“In 1946, as soon as the material and men were available, the United States government mounted what was called Operation High Jump. You can look the mission up. It was well documented. However, what no one seemed to wonder was why the government was so interested in Antarctica in 1946. And why did they dispatch dozens of ships and airplanes to the southernmost continent so quickly after the end of the war?
“It was a very extensive operation. The largest launched in the history of mankind up to that point. High Jump took so many pictures of Antarctica that they haven’t all even been looked at yet, fifty years later! The expedition surveyed over sixty percent of the coastline and looked at over half a million square miles of land that had never before been seen by man.
“But the real success of High Jump occurred when they picked up signs of metal buried under the ice in that eight-hundred-square-mile box that special attention was paid to, which is what they were secretly after in the first place.”
Von Seeckt leaned forward. “Do you know how thick the ice is down there? At some places it is three miles deep! The current altitude of the land underneath the ice is actually below sea level, but that is only because the weight of the ice on top depresses the continent. If the ice were removed, the land would rise up miles and miles! Even with all the expeditions—High Jump included—only about one percent of the surface area of Antarctica has been traversed by man.
“Antarctica contains ninety percent of the world’s ice and snow and it is a most formidable foe, as those men who were operating secretly under the cover of Operation High Jump found out. A plane with skis landed at the site where their instruments had picked up the metal signal—which, despite the aid of the drawings on the tablets, was found only after five months of searching by thousands and thousands of men.
“But the weather down there is unpredictable and brutal at best. A storm moved in and the plane was destroyed, the crew frozen to death before they could be rescued. A second mission was mounted to the site. It was determined that the reflected signal was coming from over a mile and a half down in the ice. We did not have the technology at the time to do either of the two things required to explore further: to survive on the ice at that point long enough, and to drill down far enough.
“So, for nine years we bided our time and prepared. Besides, we had the two bouncers in Nevada to work on. We weren’t sure what was down there in Antarctica, but from the symbols on the tablets it looked like there would be more bouncers, so the priority of the recovery effort was not as high as it might have been otherwise.”
“You mean there were other sites and other symbols and other priority levels?” Kelly asked.
Von Seeckt looked at her. “Very astute, young lady, but let us stay with the subject at hand. In 1955 the Navy launched Operation Deep Freeze, under the leadership of Admiral Byrd, the foremost expert on Antarctica. The operation established five stations along the coast and three in the interior. At least that is what was announced to the press and recorded in the history books.
“A ninth, secret station was also established. One that has never been listed on any map. In 1956 I flew there in the beginning of what passes for summer in the Antarctic. Scorpion Station, as it was called, was over eight hundred miles in from the coast in the middle of—Von Seeckt searched for the words, then shrugged—“in the middle of nowhere, actually. Just ice for miles and miles, which is why the spot was so hard to find in the first place. I was shown the location on the map, but what does it matter? The ice sheet was two and a half miles thick at that point.
“They had taken the entire summer of 1955 to simply move in the equipment they needed. They began drilling in 1956. It took four months to get down the mile and a half to the target. They finally punched through to a cavity in the ice, which was very fortunate. We had been afraid that perhaps the bouncers—if that was what was down there—had been covered over with ice and were frozen into the ice cap. If that had been the case we would have had no hope of recovery. But no, the drill bit broke through to open air. They sent down cameras and looked around. Yes, there were more bouncers in the cavity.
“Then they had to widen the shaft, make it big enough for a person to go down and look. It was amazing! There was a chamber hollowed out of the ice. Not quite as big as Hangar Two, but very big. There were the other seven bouncers. Lined up in a row. Perfectly preserved—everything left in Antarctica is perfectly preserved,” Von Seeckt added. “Did you know that they found food at camps along the coast that had been left over a hundred years, and it was still edible?”
“Is that why those bouncers were left in that location?” Kelly asked. “So they would be so well preserved?”
“I do not believe so,” Von Seeckt said. “The two left here in Nevada were functional. The desert air is very good at preserving things also, and they were out of the elements inside the cavern with the mothership.”
“Then why Antarctica?” she asked.
“I do not know for sure.”
“A guess, perhaps?” Turcotte threw in. “Surely you must have an idea or two?”
“I think they were left there because it is perhaps the most inaccessible place on Earth to leave something.”
“So whoever left them didn’t want them found?” Turcotte asked.
“It appears that way. Or at least they only wanted them found when the finders had adequate technology to brave the Antarctic conditions,” Von Seeckt said.
“But they left the mothership and two bouncers back in Nevada,” Kelly noted. “And that was more accessible than Antarctica.”
“The terrain and climate in Nevada is more accessible to man,” Von Seeckt agreed. “But the cavern the mothership was hidden in wasn’t. We were very fortunate to stumble across it, and it required an effort to blast into the site. No, I believe the ships were hidden with the intention they not be found.”
“Why seven in Antarctica and two in Nevada?” Kelly wondered out loud.
