Lopez walked through with the sergeant onto D-Block, a high security wing of the centre dedicated to holding high-profile inmates. The block was deserted, steel tables and benches bolted to the floor.
‘Has he said anything?’ Lopez asked.
‘No,’ the sergeant replied. ‘But then, like you asked, we didn’t check in on him much.’
A gruesome symphony of whoops rang out from the tiers nearby as the population caught sight of Lopez striding through the block below. She glanced up and saw dark faces appear at barred cell doors, stark against the orange correctional jump suits as they shouted and bellowed profanities at her. She ignored them as she followed the sergeant through a door at the end of the block that led to a small corridor with three heavy security doors along one wall.
‘Has he been held alone?’ Lopez asked the sergeant.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘Newcomers are held in four man cells, but your guy’s tests aren’t due back until tomorrow. He’ll go on the block overnight, then he’ll be on Twelve Main after that.’
Twelve Main was the high security wing where cells were walled with stainless steel to prevent the prisoners from ripping the latrines and sinks out to use as weapons. The sergeant walked to the farthest door and unlocked it, pushing it open as he led her inside.
Cuffed to a table inside was Victor Wilms. Lopez was prepared for the fact that Wilms would have been traumatized, but she was not ready for the sight that greeted her. Wilms’ face was shaded with deep, angry welts of black and blue, one eye swollen entirely shut and an unhealthy shade of purple and yellow. His hair was in disarray, dried blood caking the corner of his swollen lips where he had been savagely beaten. His head hung low on a weary neck, one eye loosely focused on Lopez as she moved to sit opposite him.
‘He’s up for more tests in the morning,’ the sergeant revealed as he moved to close the door. ‘HIV is rife in the system and let’s just say your boy had a rough old night with his cellies.’
The sergeant closed the door and Lopez looked again at Wilms. His skin was pale and haggard, his gaze hidden behind bruised sclera as though he were gazing at her from the far side of the tunnel to Hell.
‘Sleep well?’ Lopez asked brightly.
Wilms looked at her for a moment and then a weak laugh trickled from his lips, gaps visible where several of his teeth had been knocked out. The movement provoked more bleeding and Wilms winced at the pain. His features pinched tightly as his one good eye closed and his shoulders trembled as his bitter laugh dissolved into a pitiful sob.
Lopez watched as Wilms huddled over himself, his shoulders hunched and his head almost touching the table between them. Lopez, despite her hatred, could not help but feel some sort of pity for what he must have endured in the last few hours. That he had probably been gang raped was not lost on Lopez, and the beating may have occurred before, during or after his ordeal. Pedophiles were among the most reviled of convicts, and although Wilms was innocent of that particularly heinous crime he had caused more than enough suffering in other ways during his life to be deserving of such punishment. While other prisoners would have had forged into their psyche the knowledge that to show weakness, especially in front of other men, was to condemn themselves to a life of misery at the hands of others, Wilms had spent his life hiding behind money and power. He had no defense against the rough and tumble physicality of the real world, and such people were referred to inside Riker’s Island as “food”, for the bigger fish.
‘It’s going to get worse,’ Lopez said, keeping her tone stern. ‘We won’t let you die in here, Victor. We’ll make damned sure you survive the rapes, beatings and stabbings. You’ve got years of this to look forward to. Either tell me everything that I need to know or this visit will be the last you’ll ever see of the outside world.’
Wilms continued to sob quietly as Lopez leaned forward further.
‘What is KIL?’ she demanded.
Wilms’ sobbing died away as he sucked in a ragged breath of air and finally managed to lift his head to look at her.
‘I want immunity,’ he said, ‘before I say anything.’
Lopez shook her head. ‘You’re down for life, Victor, that’s not going to change.’
‘House arrest,’ Wilms uttered, his voice distorted by his swollen lips. ‘I want out of here.’
Lopez raised an eyebrow and shrugged. ‘That might happen, but I’ll need something solid before I walk out of here or you’re going straight back to your buddies in that cell, so start talking fast.’
