The Black Knight Read online

  An officer immediately hurried down the ridge again and began giving orders as Veer crouched down on one knee and ran his gloved hand down his thick beard as another officer, a former Green Beret, spoke up.

  ‘Whatever the hell they’re looking for, it’s important enough for them to virtually guarantee their deaths here. They’re barely bothering to disguise what they’re up to.’

  General Veer nodded thoughtfully. He had been contacted forty eight hours before by a man named Victor Wilms. Well connected and supremely wealthy, or at least his benefactors were, Wilms had made Veer an offer he simply could not refuse: raise a team of one hundred men, get them to Antarctica and recover an American satellite from rogue forces attempting to sabotage United States interests in the region. The price? Ten million dollars now to raise the group, a further ten million after successful completion of the mission. No taxes, no fuss and no questions asked.

  It had taken all of Veer’s mental strength to demand fifteen million dollars or there would be no deal. He had got it without question and immediately wished he’d asked for twenty. Even at that early stage, he had wondered whether the mysterious object he was being asked to recover would not be worth more to him than the payment from Wilms.

  ‘They must have further support,’ Veer decided as he looked along the length of the ridge, which extended into the distance toward the south east. ‘The SEALs must be an advanced force, with maybe a Naval vessel or two on its way to back them up. We need to move fast or we’ll get boxed in and it’ll be us who are outnumbered.’

  Veer stood and strode back down the ridge.

  ‘Bring me the prisoners!’ he boomed.

  His officers hurried to the back of one of the ATV’s , in which lay huddled two hostages pulled from the wreckage of several ski gliders damaged in battle, both of them injured and bound hand and foot. The soldiers hauled them up onto their feet and dragged them out onto the ice.

  General Veer could see at once that neither of the captives was a military soldier, which pleased him greatly. SEALs were notoriously tough and trained to be able to withstand interrogation techniques of all kinds, whereas the scientists that had evidently travelled with them were civilians, the weak link in the chain.

  The man was middle-aged and virtually bald, the other a young girl with bobbed brown hair who stood shivering on the ice. Veer had ordered their Arctic jackets removed to expose them to the bitter chill, which according to the read-out on his digital watch was a fresh minus twelve in the wind. He moved to stand before them.

  ‘I’ll make this simple,’ he said. ‘If you don’t tell me what I need to know, I will kill you both. It’s quite likely that your remains will still be here in a thousand years’ time, because I won’t shoot you – I’ll have you buried to your necks in the ice.’

  Veer let that fact sink into their minds, let them dwell on how long they would spend being cold before hypothermia would finally lead to death. In truth it probably would not be long but Veer liked toying with the idea of prolonged agony.

  ‘Your names,’ he demanded.

  ‘Harrison,’ said the man.

  ‘Amy,’ the woman replied, her voice barely audible above the bitter winds.

  ‘Tell me why you are here with those soldiers.’

  The balding man looked up at Veer with pleading eyes, his words stumbling from his blue lips as he tried to speak.

  ‘Please.., I have two children…, don’t leave us out here.’

  Veer gestured to his officers. ‘Bury him over there.’

  The balding man’s eyes flew wide and he screamed as he was dragged away across the glacier by several soldiers, all of them chuckling grimly at his protests. Veer looked at the young girl.

  ‘Last chance,’ he said, ‘to save yourself and your friend over there.’

  ‘It’s called Black Knight,’ the scientist gabbled, struggling to get her words out fast enough amid the freezing cold and the desperate cries of her colleague from nearby. ‘It’s a satellite that came down.’

  Veer took a pace closer to her. ‘Now tell me something I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s not ours,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s not Russian, or anybody’s. It wasn’t built by humans.’

  General Veer stared at the girl for a long moment and then looked at his officers. ‘That explains the rush to get down here.’

  ‘It’s been in orbit for thousands of years,’ the scientist went on, ‘and now it’s come down and we’re trying to retrieve it for the government.’

  ‘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.’

  ‘I don’t consider it to be evidence,’ Hannah pointed out as she entered the control room.

  Chandler smiled. ‘Good, that’s the right way to think: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as the late, great Carl Sagan famously said. It’s why religions don’t stand up to scrutiny, for instance. But Die Glocke does have further evidence to support its existence, and the fact that it may now belong to our own government. It was known as the Kecksburg Incident.’

