by Tom DeLonge
“Just set it there, Seaman,” he said, nodding to the table upon which I saw various papers spread out, and a sheaf of black and white photographs.
The small room felt crowded. The captain and his first officer were joined by the two diplomats in suits, an Argentine military officer in sunglasses and a pale blue jacket trimmed with heavy gold braid and epaulettes, and two other uniformed men who were squeezed in against the wall. I did not know if I was supposed to offer coffee to everyone. There weren’t enough cups.
The Captain spread the photographs out as he made room for the mugs, and I had to make my way round the table, pouring coffee over the shoulders of the seated men like a waiter. It irritated me, and I risked a look at the Captain, though he did not look back. The Argentine officer spoke languidly in Spanish, splaying the fingers of one tanned hand for casual emphasis. As he finished, the slimmer of the two diplomats translated in clipped tones.
“The internal arrangements of the US Navy are not his concern, he says. This is a matter of sovereignty. The vessels in question were surrendered to Argentina, not to the United States, and their extradition has not been cleared by Presidente Perón’s government.”
The Captain sat impassive as the Argentine officer put down his cup and continued his speech. This in turn was given in English by the increasingly frustrated translator.
“He says that your crew are welcome to the hospitality of his great city, subject—of course—to all local rules and ordinances, and he suggests that they avail themselves of the opportunity, since your ship will not be permitted to take the aforementioned submarines back to your home country any time soon. He compliments you on the standard of your coffee,” the translator concluded, “though he is, of course, lying.”
If that last was a joke, no one reacted as such. Instead they nodded sagely, and it struck me that the dynamic reminded me of some of the crew’s poker games. I moved to top off the Argentine officer’s cup and froze.
In front of him was one of the photographs. It showed three men in conversation. In the background, other people in what looked like German naval uniforms, but only the three in the foreground were in sharp focus, showing no awareness of the camera, as if it had been taken with a powerful lens from a distance. Two of them, I did not recognize. The third, though out of uniform, had a distinctive sideways smile that I knew instantly. It was the ranking officer who had been visiting the Wenceslas mine, the day Ishmael died. He had been talking to the scientists in the bell chamber. Ungerleider had saluted him. I would have recognized him anywhere.
“That’s all, Seaman,” said the Captain, sweeping the pictures back into a manila folder as if annoyed that I had seen them. “Leave us.”
He said it roughly, as if I had done something wrong, and the Argentine officer gave me a look of amused condescension as I bustled out, my head swimming.
“So?” Billy Ray demanded when I returned the tray to the galley.
“What?” I asked, only half coming out of my reverie.
“We going home with those subs or what?”
I shook my head vaguely.
“No,” I said, in answer to his stare. “I don’t think so. But we may be able to go ashore.”
“Better than nothing,” he said. “You okay boy? Look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Yeah,” I said, unsure which remark I was agreeing with.
THE ARGENTINE OFFICIAL LEFT WITHIN THE NEXT TEN minutes, but the US diplomats stayed an hour more. I was watching from below the bridge when the hatch opened and the Captain showed them out. He watched them go, then looked down and around the deck. I was sure he was looking for me. I stepped sideways into the sun, and he nodded toward me once. It was, I believed, an invitation.
He closed the door behind me as soon as I reached the stateroom.
“Sit down, Jerzy,” he said. “I’m sorry if I was brusque with you before. I didn’t want anyone to recognize what I’d seen in your face.”
“That I knew one of the men in the pictures,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said.
The table had been cleared and the pictures were gone.
“The photos were taken by a US journalist, shortly after the U-boats arrived in La Plata. I’ve had them since Guantanamo. Was it just the one man you knew?” he asked.
I thought, trying to recall the photographs, but nodded. “I think so,” I said.
“From Wenceslas?” he asked.
“I only saw him once,” I said. “For a few minutes.”
“But you are sure it was him?”
“Positive,” I said. I would never forget that face.
“You know his name?”
I shook my head. “I do not think he was stationed at the mine,” I said.
Jennings smiled ruefully at that. “No,” he said. “He was not. An Obergruppenführer of the SS would not be stationed in a mine.”
I stared at him in disbelief until he inclined his head.
“His name is Hans Kammler,” he said. “An engineer by training, Nazi by ideology. Worked his way up to command a host of construction projects and facilities. Concentration camps, extermination procedures, special weapons testing and construction. Under that last category, he ended the war in charge of the Nazi jet aircraft and V2 rocket program. A very powerful man, and one who is supposed to have died of self-induced cyanide poisoning near Prague in May of last year. Yet here he is, walking around, big as life.”
For a moment, his eyes narrowed, and he stared thoughtfully at nothing.
“Captain,” I said, framing something I had wanted to say for a long time. “What are we doing here?”
Captain Jennings gave me a shrewd look. “We are here to escort those two U-boats up to Virginia,” he said. “You know that.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“And? Is there something on your mind, Seaman?”
“Well, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so, sir,” I said, “and meaning no disrespect, sir, that sounds like bullshit. Sir.”
