Elusive Salvation (Star Trek: The Original Series)

by Dayton Ward

  “That’s incredible!” Atwell said, making no effort to hide his astonishment at what he had just witnessed. He had seen this sort of thing only on television. Observing it in person was even more awe-inspiring.

  London chuckled, no doubt amused by his reaction. “I know, right?”

  So intent was his focus on the iceberg, or ice island as he was already calling it, imagining it as the secret lair of some kind of comic book super villain, that it took Atwell an extra moment to notice the dark spot on the side of the glacier that was now exposed thanks to the calving.

  “Do you see that?” he asked, pointing to the odd dark shape sticking out of the ice. Even from well over a mile away, the discoloration was obvious.

  “Yeah, I see it,” replied London. “What is it?”

  It took them almost two full minutes to scale ladders and run the length of the deck to where a set of field glasses was mounted. Several other members of the ship’s crew had already gathered around the oversized naval binoculars, which were aimed at the glacier.

  “Looks like a plane or something,” said the man looking through the glasses.

  “How long you figure it’s been there?” asked another crewmember.

  “Maybe it’s Amelia Earhart.”

  “You bonehead. She crashed in the Pacific.”

  After several minutes of waiting, Atwell was able to get a turn with the glasses. As he peered through the eyepiece, the dark object sticking out of the glacier leapt into sharp relief.

  “So what the hell is it?” he asked, to anyone who might answer.

  Seventeen

  Raven Rock Mountain Complex—

  Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania

  August 9, 1985

  It was a ship.

  “What else could it be?” asked Major Daniel Wheeler as he studied the set of glossy photographs. Each picture bore the ever familiar “TOP SECRET/MAJIC—EYES ONLY” warning stamped in one corner, and each possessed its own coded file number. The one he now held carried the designation MJ12-29I4495-850808D, identifying it as the fourth in this series of twelve photographs hand delivered to him by a courier. The folder in which the pictures had arrived also featured the stern MAJIC stamp. Wheeler knew that each of the photos had been taken by reconnaissance aircraft at an extreme altitude and using state-of-the-art high-speed cameras.

  “If it is a ship, then it’s not like anything we’ve seen before, sir,” said Lieutenant Joseph Moreno, the Marine officer assigned to Wheeler as his aide, from where he stood before the major’s desk. The lieutenant was dressed in green uniform trousers and a tailored short-sleeved khaki shirt with his silver rank insignia displayed on his collar tips, but his chest was notably barren of decoration save for a single multicolored ribbon that told the knowing that Moreno had served a tour at an overseas installation or perhaps aboard a U.S. Navy ship. How long had the man been in the service? Just a few years, if Wheeler’s memory served him, and he was not certain that it did.

  “I’ve already sent people down to the vault to double-check everything just to make sure,” Moreno continued, “but based on what our research team has been able to suss out, the configuration doesn’t match anything in our files.” Stepping closer to the desk, he pointed to one of the papers that had accompanied the photographs inside the file. “Did you see this?”

  Setting aside the photograph, Wheeler reached for the schematic that he recognized as coming from one of the group’s engineers. It was labeled as a conjectural depiction of the object in the pictures, but even with the limited amount of time the research team had been given to study the photos and render opinions and recommendations, it was still a detailed piece of work. The drawings offered several orthographic depictions of the engineer’s best guess as to the craft’s basic form. To Wheeler, the thing looked like a wedge, thin and lean. Comparing the drawings with the photographs, he could see where the artist had been forced to theorize about the ship’s overall shape, given the amount of damage that was apparent on the actual object’s hull and what likely was still buried within the ice. There also was a handwritten note, with an arrow pointing to one end of the vessel, which read, “Bow or Stern? Section Missing?”

  “If the guys downstairs are right about this,” Wheeler said, returning the drawing to the file, “then you’re right. It’s not like anything we’ve come across before.” He tapped his fingers on the photos. “I wonder how long it’s been there.”

  Moreno replied, “There’s no way to be sure, sir. Our first response team has already quarantined the area and started taking ice and soil samples, but it’ll be a while before they figure out anything conclusive.” He checked his watch. “At last report, excavation equipment hadn’t arrived yet, so they won’t be able to get into the thing for a while.”

  Swiveling his chair, Wheeler cast his gaze toward the ceiling tiles, which along with the wall paneling and carpeting did its level best to fool him into thinking he was not sitting inside a mountain. The entire Raven Rock complex was a multilevel maze of tunnels and chambers cut into the subterranean rock. Originally constructed in the 1950s by order of then President Harry Truman, the hardened installation had continued to be expanded and fortified during the ensuing three decades. It was envisioned as both a protective bunker and an emergency operations center for the government as well as the armed forces, predating even the massive Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado.

  Wheeler hated this place. Despite working here for nearly a year since the relocation of this top-secret unit from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, he had never been able to shake what he knew was the ridiculous fear that the entire mountain was going to come crashing down on his head. Though he did not devote much time or energy to such thoughts, one emerged every so often from the recesses of his subconscious, taunting him as he went about his duties. He kept such things to himself, or attempted to push them away with humor, such as thinking the calamitous event would take place while he was in the bathroom.

