by Tom DeLonge
The world went white.
46
JERZY
Parque Teyú Cuare, Argentina, October 1946
IN THE END, I OPTED TO GET AWAY FROM THE ABANDONED jungle compound and go back to Buenos Aires as soon as possible. Ignacio and I fashioned a stretcher from bedding we found in the stone complex and two lengths of pipe, and carried Belasco back to the car. We made him as comfortable as we could, aided, at the first village we came to, by the locals who gave him leaves to chew on that eased his pain and made him sleep, and then we drove as fast as we dared on the rutted forest road. We made good time, eating as we rode and stopping only for gas in a huddle of buildings grandly titled Urugaiana. It was almost dark by then, but the roads were better as we left the high woodlands behind and kept going. South of Salto, we pulled over for a couple of hours, but we did not pitch the tent, and most of the time I sat awake, monitoring Belasco and watching the skies. I saw nothing unusual in the heavens. At dawn we pressed on, reaching the city by lunchtime.
As we headed south, an anxiety that the Kitchener might have already sailed swelled in my gut. Having to slow for the traffic, after having the road to ourselves, was doubly frustrating. Turning one corner recklessly fast got us the attention of a military policeman on a motorcycle who sped up beside us and waved us over, but as soon as he saw our situation, he put his siren on and drove in front of the car, clearing the road. He led us not to the dock but to a hospital, where we unloaded Belasco into the care of some crisply dressed nurses. He was awake enough to wink at one of them, then give me a fractional nod of acknowledgment before I jumped back into the car and headed down to the quay.
Captain Jennings—alerted by the hospital—was waiting for us. He listened to my story in silence, showing not the slightest trace of emotion except when I told him about Hartsfeld, when his eyebrows arched and he turned away from me, his head bent in contemplation. The chart of Antarctica seemed not to surprise him at all.
“You knew,” I said.
“No,” he said. “But I had been warned that there was a possibility of this.”
“‘This’ being?”
“A Nazi base,” he said. “They went to Antarctica before the war. Claimed a portion of it, which they named Neu-Schwabenland. Supposedly, the mission was to look for places they could hunt whales. Whale oil is used in margarine and various other products, but they were really looking for somewhere to build a naval base. Planted little swastika flags in the ice and everything.” He unrolled the chart on the tabletop and pinpointed a spot with his finger. “The Schirmacher Oasis,” he said. “Named after the guy who spotted it during one of their aerial recon missions. An area above the ice shelf. Fairly temperate by Antarctic standards.”
“You know a lot about it,” I said, annoyed that so much had been kept from me.
“Mostly learned since you left,” he said. “This is all top secret. Even if I had known before you went, I wouldn’t have been allowed to tell you. And now you know, so it’s water under the bridge.”
“And Hartsfeld?” I demanded. “You knew about him too.”
“Only suspicions, which I voiced to you. It could have been any number of people who were helping the Nazis slip through our nets.”
“Sounds like they are doing more than escaping,” I said.
“Yes,” he conceded. “It does.”
“There’s something else,” I said. I hadn’t mentioned the strange end to the firefight in the jungle, the light in the sky, or the one I had seen the night before which Hartsfeld had said was a meteor. “Something took them away. Something that came at night, flying in silence. It hovered over the hideout, and then there was a light and I lost consciousness. When I woke up, they were all gone.”
Captain Jennings eyes narrowed and he became very still, but said nothing for a long moment. At last he simply nodded, and said, “Anything else? Do you remember any other details?”
“No,” I said. “What do you think it was?”
For a second he looked vague, his eyes not clearly focused on anything.
“Probably a helicopter,” he said. “You’ve never seen one, I take it? Remarkable things.”
I was about to respond when he turned sharply away and, with his back to me, said, “Thank you, Seaman. Good work. That will be all.”