  ‘What happened?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘The Kecksburg UFO incident occurred in December 1965 in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania,’ Chandler explained. ‘A brilliant fireball was seen by thousands of people in several states and across Ontario in Canada, much like the one we witnessed as we travelled here. It passed over Detroit, Michigan and reportedly deposited hot metal debris over Ohio, starting grass fires in the process and caused sonic booms in the Pittsburgh area. It’s fair to say that something real happened that night.’

  ‘Sounds like a meteor or comet or something,’ Hannah said.

  ‘That’s what the Air Force thought,’ Chandler agreed. ‘It was assumed and reported by the press to be a meteor after the authorities discounted other explanations such as a plane crash, failed missile test or satellite debris. The problem was that eye witnesses in the town of Kecksburg, roughly thirty miles south east of Pittsburgh, reported that something crashed into the woods near the town. Several people reported seeing an object go down, feeling the impact as an earth tremor and seeing smoke in the vicinity. They alerted the authorities, thinking that an aircraft had crashed, and the fire department was scrambled to the area. What they found in the woods has since gone down in legend as one of the best documented UFO encounters in history.’

  Chandler replaced his glasses.

  ‘The volunteer fire department guys reported finding an object in the shape of an acorn about as large as a Volkswagen Beetle, a description that closely matches that of Die Glocke. Writing resembling Egyptian hieroglyphics was also said to be present around the circumference of the base of the object. Before they could spend much time examining it they reported an intense build-up of military personnel and then the United States Army ordered all civilians out of the area, secured the object and removed it on a flatbed truck. They later claimed that they searched the entire area and found nothing.’

  Hannah shrugged.

  ‘Could have been a downed satellite,’ she suggested. ‘They come down from time to time, right?’

  ‘Yes they do,’ Chandler admitted, ‘and they’re very delicate objects that would burn to a cinder long before they reached the ground. The object the firefighters reported was solid and intact and shaped nothing like a satellite. The Greensburg Tribune-Review layer reported the object sighting and the Army’s sealing off of the area, including interviews with military personnel who said that their superiors were interested in examining the object. However, a later report in the same paper said that nothing was found, suddenly following the Army’s official line of explanation which was that the fireball was caused by a meteor which exploded in mid-air before reaching the ground, the sonic boom causing the ground tremor that witnesses reported. When pressed, the reporter involved revealed that he had been pressured by government agents to alter his original report to match that of the Army.’

  ‘So you’re saying it was a cover-up?’ Ethan said.

  ‘NASA went back on its original explanation in 2005 and said that the object was in fact the remains of a Russian satellite. This was immediately rejected by a former NASA scientist who revealed that the orbital mechanics of the satellite in question revealed that it could not possibly have been responsible for the event. Furthermore, when pressed with a law suit and a court order to reveal the fil
es surrounding the incident, NASA stalled for three years before revealing that the files had been lost, if you can believe that.’

  Ethan looked out of the windows again.

  ‘So if you think that the Kecksburg incident object was Die Glocke, then what could we be looking at here? A similar device?’

  ‘It’s only a hunch,’ Chandler replied, ‘but I don’t think that the Germans built Die Glocke. I think that they captured it after the UFO crash in Germany in 1936 and began trying to reverse engineer the device. It would explain some of the incredible advances they made in short time spans during their war effort, and the advanced research they were doing in the later stages of the conflict. Some of the scientific advances made by the Germans during the Second World War are only really being understood today. If they had been successful in developing some of the technology they were working on and had weaponized it, they could have completely changed the outcome of the entire conflict, perhaps even defeated the United States of America.’

  Ethan knew that the Germans had developed the V2 missile, which they used to attack Britain from afar. Another couple of years of development could have seen longer range missiles used to strike the United States, certainly Russia and likely even the Far East with impunity.

  Ethan’s mental image of Nazi missiles arcing across the Atlantic toward America drifted across his field of vision, following the lines of light raining down the walls, and suddenly he took a breath as he realized what he was seeing.

  ‘Damn, it went beneath the water,’ he gasped.

  ‘What?’ Hannah asked as she looked at him.

  Ethan did not reply as he dashed from the control room and hurried down the stairwell outside, heading for the docks. He almost slipped twice on patches of black ice in the poorly illuminated corridors as he hurried outside, Lieutenant Riggs and two of the SEALs looking up at him as he dashed past.