by Tom DeLonge
The heavy door creaked open and Dubchek came in, slim mouth smiling, eyes watchful as a cat’s. Morat started to rise—persisting in the social niceties that had become part of their game—but Dubchek waved him down and drew up the room’s only chair. He had not closed the cell door. Morat felt a tension in his body, like a sprinter in the blocks, waiting for the starter’s pistol.
But unsure which way he would run.
The idea amused him, but did not make him smile.
“Mr. Dubchek,” he said. “This is an unexpected visit.”
“Your rescuers, I’m sorry to say,” said Dubchek, pleasantly, “have made it necessary.”
“My rescuers?”
“The Americans are coming. Like the cavalry in those Westerns films you people love so much. Always in the nick of time.”
“I was never much of a movie fan,” said Morat.
“No?” said Dubchek, taking a cut-throat razor from his pocket and unfolding it. “Then you missed out. The world in films can be extraordinary. Beautiful, and passionate, and thrilling, full of good and evil, right and wrong. People making big moral choices. John Wayne. Wonderful stuff.”
He said it almost sadly, and the shrug at the end struck Morat with a special poignancy. The man had come to kill him. He didn’t particularly want to do it, might even feel bad about it, but he was going to do it anyway. There was no doubt about that.
“Well,” said Morat, rallying, “that’s good. About my rescue, I mean. I don’t know why you are sorry to say it.”
“Yes, you do,” said Dubchek simply. He looked at the stone floor like a man who had just stubbed out a cigarette, and Morat felt the cold of the cell settle into his bones.
He started to say something but his voice cracked and he had to clear his throat before proceeding. “You could let them take me,” he managed, eying the razor.
Dubchek nodded thoughtfully and smiled a wan, distant smile. “Unfortunately, not,” he said, “but I wanted to tell you how much I have enjoyed our little chats over the last few days. I meet so few interesting and cultured people in my line of work.”
He moved the razor to his own throat and absently began cutting away chunks of beard. Morat watched, mesmerized.
“I don’t think you ever told me what that line of work actually was,” said Morat. He was stalling now.
“No,” said Dubchek. “And I must keep the specifics to myself still, I’m afraid, though I’m sure you have the general picture already. I’m in the same line of work as you. And I know the costs, the losses such work entails. I am sorry that it must come to this. Ordinary people have other things to give their lives meaning. Money. Love. Respect. Not for the likes of us. You’ve been in this country so long, I don’t suppose most of your commanders even know what you look like anymore. That is very sad, I think, though it will make my job easier. Have you never noticed how alike we are? We did. Months before we captured you.”
He smiled as Morat’s puzzlement turned to horror.
“That’s right,” said Dubchek, waggling the razor tellingly. “We have been planning this moment for a long time.”
He couldn’t be serious.
“Switching places?” he said. “Taking my identity? You’d never get away with it.”
“Not for long, probably,” said Dubchek. “But I won’t need long, and I am surprisingly well-prepared.”
Morat stared at him. The man’s composure was astonishing. How could he consider such a thing so calmly when it must end in failure and death? Morat had had his share of dangerous missions, but accepting something so obviously suicidal was beyond him. Even here, in what were probably his final minutes, the thought made him angry.
“If the US has sent a rescue team, they won’t come short-handed,” Morat said, defiant. “They’ll send a crack team. And air support. You won’t be able to fight them off. Surrender and I’ll put a good word in for you.”
Dubchek shook his head slowly.
“I won’t be able to fight them off, no,” he said. “Nor will our Afghan friends. But I have other allies who will more than level the playing field.”
He smiled at that last phrase, as if he had been hoping to be able to use it.
“They’ll never get here in time,” Morat tried, his final bluff.
“Time,” said Dubchek, standing, and drawing the Strike One pistol from the waist band in the small of his back, “as you well know, is not something they need in large amounts.”
Morat did not move. He took a breath. Perhaps if he lunged for the gun at just the right moment …
Dubchek fired twice, then added a third shot to be sure. He waited for a few minutes, then said a blessing over the man he had killed and moved into the next room to dress and finish shaving. The disguise would not need to be especially good, not given what was about to happen and the chaos it would lead to, but if something was worth doing, he thought, giving one last look at the body of Morat, it was worth doing well.
52
JERZY
Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica, January 1947
I HAD NEVER SEEN ANYTHING AIRBORNE MOVE WITH THE agility of the Nazi disk. It rolled and pivoted over the Antarctic mountains, leaping forward and stopping abruptly in mid-air as if gravity had no power over it and aerodynamics were irrelevant. It spun, firing cannon shells, and the Mustangs fell on it like dogs on a bear.
On the ground, we could only watch, dumbfounded, and then, at the urging of the rangers, make a double-time run down the ridge toward the base and the henge at its heart. We ran clumsily, eyes on the sky, as the saucer-like craft dodged and wove with improbable grace and speed as the Mustangs pelted it with .50 caliber machine gun fire. It had abandoned the lumbering Mariner, which was lightly armed and therefore the least of its worries, but the Mustangs were quick and deft, hard to see against the pale sky, and too scattered to target. For all its speed and maneuverability, the saucer was losing. As it turned to fire on one plane, two more swooped in from behind, riddling it with gunfire, and soon it began to smoke.