“I don’t know,” Von Seeckt said. “We would have to ask whoever left them.”
“Go on with what happened in Antarctica,” Turcotte prodded.
“It took us three years to bring the bouncers up. First the engineers had to widen the shaft to forty feet circumference—and remember, they could only work six months out of the year. Then they had to dig out eight intermediate stopping points on the way up, in order to bring them up in stages. Then, it was necessary to tractor the bouncers to the coast and load them onto a Navy ship for transport back to the States. All in all it was a fantastic engineering job.
“Then we began the real work back at Area 51 trying to figure out how they flew. We had been working on the first two, but with nine, we could afford to disassemble a few. After all these years we can fly them, but we still don’t know how the engines work. And even though they can be flown, I do not believe we are able to use them to anywhere near the limits of their capabilities. There is still equipment on board the craft that we don’t know how to operate and in fact whose purpose we’re ignorant of.” Von Seeckt then told Kelly the story about the engineering mishap on the bouncer engine. She found all this fascinating. If it wasn’t for Johnny she’d be on the wire right now, breaking the story. But she knew this is what Johnny would do for her if she had disappeared.
“What else did the tablets show?” Turcotte asked.
“Some other locations. Other symbols. It was all very incomplete,” Von Seeckt said.
“For instance?” Kelly said.
“I do not remember it all. The work was compartmentalized very early on. I was not allowed complete access to the tablets, which were moved down to the facility at Dulce early on in the project. Nor was I allowed to see the results of the research at Dulce. The last time I was in Dulce was 1946. I do not remember it very well. I do not believe they have had much success with the tablets, otherwise we would have seen the results at Area 51.”
Kelly thought that was odd. Her reporter’s instincts were tingling. Had they cut Von Seeckt out
of the inner circle years ago? Or was Von Seeckt holding something back?
“That is why we need to link up with this Nabinger fellow,” Von Seeckt continued. “If he can decipher the high runes, then the mystery may be solved not only of how the equipment works, but also of who left the equipment and why.”
Kelly caught herself before the words came out of her mouth. This was not what Von Seeckt had said back in the hotel room. Just a few hours ago he was focused on stopping the mothership. Damn Johnny. She was stuck in this car with these two because of him. Kelly slumped down in the passenger seat and the miles passed in silence.
CHAPTER 16
Miami, Florida
T - 107 Hours, 15 Minutes
With only fifteen minutes before his flight was scheduled to depart, Peter Nabinger debated whether he should check his answering machine, but impatience won out. He punched in his long-distance code and then his number.
Two rings and the machine kicked in. After the greeting he hit his access code, then the message retrieval.
“Professor Nabinger, this is Werner Von Seeckt returning your call. Your message was most interesting. I do know of the power of the sun, but I need to know about the rest of the message. Both what you have and what I have. I am going to a place where there are more runes. Join me. Phoenix. Twenty-seven sixty-five Twenty-fourth street. Apartment B-twelve. The twelfth. In the morning.”
The message ended. Nabinger stared at the handset for a few moments, then headed toward the gate with a bounce in his step.
Las Vegas, Nevada
Lisa Duncan was in her hotel room in Las Vegas. Gullick’s reasoning about the accommodation was that there were no suitable quarters available at Area 51 for her. She thought that was a bunch of bullshit, just like a lot of what she had seen and heard so far about Majestic-12, more commonly known as Majic-12.
Lisa Duncan had everything that was available in the official files about Majestic-12, and it was a pretty slim reading file. Majestic-12 had been started in 1942 when President Roosevelt signed a classified presidential order initiating the project. At first, no one had quite understood the strange facts that were being uncovered with the transfer by the British in the fall of 1942 of a German physicist, Werner Von Seeckt, and a piece of sophisticated machinery in a black box.
The British had not known what exactly was in the box, since they couldn’t open it, except that it was radioactive.
Since, in those days of the Manhattan Project, nuclear matters were the province of the United States, Von Seeckt and the box were sent over the ocean.
At first, it had been thought that the box was of German development. But Von Seeckt was clearly ignorant, and the contents of the box, once it was opened, raised a whole new set of questions. If it had been German, then most certainly they would already have won the war. There were symbols on the inside of the box—which they now knew belonged to a language called high rune—that the early Majestic-12 scientists puzzled over. One thing was clear, though: there was a map outline of North America on which a location had been marked— somewhere in southern Nevada, they determined.
An expedition armed with detecting equipment was sent out, and after several months of searching they discovered the mothership cavern. The men of Majestic-12 had quickly identified the black metal of the box container with the metal used in the struts of the mothership. They now had more information, but were no closer to figuring out who had left the equipment, or why the box had been placed in the pyramid and the ships left out here in the desert. The other bouncers had been discovered in Antarctica from maps found in Hangar Two. And they had been able to piece together that the Germans had most likely been led to the hidden chamber under the Great Pyramid by maps they had discovered elsewhere.