I had no right to be outraged, of course. I was about as junior as it was possible to be, and he was my commanding officer. I suppose he had also become a kind of parent to me, since I had no one else, but after what I’d gone through in the jungle, I felt he owed me more than this. I just stood there, not knowing what to say, what to think, and then he turned and put a hand on my shoulder. For a moment, I nearly shrank away, but then I nodded, saying nothing.
“You should go rest up,” he said. “Take a couple of days. When the order comes, we’ll need to sail quickly.”
I looked at him. “There?” I said, indicating the map. The prospect of going back into combat, fighting a war the world thought was over, in the freezing waters of the Antarctic, was too exhausting to contemplate.
“I have to talk to Admiral Byrd,” he said. “But that’s my guess, yes.”
REAR ADMIRAL RICHARD E. BYRD WAS AN EXPLORER WHO’D been to the Antarctic several times before. His first expedition in the twenties had involved a flight to the South Pole itself in a Ford Trimotor, during which he’d had to ditch supplies and fuel tanks to maintain altitude. Partly as a result, he was made an admiral at forty, the youngest in the history of the US Navy. During the war, he’d led recon missions in the South Pacific, scouting for land that might be used as airfields and forward command bases, and he had—it was said—been present at the surrender of the Japanese. A hero and a big shot, in other words, who was involved in important things, and he did nothing by halves.
Whatever Byrd had been planning, the operation had been in its preliminary stages long before the details of our experiences near the Paraguay border could be relayed to him and I never learned how much our findings shaped the mission to come. What was clear is that Captain Jennings’ report gave the enterprise new focus and urgency, as did seasonal conditions. The window in which the Antarctic was accessible, before the Southern Hemisphere winter made any kind of exploration there impossible, was very narrow. We holed up in Buenos Aires for two more weeks before the Kitchener set sail to meet up with the rest of the fleet.
By the time Byrd’s armada had been assembled, Task Force 68—approaching the Antarctic from both the west through the Marquesas Islands, where weather stations were set up, and the east, from an island called Peter I, off the western coast of the Antarctic peninsula—the armada consisted of over four thousand men in thirteen ships, with thirty-three aircraft at their disposal, most of them based on the aircraft carrier USS Philippine Sea. Given the battle-weary condition of the military, so soon after the war, and the growing anxiety about the standoff with the Bolsheviks in Europe, it was a massive deployment of Naval power for what must have seemed, to the outside world, to be a bewilderingly unimportant spot of the globe.
Everyone was in position a few days before Christmas. I say that the weather was warming up, but that was a relative concept. The Antarctic—as my winter reading had revealed—was covered by an ice sheet a mile thick year round. The South Pole proper never warms above minus ten degrees Fahrenheit. The Antarctic coasts weren’t that cold, and the west, our targeted destination, was warmer than the more mountainous east. Summer temperatures still tended to be a below freezing. Much of the continent is also technically a desert, with little or no precipitation. The snow on the ground is ancient, gradually becoming part of the ice sheet. Though my Polish blood was keen to escape the sweltering weather of the tropics, the prospect of heading to the South Pole was daunting.
Belasco had made a complete recovery, and though he was still his crass, boorish self, quick to anger and contemptuous of anything he couldn’t drink or bed, he had decided I was to be protected, as one might look after a fragile pet who could not forage
for itself. He brought me chocolate when he had it, even books—a bizarrely random assortment of classics, westerns and smut, which was probably illegal—and he made it clear to the other bullies on board that I was to be unmolested. This raised eyebrows, and because we could not discuss what had happened to us in the jungle, some assumed that he had taken a particular kind of fancy to me, such as sometimes happens on ships. When a corn-fed Kansas boy made the mistake of suggesting as much to his face, Belasco beat him senseless with a chair. No one made the insinuation again. It was ironic, because I had my own suspicions about Belasco that ran contrary to his ostentatious womanizing, not that it mattered to me either way.
