. After all, are these not the gifts of literature and film?

  I am here to tell you that an entire history of an unexplained and infamous myth—a Legend—IT’S ALL TRUE.

  It started to get very serious when I got an email by The BossMan a few weeks later to meet next to the Pentagon at a certain day, at a certain time. He was going to introduce me to somebody who was “connected.” You see, I grew some balls and sent him the prologue that Peter Levenda and I were working on for a series of nonfiction books, a thesis on certain elements within this project. And it seemed to have made quite the impression, because now I was on my way to meet “others.”

  I was scared when I entered the dark room; I had no idea whatsoever what I was walking into. I had no reason to be doing these types of things, anyway. But I was ignited by a passion within that it was time to put myself out there a bit and accomplish something I believe is hugely important. I spoke for about forty-five minutes straight as a man stared across at me from a wooden table with squinty, learned eyes. He had a beard, a suit tired from a full day’s work, and a hand gripping his adjacent wrist: a posture that seemed full of confidence. He really did loo
k straight out of a spy movie, if you’ve ever seen one.

  After my speech, he watched me for a few seconds, then told me something I will never forget:

  “Things like this do not happen at the White House, they do not happen on The Hill. They happen at places like this, at tables like this, where a few men get together and decide to push the ball down the field.” Meeting was over. Jesus Christ, my heart was beating again. How fucking cool. Cool, but real. I must remember to not lose sight of that.

  You see, I pitched a massive entertainment franchise that involved novels, feature films, nonfiction books, documentaries, and everything else that goes along with a story that’s been told over decades and teaches people the truth about something that is almost too big to handle. I knew more than most that this phenomenon was scary, and everything that we did over the past sixty years was based on the enormity of the unbelievable task at hand. We had to rethink religion, history, national security, secrecy, physics, defense, space exploration, cosmology, humanity. But the generations of civilians who followed this matter felt left out, lied to, and disrespected.

  And truthfully, after I jumped into this project and learned what I have, I realized we were rightfully treated the way we were. We all would’ve done the exact same thing if instead we were chosen to deal with the extraordinary. But we weren’t, other brave men and women who came before us were, and they had to face the difficult consequences of such a reality. A reality demanding some type of strategy to “comprehend … and outwit” (not my words, but those of one of my advisors).

  I’ve had meetings in mysterious rooms far out in the desert. I’ve had meetings at the highest levels of NASA. I have had conversations at research centers, think tanks, and even on the phone connected to secret facilities. I’ve been introduced to a man whom I call “the Scientist,” and another whom I call “the General.” And there are many more of whom I cannot say much about, but some have become true friends, and all have become close counselors. Each of these men has all held, or currently holds, the highest offices of the military and scientific elite.

  The point is, I have done it. I have assembled a team of men and women “in the know.” And they all believe I am doing something of value, something worth their time and yours.

  All along I was never just another “conspiracy theorist.” So don’t be naive, and become one yourself. Don’t regurgitate the same old alien tale. I was never immature about the matter, nor should you be. I respect the fact that it is a matter of national security, and I thoughtfully commiserate with the men and women dealing with what we could easily call the most important discoveries in mankind’s brief history.

  I MET A.J. HARTLEY ON THE PHONE FIRST, BUT IN PERSON many more times over the past year. We had a lot to go over. I had to start from ground zero with him; he knew very little about the phenomenon. He was a distinguished Shakespeare professor, a New York Times best-selling author, British through and through, but most importantly, an open-minded skeptic. At the end of the day he took in my madness with open arms and together we created an architecture to level the playing field once and for all. We have opened a door for you all to experience these topics in a way as if you were there yourself, which would, in all truth, be a frustratingly mind-blowing existence if you’re not given the entirety of facts in one dose. A Shakespeare scholar and a rock star join forces. Who would’ve thought?

  This first novel sets up many things: important events that had their genesis as far back as World War II and continue today. The events, locations, and moments of wonder are all true. We weaved them together in a way that echoes what really happened to those who stumbled across something spectacular, wondrous, and a bit frightful. The glue is fiction. The building blocks are not.

  As earlier scientists, engineers, and leaders had to learn day by day, we will do the same with you, page by page. Once again, you will be given important information to live through as though you were there yourself. And by design, we are not answering all the questions that may be posed. A lot of these answers will come in later books, over time.

  This subject is full of questions we’ve not been able to answer right away. Each event was studied closely, and sometimes it was painfully misunderstood and confusing at the time. There is just a lot more to the story than you and I could imagine. So we consciously tried to reflect that throughout the narrative, to give you time to digest and time to think back as to what may be what.

  So to all my passengers taking a ride into the land of Sekret Machines, I have been granted the opportunity to tell you a story over a series of novels about the important events that happened over the past sixty years. These moments shaped our world in more ways than one. I know it seems unbelievable, but it’s true.

