There was almost no visibility through the dust and haze. He could see light streaming through the newly created opening in the back wall. Jake ran straight for the light. Then, with all the power he could summon, he leaped out of the building into the open space.
Jake knew he needed to gain as much distance as possible between him and the building before gravity would take hold of him. His legs pedaled through the air like an Olympic long jumper straining for distance as he flew through the haze and smoke.
When Jake punched through the dark smoke cloud he found himself 30 storys up in the air, out in open space.
Behind him the Raptor’s missiles smashed through the glazed facade, each impacting their designated targets – the building’s internal columns.
The resulting fireball blew out all the windows above Natasha and Mark, rapidly expanding to blow through the newly created opening in the rear wall. It narrowly missed Jake, passing over his head as he descended.
With gravity now taking hold he stretched his arms out forward in an effort to rotate his body, forcing himself into a controlled dive. He was now upside down, like a diver falling toward water, except Jake was accelerating toward the ground.
With a fluid motion he unslung the grappling gun and took aim, knowing that he was only going to get one chance. Aiming for an internal concrete column through the gun’s crosshairs, he sighted his target at level 10 and squeezed the trigger.
The grapple hook hit its mark, lodging in the column near its base. At that moment Jake was falling past level 10 and the slack in the grapple hook’s line quickly went tense. The line then dragged the hooks back outside. On its way out the hooks slashed through carpet on its path to the window ledge. That’s where two of the hook’s teeth bit hard into the window sill and held tight. It stabbed through the sill to grip into the small concrete wall supporting the window.
Jake braced, gripping the grapple cord hard. He had gambled that the concrete window ledge would have enough strength to hold him despite his speed toward the ground.
The small concrete wall held; the resulting tension in the line then hurled Jake back toward the building, converting his vertical velocity into angular acceleration, effectively turning him into a giant 180-pound pendulum.
Now in a sweeping arc, he accelerated back toward the building, catching a glimpse of the approaching window moments before impact. With barely enough time to curl into a human ball for protection, he had more than enough momentum to smash through the second level facade glazing.
Jake felt the bone-shaking thump as he impacted, forcing the air to be expelled from his lungs. Glass exploded around him as he burst through the window. He felt the sensation of rolling on the floor, again and again, and struggled not to black out as he catapulted across the second-story office.
Did I just do that? What could have possibly been the series of events which would lead me to this?
Jake wasn’t NSA or CIA. Nor was he FBI, KGB, MI6, Navy Seal, Special Forces, stationed at NORAD or a part of any other hyper secret government agency whose name consisted of indeterminate letters. And he definitely wasn’t trained by any nameless underground military units funded through black budget back channels.
Although he did have a university degree in engineering and had taken up martial arts, he had never owned a gun or knew anything about explosives. Like most guys his age he was interested in motorbikes, girls and nightclubs.
Jake had no way of knowing it, but the incident that triggered the chain of events that led him here occurred decades before he was born.
He used to believe that things happened for a reason. But he never believed that one person could have enough influence to alter the course of modern history. What Jake Marcel was about to learn was that it only takes one person to ask the right questions, and it’s the answers to those questions that have the potential to change everything.
CHAPTER 3
2nd July, 1947
11:54 pm
The armada of B-29s, known as the 7th Bombardment Group, stretched out across the fields nestled on each side of the main runway strip at the US Air Force Strategic Air Command base in Fort Worth, Texas.
The soldier assigned to the evening’s security shift never tired of watching over the hulking silhouettes perched along the runway. After arriving to start his watch, he unpacked his small transistor radio and noticed that his partner was absent from the small outpost. Along with his partner, they were to keep watch over the dark beasts lined up in perfect rows before them – the aircraft all aligned facing the same direction.
He’s probably already started his rounds, the soldier thought.
Most nights the moonlight would shimmer off the aircrafts’ wings, but on this evening the soldier was treated to a more active panorama. After tuning the radio, he settled in to watch the storm gathering around him; he could almost feel the voltage in the clouds. The soldier was not yet concerned that his partner had not reported to his post, so long as he materialized soon.
Huge storm clouds now clamped down overhead. The soldier’s eyes lit up as awesome thunderclaps crashed in the distance. Lighting blazed in chain reaction across the horizon.
He jolted as ear-piercing thunder clapped in the clouds above him then seemed to roll overhead toward the main hangers and heavy armory bunkers located close by his outpost. The soldier was surprised at the speed at which the weather rolled in. Moments later a trickle of rain gained momentum, turning into a steady soaking. Nevertheless he reached for his M1 Carbine service rifle and small radio and prepared to walk his usual rounds, an activity he would repeat several times per shift.
As he passed the first armory bunker along his route the transistor radio began to choke on static, killing off a soft tune midway through. Lifting the radio to his ear, he gave it a shake before opening its rear compartment to check the batteries. The rain added an extra layer of difficulty, challenging him to keep the small radio dry as he fiddled with its switches.
Something in his peripheral vision drew his attention. Instantly, he wheeled in its direction.
