The Black Knight

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Is this your vehicle, sir?’

  ‘Yes it is,’ Vaughn replied, affecting the air of a New York businessman on his way to work. ‘Is there a problem?’

  One of the agents walked to the rear doors of the car and opened one of them, leaning inside.

  ‘No problem sir,’ came the reply, ‘we’re looking for somebody.’

  Vaughn knew damned well that law enforcement officers could not simply open the doors of a citizen’s vehicle and search inside without a warrant, but he also knew that revealing too much knowledge of the law might arouse suspicions as to his identity.

  The agent behind him rummaged around and lifted out a charger attached to a series of wires.

  ‘What’s this?’ he demanded, looking at Vaughn.

  ‘It’s my laptop’s battery charger,’ Vaughn replied. ‘Why?’

  The agent peered at the device as though uncertain. If he looked in the trunk, Vaughn knew that he would find the rest of the drone’s paraphernalia and then he’d be done. The agent climbed out of the vehicle and pointed at Vaughn.

  ‘Pop the trunk, sir.’

  Vaughn frowned, cursing mentally. ‘Don’t you need a warrant for that?’

  ‘We don’t need warrants to arrest you and impound the vehicle,’ the other agent assured him as he produced a US Marshall’s badge. ‘Pop the trunk.’

  Vaughn glanced at the badge, which appeared genuine enough although he knew that the men confronting him were most likely not US Marshalls. Vaughn glanced past the men at the sidewalk and saw two police officers strolling their beat on the sidewalk. It was illegal in the state of New York to fly drones, for obvious reasons, but facing down that charge with the DIA behind him was far preferable to being apprehended by the MJ-12 agents starting to surround the car.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Officer!’ The two cops looked in Vaughn’s direction as he called to them. ‘These guys are impersonating Marshalls!’

  The effect was startling. The agents scowled and immediately dispersed toward their vehicles as the police officers changed their route and began marching quickly toward the entrance to Terrace Drive.

  Vaughn put the car into reverse and pulled gently away as the officers attempted to intercept the SUVs, both of which were pulling out of the park and onto 5th Avenue. Vaughn saw the officers speaking into their radios as he turned away and drove north. He drove for thirty seconds before he then pulled the car into the sidewalk, killed the engine and jumped out. He locked the vehicle and then abandoned it, knowing that to use it further would be suicide as it would be tracked by MJ-12. He crossed the park toward the west and hoped against hope that Lopez had gotten the downlink sorted before escaping the park.

  He walked as casually as he could, fighting the urge to sprint for the west side of the park among the joggers and dog walkers as he sought the nearest exit. He was headed for the denser trees of the Ramble, which would take him to the footbridge over the lake and onto West Drive and West 77th, perfect for losing himself on Central Park West and finding Lopez.

  He crossed the footbridge and turned onto West Drive, then stopped as he saw two agents making their way toward him. Both reached for their weapons in an instant, aiming at him. Vaughn looked over his shoulder at the footbridge and the lake, but one of the agents shook his head.

  ‘You won’t make it,’ he snapped. ‘Hands on your head!’

  Vaughn complied, glancing up and down the road but seeing no pedestrians, no police officers or any other source of assistance that he could use to scare off the agents. One of them maintained their aim at him as the other hurried forward and produced a pair of handcuffs.

  ‘Where’s the drone?’ he demanded as he fastened one cuff around Vaughn’s right wrist.

  Vaughn’s arm was yanked down off the top of his head and pinned against the small of his back.

  ‘What drone?’

  A grim chuckle and the agent behind him reached up for the other wrist. Vaughn dropped his head forward and then snapped it back, the back of his skull smacking into the agent’s nose with a dull crack that echoed among the silent trees. Vaughn spun around, swinging his free left arm around to grab the agent and pull him against his chest as a human shield, the other cuffed wrist slammed up into the man’s throat and pitching him backwards and off his feet as Vaughn reached beneath his jacket and drew the man’s pistol from its holster and jammed it against his jaw. The entire move took no more than two seconds, far too fast for the other gunman to pick his target without fear of hitting his comrade.