Wilms sighed, and Lopez realized that every last ounce of this man’s resistance truly had been destroyed by a single night in a real jail. She wondered briefly whether she could pull this stunt off with the other members of Majestic Twelve.
‘What do you want from me?’ he asked in a ghostly, ragged whisper.
Lopez felt a tingle of excitement that she suppressed rapidly, unwilling to reveal to Wilms her anticipation of finally learning what everything they had been fighting for was about.
‘Majestic Twelve,’ she said, ‘who are they? What do they want? Why do they know about this base in Antarctica?’
Wilms did not look at her as he replied, his battered face staring down at the grubby Formica between them.
‘The Silver Legion,’ he said.
‘The what?’
‘The Silver Legion of America, also known as the Silver Shirts, was an underground American fascist organization founded in 1933 by William Dudley Pelley that was headquartered in North Carolina,’ Wilms said. ‘It was a white supremacist group, based partly on Hitler’s Brownshirts. Two years after their founding, and with Nazi funding, the Silver Shirts had built a fortified headquarters in the Los Angeles hills and had some fifteen thousand members. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 killed off most support for the legion, but a few die-hards remained. They were ready four years later when the Nazis were defeated to bring into America survivors of the Third Reich along with all of the wealth that was pilfered from Germany in the last days of the war.’
Lopez sat stunned in her chair as she digested what Wilms had told her.
‘We’ve been fighting the Nazis all this time?’
Wilms continued to speak, his voice monotone, his eyes cast down as though he were spilling a lifetime of regret across the table between them.
‘After the war, twelve former members of the Silver Legion used their new found wealth to invest heavily into the industrial-military complex, just as their Nazi comrades had done. They prospered, became powerful, and when in 1947 the first hints of extra-terrestrial technology coming into the hands of the United States government began to circulate, they were there to pick up the threads of what had begun in Germany many years before with Die Glocke. Majestic Twelve was formed and the rest is history, although you won’t find that in any of the official records.’
Lopez sat in silence for a moment, reflecting on just how closely MJ-12’s actions and power were based on the Third Reich’s regime of oppression, fascism, deception and financial power. Hadn’t Hitler burned down the Reichstag in order to declare a false-flag war against Communism and waged genocide against the Jews despite being of Jewish descent himself? Lopez was no student of history, but she knew enough to figure that MJ-12 could indeed be descended from Nazi survivors of the Second World War, which also suggested that Wilms was telling the truth. Lopez decided to go for broke.
‘What does KIL stand for?’ Lopez demanded again.
This time, there was no resistance.
‘Kinetic Incendiary Launch,’ Wilms uttered.
‘What?’
‘KIL,’ Wilms whispered. ‘That’s what it stands for.’
‘Explain.’
Wilms sucked in another painful breath.
‘It’s a satellite that my company began putting into orbit in 1974,’ he mumbled, his voice altered by his swollen lips and missing teeth. ‘The purpose of the satellite is to give Majestic Twelve the ability to launch a nuclear grade assault on a t
arget of their choosing anywhere on Earth.’
Lopez stared at Wilms in horror for a long moment. ‘They have a nuclear capability?’
‘No,’ Wilms replied, his voice a hoarse whisper. ‘The Kinetic Launch system relies upon gravitational energy. The impact of any such weapon would equal or exceed a nuclear detonation without the complications of radioactive fallout.’
Lopez’s mind reeled.
‘Where is this satellite of yours?’ she asked.
Wilms looked up slowly at her and despite his suffering she thought she saw a gleam of vengeance twinkling in his one open eye.
‘By now, it should be almost over Antarctica.’
Lopez was out of her chair and running within an instant.
*
Defense Intelligence Agency Watch Station,
Manhattan
Lopez dashed into the watch station even as Hellerman and Jarvis were coming the other way, having driven at a breakneck pace across the city. She had called in what she had learned from Wilms straight away, but it had taken time to get back to Manhattan.
