“I can vouch he’s telling it as it is,” said Durand. “The military history courses I took when I did my training at Groton lines up with what Juan’s saying, for sure.”
Sam’s angry baritone voice boomed through the crowded space, “So one of Hitler’s Nazi scientists actually put the first man, an American, on the moon?”
Juan responded, “Well, I doubt it actually says that on the About Us page on NASA’s website, but that’s more or less how it happened. It was literally a space race. We were racing the Russians, the communists, for the high ground. Space.”
Jack had a question for Juan. “Okay, so getting back to Kammler, you’re saying that he basically went missing, vanished without a trace after the war and each side thought the other had him, but he fled here, on the U-Boat and with this secret weapon?”
“When you say it like that, it sounds a bit thin,” Juan responded, “but the diary and the sealed compartment support the proposition. We’re scientists… we just follow the evidence. The question I’m asking is why they built this place. It must have been a mammoth undertaking, even by Third Reich standards and they were known for doing things in a big way.”
Coulson stroked his chin in thought. “I was thinking the same thing. This place has virtually zero strategic value from a military perspective. Could it have been for scientific or engineering reasons?” he asked Juan and Dave.
“We’ve only had a quick look around, but there’s no evidence of laboratories, manufacturing facilities or anything much of anything really, other than some decrepit generators and a few crates of ammunition of some sort,” replied Dave with a shrug.
“That only leaves one possible explanation,” Jack said, shaking his head as he said it. That couldn’t be right. His eyes tracked to the ceiling of the pokey mess room. Impossible.
But the heavily armed force up there on the ice suggested Jack was right.
He wished he wasn’t, but he kept his thoughts to himself, for the moment.
Chapter 30
“I think the U-Boat commander wanted someone to find this.” Durand held up the old log. “He’s documented a lot more than just operational notes. He seems fixated on something he calls ‘Die Glocke’, The Bell.”
They were all enthralled by Kapitänleutnant Sohler’s handwritten account by now and waited eagerly for Durand to read and translate each page at a painfully slow pace. Sam had even stopped wolfing down the boats rations as he listened raptly to the story as it unfolded.
“It’s not clear how he knows this, but Sohler claims the device, The Bell, was designed as a propulsion system to be used on aircraft to deliver speed and maneuverability beyond anything possible with the jet engines of the day.” Durand paused and looked around the room, “How does a propulsion system become weaponized? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe we’ll all find out if you get back to the log entries,” Sam suggested.
Durand’s finger traced each word in German across the page and his lips moved as he read to himself in a whisper, like a preschooler. Other than that, the room was silent. Even Captain Jameson remained silent, his mind preoccupied with the crazy events of the past 24 hours.
Finally Durand’s finger stopped tracing the lines on the page and his face paled noticeably.
“If this is true, then God help us.” The hands of the man who made a career of patrolling the depths in a steel tube with a nuclear reactor trembled as he lowered the wartime log.
“What is it, XO?” Jameson asked. He hadn’t known the man long enough to have the measure of him, but you didn’t get to be the XO of an attack submarine by being a pussy. Jameson wanted to know what had his officer so spooked.
“I don’t understand some of the jargon, but he’s suggesting that Kammler revealed to him how the thing works…”
“And?” Jameson prompted.
“Well, it sounds like it works by bending space and time, somehow, so it can move from one place to another, well… in an instant. He talks about Jew physics, Einstein’s theory of relativity and about…”
His words caught in his throat.
“For God’s sake, man, out with it,” Jameson commanded impatiently.
“Time travel, sir. He says that the device had been re-engineered to move through time.”
Jack noticed that for the last minute or so, Juan and Dave had been looking directly at Leah. Not in that way, either. There was something they knew that the others didn’t. But Leah remained tight lipped and avoided eye contact with her two prodigies.
The room fell silent, yet again.
Juan’s excited outburst punctuated the stunned silence. “He’s talking about Einstein’s theory of relativity. Hitler debunked it because Einstein was a Jew, I think that’s why Sohler mentions ‘Jew Physics’. Leah? Want to help me out here?”
Shaking her head, Leah waved her hand for Juan to continue his physics tutorial.
“Okay, so a few years before the Second World War, Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, also a Jew, published a paper detailing what they called their general theory of relativity. In it, they hypothesized the existence of wormholes and suggested that these ‘bridges’ or wormholes connected different points in space and time.
These wormholes or bridges were naturally occurring but short-lived and highly unstable, so they were of no practical value. It was purely conjecture that they could be used to travel vast distances in a short space of time, yet that’s exactly what Star Trek and Dr. Who have built their franchises on — travelling through the galaxy or through time using wormholes.”
“So where does this ‘Bell’ come into it?” Jameson asked.
Durand had composed himself and resumed his explanation, “It seems this Kammler fellow had tried to develop a propulsion system using this bridge theory so that aircraft could move from one place to another in an instant using a bridge or wormhole created artificially by the Bell.”
“Which is how we speculate that UFO’s are able to maneuver in three dimensional space as fast as witnesses report they do. Way faster and more agile than any jet fighter,” Juan added.
“Yeah, during The Second World War pilots reported seeing spherical ‘bogies’ darting around the sky. They couldn’t explain what they were or how they moved like lightning, so they just called them Foo Fighters.”
“I’m still not seeing how this propulsion system is a weapon. If the Nazi’s had this technology earlier, then maybe they could have won the war, but even though a lot of their tech was superior to what the Allies had, it was developed too late in the war and in not in enough volume to make much of a difference,” suggested Dave Sutton.
Jack Coulson’s analytical mind had been churning and processing the data that he’d been absorbing since the mission began. A picture was beginning to emerge from the murky collection of facts and speculation that he’d gathered.
Jack decided to take the floor and share what had been going through his mind. “I’m no scientist I’m a black ops soldier, for those who hadn’t figured that out already.” He paused and looked them all in the eye. Juan and Dave looked almost impressed, but the others gave nothing away in their expressions.
“The hostile force we encountered on the ice was extremely well armed, highly motivated and extremely well trained. Men like that aren’t easy to find. The fact that they seemed hell bent on capturing that U-Boat,” he gestured to the where the German boat lay alongside the Barracuda, “suggests that there’s something on board that is of extremely high value to whoever is overseeing the hostiles.