Everyone nodded, waited for Parker to continue. “Very well, gentlemen. First, a little good news — we have some leads on who or what we may be up against… Mr. Olmstead?”
The Director from CTG nodded. He was in his late forties, and had kept himself in shape with time in the gym. His hair was getting thin, but hadn’t gone too gray, which added to his youthful aspect. He looked at McCauley. “Thanks to your input, our digital forensic sketch technology scored some hits on the identities of your intruders.”
Olmstead opened his file folder, handed several photographs to McCauley. “Are these your guys?”
McCauley barely looked at them as his jaw muscles tensed. “That’s them.”
Indicating the first photo of a red-haired man, Olmstead spoke quickly. “Stewart Entwhistle. Ex-MI5. Reputation as brilliant data guy. Specializes in decryption, cryptanalysis, digital espionage. But also a competent field mechanic. Dropped off the radar five years ago. Vanished. Until this.
“The other guy is Junius Sinclair. Captain, US Navy. He—”
“Christ on a crutch!” said Parker. “I know that man! He was in DSR.”
“That’s right,” said Olmstead. “On a fast track until the Norfolk incident.”
Parker shook his head. “He got CYA’d. Broke him back to Lieutenant Commander. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
“Not long after that, he was reported lost at sea in a storm. His own sloop,” said Olmstead. “Obviously bullshit.”
“So who’re these guys with now?” McCauley continued to stare at the photos.
Olmstead shrugged. “Most likely one of several New World Order entities. Nobody believes they exist except the conspiracy nuts… and of course people like me who know they do.”
“How powerful are they?” McCauley’s complexion had deepened, his voice sounded stronger. “How dangerous?”
“Extremely. They’ve cultivated access to the best technology and info access in the world, no matter what country controls it. And they can manipulate a lot of money as well,” said Olmstead. “I’m talking on the world market level.”
The SEAL Commander nodded. “They prefer a very covert presence. This kind of bold strike is out of character. Usually, any up-profile action is disguised as terrorism.”
McCauley shook his head. “They didn’t seem interested in disguising much of anything this time.”
Olmstead looked at him. “That tells me they were in desperate mode. Obviously they’ve placed a high value on Captain Bruckner… or what he knows.”
Chuck Drabek tapped a pencil on his legal pad. “We need to ascertain their objective, then form our own. Quickly.”
Parker looked at everyone at the table. “I’m assuming you have all read Mr. McCauley’s debriefing documents… that should provide us with a good jump-off point.”
Drabek, the SEAL Commander, nodded toward Dex. “Chief McCauley, this thing about the ‘inter-matter’, I mean, you can swear to this?”
“I can swear to seeing a piece of something weird, something Captain Bruckner says can be converted into any known substance. But I don’t know if it’s what they say it is…”
Parker looked at the face on the screen. “You’ve had some time to research this, McGrath. What can you tell us?”
Everyone looked at the archivist. “The biggest problem is there is no single folder or file on Station One Eleven. The Germans got sloppy with their record-keeping during the final months of the war.”
“Which means…?” said Olmstead. He adjusted his tie unconsciously, a nervous habit.
“Which means I’ve been pulling out data from so many places, it’s like one of those puzzles with the really tiny pieces and half of them are pictures of a blue sky, and the other a dark woods. Even after I retrieve them, I still have no idea how they fit together. See what I mean?”
“I do,” said Parker. “And I’m sure we all sympathize with the task I’ve given you, but can you just tell me what the hell you do have, sailor?”
McGrath cleared his throat. “Well, since very little of this is sequential or connected by secondary source threads, I’ve had to do some conjecture.”
Olmstead nodded. “Please… go on, all right? We won’t hold it against you if you’re wrong.”
Parker smiled to himself on that one. Yeah, right. One of the military’s prime missions is to punish mistakes — the enemy’s… or yours.
“First thing I checked, because it was the easiest, was the two ships mentioned in the log. The Sturm was a light cruiser in the German Kriegsmarine, reported lost at sea in late spring, 1945. The Nebuchadenezzar is a lot weirder. It was a whaler out of Innsmouth, Massachusetts — last seen entering a strange, glowing fog bank off the coast of a small island, Ponape, in the South Pacific. I found that in the captain’s log of another whaler, the Miskatonic, who witnessed its vanishing.”
“Greenland’s a long way from Micronesia,” said Dex, wondering what the hell he’d stumbled into.
McGrath nodded. “Yessir, it certainly is.”
“What else?” said Parker. The business of the sailing ship gave him a bit of a chill. No easy explanation for it. “You have anything to give us a better idea what’s under the Greenland Shelf?”
The archive specialist paused to consider his answer. “Well, I don’t have anything relating specifically to it. But I have some documents on the 1947 expedition to neutralize a Nazi base under the ice in Antarctica.”
“I know something of this.” Parker nodded. “Give us the condensed version, Chief.”
McGrath adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses, nodded. “Well, basically, even though the war had been over for more than eight months, Nimitz and Forrestal sent a Carrier Task Force to destroy a hold-out Nazi base called ‘Neu Schwabenland’ also know as ‘Station Two Eleven’. The action was called Operation High Jump. Admiral Byrd had five thousand men under his command, and they had a hell of a battle with plenty of casualties on both sides. A bunch of Nazis escaped by submarine to Argentina.”
“I’ve seen these files,” said Olmstead. “Truman authorized another remote nuclear test to finish it off. The Germans were entrenched and weren’t about to give the place up.”
Parker had heard sanitized versions of Admiral Byrd’s exploits at the South Pole, but this one sounded a lot more interesting. “Did we get inside the base? See what was going on?”
“I don’t have anything verifying we did,” said McGrath. “Just some speculation the Germans had found evidence of an advanced civilization.”
“That sounds familiar.” Dex grinned. “They seemed to be pretty good at doing that.”
The archivist ignored the remark, kept looking through his notes. “Admiral Byrd reported to Forrestal that reports of ancient ruins under Antarctica were very possible. He claims to have used airborne magnetometers to detect large hollow spaces under the ice. Byrd also cited reports of ruins in Micronesia — a place called Nan Madol, or Nan Matal, where divers and archeologists have found a sunken city that could be a half million years old. And oddly enough, those ruins are off the island of Ponape where the Nebuchadenezzar vanished. Byrd also mentioned an immense platform in Baalbek, Lebanon — the largest consciously designed construction on earth — that some scientists believe it’s just as old.”
“I think we’re getting a little far afield,” said Olmstead. “We need something more concrete.”