He didn’t shout me down or throw me out. He didn’t even glare. But his right eyebrow raised in mildly quizzical surprise.
“Is that right?” he said.
“Sir, yes sir, if you don’t mind me saying so, sir.”
“At ease, Jerzy,” he said, fishing a cigarette packet from his breast pocket. “Smoke?”
“No, sir. Thank you, sir,” I said, still a little stiff.
He lit up and took a long, slow drag, exhaled and considered the smoke, as if he were trying to read what he would say next in its gunmetal grayness.
“You are right, to a point,” he said. “Though I could have you up for insubordination for saying so. Our official mission remains to escort the U-boats stateside, but the paperwork hasn’t cleared yet.”
“We came anyway,” I said.
“We’re a little early,” he conceded.
“Giving us time to do what?” I asked.
“Well, now,” he mused aloud. “That seems to be the question.”
“Is this strictly a Navy mission?” I asked, emboldened by his confessional manner.
“Escorting the U-boats is a navy mission, yes,” he said. “But there are other objectives in play which are best addressed by other elements of the government and armed forces.”
“Such as?”
“Have you ever heard of the National Intelligence Authority?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“No,” he said. “It didn’t exist last year. What about MI6? The British intelligence gathering service?”
Again I shook my head.
“Spies, Jerzy,” said Jennings. “It’s the beginning of a new world order. President Truman was impressed by what the British commandos accomplished in what they were calling ‘covert warfare’ against the Nazis. And he was, to say the least, dismayed by what happened at Pearl Harbor. By what we didn’t see coming. Now we have the Soviets to deal with … So resources are being diverted, agencies created, so that we’ll be able to fight the c
oming intelligence and information wars.”
I blinked at him.
“Intelligence?” I repeated, unsure of how he was using the word.
“Secrecy,” he said. “Not battles and uniforms and flags. People who watch. Who listen. Who mislead the enemy …”
“And you work for one of these agencies?” I asked.
“You know what we learned from Pearl Harbor?” he said, ignoring my question. “The same thing the Italians learned from Taranto in 1940. The same lesson taught by every Kamikaze attack that sent one of our ships to the bottom of the ocean. We learned that the days of the Navy are gone. Ernie King might tell you different, but the days of wars—nations—being won and lost by ships have passed. We now live in the age of the air power. One airplane, cheaply made, and flown by a single pilot can destroy a state-of-the-art battleship and everyone on board. One airplane, carrying an atomic bomb, can end a war. And I’m a career Navy man. I wish I didn’t have to admit the Navy is finished, but I do.”
I said nothing. His voice was level, but it was taking an effort to keep it so.
“A version of the world is passing away,” he said, “and a new one will take its place.”
“So this … National Intelligence Authority,” I said. “You work for them?”
“As long as it doesn’t run contrary to my Naval duties,” he admitted, “yes. Unofficially.”
I frowned, unsure what to do with this new information.
“I’m still the captain of this vessel,” he said, “until my superiors decide there’s a conflict of interest in my being associated with both entities.”
“Which superiors?” I asked, tartly. I could not help feeling betrayed. I had joined the Navy because of him, and all the time, he had been taking orders from someone else.
“As I said, there is, as yet, no conflict of interest,” he said it firmly, but relented a little when he saw my face. “I’m sorry if you feel misled, Jerzy. This is all confidential, and I must ask you to keep it that way. My concern here is that prominent Nazis, officers, engineers—and possibly some of their most dangerous equipment—escaped the fall of Berlin. Some of what was salvaged may be here. And some of these men may feel their defeat is only temporary.”
“What could they have brought that you are so worried about?” I shot back. “The war is over.”
“The battles are over,” he said. “But if you’re fighting a war of minds and hearts, it’s never truly over. And if you no longer need those tanks and thousands of uniformed soldiers …”
“How are you going to win a war without soldiers?” I asked.
“Same way we forced a surrender from the Japanese,” he said, grimly. “With weapons so appalling that no one will fight against them.”
For a second I just gaped at him.
“You think the Nazis were building an A-bomb at Wenceslas?” I said.
“It would fit Kammler’s profile,” he said. “The technology was clearly already under development. We don’t know how far along they were, or what they may have been able to build. But imagine if they had one. We dropped ours from bombers. But they already had rockets that flew hundreds of miles—the V2s the Nazis fired at London, a program that fell under Kammler’s control. Imagine those rockets, equipped with nuclear warheads. You got that image in your head?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Keep it there while you consider your answer to my next question. How would you like to be a secret agent?”
I did not hesitate. “What do you need to me to do?” I said.
28
WILFRIED DEBROUWER
Belgium, November 29, 1989 to March 30, 1990
IT BEGAN IN NOVEMBER NEAR LIEGE, A LARGELY FRENCH-speaking city in Wallonia. The medieval town-turned-modern steel producer sits close to the Dutch and German borders where the rivers Meuse and Ourthe meet. It is, depending on how you calculate such things, the third- or fourth-largest city in Belgium. It fell to the Germans during both World Wars, and was pummeled by V1 and V2 missile strikes between its liberation by the Allies and the final Nazi collapse. Forty-five years later, its people turned their eyes to the night sky once more, this time in wonder and disbelief.