‘Did you find anything?’ she asked desperately. ‘Was Wilms telling the truth?’
‘Oh yeah,’ Hellerman replied, ‘he was telling the truth all right. You’re not going to believe what this guy’s been up to.’
Lopez had been secretly hoping that Wilms’ story had been a bluff to get him out of Rikers, but now she saw Jarvis’s gloomy expression as he spoke.
‘Wilms’ telecommunications company launched twelve satellites in the 1970s,’ he said. ‘Trouble is, his network only has four in orbit.’
‘Wilms used NASA launches and also purchased other launch vehicles in Russia to enable him to launch more objects into orbit, all of them part of his KIL system,’ Hellerman explained.
‘How the hell do they work?’ Lopez asked.
Hellerman showed Lopez to a computer monitor, where an image of a satellite in low Earth orbit awaited.
‘A kinetic orbital strike is the act of attacking a planetary surface with an inert projectile, where the destructive force comes from the kinetic energy of the projectile impacting at very high velocities,’ Hellerman explained. ‘The satellite contains a magazine of tungsten rods, each some twenty feet long, and a directional thrust system. When a strike is ordered, the satellite releases one of the rods out of its orbit and into a suborbital trajectory that intersects the target. The rod accelerates as it approaches periapsis and the target due to gravity, reaching tremendous velocities shortly before impact. The rods are shaped to maximize terminal velocity.’
Lopez’s mind reeled. ‘How fast would they be moving when they hit the planet?’
‘Roughly five miles per second,’ Hellerman replied.
‘That’s fast,’ Lopez said. ‘How much damage could they cause?’
‘Hard to predict because there are so many variables and as far as we know, they’ve never been built or tested before,’ Hellerman explained. ‘The Outer Space Treaty prohibits weapons of mass destruction in orbit or outer space. However, it only prohibits nuclear, biological and chemical weapons as part of its statement. Since the most likely form of kinetic ammunition is inert tungsten rods, in most cases kinetic bombardment remains legal.’
‘If you can afford to build them and put them in orbit,’ Jarvis replied.
‘How come everybody’s not doing this?’ Lopez asked.
‘They have done in the past,’ Hellerman pointed out. ‘During the Vietnam War there was limited use of the Lazy Dog bomb, a steel projectile shaped like a conventional bomb but only about one inch long and a half inch in diameter. A piece of sheet metal was folded to make the fins and welded to the rear of the projectile. These were dumped from aircraft onto enemy troops and had a similar effect as a machine gun fired vertically. Observers visiting a battlefield after an attack said it looked like the ground had been ‘tenderized’ using a gigantic fork. Bodies had been penetrated longitudinally from shoulder to lower abdomen.’
‘Project Thor was a research program at Boeing in the 1950s,’ Jarvis added, ‘which is pretty much what Wilms must have based his own design on. The system most often described is an orbiting tungsten telephone pole with small fins and a computer in the back for guidance. The system described in a 2003 United States Air Force report was that of a twenty foot long, one foot diameter tungsten pole controlled with a satellite and capable of hitting any spot on the globe with a velocity of around Mach ten.’
Lopez looked at the map of Antarctica displayed on a screen nearby.
‘Can we track this thing?’ she asked.
‘Cheyenne Mountain is already providing us with a tracking solution,’ Jarvis explained. ‘The team at Cheyenne are calculating orbital trajectories and such like as we speak.’
Lopez turned to Hellerman.
‘How long would it take between launch and impact of one of these tungsten weapons?’
‘The time between deorbit and impact would only be a few minutes, and depending on the orbits the system would have a world-wide range.’
‘Damage radius?’ she pressed him.
Hellerman sighed.
‘In the case of the system mentioned in the 2003 Air Force report above, a six meter long tungsten cylinder impacting at Mach ten has a kinetic energy equivalent to nearly twelve tons of TNT. Some sources suggest a speed of nearly forty thousand feet per second, which for the aforementioned rod would amount to a kinetic energy equivalent to one hundred twenty tons of TNT.’
