“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
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.
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.