Whoever was piloting it made the decision to run, which is probably what it should have done to begin with, and the whole thing began to pulse with an amber light as it sought to leap into some new uncatchable velocity. But the act of powering up had forced it to hang in place, its guns silent, and in that moment, it was pummeled by the Mustangs. There was a brilliant flash as it surged into an upward acceleration of dazzling speed, but the damage was done. As it streaked away from our planes, climbing ever higher, the plume of smoke it left behind thickened and darkened, until there was something sickly about it. Moments later the disk exploded in a fireball that could be seen for miles.
THE NAZIS HAD FINISHED IN ANTARCTICA WHAT THEY’D been unable to complete at the Wenceslas mine, but it had absorbed all their resources. The ground fight was surprisingly, mercifully desultory. Once the disk exploded, the defenders were quick to lay down their arms, and they emerged looking drawn, weather-beaten and defeated. Many had lost fingers and toes to frostbite, and walked like badly constructed marionettes, hobbling, unable to carry their own gear. When we made our way into the buildings to round up the survivors, we found men emaciated from hunger and dysentery, as well as a stack of bodies that resembled the piles of corpses I’d seen in photographs from the concentration camps. I cannot pretend to have been sorry about it.
Their rations were largely gone, their generators failing, and half of the men had frozen to death. There were a few concrete bunkers cased in ice, but the great Nazi war machine had not survived the journey to this bleak place. Any member of the Third Reich who believed this was the ground upon which they would rebuild was delusional.
But then that was hardly news.
Under the henge, we found the bell chamber, though the soldiers in our ground party were quickly herded out once it had been secured. The subsequent airlift of parts and wreckage was designated a matter of the tightest classification and it was only my special orders from Captain Jennings that allowed me to see a
nything at all. What was clear—to me at least—was that this was no atomic weapons factory. I had seen the way that disk moved, the way it hovered in the air, and though it had been too poorly armed to engage a squadron of fighters, it clearly represented a colossal technological leap forward.
The henge, it seemed clear, was part of an anti-gravity system, or its development.
It did not survive our arrival. Moments after getting everyone clear, the Nazis blew up entire structure with a series of demolition charges causing the whole thing to collapse under a great feathering of concrete dust and ice shards that rained down on us like hail. Amazingly, no one was seriously hurt, and it took no great time to find the men who had ordered soldiers to set the explosives. There were two. One was the man Captain Jennings had pointed out as a high-ranking SS officer and engineer called Hans Kammler. When cornered, his last shot was for himself.
The other man did not feel the same suicidal urge, a blond officer in the uniform of an SS Hauptsturmführer with the domino insignia of three pips and two bars on his collar: Ungerleider.
I knew him at once, though his face was blank when I stood before him. I felt at my back for the trenching tool that was part of my kit. It was a one handed, folding pick used for breaking up ground.
Or someone’s skull.
I drew it out and snapped it open as I walked toward him.
Then Belasco barreled into me, dragging me aside and pulling me back, his great coat drawn tight about him, his scarf wound tight around his face.
I was no match for Belasco. He told me to calm down, that it wasn’t worth it, and then he handed the trench tool back to me, promising that justice would be done, and telling me to find shelter while we waited for the helicopter. There was no point ending my career to do what a war crime tribunal would do just as well.
Within an hour, I convinced myself that he was right, that it was good that I had not killed Ungerleider.
A month later, I was less sure. And two months after that, I was positive that I should have killed him when I had the chance.
There is one more thing. The Nazis had eaten everything they could, whether it was technically food or not, and they had burned anything that would take a flame, including crates of paintings that had made their way from the Fatherland in one of those stray U-boats. But there was one thing they had not touched, something squirreled away into Kammler’s private quarters, where it was kept under lock and key.
It was a box, metallic, possibly lead because it was very heavy, about a yard long and stamped with a German eagle. Jennings and I opened it, back onboard the Kitchener.
I will not say here what it was or why our superiors thought it unworthy of their attention, but I will say where it may still be found, and I will say that of all the things that came out of Operation High Jump (for so the mission was called), nothing was more important, even if we did not see its importance at the time. Its implications are so far reaching that they will one day redefine world history.
I saw the significance right away, though I think that of all the people there, only Jennings understood why it subsequently became my obsession. But I was not the first person to be drawn to the strange metal box. Kammler had been. So was the blond officer who had done his bidding.
Ungerleider, like the other Germans, was arrested, disarmed, and put in confinement back on one of the ships. But while most of the soldiers were shipped back to Germany—some to face trial—he was not.
He was special. He knew things. He was the last best hope to rebuild the bell and the henge above it, and the flying disk it had enabled. He was given a new name, a new job, and a government ID, then he was deployed to a test facility in Nevada.
The metal box went with him. Captain Jennings reported it gone from stores the day after Ungerleider left. HQ confirmed that he had claimed it as personal property, and since none of our superiors on hand had thought it worth special attention, while the Nazi apparently was, he had been allowed to take it.
