‘Whose government?’ Veer demanded.
She frowned. ‘Our government, the United States. We’re employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency.’
The general peered at the girl before him for a moment, and then he realized that she was telling the truth. If the Navy team was indeed working for the US Government, then that meant that Wilms had been…
Veer turned away from the scientist and walked out across the ice to where the other scientist was being forced to dig his own ice grave on the glacier, weeping and shivering as the soldiers around him waited impatiently. Veer strode up to the scientist and grabbed him by the throat, lifting him up onto his toes as he growled into his face.
‘Who are you working for?’ he demanded.
The scientist croaked his response, his eyes bulging. ‘Defense Intelligence Agency.’
Veer released his grip and the man collapsed to his knees on the ice as the general considered what he had been told. Wilms was a liar and had just spent ten million bucks on an armed force to recover his mysterious alien box of tricks for him under the pretence of Veer working for the government. The fact that FBI Director Gordon LeMay was in on the deal had convinced Veer of Wilms’s credentials, but now…
Veer looked at the ridge line. He had a choice: he had already pocketed four million of the ten million dollars he had been paid by Wilms, the cash squirrelled away in some off shore accounts for when he got back. He could have hired another twenty men with the cash, but he hadn’t reckoned on coming up against Navy SEALs so he’d figured what the hell. Wilms had promised him another ten million on completion, but Veer now wondered just how likely that payment would be. If Wilms was not working with the FBI, then who the hell was he working for and what were the chances of them honoring payment? If the scientists were right, and Veer had no reason to think otherwise seeing as their lives were in his hands, then such a device, an alien satellite, would be worth a hundred times what he was being paid.
Veer looked down at the scientist sobbing on his knees and was overcome with a sense of regret and compassion. He couldn’t let the father of two freeze in the ice alone out here.
Veer stepped back, drew his pistol and aimed it at the scientist’s head. Before the man could respond and beg for his life Veer fired. A spray of crimson blood splattered the ice behind the kneeling man and he toppled onto the glacier, his eyes staring lifelessly at the blue sky above as Veer holstered his pistol and strode back toward the remaining scientist.
The girl collapsed in horror to her knees and promptly vomited onto the ice as Veer strode across to her.
‘He refused to help me,’ Veer growled. ‘For your sake, I suggest you decide otherwise. Can this Black Knight satellite be transported?’
The scientist’s head bobbed frantically up and down as she nodded, her face twisted with fear and disgust.
‘It’s solid and it survived aeons in deep space, it can be moved.’
Veer nodded and turned to his men. ‘Get her a coat and hot coffee. I want her on her feet and moving with us within twenty minutes!’
The troops hurried to carry out their orders as Veer turned to his officers.
‘I want ten men up here to guard the entrance to the chasm,’ he snapped. ‘If they try to come out before us then blow them all to hell. The rest of us will go down there and retrieve the object with maximum force, no considerations, understood?’
The officers nodded.
‘Get to it then!’ Veer boomed.
The soldiers dashed to prepare for their mission as Veer turned and surveyed the wilderness around them. At best, he reckoned he had twenty four hours before the might of the United States Navy descended on the area. At worst he would walk away from the mission with four million bucks tucked away, but if he could recover this Black Knight and get it out of the continent he would make a hundred times that, or even more.
All he had to do was ensure that Navy didn’t take it from him.
XXVII
Ethan stood at the control panel of the old submarine pens and looked down through the shattered windows at the dock below. The SEALs had placed a handful of glow sticks around the docks to illuminate the vast chamber with an eerie orange glow that reflected off the icy walls of the cavern and contrasted with the strange blue glow of algae plumes that periodically drifted through beneath the water. It sometimes seemed as though the entire chamber was alive, shimmering with mysterious glowing beings rippling down the walls toward the exit tunnel ahead.
‘I can’t believe the Nazis built something like this out here,’ Doctor Chandler said as he examined the control bunker. ‘The sheer effort required to build a base of this size is almost unthinkable.’
Chandler leaned forward and peered out of the windows, his breath condensing on the freezing air as he spoke.
‘Where did the Black Knight go? It’s a sizeable object according to NASA’s sensory data, and even if it shed its protective shell after re-entry and halved in size it should still be easy to locate, so why can’t the soldiers find it?’
Ethan shrugged, uncertain of what they were dealing with and equally unsure of what it might be capable of. Ethan had a passing interest in Unidentified Flying Objects, which was a category that Black Knight surely belonged to. He had watched many television documentaries on them, had seen video clips shot by nervous civilians depicting strange glowing objects traversing the skies, most of which could be explained away quite easily. Yet there were others that defied all rational explanation; encounters that left witnesses with severe burns and radiation sickness; observations supported by radar records and multiple witness testimony that correlated with the reports of experienced pilots both military and civilian, and first-hand accounts by those who had worked within the military and had testified on oath that they had been involved in cover-ups of UFO sightings around the world.
‘This bell that we were told about,’ Ethan asked Chandler. ‘Why do they seem so sure that it has something to do with Black Knight? Surely the Nazi connection isn’t enough on its own to suggest we know that shape and size of the object we’re looking for?’
Chandler gestured to the tunnel through which they had travelled to reach the submarine pens.
‘That tunnel was about the right size for an object matching Die Glocke’s size to have travelled through it, perhaps even created it,’ he pointed out.
‘Yeah, but we found a Nazi in the ice that had been there for decades,’ Ethan pointed out, ‘so the tunnel itself is also old, right?’
Chandler removed his spectacles and attempted to clean their foggy lenses as he spoke.
‘Die Glocke was never identified as having been in the German’s possession, although many references to it were found in the secret bases at which they were purportedly testing the device. However, we also know that in the wake of the Second World War our government spirited away countless Nazi machines upon which they had been working. Many of their finest minds came too such as Werner Von Braun, the inventor of the dreaded V2 rocket bombs, without whom we would have possibly lost the space race. Von Braun was the chief designer of the immense Saturn V launchers that took our astronauts to the moon.’
Ethan leaned on the control panel and folded his arms.
‘So you think that the bell was taken out of Germany by our own people and…, what, worked on?’
Chandler shrugged. ‘I wish I knew, but I don’t. The only thing that I know for certain is that within two years of the end of World War Two the modern UFO phenomenon grew rapidly. From Kenneth Arnold’s iconic sighting in 1947 to the alleged Roswell incident and others, flying saucers became more commonplace in human history after the end of the war. I don’t consider that to be a coincidence.’