For a long moment the lone security soldier stood frozen, trying to process what he was seeing.
Emanating from the roof of the heavy armory bunker before him was a pencil thin beam of light that appeared to shoot up into the sky. The soldier stifled a gasp. The beam of light was bluish red and perfectly thin, similar to a spider’s web and narrower than any beam of light he had ever before seen.
His blood chilled as he realized that the bunker was also the Strategic Air Command’s Special Projects storage facility that housed the 7th Bombardment Group’s super-secret armament, atomic weaponry generations ahead of the bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war almost two years prior.
The soldier instantly reached for his two-way. “Alpha-Four-Charlie, do you copy?”
No response.
“Frank…” his whisper trembled, “are you there?”
The two-way was dead. It was at that moment that he also noticed his watch had stopped.
This can’t be a coincidence, he decided.
Filled with uncertainty the soldier drew in a deep breath and edged toward the storage facility, the random lightning strikes above erratically lighting up his path.
Now in front of the facility’s side entrance, and with eyes still fixated on the luminescent beam of light that disappeared up into the storm clouds, he reached out to pound on the door. When the door opened the soldier was surprised to recognize a familiar face.
“Frank!” the soldier spat, “I’ve been trying to reach you. Where the hell have you been?”
“I saw the beam of light and came over to see what the hell is going on. I tried to call it in but my radio is down.”
“Mine too,” the soldier said, his eyes urgent, “you don’t think this is some sort of exercise?”
The pair looked up to follow the bright thin beam to the clouds above. Strikes of lightning illuminated the storm clouds from within. With every flash t
hey glimpsed a dark silhouette hidden within the clouds.
They both gasped in unison as sporadic portions of the object were revealed, giving them an impression of a solid circular-shaped mass that hung silently above them.
The arriving soldier flashed his partner a startled look. “Try the landline. Call the tower and ask if they’re picking up anything on the radar.”
With an acknowledging nod Frank immediately disappeared back inside the bunker. The soldier’s eyes flashed back up to the beam of light, fixing on the point where it made contact with the bunker’s roof.
Having run a mental calculation of where in the bunker the light beam made contact with the roof, he entered the storage facility and paced out the distance to the area under the beam.
*
“This is Alpha-Four-Charlie. I repeat, do you have any unusual contacts on your radar?” Frank was relieved that the telephone was still working.
“That’s a negative Alpha-Four-Charlie.”
“Are you sure? Because I’m telling you there is a flying craft about 55 feet in diameter and hovering anywhere between 50 to a 100 feet over our heads. Both Alpha-Four-Bravo and I were staring right at it. It’s as black as night and shooting a beam of light into the storage bunker housing the atomic ordinance!”
There was a long pause from the other end of the phone. “Ummm…okay. Stand by.”
*
With growing apprehension, the soldier let himself through a series of locked enclosures until he reached the location under the beam of light. As he stepped through into the highly restricted storage area, he felt himself momentarily go rigid when he realized that the ceiling over the atomic ordinance storage housing looked as if it was glowing, bathing the room in an eerie reddish-blue wash of light. A thin luminescent beam pierced through the glowing ceiling. His eyes filled with horror when he realized the beam’s target – the live atomic ordinance.
At that moment the base’s auxiliary lights, which were perpetually illuminated to mark walk paths and emergency exits, all went dead.
The soldier bolted for the exit, nervously feeling his way through the darkness to find the doors he passed through minutes earlier. When he finally found himself back outside his eyes shot straight up. The only remaining light source was the rolling storm. The lightning strikes had now intensified, sharpening the shape of the craft’s eerie silhouette looming above.
“The landlines have gone dead as well as the…” Alpha-Four-Charlie burst through the exit straight after Alpha-Four-Bravo, but was stopped short mid-sentence by the realization that the entire base had gone dark. The two soldiers exchanged a nervous glance.
Without warning the beam disappeared milliseconds before the dark silhouette morphed into a brilliant bright sphere of silver light then shot straight up in a vertical blur before making an impossible right angle turn. It instantly disappeared over the western horizon as a streak of light like a shooting star. The pair watched in bewilderment. The object’s silent departure had happened within the blink of an eye, leaving a faint smear through the storm clouds in its wake.
*
Back inside the bunker, power had returned to the atomic ordinance storage enclosure after the object’s departure. The two soldiers stood speechless in front of the deadly bomb that had been of interest to the light beam.
Although Alpha-Four-Bravo was not an atomic physicist, being assigned to maintain security of the United States’ most secret weaponry required his training to cover the very basics of the ordinance’s internal mechanics. He frowned, recalling that their atomic weapons used an isotope of uranium to create a chain reaction. The reason for using an isotope is that its atoms contained extra neutrons, making it less stable than its associated element as it tended to shed the extra neutrons over time. When the uranium isotope reached a certain critical mass, which is the mass that will provide enough neutrons to sustain a cascading reaction, the isotope atoms would shed neutrons, shooting them into other atoms and causing them to split, in turn shedding another wave of neutrons and splitting even more atoms in an escalating chain reaction. When an atom is split, called nuclear fission, a colossal amount of energy is released.