The cold of the Antarctic was impossible to prepare for, despite all my reading. It was bitter, bone chilling and constant. If it fluctuated much, you couldn’t tell, as your senses could not distinguish variations so far beyond human tolerance. The only thing you could do was stay out of the wind. The cold wasn’t the only environmental hazard. After a few weeks of twenty-four hour daylight, forcing your body to sleep on a schedule it refuses to recognize, going to bed with the sun in the sky and getting up with the same sun still in the same sky, it felt like you were going insane.
The mission went well at first. Byrd took the first flight himself, using the JATO rocket assist tubes to help get the plane airborne. Soon there was a steady stream of sorties, day after day, though it wasn’t clear what they were doing. Mapping, we were told. But the flying boats went up with P-51 escort fighters, despite the fact that the only things that lived down here at the bottom of the world were skuas, terns and penguins. There were indeed whales and seals in the frigid waters, but nothing and no one on land, or so we were told.
I saw Captain Jennings only a few times in those first days, and he kept his distance, which was fine by me. After what had happened in the jungle, I was content to be a regular seaman for once. The appeal of secrecy had worn off. Then things took a turn for the worse, and I was reminded why we were really here.
We lost one of the flying boats on the thirtieth of December. It was a Martin Mariner, what they called a PBM—patrol bomber—and it went down with its nine-man crew in heavy weather. Mariners are a rugged, versatile airframe, adaptable to all kinds of specialized roles from recon and air/sea rescue to antisubmarine assault, but we never knew what equipment the flying boats were carrying. What I knew, first hand, was that the Mariner that had gone down had been accompanied by a pair of P-51 Mustangs, and though they made it back to the USS Philippine Sea, they’d been pretty badly carved up. The official report said weather. Belasco said otherwise.
He had a buddy on one of the repair and refueling tenders who said the Mustangs had holes through their fuselage and wings, big, round holes, the kind made by serious cannon, twenty millimeter or larger. The fighters were lucky to have gotten back at all. The pilots had been sequestered for debriefing, and the planes had been sealed up below deck while they were repaired, off limits to all but top brass.
Meanwhile, a search-and-rescue operation was mounted for the Mariner’s nine-man crew, an operation that required a ground team as well as air support, because the Mariner had gone down over land, possibly effecting a crash landing. Jennings volunteered me and Belasco.
I wasn’t angry, and I knew why he had done it, but I needed to hear it from him. I was summoned to the Captain’s quarters that evening, and didn’t beat around the bush.
“Why me?” I said.
“Because you’ve already seen,” said Jennings.
“Seen what?”
“The Nazi presence here. Nocturnal airlifts and charts of Antarctica.”
“Airlifts?”
“How else did Hartsfeld and his Nazi cronies evacuate except by helicopter?”
We’d gone over this before. I hadn’t seen helicopters in operation. The Nazis and the Allies both had a few in service during the war, but they’d been rare and specialist aircraft. I found it hard to believe that that was what I’d seen in the jungle that night during the firefight at the Nazi compound, but Jennings assured me it couldn’t have been anything else.
“Is that the only reason?” I asked. “To keep the knowledge among those who already have some awareness of it?”
“That’s a big part of it,” he said. “But in your case … there’s more.”
“Like what?”
He drew a manila envelope from a drawer and slid out a series of large aerial photographs.
“These were taken on the mission, prior to the one when we lost the PBM,” he said. “It was going back for a second look. We were mapping an area that’s warmer than most of the region and accessible by inlets. Natural harbors, suitable for use as such, assuming they haven’t already been claimed. But look here. Seen this before?”
He pointed to a ring, darker than the icy ground beneath it. It was perfectly symmetrical. Man made. And then, when he showed me the enlarged version of a different picture, one taken not from directly overhead but at a shallower angle, the awful familiarity of the thing was clear.
“We know the Nazis were working on an atomic weapon at the end of the war,” he said. “Based on this, we think they still are.”
I stared at the picture. It was what I had come to think of as a henge, a circle of pillars, probably concrete, connected at the top to a ring, run with cables and charged from beneath. I saw it all in my head, the peculiar underground chamber with the bell-like structure, the ladders up the side of the henge, the men, the gunfire …
Ishmael.