The MJ-12 program had remained the most highly classified project in the United States for the past fifty-five years, at first because of the atomic information. Then, after the Soviets had finally detonated their own bomb—using information stolen from the United States—the existence of the mothership and the bouncers was kept secret for several reasons.
Duncan turned the page in the briefing book and looked at the official reasons. One was the uncertainty of the public’s reaction should the information be released—a topic Dr. Slayden was supposed to cover in his briefing.
A second reason was that once flying the bouncers had been mastered, in the mid-fifties, the craft were incorporated into the Strategic Air Command on an emergency use-only basis. All of the bouncers were fitted with external racks for nuclear payloads to be used in case of national emergency. It was felt that because of their speed, maneuverability, and nonexistent radar signature, the bouncers would be a last-ditch method to get to the heartland of the Soviet Union to deliver a fatal blow in case of all-out war.
Another reason, spawned by the Cold War, was simply security. The Russians had been able to develop their own atomic weapons off of plans stolen from the U.S. It was feared that, even though the American scientists couldn’t figure out the propulsion system of the bouncers or even, for so many years, how to get into the mothership, the Russians might do a better job. That fear was especially heightened after the Russians lobbed Sputnik up into space, beating the United States to the punch.
One thing the report didn’t mention, though, Duncan knew, was the existence of Operation Paperclip and its effect on the MJ-12 project. Paperclip was officially launched in 1944 as the war in Europe was winding down, but Duncan felt that Paperclip really began the day Von Seeckt was shipped over from England to the United States.
Paperclip—a rather innocuous name for a very deceitful operation. As the war in Europe was ending, the United States government was already looking ahead. There was a treasure trove of German scientists waiting to be plundered in the ashes of the Third Reich. That most of those scientists were Nazis mattered little to those who had invented Paperclip.
When Duncan had first read of Paperclip, she’d been shocked by the blatant incongruity of the situation. The end justifies the means was the motto of those who recruited and illegally allowed the scientists into the United States. Yet at the same time, colleagues of those same scientists were being tried for war crimes where the defense of the end justifying the means had been ruled immoral. In many cases intelligence officers from the JIOA, Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, were snatching Nazi scientists away from army war-crimes units. Both groups were hunting the same men but with very different goals in mind.
Despite the fact that President Truman had signed an executive order banning the immigration of Nazis into the United States, the practice continued unabated, all in the name of national security.
Majestic-12 had started with Werner Von Seeckt—an undisputed Nazi—and it had continued over the years, using whatever means were required. Several of the scientists used in the early work on the bouncers and mothership were Nazis, recruited by Paperclip. While the names of some of the former Germans working on the NASA space project were highly publicized, the vast majority of the work covered by Paperclip went on unobserved. When news of the project became public, the government claimed that Paperclip had been discontinued in 1947. Yet Duncan had affidavits from an interested senator’s office that the project had continued for decades beyond that date.
One of the things that disturbed Duncan the most about the present state of affairs was not so much the work being done at Area 51 with the mothership and the bouncers.
What bothered her was what General Gullick was hiding. She was convinced he was holding something back. And she had a strong feeling it had something to do with other aspects of the MJ-12 program that they weren’t showing her.
The senator who had provided Duncan with information on Paperclip was under pressure from several Jewish groups to disclose the history of the project, with the possibility in mind of prosecuting some of those involved.
Duncan was concerned about the past, but she was more worried about the future. While the German physicists had gone to MJ-1
2 and the German rocket scientists had gone to NASA, the largest group of Nazi scientists involved in Paperclip had yet to be uncovered: the biological and chemical warfare specialists.
As advanced as German rocketry had been at the end of the war with the V-2 and jet aircraft, their advancements in the field of biological and chemical warfare had been chilling.
With plenty of human beings to experiment on, the Germans had gone far beyond what the Allies had even begun to fear. While the Americans were still stockpiling mustard gas as their primary chemical weapon, the Germans had three much more efficient and deadly gases by war’s end: tabun, soman, and sarin—the latter of which the American military immediately appropriated for its own use after the war.
Where were all these biological and chemical scientists whom Paperclip had saved from prosecution? Duncan wondered. What had they been working on all these years?
She put the briefing book down in aggravation. There were too many questions and everything was going too rapidly. Not only was this whole Paperclip issue a problem, but she also wondered about the Mothership test itself. Was Gullick moving ahead quickly with the flight for reasons that weren’t apparent, and in doing so was he overlooking problems with the mothership and its propulsion system?
She most definitely remembered the feeling of nausea she’d had in the hangar during the test.
She’d been sent here by the President’s advisers to check on the situation and look into the potential problems that revealing the existence of the MJ-12 project might create.
After all, the President had been in office three years already and his administration by default would be implicated in any cover-up.
She flipped open the lid on her laptop and went to work, typing out her findings so far.
CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET, Q
CLEARANCE, ADDRESSEE ONLY
Area 51 Page 17