All the bomb did was transport a precise amount of the uranium isotope to the target in two separate portions. When the bomb reached its target it then fired one portion of the uranium isotope into the other, slamming them together to form the critical mass, initiating the imminent chain reaction.
The manner in which the two uranium isotope portions were brought together was foolishly simple. Alpha-Four-Bravo pictured it as a small bullet of uranium, packed with conventional explosives behind it, similar to a shotgun shell, being loaded into a long barrel that ran the length of the weapon. At detonation, explosives fired to propel the bullet down the barrel through the center of the bomb to strike the sphere of uranium at the other end. The two masses thus combined to form the critical mass, initiating the fission reaction and resulting atomic explosion.
The mechanism that fired the uranium bullet was an electronic triggering device powered internally by a 24-volt battery. The soldier’s blood chilled as he read the needle on the voltmeter monitoring the weapon’s triggering assembly. It was at zero volts, not 24 volts where it should be.
Turning to his confused partner the mortified soldier stammered, “Whatever that thing was, it’s killed the battery…it’s dead, the bomb is completely neutralized!”
CHAPTER 4
3rd July, 1947
12:27 am
The night sky lit up with violent red and passive blue clouds huddled together in random lumped masses. Laid out like a soft quilt, the storm stretched out to touch the horizon in all directions. The desert danced along with the thunderstorm, frequently revealing itself under the random bursts of lightning.
Above the layers of chaos, peace resided. The stars burned with constant brilliance.
Through the still air, and over the clouds being lit up with random bursts of color, streaked an unearthly object. It was metallic silver and shaped like a disk with a dome structure positioned at its core.
Glistening in the moonlight, the silver disk tore through the air at a blistering speed toward the west horizon. A glowing bluish haze emitted from the perimeter of its circular edge like a halo as the surrounding atmosphere was ionized by the craft’s magnetic field, generated from its non-terrestrial propulsion system.
With military precision it descended to meet a second disk, the two crafts now skimming through the upper wisps of storm clouds. Lumped cloud masses, erratically lit from within, continued to rip past at hypersonic speed.
Even with all their advanced avionics, there was no way for the objects to detect what was about to unfold. In an earthshaking thunderclap, a brilliant lightning bolt leaped from a passing cloud mass to strike at the heart of the lead craft’s core.
Its metallic shell burst open in a blinding flash. Overloaded by the sudden electrical surge, the propulsion system exploded with fury, disintegrating a great portion of its mass and causing it to rocket toward the second craft.
The two objects came together in an explosive impact as the first sliced through the second, leaving a wedge-shaped rip in the second craft’s hull. A violet-blue blast erupted from within what remained of the first craft on impact, disintegrating what was left. A cloud of ejected debris stretched across the sky in its wake, left behind to fall toward the desert below.
Catapulted off its course, the crippled second craft sliced its way through the clouds to emerge from beneath the storm. It struggled to maintain altitude then continued at speed as it descended toward its point of impact.
When it struck the ground the entire desert floor was momentarily illuminated by the explosion. The force of the impact spewed debris; inertia propelled what remained of the intact body, dragging it across the desert’s rocky surface.
Heating up as it scraped across the desert plane, the craft’s underside glowed white hot as it sliced a path through the rocks and rubble. It
continued scraping with sparks and smoke bellowing from its rear, the friction from the desert floor doing little to slow it down.
The fallen craft trenched a mile-long path across the desert before inertia finally succumbed to the persistence of friction against the dry earth. It slowed down before coming to a smoky halt against a small cliff face.
CHAPTER 5
7th July, 1947
7:36 am
“We’ve had weather balls come down over these parts plenty, but never anything like this.”
William “Mac” Brazel stood with two uniformed intelligence officers as they looked out over the desert plain of the Foster Ranch located in Corona, New Mexico. Before them lay a scattered debris field that stretched out almost a mile in length and at least 300 feet wide.
“The sheep and cattle around here are scavengers,” Mac Brazel continued, his words peppered with grit as the ranch foreman spoke. “They’ll eat anything in their path. But if we don’t clear out your downed weather balloons in time, their bits and pieces end up choking my stock.”
The rancher exhaled slowly and lowered his voice. “But this stuff is different…the herd won’t go anywhere near it.”
RAAF Counter Intelligence Officer Major Jesse Marcel kneeled down to inspect a torn piece of material. Beside him RAAF Counter Intelligence Corps Captain Sheridan Cavitt was already holding a fragment of the scattered wreckage. The two intelligence officers had traveled back to the ranch with Brazel the night before, after the rancher had reported the crash debris to the local County Sheriff’s office on the previous day.
Marcel exchanged a glance with Cavitt, the captain’s concerned expression confirming Marcel’s assessment of the scattered materials. The remnants of whatever had crashed must have exploded in the air mid-flight, as there were no impact craters or burned ground depressions.
More puzzling was that the scattered material was not consistent with any conventional aircraft crash site he had ever seen.
Disclosing the Secret Page 2