  ‘Walk,’ Vaughn snapped at the gunman, ‘or I’ll sink him in the lake.’

  The gunman shrugged.

  ‘Sink him then but you’ll go down with him. There’s no escape pal, the rest of our team will be here soon.’

  Vaugh betrayed no emotion as he cursed silently and sought an escape route.

  ‘You’re done,’ the gunman insisted. ‘Drop the weapon or I’ll shoot you straight through him.’

  Vaughn knew that he had no option but to kill both men and hope that he didn’t take a bullet in the process. Lopez and the drone were the priority and he knew that he could not afford for them to fail in escaping MJ-12’s agents.

  A sudden whining noise roared in from nowhere and Vaughn saw something streak across the sky above them in a blur of motion. The other gunman threw his hands up in front of his face as the drone rocketed down and smashed into his head at full speed. Vaughn turned the agent in his grasp and rammed one knee into his thigh, crippling the man’s leg with a single blow. The agent crumpled onto the path as Vaughn drove his boot down onto the man’s face, incapacitating him and then he dashed forward.

  The gunman hit by the drone tumbled onto the pathway, his face bleeding profusely as he tried to aim his gun at Vaughn. Vaughn swung his boot and it impacted the gunman’s wrist with a loud crack like a snapping twig as the delicate bones shattered under the blow.

  The gunman’s pistol flew from his grasp as he cried out in pain. Vaughn jumped over him and dashed to the drone, which had smashed into the pathway and was now scattered into dozens of pieces all along the bank. Vaughn saw the drone’s camera drive and grabbed it, ripped it from the drone’s frame as he turned and sprinted down West Drive toward Central Park West. He tossed the guard’s gun into the bushes as he hurried out onto the main street and saw Lopez on the sidewalk opposite, beckoning him to follow.

  Vaughn dodged the traffic as he jaywalked across to her.

  ‘We lost the drone!’ he snapped. ‘You’re lucky I got the drive.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Lopez replied without concern as she turned and walked swiftly away down West 77th Street. ‘And you lost the damned car.’

  ‘The agency will sort that out,’ Vaughn said. ‘Did the download complete?’

  Lopez smiled as they walked and hailed a cab.

  ‘Oh ye of little faith,’ she murmured as the cab pulled in alongside them. ‘You think I’d trash the drone without first pulling the data from it?’

  Under her jacket Lopez held her laptop.

  ‘You downloaded it directly?’ Vaughn asked in surprise. ‘What about the agents on foot who were chasing it?’

  ‘I led them into the trees and then turned around,’ she said. ‘Only took a moment to land the drone, plug it into the USB port and download everything directly, then send it back up again. They never knew a thing.’ She looked at the cab beside them. ‘Ladies first, right?’

  Vaughn stared at her for a moment and then shook his head with a smile as he opened the cab door. They hadn’t even got inside when Lopez’s cell rang. She recognized the voice instantly.

  ‘Wilms is on the move.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Lexington. He’s left the hotel via a back door and is on foot, moving quickly. If you hurry, you can intercept him.’

  ‘What’s your play in all of this, Mitchell?’

  ‘Just get there, I’ll take care of the rest. I know which vehicle he arrived in. Have LeMay’s original driver m
eet us there.’

  ‘And do what?’ Lopez asked as the cab pulled away and Vaughn, able to hear the conversation, directed the driver to head for Lexington.

  ‘It’s all in hand,’ Mitchell replied. ‘Trust me, once I’m done with him, there won’t be a thing he won’t tell us. But if he escapes the city, we’ll never see him again.’

  ***

  XXXIII

  Antarctica

  Hannah stared at Ethan in amazement.

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’ she uttered. ‘You’re trying to tell me you think that Black Knight is some kind of UFO and that its owners might be listening in, that they picked up Nikola Tesla’s signals and started transmitting?’

  Ethan gestured to the Piri Reis map.