Lopez looked again at the map and she knew that they were running out of time.
‘Wilms must already have tasked his satellite with the hit,’ she said. ‘Is there any way we can knock it out of orbit or intercept it in some way?’
Jarvis shook his head.
‘There are no other options,’ he replied, ‘and with Wilms out of the picture Majestic Twelve would likely have taken control of the KIL Satellite.’
‘And it’s the perfect kill,’ Hellerman said. ‘The ice will refreeze the impact zone within days. Nobody will ever know what happened down there.’
‘The satellite must have codes,’ Lopez said, ‘a way for us to hack it.’
‘Get back to Wilms and get them from him,’ Jarvis ordered. ‘Any way you like, just get them or this will all be over long before we can get Ethan and Hannah out of there!’
***
XLII
Antarctica
‘We’re almost there.’
The interior of the Seehund was bitterly cold as Ethan guided the submarine using the electric motors toward a shimmering veil of water above them. From below he had almost missed the submarine pens in the gloom, only the faint halo of illumination coming from glow sticks tossed across the docks revealing its location at the last moment.
Ethan gently angled the hydroplanes upward and prepared to surface as he looked down at Amy.
‘We don’t know what’s happened here since we left, so be ready for anything.’
Amy nodded, her features pinched with concern as the Seehund rose up and Ethan peered up out of the dome as the submarine finally broke the surface of the pens. To his relief he saw Riggs and Del Toro rush to the side of the dock with mooring lines as Ethan held the submarine in position alongside the dock and they tied the vessel down. Ethan shut down the engine and immediately reached out for the dome latches, unlocking the seals and pushing the dome up and open.
A waft of clean, cold air breezed in to the submarine and Ethan breathed it in deeply as he levered himself out of the cockpit.
‘Did you get it?’ Riggs asked.
Ethan nodded as he jumped down onto the dock and stretched his legs, Amy jumping down after him. ‘We got it. It’s attached to the cable on the bow.’
Riggs looked at the cable.
‘Good,’ he replied. ‘Let’s get it out of the water and into the base. The sooner we get this sorted, the sooner we can get the hell out of here.’
Ethan saw Hannah hurry across to him. ‘We lost contact and t
hought that you’d both gone under.’
‘We almost did,’ Ethan admitted as he watched the SEALs hurriedly attach the cable to a winch on the edge of the dock. ‘I don’t know what that thing is but it’s lighter than we expected. It came up without any trouble but it shuts off any electrical devices within a few yards of it.’
Doctor Chandler’s voice reached him from behind.
‘Electromagnetic interference,’ he called out as he descended the steps onto the dock. ‘A common event during UFO encounters.’
‘And lighting storms,’ Amy countered as she turned to watch the SEALs begin to winch the object up out of the water. ‘Just because it’s charged doesn’t mean it’s from another planet.’
‘Doesn’t mean it’s not, either.’
‘That’s not a logical argument,’ Amy protested. ‘You can’t prove a negative. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you don’t have…’
‘Will you two cut it out?’ Hannah snapped. ‘Look, you can test the damned thing to your heart’s content now.’
Ethan watched as the SEALs heaved on the winch and something below them in the water loomed out of the darkness. As he watched, the water in the pen began to glow a luminescent blue as fresh bacteria plumes began appearing on the water.
The winch heaved again and the tip of the object broke the surface. Ethan could see that it was as black as night, a sort of metal that seemed entirely smooth and yet matt in appearance, reflecting none of the lights illuminating the pen. As the SEALs hauled on the winch, more of the object was lifted clear of the water and he heard Amy gasp in surprise.
The object was indeed bell-shaped, roughly twelve feet high and perhaps ten feet in circumference at its base. Ethan could already see that there were odd markings around the rim of the base as the water streamed off the object, like angular hieroglyphics that were etched into the solid metal itself. The object was lifted clear of the water, and Ethan stepped back as the SEALs swung it around on the crane and gently lowered it onto the dock.
The Black Knight Page 27