  And this all started because on a whim I asked The BossMan if he could speak to me alone for five minutes. Remember, he said: “Sure.”

  Well, this adventure may finish somewhere even more exciting.

  I recently asked another important individual if there is a possibility to get support from The White House itself for the truth to be expanded upon, and communicated further within my project.

  And that man said: “Sure.”

  —Tom DeLonge, 2016

  SEKRET

  MACHINES

  BOOK 1

  CHASING

  SHADOWS

  1

  ALAN

  Safid Kuh, Central Afghanistan, September 2014.

  MAJOR ALAN YOUNG CHECKED THE HARRIER II PLUS’ Heads-Up Display, put a few ounces of pressure on the throttle with his left hand and adjusted the trim with his right thumb. Far below the Harrier, the arid mountains of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush range rose and fell away, invisible in the darkness as the plane banked to starboard.

  Deep in those mountains, a MARSOC team was already on the ground, working to secure an asset from a remote rebel base. Alan knew what he needed to know to complete his mission and was not interested in knowing more. It hadn’t always been so, but he had learned the discipline of incuriosity, a gift, his old flight instructor had been fond of saying, that kept on giving.

  You don’t need to understand the nail to be the hammer.

  How many times had Alan heard that? A hundred? A thousand? And he heard it now, felt it in his bones with the hard, cold certainty of truth beyond faith. He had his mission, which, God willing, would be uneventful, a routine patrol in support of ground operations. If it became anything more than routine—and when you’re pulling four hundred knots at altitude, nothing is truly routine—then something had gone wrong.

  Alan had been flying AV-8Bs—Harriers—for eight years, three of them in Iraq and the last two in Afghanistan, the culmination of his twelve years as a Marine. He’d flown dozens of sorties and never seen a bogey, but that was hardly surprising. The enemies he’d faced had no air power to speak of. It was their GBAD systems and shoulder-fired SAM missiles you had to watch for.

  And over-confidence.

  But Alan had that under control. He’d let it out again once he’d returned to base, but until he was RTB, but there was no place for that Top Gun swagger up here. In ancient Rome, he’d once read, a legionary who put the lives of his comrades in jeopardy through cowardice, stupidity or some other disciplinary failure would be beaten to death in front of his unit. That seemed about right. Unquestioning loyalty to your superiors and to your comrades and the discipline to act upon it regardless of the circumstances was the frame, the purpose of your skills, your life. Alan Young happened to fly a $30 million airplane, but in his heart, he was simply a Marine.

  The lead Forward Air Controller on the ground was Sgt. Barry Regis, a great bull of a man who had once—long ago and a world away—been the heart of an offensive line which had protected Alan when he had played quarterback for Monroe High back in North Carolina. Go Redhawks! It was a long and deep friendship that crossed lines of class, color, rank, and branch of service. Regis was also a pilot but, like other FACs, he was serving a ground tour and seemed to have f
ound his calling. He joked that he’d done so because he was too big to fit into the cockpit of all but the most luxuriant of aircraft.

  “The Air Force wanted me,” he once told Alan, “but they woulda had to slather me up with butter and jimmy me into the F-16s.” He made squelching, oily sounds with his mouth and made a show of running his huge, dark hands over his body.

  There would be no jokes tonight, not until they were back at Camp Leatherneck.

  With Regis was a twelve man Marines Special Ops team with three objectives: infiltrate the enemy base and eliminate all resistance by capturing or killing its leader; locate and recover a pair of computer hard drives; and, most challenging of all, locate and extract a captured US operative—alive. Even with all his emotions iced for flight, that last task left a knot in Alan’s gut.

  It was hard enough getting a team into a secure facility, but to do so undetected, before some zealous insurgent could run back to a holding cell and put a bullet in the head of his captive, was next to impossible. The team had HALOed in shortly after moonset and had spent the last three hours making their approach on foot and in silence. The closer they got, the more dangerous it was. If they were detected even thirty seconds before they were in position, all that planning and preparation would be for nothing.

  Alan circled twenty kilometers from the LZ ready to throttle up at the first sign of trouble, but otherwise content to patrol the night sky, where the roar of his engines wouldn’t alert enemy sentries, until Barry Regis called him in. In the Air Force, he might have flown strike missions—fly out, drop your ordinance and fly back on schedule—but that was not how the Marines worked. Alan was flying tactical Close Air Support, like the “taxi rank” Typhoons and Tempests called in to deal with stubborn Nazi armor at the end of World War II. You got close to the combat zone, and waited for the call. It made Alan feel a little like one of the black buzzards back home, in the sky above the woods of North Carolina, drifting aimlessly until the scent of death brought it swooping down …