  ‘Somebody had to tell those cartographers that there was a continent beneath Antarctica, because they sure as hell couldn’t have known about it. Quite apart from that, we know that most UFO sightings occur not over the land but over and beneath the ocean.’

  Again, Hannah appeared stunned.

  ‘And we “know” this how?’

  Ethan leaned against the control panel and folded his arms against the cold penetrating his Arctic jacket.

  ‘Let’s just say that Lopez and I spent a fair amount of time chasing around the globe in pursuit of artifacts for the Defense Intelligence Agency that support the existence of alien life in our universe. In the course of that work we’ve found that most craft described as UFO’s originate from maritime environments – they come out of the sea, or in some cases, the ice.’

  Doctor Chandler agreed.

  ‘Sightings of UFO’s coming in and out of the water are not new. Christopher Columbus recorded such a sighting in October, 1492. Crew members of the Santa Maria and Pinta sighted a strange light over the ocean shortly before the landing on Guanahani. The light was reported in Columbus’ journal, Ferdinand Columbus’ Vita del Ammiraglio, the proceedings of the Pleitos Colombinos and some other sources. Columbus described the light as a small wax candle that rose and lifted up, which to a few seemed to be an indication of land. He received a royal reward for the sighting. His son Ferdinand also characterized it as a candle that went up and down, and Columbus wrote that “there exists the possibility of never leaving this legendary sea. My compass acts strangely. This sea seems to have the ability to draw things in from all over the Atlantic like a catch-basin.”‘

  ‘In June 1945,’ Chandler’s assistant went on, ‘the Malta Times reported on a sighting by the brigantine Victoria nine hundred miles east of Adalia, where her crew saw three luminous bodies emerge from the sea into the air. They were visible for ten minutes a half mile from the ship. There were other witnesses who saw this same UFO phenomena from Adalia, Syria and Malta. The luminous bodies each displayed an apparent diameter larger than the size of the full moon.’

  ‘March 22nd, 1870,’ Chandler said, ‘in the equatorial waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the sailors of the English corvette Lady of the Lake saw a lenticular cloud with a long tail advancing against the wind. This form was visible for an hour, wrote Captain F.W. Banner in the ship’s log. The drawing by Banner in his log looked extraordinarily like a flying saucer.

  Commander Graham Bethune, U.S. Navy, was flying his military plane from Iceland to Newfoundland on February 10, 1951 when he saw a UFO coming out of the water. He was about 300 miles from his destination when he and his crew saw a glow on the water like approaching a city at night. As they approached this glow it turned to a monstrous circle of white lights on the water. Then they saw a yellow halo, much smaller than whatever it was launched from, about fifteen miles from them. As the UFO approached the plane and flew alongside it, he could see what he described as a domed craft which emitted a coronal discharge.’

  ‘But even that was nothing compared to three different occasions lasting a total of forty six days when an unidentified submarine was hunted by some fourteen Argentine warships, including an aircraft carrier, and thirty Navy planes,’ the assistant said. ‘The submarine, though audible and occasionally visible to the naked eye, could not be triangulated by sonar, sonar buoys, hydrophones or radar. Despite intense bombing and depth-charging by the most up-to-date US explosives, torpedoes and naval gunfire, it proved impossible to damage or sink the submarines, and the hunt was abandoned on each occasion without success. Captain Ray M Pitts, the leader of the U.S. Navy anti-submarine warfare team involved in the third hunt, confirmed afterwards that it had definitely been some kind of submarine, but he was prevented from saying more by the Navy.’

  Doctor Chandler scanned the map as he spoke.

  ‘The Shag Harbour UFO incident was the reported impact of an unknown large object into waters near Shag Harbour, a fishing village in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia on October 4, 1967. The reports were investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Canadian Coast Guard, the Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Canadian Air Force as well as agencies of the Government of Canada and the U.S. Condon Committee. The Canadian government declared that no known aircraft was involved and the source of the impact remains unknown to this day.’

