Ian Douglas - Alien Secrets

Stark hefted the two black cases he was holding. “I can manage, Herr General. And screw the danger.”

“No arguments! Give me the papers, Untersturmführer!”

“Jawohl, Herr General!”

Stark vanished back in the direction of the complex entrance, and Kammler and Sporrenberg proceeded through the eerily lit woods. On their left, the cooling tower blocked out much of the sky. Raised on an immense concrete support structure—a ring positioned on ten enormous pylons—the wooden tank contained thousands of liters of water used to cool the ranks of electrical generators buried in an underground chamber deep below. Nearby, power cables snaked up through heavy pipes and ran along the forest floor. The two generals followed the cables along a well-worn path. The bags were heavy—perhaps forty kilos’ worth in all—but, fortunately, there was not much farther to go.

Ahead, Die Glocke hovered half a meter off the ground, a metallic acorn shape four meters high and three wide, bathed in a blue-violet nimbus of its own generation. Six heavy power cables, each as thick as a man’s thigh, were connected to the device by means of ports around the swollen base. Several technicians stood off to the side, awaiting their final order. A hatch stood open in the thing’s side, spilling red light into the blue-lit night.

The two men hauled the leather bags up and began passing them through the hatch. For Kammler, it felt like swarms of ants were crawling on his skin, the effect of the enormous electrical charge bleeding into the air.

“You know what to do, Jakob,” he said. “The last of the slave workers … they are to be eliminated.”

“ Ja. It will be done. Tonight.”

“And Damlier, Prueck, Stark, and the rest. They know far too much.”

“It’s already been arranged, Herr General.”

“Good. I knew I could count on you, Jakob.” Kammler cracked a rare smile. “And now, our guest is waiting for me!”

He turned again and clambered up and through the hatch.

Inside, strapped into a narrow wire framework, the Eidechse turned its bulbous head, looking at Kammler through those lustrous golden eyes. Kammler suppressed a shudder. The thing, man-shaped but utterly alien, was the ultimate in Untermenschen .

I might say the same of you, General.

Kammler heard the words in his head, but the creature’s lipless mouth did not move. How were you supposed to keep secrets from a damned thing that could read thoughts …

Strap in, General. We must leave this place.

“Ja … ja.”

Outside, the technicians were uncoupling the massive power cables. They, too, would not survive this night … even if they survived Die Glocke’s power field. Sporrenberg, too. His death had also been arranged.

There would be, there could be, no loose ends.

How far? the voice in his head asked.

Kammler took a deep breath. “I would say … about twenty years. That ought to be enough.”

He felt the power field building around him …

I was a Flight Security Supervisor (FSS) for the Minuteman missiles at Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota, from May 1973 until December 1978. We had an incident around 1977, when strange lights took over our missiles … I just wanted to confirm that these incidents were happening.

USAF TECHNICAL SERGEANT THOMAS E. JOHNSON (RET.), 2017

A GROUP OFprisoners, clad in ragged black-and-white stripes, were being herded off the truck in the valley below. Guards screamed and shouted, their voices muted by the distance. Half a kilometer away, Navy lieutenant commander Mark Hunter crouched on the barren hillside, his form smothered by the shaggy folds of his ghillie suit.

“Bastards!” he whispered, pressing his high-tech binoculars against his camo-painted face. The binoculars, zoomed in twenty times, were recording 1080 HD video in 3-D stereoscopic mode, recording every detail of the North Korean test site below. A faint rumble, like distant thunder, sounded from the valley, and a dust cloud boiled from the open tunnel mouth. “Uh-oh,” Hunter added. “Thar she blows.”

Hunter and the other seven men of his squad were spread out along the slope, all of them invisible under their ghillies, all of them armed, but with four of them concentrating at the moment on several items of high-technology equipment. Sanders was monitoring the seismic recorder, Brunelli a radiation counter, Nielson was on the AN/PED-1, while Colby was using headphones to listen to a broadband radio scanner. Taylor, Kline, and Minkowski were on overwatch, alert for the approach of North Korean sentries.

They’d already scouted the area, photographing everything and uploading it all to an orbiting satellite. They’d collected soil samples; these would be tested back in Japan for the presence of certain isotopes, which would prove whether or not the recent bomb test had been of an ordinary atom bomb, or of a much larger and more deadly thermonuclear warhead. Right now the SEALs were just observing the activity in the valley below.

“Whatcha got, Sandy?” Hunter asked. The team members were linked by small, voice-activated radios with earplug receivers.

“A small quake … three … maybe 3.5. Might be subsidence of the main chamber, or maybe a tunnel collapse.”

“Brewski?”

“No new radiation, at least not yet. But the background count is still pretty high.”

“Copy that.”

Hunter felt exposed up here under a dull, overcast sky, and was still concerned that the NKs might have infrared sensors that could detect them despite the heat-masking effects of the ghillies. They’d been up here for hours already though, silent, unmoving, and there’d been no sign at all that the North Koreans were aware of their presence.

He glanced at the pile of rubble that was Nielson. If things went south, or if direct intervention was called for, they could call in a flight of Tomahawk cruise missiles from off the coast, and the AN/PED-1 LLDR, or lightweight laser designator rangefinder, would guide them in smack on-target.

He sincerely hoped that wouldn’t be necessary. He doubted that it would even do anything. That was a huge mountain over there.

The southern flank of Mantapsan—Mantap Mountain—was the site of North Korea’s lone nuclear test facility, an isolated and barren wilderness honeycombed with tunnels. The village of Punggye-ri lay twelve kilometers to the southeast, while just two kilometers to the east was the Hwasong concentration camp, the largest in North Korea and the source of the slave laborers who’d been forced to carve tunnels hundreds of meters long into the side of the granite mountain.

Pyongyang had set off six nuclear tests here, beginning in 2006. The last and biggest, estimated at between two hundred and three hundred kilotons—ten times the power of the weapon dropped on Hiroshima—had been detonated just five weeks ago, on September 3. The North Koreans had claimed that this had been their first test of a thermonuclear weapon—a hydrogen bomb—and it was to verify this claim that the squad—eight men out of SEAL DEVGRU—had been deployed, first to Yokosuka, Japan, then to the rugged coast of North Korea. They’d inserted by an MH-60 Blackhawk stealth helicopter, an aircraft identical to the ones used to take down bin Laden two hundred miles inside Pakistan. Flying nap-of-the-earth through the rugged mountain passes of eastern North Korea, they’d touched down in the middle of the night less than ten kilometers from their target. An overland trek through the roughest terrain imaginable had brought them here to this hillside, giving them a vantage point from which they could observe the base directly.