After everything we had gone through, the injustice of this—the sense that a monster like Ungerleider would not only escape punishment but would be rewarded for what he had done—burned into me like the frigid wind whipping the decks off the Ross Sea. It cut its way inside me and lodged there, hard and cold, leaving me no choice as to what I would do next.
Ungerleider had taken his knowledge, his talent, and his secret treasure to Nevada, and I would go after him.
53
JENNIFER
Rachel, Nevada
“PULL OVER!” SAID TIMIKA. THEY WERE DRIVING FAST, too fast, and not driving to anywhere. Just away.
“Damn it, Jennifer, pull over!” She grabbed Jennifer’s arm, so that the Chevy veered to the right. Jennifer shook her loose.
“Can’t,” said Jennifer.
“We’ve got to find somewhere to talk,” Timika insisted.
“We’ve got to get away from here.”
Letrange, standing outside the bar with the military guy, Alan, who she’d argued with only a couple of hours before. It was mad. And terrifying.
“Hey,” Timika snapped. “I just got dropped off by a goddamned flying saucer, so if anyone has the right to freak the fuck out …”
“Triangle.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t a flying saucer,” said Jennifer. “Not in shape, anyway. It was a triangle.”
“Oh,” said Timika, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “Well that’s just fine, because—as everyone knows—when it comes to being abducted by guys in rubber alien suits, it’s the shape that matters …”
Jennifer stepped hard on the brakes and the Impala slid to a keening halt, pitching both women forward in their seat belts.
“You want to talk?” snapped Jennifer. “Fine. What do you want to talk about? The guy who tracked me across the fucking Atlantic, so he could put a bullet in my brain? Part of the team who engineered the fake suicide of a US Senator, and my father too, for God’s sake! Let’s talk about that. Maybe we should get tea so we can chat it out properly, have a good old-fashioned chinwag, full of wit and repartee, while he finds us and puts us both in the fucking ground. That does sound like a plan.”
Timika waited to respond. “And I thought New Yorkers were the masters of sarcasm.”
“What?” Jennifer, shot back, still lost in her own fire.
“What the hell is a chinwag? Jesus. Chinwag. If you put as much energy into figuring out what we should do as you do into making up words …”
“It’s a not a made-up word,” said Jennifer, distracted out of her fear.
“Sounds made up to me. Chinwag. Jesus.”
“It’s a perfectly normal phrase, where I come from.”
“Which ain’t here,” said Timika with finality. “Now. Where are we going?”
Jennifer’s head was swimming. The shock of seeing Letrange had driven everything else from her thoughts. She knew it wasn’t fair to Timika, but she couldn’t help that. She’d let her guard down with Letrange once, and it nearly cost her everything. She would not make the same mistake twice.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “Home. England.”
“You think you’d be safe there?” asked Timika. “That’s where he tried to kill you.”
“Maybe if he doesn’t think I’m a threat anymore …” she tried, but she didn’t believe it, and neither did Timika. “You have a better idea?”
“Take the fight to them,” said Timika. “Sometimes the best defense …”
“In football, maybe. In life, when you are two unarmed women up against the hired hit men of a clandestine multinational corporation …”
“And the government,” said Timika. “They run this place, right?”
“Maybe,” said Jennifer. “I’m not sure. Suddenly, I’m not sure of much, except that I don’t want to be here.”
“I hear the Caribbean is nice this time of year,” said Timika. “Maybe you’re right. It’s not like there’s anything we can do here in … where did you s
ay we were?”
“Area 51, or close to it.”
“Of course,” said Timika. “Post a bogus UFO story on my sight and drop me off outside the crazy capital of the world. It’s genius in a depressing kind of way. I’ve been debunktioned.”
“You’ve been what?”
“Wait,” Timika gasped, her eyes suddenly wide.
“What?” asked Jennifer.
“Nevada!”
“As I told you an hour ago. What are you doing?”
“Please be there …” the other woman was muttering as she unbuttoned her shirt, and reached into her ample cleavage. She plucked a tightly folded piece of paper and held it up with a look of triumph.
“Yes,” she hissed.
Reading Jennifer’s look, she buttoned up again.
“What’s that?” asked Jennifer.
“It’s from the book I told you about. Jerzy Stern’s journal. This was at the back.”
She unfolded it. The paper had numbers on it. Coordinates. The words printed carefully above it said “Airfield. Groom Lake, Nevada.” The sheet had been wrapped tight around a brass key.
“Where does this lead?” asked Jennifer, considering the paper.
“Here, or hereabouts,” said Timika. “Stern was stationed in Nevada in the fifties, on an airbase and test range. See? Groom Lake. He put something here. Something important. And he obviously assumes it’s still here.”
“I’m not wandering the desert digging for buried treasure. We’ll die.”
“Not many caves need a key,” said Timika. “This is a building.”
“But Groom Lake is Area 51,” said Jennifer. “And I’m pretty damn sure it’s where those guys in the diner were going. There’s no way we can walk into the most secret government facility in the country on a scavenger hunt.”