“Yes,” I said. “I will go.”
THE WEATHER WAS GETTING WORSE. THE BRIEF WINDOW OF what we laughably referred to as the Antarctic summer seemed to be closing earlier than expected, and the sailors discussed the possibility that the mission would be abandoned sooner than had been scheduled. And of course, no one could survive out there for long. If a rescue of the surviving PBM crewmembers was to take place, it was going to have to be soon.
Jennings confided that the Mustangs had indeed taken fire, but the weather had been so bad that they couldn’t be sure whether the guns had been mounted on the ground or had come from hostile aircraft. No definitive sign of a runway had been discovered so far. That meant that we did not dare go too close to the site where the Mariner had gone down, for fear of straying into the same AA fire. Belasco and I were to be ferried to the icebreaker USCGC Northwind, then fly on a Coast Guard helicopter to a drop point two miles from where the PBM came down, meet up with the rest of the team, and cover the rest of the ground on foot.
Again, I’d never so much as seen a helicopter up close, let alone ridden in one, and I will admit to being scared. Compared to planes, they felt slow and fragile, easy to shoot down, and we stayed terrifyingly low, so that it seemed a single gust of wind would flip us into the gray, freezing waves. I gripped my seat all the way and tried not to stare into Belasco’s massive and malicious grin. He was cradling a Thompson submachine gun in his lap—for all I know, the same one “Hartsfeld” had tampered with when we were in the jungle. He seemed quite content, like it was all a bit of fun, not worried about what might be waiting for us on the ice.
Including me, there were eighteen men on the ground, led by a pair of Rangers, and two radiomen who’d been ashore already, and a dogsled team for the equipment. We were to move inland from the edge of the Ross Sea toward the Queen Alexandra Range. We wore scarves around our faces and fur-lined gloves and boots, so that we looked like lost Cossacks. No one talked much. Even the dogs went quiet once we started moving, and though it was slow and heavy going, the ground underfoot was hard, and the forced march generated as much warmth as I’d felt in weeks.
We’d been walking for a little over an hour when we heard fighters coming in with two more of the Mariner flying boats, the latter low and slow, scanning the ground, the Mustangs up high, circling, waiting. We slowed as we navigated an icy shelf that canted up toward the mountains, and paused on the top to see what we could see.
There was depression in the ice,
a stretch of tundra that ran for a couple of miles to the mountains, then shot up in a steep impassable wall of rock. It was latticed by shining, icy ridges, any one of which might be cover for a base of some kind. One of the Mariners made a particularly low pass, and suddenly it was pulling up steeply.
“They’ve seen something,” said Belasco.
“Or something has seen them,” said someone else. There was a crackle of gunfire, and we all shrank instinctively. Then the radio was blaring, and the Mustangs were streaming in, and we were moving again, running now, down and up the next rise until I could see it, a huddle of nondescript buildings, and the great concrete henge in the center.
Out of its ring, rising slowly, was an impossible ship, disk-shaped but bulging in the center, which flashed with glass. It rose vertically, soundlessly, and two ports beneath the windows flared as its guns opened up.
The Mariner labored to get clear, and the disk craft gave chase, quickly hitting a rapid cruising speed so that it was on top of the flying boat in seconds. Only as it wheeled to fire did I see the swastika stenciled on the side.
47
TOMMY REZNIK
Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, March 16, 1967
TOMMY REZNIK FIGURED HE’D LANDED THE CUSHIEST job in the services, at a time when the alternatives could have been a whole lot worse. According to the paper, the House Appropriations Committee had just approved another twelve billion dollars to satisfy President Johnson’s demands for security concerns. In other words, for the war. That was on top of the sixty billion that had already been assigned for the year.
Sixty billion to get them through the year had got them as far as March, but now President Johnson’s people were saying there was no end in sight. Robert Kennedy, Senator from New York and brother to the late President, John F. Kennedy, was saying the US needed to pull out and go back to the conference table.