  “Here’s another question,” Wheeler said, once more setting aside the errant thoughts. “Is it there deliberately, or was it an accident?” He retrieved one of the photographs. “It looks to me like this thing is damaged. If it crashed, then maybe there’s a crew inside, and if it’s been stuck in the ice since it got here, then any bodies we find might be well preserved.”

  Another thought struck him, and he reached again for the engineer’s drawing. “He says here he thinks there’s a piece missing. If I’m looking at this thing the right way, it could be a pretty major hunk of the ship. Some kind of detachable module? Maybe even a lifeboat?”

  “It’s as good a guess as any, sir,” replied Moreno. “Have you run into anything like that before?”

  Wheeler shrugged. “We’ve run into a lot of things where we end up making a best guess. Then we move on to the next thing and end up forgetting about whatever it was that seemed so important at the time. That was just one of the problems with having one group operating under so many different mandates, which is why we came up with this new approach.”

  After more than two decades spent grappling with the numerous issues that came with attempting to understand the realities of extraterrestrial activity on Earth, the clandestine organization known in very limited circles as Majestic 12 had closed in on itself. Shutting out anyone and anything that did not fall within their protected realm, the group’s leadership, who, like the cabal they represented, existed more as whispered theory or unsubstantiated rumor, redirected their attention and their energies away from often competing goals in order to focus on a single, straightforward mission. Rather than simply investigating or truth finding, as some liked to call it, this new initiative’s prime thrust was to locate and retrieve any and all evidence of extraterrestrial activity or technology on Earth, and to exploit those discoveries in order to defend the planet, period. So compartmentalized was this new effort—code named “Project Cygnus”—t
hat Wheeler, himself an MJ-12 veteran, had not known of its existence until he was assigned as its commanding officer thirteen months ago.

  In truth, this effort was a renewal of MJ-12’s original mission, as outlined by President Truman in 1947 following the incident in Roswell. Additional efforts, beginning with Project Sign and Project Grudge and their better-known descendant, Project Blue Book, had concentrated on verification of sightings and encounters by members of the public. After Blue Book’s deactivation in 1970, MJ-12 continued its own research behind a thick veil of secrecy. Most of the people involved with the public face of the air force’s efforts to understand UFOs were reassigned, retired, or simply removed. Assets and information amassed over a twenty-year period were stored at facilities around the country, and much of that treasure trove remained hidden away. Wheeler was certain much of it would never again see the light of day, at least until a genuine alien crisis presented itself.

  Indeed, this pronounced lack of an imminent threat had challenged Project Cygnus during its early years. Activated in 1975 as the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War was coming to a close, the effort had progressed in near total obscurity, its members unhindered by the usual machinations of government and military affairs. However, the lack of verifiable sightings of alien craft or other evidence of extraterrestrial activity had led those few government leaders with knowledge of Cygnus to question its viability. On the other hand, the project retained a handful of faithful champions who knew from experience that the threat from beyond the stars was very real. Project Blue Book had proven that much, regardless of the ignoble ending it had suffered.

  What had prompted the creation of Cygnus in the first place? Wheeler credited that to a rare moment of clarity by the highest levels of leadership, who for the first time seemed to realize that the United States was not the only country on the planet dealing with these sorts of issues. Other governments—whether ally or adversary—had created organizations similar to Majestic 12 and charged them with similar missions, and some of those groups were dealing with the same things faced by MJ-12 and Blue Book. Russia, Japan, and Australia had shared their findings during secret summits held at different locations around the world, and England’s effort was ongoing. Wheeler had read numerous reports submitted by the British military task force that had been dealing with its own extraterrestrial threats for years. Despite the political games being played by the world’s governments, people who toiled within these covert organizations knew that the potential for alien invasion was a global problem, with no regard for the trivial squabbles in which humans chose to embroil themselves.

  Even before his assignment to Cygnus, Wheeler had immersed himself in the legacy of the mission he had undertaken. This meant studying as much of MJ-12’s archives as he could access, along with the repositories of information collected since the 1940s by Blue Book and its predecessors as well as similar organizations and units from around the world. It was equivalent to cramming for a dozen college final exams at once, but the effort had paid off. In less than six months, he had become a leading authority on everything accomplished by Majestic and its satellite organizations and projects, second only to those few men from the original MJ-12 roster who remained alive.

  “Has the scout team come up with an estimate on what it’ll take to get this thing out of the ice?” asked Wheeler, gathering the photographs and returning them to the file.

  Moreno replied, “Not yet, sir. They haven’t even had a chance to retask a satellite to make a pass over the area. All we’ve managed so far is the recon flight that gave us those pictures, from an SR-71 out of Kadena.” The top-secret reconnaissance plane, one of a squadron of such craft assigned to Kadena Air Force Base on the Japanese island of Okinawa, normally was charged with flights over the Soviet Union at extreme altitudes while traveling at more than three times the speed of sound. Redirecting one of the planes back to North America for the flyover had been far simpler and faster than altering the flight path of an orbiting satellite, but Wheeler had already set that action in motion as well. One of the perks of being the Cygnus commanding officer was an almost unlimited ability to call on any resource in the United States’ arsenal of weapons or technology, and he had no problem exercising that authority for something like this.

