If water was out there, could we drag the sub to it before our air cavities ruptured?
I was about to broach the subject with my bickering shipmates when we felt the river bed beneath us rumble.
Silence took the sub. I quickly shut down the Valkyries while Ben extinguished our exterior lights. Huddling in the dark, the three of us searched the landscape using our night-vision goggles.
The reverberations were getting closer, and then a creature appeared over the rise and I forgot all about venturing outside.
It was a Purussaurus, a pregnant female, I surmised from its labored gait. Staking out a sand-covered expanse close to the river bed and less than fifty yards from our sub, the eighteen-ton prehistoric crocodile began digging a hole with her clawed hind feet while her enormous tail swished back and forth, flicking debris in every direction.
Ben backed away from the glass. “Mother of God… I seriously need to be drunk.”
Sand rained across the pod, obscuring our view. I heard Ben offer Ming something. A moment later, he leaned over into my cockpit and passed me an open whiskey bottle. “A gift from your Viking pal. Go on, it’ll make it easier.”
I took a long swig and passed it back to him. “I feel like such an arse. For the first time in my life, I had it all — the girl of my dreams, a son, a prestigious job. Why’d I do it?”
“You’re a scientist; you did it for the work.”
“No, it was my stupid ego. Over three thousand people have climbed Mount Everest, hundreds have been in space, but Vostok — I wanted to be the first, the Neil Armstrong of subglacial lakes, the marine biologist who ventured back in time.”
“I suppose that makes me Buzz Aldrin. Want to know why I took this mission?”
I glanced at the air gauge. “You have fifty-seven minutes, go for it.”
Taking the whiskey again from Ming, he took a long swig. “I’m a fighter pilot. It’s in our blood. My grandfather flew B-29s over Normandy; my dad flew F-16s during Desert Storm. Even my best friend, John Rodsenow, flies test planes for Skunkworks. The Air Force was all I knew.”
The sound of dirt piling up on our hull grew more muffled as our burial deepened. I wanted to scream.
Instead, I grabbed the whiskey from Ben and swallowed until my stomach burned. “Sorry. You were saying?”
“Everything started with my grandfather. After WWII he was transferred to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and OSI, the central investigative agency for the Air Force. Did you know the United States Air Force wasn’t even established until 1947? That was the year an unidentified airborne object crashed on a ranch in Roswell, New Mexico. My grandfather was part of the official investigation, assigned to Project Grudge, which later became Project Blue Book. Data was sent to his office for analysis: reports of sightings, radar signals — all made by reputable people like military pilots and radar techs and police officers. Back then, no one had ever even used the term UFO. OSI kept a lid on everything.”
“Wait,” I said. “Are you seriously talking about UFOs?”
“Says the man who hunted the Loch Ness Monster. Sorry, ‘biologic.’ Wouldn’t want to paint you as a nutjob. May I finish my story?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Ben ignored me and continued. “My father, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Hintzmann, experienced two close encounters. The first happened fourteen months after he retired from piloting jets. At the time, he was training as an aircraft control and warning operator stationed at the 753rd Radar Squadron at Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan. One night his phones lit up with calls from cops who claimed they were chasing three UFOs from Mackinaw Bridge up I-75. Dad checked his radar and sure enough, there they were.
“There were no written instructions for how to deal with a UFO, so my father called NORAD’s chief of staff, a Major General Todd Coleman. Dad told Coleman there were two inbound B-52s en routed to Kincheloe Air Force Base minutes away from a head-on encountered with three UFOs and asked what he should do. The general ordered the bombers diverted to another AFB; then he told my father that if any reporters or cops asked, he was to tell them there was nothing on radar and to keep everything to himself.
“A few years later, Dad was stationed at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. Cool place, Nellis, very high security. It’s the site where my buddy tests highly classified aircraft, designed and built by Lockheed Skunkworks. Anyway, one night around one-thirty in the morning, my father was walking back to his barracks when he noticed a crowd had gathered, everyone watching the northwest sky. Dad looks and sees flashing lights moving at incredible speeds that he estimated to be well over three thousand miles an hour. But here’s what really blew him away — the UFOs would trek across the sky at super-high speeds, then suddenly stop dead and change directions. They were moving and changing directions so quickly that Dad said they were leaving blurs of light in the sky. As he and the others watched, these E.T. vessels aligned with one another to form a circle in the airspace just east of the Groom Lake Flight Test Facility, more commonly known among us alien conspiracy guys as Area 51. The UFOs began rotating in their circle when poof—they suddenly disappeared.
“Dad hurried inside to check with the radar techs on duty, who confirmed seven UFOs were flying back and forth through the radar beam, with an eighth vessel hovering at about eighty thousand feet. Everyone was watching it onscreen. It remained stationary for a good ten minutes, and then slowly descended until it dropped off the radar. It disappeared for another five minutes, then instantly re-appeared at eighty thousand feet, again just sitting in the sky, completely stationary. On the next radar sweep it showed up again, only now it was two hundred miles away. It hovered there for another ten minutes before repeating the pattern two more times.”
We were down to our last fifty-two minutes of air, yet I was on the edge of my seat, buzzed and listening. There was nothing to question here. Ben was repeating classified information on his deathbed before all three of us suffocated.
Ming was listening too. “What happened over Pakistan?”
Ben turned to her, close to drunk. “Give me a kiss and I’ll tell you everything.”
She leaned over his seat, and I became the third wheel as they made out in the darkness.
I stared at the air gauge: forty-three minutes.
After a minute Ben continued his story. “Pakistan. In the fall of 1998, I was assigned to an air division in the Persian Gulf. I had all the top security clearances and was one of the control officers who had access to the nuclear launch authenticators. One night our radar detected a UFO hovering over a Pakistani nuclear site, and yours truly was sent to be our eye-in-the-sky.
“This wasn’t our first close encounter with E.T.s over nuclear facilities. Many insiders shared the belief that it was our nuclear tests, combined with the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that summoned them to Earth in the first place. Over the years I’d seen top secret SAT photos taken of both U.S. and Soviet nuclear sites. Sometimes in the process of verifying a SALT Treaty we’d find objects in those pictures that shouldn’t have been there. In fact, on my first tour in the Middle East I was briefed about a 1976 UFO incident over Tehran. Two F-4s from the Iranian Air Force had tried to intercept the E.T. vessel. When the Iranian pilots turned on their fire control systems, their electrical systems went out, and they had to return to base.