  ‘They made an official admission?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ the assistant confirmed, ‘although today they say that all documentation regarding the incident was lost – no surprises there, and it’s remarkable how governments keep losing such valuable and explosive documents don’t you think? What we do know was that the craft was about sixty feet long and was hovering while flashing orange lights, then it tilted to about a forty five degree angle and entered the water. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were notified about the incident. A yellow light was reported in the water moving about and leaving a trail of yellow foam. The Canadian Coast Guard was dispatched but by the time they arrived along with other vessels at the point of entry the yellow foam was all that remained.’

  Chandler nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘At least eleven people saw the low-flying lit object head down towards the harbor. Multiple witnesses reported hearing a whistling sound like a bomb, then a whoosh and finally a loud bang. Some reported a flash of light as the object entered the water. Thinking that an airliner or smaller aircraft had crashed into the Sound next to Shag Harbour, some witnesses reported the event to the local Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment. The unknown flying object was never officially identified and was therefore referred to as an unidentified flying object in Canadian government documents, the ones that can no longer be found. A Canadian Naval recovery effort immediately followed during which divers allegedly encountered not one but two objects, which later moved off.’

  Ethan glanced at the Piri Ries map.

  ‘But if Black Knight arrived here thirteen thousand years ago then there can’t be any life forms aboard, right? They’d have long since died out.’

  Chandler nodded.

  ‘I would imagine not,’ he replied. ‘But if they were an aquatic species, and found refuge beneath the ice...’

  Hannah shook her head.

  ‘I’m not buying that. Thirteen thousand years? If they’d survived they would have bred, and surely if they were capable of such technologies as Black Knight they would have found their way off the planet in spacecraft or something?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Chandler admitted with a wry smile, ‘but I do know that it’s not just a human experience for things to go plain wrong.’

  Even as he said it, a low, ominous moan shuddered through the complex once again. Ethan felt the deck beneath his feet vibrate with the force of it, saw the glow sticks around them bounce and dance about, sending their glow shimmering across the ice covered walls.

  ‘Damn it, what the hell is that?’ Hannah gasped.

  Ethan’s eyes caught on a large schematics diagram on the wall next to the one that bore the Piri Reis map, the light from the glow sticks briefly illuminating it. He glimpsed the shape of the base itself, and then extending out to the north a series of conduits or tunnels, some kind of cave system perhaps.

&n
bsp; The hellish moan subsided once more and Ethan hurried across to the image, grabbed a glow stick on his way and held it up to the schematic. He wiped the ice from its surface, the schematic itself sealed inside a plastic sheath, and shone the light directly on it.

  The base was depicted as a small, angular construction in the center of the image, with the tunnel they had used to access it departing to the right of the map. To the north, Ethan could see a complex series of tunnels, many of them winding tightly beneath the glacier and extending many miles into the glacier. He could tell just by looking at them that they were not man-made, their structure devoid of the sharp angles and precisely uniform corners that was the hallmark of humanity.

  ‘What is it?’ Hannah asked as she joined him.

  Ethan continued to shine the light up at the image, and finally he began to understand what he was looking at. Markers on the map depicted bore holes drilled down into the ice that appeared to intercept many of the tunnels leading south toward the base, and small images superimposed on the tunnels portrayed blocky devices and tubes, strange objects that had been inserted into the tunnels by the Nazis decades before.

  Ethan looked at the tunnels, the inserts and the cables running from them to the base and he finally realized what he was looking at.

  ‘Power,’ he said finally, ‘hydroelectric power. The Germans were generating electricity from the water flowing beneath the glacier.’

  Doctor Chandler looked at the map.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘They must have run the base using the generators as back up for the hydroelectric power produced by this system of channels and ducts.’

  Ethan traced some of the lines up and down the map.

  ‘If we could reactivate this system we could re-seal the base and prevent Veer and his men from getting inside.’

  Hannah shook her head.

  ‘This glacier is moving,’ she pointed out. ‘Those tunnels and power cables are most likely nothing more than debris now.’