  “At least we can dig it out, rather than have the damned thing sticking out of the side of the glacier.” Excavating the mysterious object while standing on a ship next to a wall of ice that had already demonstrated a propensity for chunks of it to fall into the sea was not something he wanted to try. It would be far easier to dig the thing out of the ice from the top. “Where are we with the icebreaker crew?”

  “The Polar Sea reached Tuktoyaktuk this morning, sir. It was late thanks to all of this, but our cover story is that ice conditions in the Amundsen Gulf slowed the ship’s arrival.” Moreno shrugged. “The Canadian government wasn’t very happy, particularly because of the observer team traveling with the ship, but our liaison in the RCAF is helping to smooth things over.”

  Wheeler nodded. Though the Royal Canadian Air Force had no specific counterpart organization to Majestic 12—at least, none he was aware of—they had been working with the United States for years thanks to efforts like the Distant Early Warning Line radar tracking stations stretching across Alaska and Canada.

  “So the observers are cooperating?”

  Moreno chuckled. “That’s one way to describe it, sir. They’re not happy, but they’re not raising too much of a fuss. I think they’re tired of shipboard coffee. They did last a whole week, though.”

  “In the crew’s defense, their coffee is better than ours.” Pushing away from his desk, Wheeler stood and straightened his uniform jacket. “What about the debriefings?”

  “The first interviews are already under way, starting with the captain and officers, with the rest of the crew to be completed in the next couple of days. By all accounts, only a small percentage of the crew even really saw anything, but our team’s talking to everyone.”

  Wheeler stepped around his desk on his way to his office door. “Good. Let’s get those done as fast as possible, and let the Polar Sea get on her way. That ship’s already caused enough trouble, but at least it gives us some cover.” Reaching the door, he stopped and turned back to Moreno. “Ever been to Canada?”

  The lieutenant shook his head. “No, sir.”

  “Dress warm. We leave in an hour.”

  Eighteen

  The Northwest Passage—Location Classified

  August 12, 1985

  Wheeler had seen something like this in a movie once.

  “That is incredible,” he said to no one in particular as he studied the object extending from the ice. Even the stark clarity of the SR-71 recon photos had not done proper justice to this thing’s size. The exposed portion rose nearly ten feet into the air, and its circumference was at least twice that. Dark metal reflected the afternoon sun, appearing to have been cast in a single piece rather than assembled from individual plates or other components. Wheeler ran a hand along its smooth length, crouching down to where metal met ice. There were several dents and scars marring its surface. The protrusion’s ghostly outline descended into the ice, and thanks to the sunlight, he was just able to make out the silhouette of something larger, several feet below the surface. He tried to picture what the rest of this thing must look like. How close had the computer imagery created from the photographs come to portraying reality?

  We’ll find out soon enough, I suppose.

  “You’re sure about the radiation readings?”

  Standing next to Lieutenant Moreno and, like everyone else, dressed in a bright orange parka, Doctor Kayla Iacovino replied, “Nothing on the Geiger counter, Major. A thermal scan shows some very, very minor activity inside, but our best guess right now is a battery of some kind.” She reached up to push aside her parka’s thick collar and scratch the tip of her nose, which w
as all that was exposed beneath her oversized goggles.

  “Tell me this doesn’t beat stomping around some volcano,” said Wheeler, unable to suppress a grin.

  Iacovino smiled. “Depends, sir. If it’s Mauna Loa, I’d be all right with it.”

  “I’ll see if I can’t find a reason to send you to Hawaii once this is all over.” Wheeler had read about the volcano’s eruption the previous year after being quiet for nearly a decade. Though Iacovino had not been the one to suggest the eruption might be the result of extraterrestrial activity, she had been the first to volunteer to fly to Hawaii and investigate. Wheeler gave her credit for lodging her request while maintaining a straight face.

  A geologist by profession, Iacovino and a number of civilian scientists representing several fields and disciplines had been recruited by the air force to assist in sensitive matters such as the one buried in the ice before them. Though examination and interaction with alien technology had not been her original course of study, Iacovino and other specialists like her had more than proved themselves as invaluable assets to Majestic’s mission dating back to the 1940s. There were those in the higher levels of military leadership who questioned the use of civilians, often expressing worry that they might share secrets with friends or family, but Wheeler had never given much thought to such concerns. Treason and federal prison were frightening prospects to anyone regardless of whether they wore a uniform. In his experience, people like Iacovino were quite happy to sign the same nondisclosure agreements he had in exchange for the unique opportunities provided by working for a top-secret government program that investigated aliens.

  “A power source?”

  Iacovino shrugged. “Could be. No idea what it is or how it works though.” She gestured toward the object. “We need to get inside to find out.”