Twelve miles to the east of Liege, across low, rolling country on the road between Eupen and Kettenis, a pair of policeman were on routine patrol when they observed what seemed to be a large triangular object with white lights at its corners and a red light in the center moving slowly over a field, perhaps two hundred meters from the road, at an altitude of a little more than that. As they watched, the shape seemed to change direction, moving directly overhead and on to the village of Eupen, where it hovered in almost complete silence over the Lac de la Gileppe dam for the better part of an hour, before heading southwest towards Baelen-Spa, and then quickly out of sight.
The police officers called the sighting in and, since their report was corroborated by other policeman and the general public, the air force base at Bierset was alerted. Having already detected the object on radar, an AWACS aircraft was dispatched to investigate, coming into the area from Gelsenkirchen. Sightings continued to come in for the next two hours, from locations throughout the Liege region and from border towns in Holland and Germany. Thirty groups of witnesses and three separate police patrols claimed to observe the lights in the sky. Later, the original two officers reported seeing a considerably larger triangle rise up from behind some trees and ascend quickly before moving in the direction of the road at about fifty miles an hour.
This was how it began.
It continued through the ensuing weeks and months, culminating on the thirtieth of March, the following year, when, approaching midnight, local police stations in Wavre near Brussels were flooded with calls reporting strange lights in the sky that seemed to indicate a triangular object. The police reported the sightings to the Glons radar station, part of the NATO defense group, which confirmed that they were reading an object apparently cruising at about three thousand meters. The Glons readings were further confirmed by the air base at Semmerzake. These were the last days of the Soviet Union, only weeks after the non-Russian states of Moldova and Lithuania had voted to throw the Communists out of their governments, acts to which the Soviet army responded with a military and economic blockade, allegedly to protect the rights of ethnic Russians like those killed earlier in the year in Azerbaijan. It was only a few months since the Berlin wall had been torn down, and Western Europe was watching closely for signs of old-school Soviets attempting a counter-coup that might have included smash-and-grab military actions.
Fearing a hostile incursion, and detecting no identifying transponder signal from what looked like a slow moving aircraft, Belgian Air Force Colonel Wilfried DeBrouwer scrambled two Belgian F-16 fighters stationed at Brevocom. The pilots of these planes, guided by the Glons radar, were unable to make visual contact with the triangles, but their instruments showed the presence of an unidentifiable mass moving at speed through the sky. They attempted to lock their chase radar onto the target, but when their instruments indicated a successful target acquisition permitting the deployment of missiles, the target dropped precipitously, disabling the weapons lock.
The object then moved erratically, seeming to take evasive action each time the fighters attempted to lock on, moving at speeds in excess of fifteen hundred kilometers an hour, in ways that would produce unendurable G-forces on the pilot of a conventional aircraft. The object moved to the skies above Brussels, changing direction at speeds the F-16s couldn’t begin to match, appearing and disappearing from radar in ways suggesting either a failure of the F-16s’ onboard systems, or else it had dropped too low to be detected, vanishing in the lights of the city below. To Colonel DeBrouwer, the movement seemed deliberate, because at such low altitudes, the density of the air limited the F-16s to speeds under 1300 KPH. Three times, the cat-and-mouse game played out over the next seventy-five minutes, the object diving to safety just as the fighters were about to complete their weapons lock. Numerous witnesses
on the ground, including police officers, reported watching the whole encounter, though the object generated no supersonic boom, and no windows were blown out, as would be expected at that altitude and velocity, suggesting some form of propulsion that defied conventional analysis.
After the events of that night, the data accumulated by the Belgian Air Force was, for the first time, shared with scientists and research groups who attempted to explain what had happened with a range of possible scenarios. Could the object have been some form of balloon? No, said the expert witnesses. The meteorological conditions had been thoroughly analyzed and could in no way account for the movement of the object. They asked if it could it have been a meteor or piece of falling space junk, but were told that the trajectory of such things did not fall into accord with the unidentified object, whose recorded radar signature indicated numerous changes of directions as it zigzagged across the sky. Neither could the object have been the undocumented incursion of a known stealth aircraft such as an F-117, due to the absence of the sonic boom, and the moments when the object flew at no more than 40 KPH, more than 200 KPH slower than the stealth fighter’s minimum operating velocity. Moreover, the military attaché to the American embassy expressly denied that any such US stealth aircraft had been stationed in Belgium or had operated in its airspace. Several prominent scientists issued outlandish statements saying that the only logical conclusion was that the object was of extra-terrestrial origin.
Countless pictures and videos were shot in the course of the various events over Belgium, some of them generating impressive images of triangular craft with lights at the corners, some suggesting infrared beams. Many were too small or blurred to present useful detail, and those that did were accused of fakery, though some remain compelling to this day, at least to believers. Whatever actually happened, the Belgian triangle wave remains one of the most witnessed and best-documented UFO sightings in human history. Its true nature remains a mystery.