Vostok (21 page)

“It’s public record.”

“Let me rephrase that.
Why
do you know all this?”

“I know it because their defense sector is a front for MAJESTIC-12, a tightly wound group of puppet-masters who profit from war and are committed to maintaining the status quo when it comes to our energy supply. Big Oil, Monsanto, the military industrial complex, and a select group of bankers… don’t roll your eyes, Zach. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Discover a new clean-energy source that can free us from fossil fuels and these boys will deny you a patent, steal your technology, and crush you like a bug. There’s a reason they’re funding this little venture, but it has nothing to do with marine biology. Oh, and you can bet the farm it was their GeoEye-1 satellite that pinpointed our location when we splashed down a million miles off-course.”

The satellite
…
Vostok Command can’t send help unless they know where we are!

Spinning my chair back around to my command console, I powered up the Valkyries, creating a heat signature for their thermal imaging sensors.

Ming and Ben continued wasting our air supply. “My job in organizing this venture, Captain, was to procure enough funds to cover the technological expenses. So what if a defense contractor invested in our mission?”

“Vostok’s huge. Yet somehow you managed to select a splashdown site where the magnetic anomaly is at its strongest?”

“It’s a geological phenomenon. I’m a geophysicist.”

“A geophysicist who recruited Zachary Wallace as a front, to fool the Russians into believing the mission’s aim was to discover new life-forms. Of course, you never said what kind of new life-forms.”

The conversation was getting heated and more than a little weird. Perhaps I might have cared had we not been running out of air.

Thick droplets of water rained down from the ice sheet, dropping out of a dense fog. The river bed twisted up ahead to the right. Beyond that, we’d probably never know.

What if there was water around that bend?

My eyes returned to the gauge monitoring the exterior pressure.
How much could the human body handle? The ice sheet was obviously off the scale, but 228 psi— that equated to free diving in about 350 feet of water. The world record for free diving was about 420 feet. I was certainly no diver, but leaving the sub wasn’t about holding my breath, it was about being able to handle the extreme pressures that would be squeezing my ears, sinus cavity, and lungs—something I had faced years earlier when our submersible had suddenly cracked open in the depths of the Sargasso Sea
.

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 753
^rd
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.

“Anyway, I was in my jet approaching Pakistani airspace when I received word that the UFO was hovering a thousand feet over their nuclear facilities and everything had gone black—no power. Since the Pakistani radar was dead, my supervisor decided it was politically safe to take a closer look. I executed a steep dive and leaped down from forty thousand feet. I had the UFO painted on my radar; I could see his lights in the distance. Then I saw it—a saucer as big as a city block with a four-story-high dorsal-fin-shaped conning tower. At least that’s what it looked like to me. The vessel was hovering over the nuclear weapons facility while four Pakistani JF-17 interceptors bore down on us from the southeast. Without warning, the UFO took off like a speeding bullet and disappeared into orbit, leaving yours truly in Pakistani air space on Pakistani radar over their powerless nuclear weapons facility.

“The Pakistan government blamed the United States, and I took the fall. A falsified psychiatric evaluation all but sealed my doom. Six months after I received my walking papers, a guy named Steven Greer contacted me.

“Dr. Greer had left his career as an ER physician to dedicate
his life to persuading military and government officials to come clean about UFO sightings—not just to convince the public they were real and meant us no harm, but to release extraterrestrial technologies, which the military industrial complex had been suppressing, that could supply society with an endless supply of free, clean energy. In 1993, Greer had met with a group of military advisors to find a way to poke holes in the dam of secrecy and disinformation that had obscured the truth about extraterrestrial contacts since 1947.

“Greer had been selected to carry the disclosure baton for multiple reasons, not the least of which was the access he gained to military and political leaders. He and his lawyer used the Constitution to create a legal loophole in the Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement signed by all military and civilian personnel with top-security clearances. Greer was able to convince hundreds of individuals with top secret clearances who’d had encounters with UFOs to come forward to testify on May 8, 2001, at the National Press Club Meeting in Washington, D.C., at an event called
The Disclosure Project
.

“Armed with classified photos and testimonials from hundreds of seasoned Intel and military commanders, pilots, and NASA and FAA officials, Greer put together the briefing materials requested by President Clinton. He personally briefed James Woolsey, Clinton’s first CIA director, along with the heads of the Defense Intelligence Agency, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a select number of congressmen. To his shock, Clinton was denied access to MAJESTIC-12, which was operating on an annual multi-billion-dollar black budget, free of congressional oversight. Greer learned that there is a shadow group—a cabal—made up of the four largest banks, which also own and operate the four largest oil companies. These cartels work hand-in-hand with the defense industry and orchestrate the wars that finance their entities. They own every major newspaper, magazine, radio, and television network, which allows them to black out news stories that run counter to their enterprises. When
inquiries are made, people turn up dead, and no rank is too high to be assassinated. CIA Director William Colby agreed to support Greer’s investigation—until his body turned up in the Potomac River.

“That was a warning to Clinton and other members of the cabal who might think of defecting. President Obama received his warning while in Norway to receive his Nobel Prize. On December 9, 2009, MJ-12 fired off a scalar burst over Oslo from one of their satellite weapons. A scalar weapon uses gravitic waves to vaporize targets, and the Norway blast left behind a blue spiral in the night sky that was witnessed by thousands. Obama was put on notice that he may be President, but the cabal is still in charge. This group has one singular objective—to acquire E.T. technologies for weapons applications while keeping a tight lid on clean, unlimited power-generating systems that would essentially solve the planet’s energy crisis and put the fossil-fuel industry out of business. The powers-that-be don’t want that… do they, Ming?”