The Black Knight Read online

  ‘So what’s so special about this signal?’ Ethan asked.

  Jarvis grinned conspiratorially as he led them to a briefing room, outside which awaited Mickey Vaughn. The former FBI Agent shook Ethan’s hand and offered him a genuine smile.

  ‘Good to see you back.’

  Vaughn ushered them into the briefing room, where sat Lieutenant General J. F. Nellis, the Director of National Intelligence. Nellis was a former United States Air Force officer who had recently been appointed DNI by the current president. Jarvis had been selected by Nellis to run a small investigative unit designed to root out corruption within the intelligence community while remaining beyond the prying eyes of senior figures on Capitol Hill. Jarvis had been chosen due to his prior success in operating a similar unit within the DIA that had conducted five investigations into what were rather discreetly termed as “anomalous phenomena,” which had attracted the attention of both the FBI and the CIA and eventually been shut down. Jarvis had spent some twenty years working for the DIA and been involved in some of the highest-level classified operations ever conducted by elements of the US Covert Operations Service. Most of them he would never be able to talk about with another human being, even those with whom he had served. Jarvis knew the rules and had obeyed them with patriotic fervour his entire career.

  ‘Please,’ Nellis gestured to seats around a long table with long, elegant hands. ‘Take a seat.’

  Ethan sat down among several scientists, all of whom were whispering excitedly among themselves as Vaughn shut the briefing room door and all eyes turned to Nellis. The tall general, gray haired and imbued with an air of great authority, spoke softly but clearly.

  ‘My apologies for the speed with which you have been mobilized but there is little time and we need to act fast. At oh four hundred hours this morning, Eastern Seaboard Time, an anomalous signal was detected by NASA engineers at Cheyenne Mountain’s Surveillance Base in Colorado Springs. This signal has now been confirmed by signals officers at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, and Signals Inteligence stations both at Joint Base Edwards and multiple listening posts across the globe. So far, we have been able to use our satellites to intercept these signals so that they cannot be detected by non-military or non-US assets on the ground.’

  Ethan frowned.

  ‘How did you manage that so fast?’ he asked. ‘Surely people could have detected the signals themselves? It will be all over the Internet by now.’

  General Nellis smiled.

  ‘That would be true had we not already known about the object making the transmissions. Fortunately, we have been aware of its presence for over a century.’

  The scientists around Ethan gasped, their eyes wide as they stared at Nellis.

  ‘A century?’ Hannah Ford echoed. ‘But we haven’t had satellites in orbit for that long.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Nellis agreed. ‘That’s because the satellite does not belong to us, and we have been able to conceal its presence for decades because we already knew that it was there. The object was placed in orbit long before mankind first launched a satellite into space.’

  Ethan’s curiosity got the better of him. ‘How long has it been there?’

  General Nellis folded his hands before him.

  ‘The object’s rate of decay, when measured against its mass, provides scientists with the means to calculate how long the object has been in orbit around our planet by back-tracking its orbital path to the point where it was first captured by Earth’s gravity.’ Nellis breathed out softly as though unwilling to impart his next sentence. ‘They have calculated that the object, now code-named Black Knight, has been in orbit around the Earth for approximately thirteen thousand years.’

  ***

  IV

  A silence descended in the briefing room that lasted for several long seconds, as every man and woman present considered just what that meant.

  ‘Thirteen thousand years,’ Hannah echoed. ‘So it’s not man-made?’

  ‘Hardly,’ Jarvis pointed out. ‘Thirteen thousand years ago, mankind had just worked out how to throw spears a long way and make knives out of something other than chipped flint. There’s no way Black Knight could have been produced by us.’

  Mickey Vaughn, who had been leaning against a wall listening, spoke for the first time.

  ‘What’s it signalling, and to whom?’

  ‘A good question,’ Nellis answered as he picked up a remote from the table and pointed it at a television monitor mounted on the wall behind him. ‘This is a recording of the signals detected from the object before it became silent again a half hour ago.’

  Nellis touched a button and Ethan heard the strangest sound emerge from speakers mounted discreetly around the walls of the room. What sounded like a rush of distant ocean waves was followed by a harmony of whistling wind, then whoops and what sounded like trickling water. A series of long, low moaning sounds drifted in and out of range over the existing chorus, sombre and deep, followed by what might have been the sound of a crackling fire.

  Ethan listened in fascination, actually closing his eyes as he heard the sounds and behind them all a digital warbling, a rippling cacophony that was clearly not natural.

  Nellis switched the recording off as he set the remote down on the table. ‘We have our finest cryptographers working on the signals at the moment,’ he revealed to them. ‘As yet we have absolutely no idea what the message means, but then again we always knew that any signal from an alien civilization might take a form that we could not comprehend, let alone translate.’

  Hannah leaned back in her chair, one hand absent-mindedly twirling a strand of her long auburn hair.

  ‘So it’s alien and it’s been up there for thousands of years, and NASA knew about it? How? Did one of the Apollo or Space Shuttle missions stumble across it?’

  Nellis picked up the remote again and hit a button. On the screen behind him appeared the image of a young man, dark wavy hair and a thick moustache dominating a stern expression.

  ‘Nikola Tesla,’ one of the scientists gasped, a man with short white hair and rectangular spectacles that gave him the appearance of a physics professor. ‘Damn me, I might have known!’

  Nellis nodded.

  ‘Indeed, Doctor Chandler. Nikola Tesla was an electrical and mechanical engineer and is widely regarded as one of the greatest geniuses ever to have lived. Born in Serbia, he moved to the United States and became a prolific inventor with some three hundred patents to his name. His research gave us alternating current, the Tesla Coil, induction motors and wireless communication. In short, he gave us much of our modern world.’

  ‘And what does this guy have to do with Black Knight?’ Vaughn asked.

  ‘Tesla picked up the first verifiable repeating signal from Black Knight in 1899,’ Nellis explained, ‘while experimenting with electrical discharges into the Earth’s atmosphere as a means of communicating wirelessly over long distances. His data showed that something else was present in the returning signals from Earth’s orbit, and Nikola Tesla at the time made an announcement that he had detected the first signal from another civilization from outer space. It made quite a stir in the media of the time.’

  Jarvis picked up the story from one corner of the room.

  ‘In the 1920s, a small number of amateur HAM radio operators were occasionally able to receive the same signal. In 1928, scientists in Oslo, Norway experimenting with short wave transmissions into space began picking up what they called Long Delay Echoes, in which they received echoes several seconds after transmission. The phenomenon is still not well understood. Everything went silent again until 1954, when several newspapers including the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the San Francisco Examiner reported an announcement from the United States Air Force that two satellites were found to be orbiting the Earth at a time when no nation yet had an ability to launch such objects.’

  General Nellis gestured to the image of Nikola Tesla.

  ‘Tesla died in 1943, penniless. It turns out that after he fir
st detected what we now call Black Knight, the government of the time took to employing him and ensured that none of the recordings he made of the signals reached public hands. Over the next few decades they made every effort to ensure that any tracking of Black Knight’s signals were explained away as atmospheric phenomena.’

  ‘By 1960 the United States and the Soviet Union both had hardware in orbit,’ Jarvis went on. ‘But in February 1960, newspapers everywhere reported that somebody else also had something in orbit. A radar system that had been designed by the US Navy to detect enemy spy satellites had picked something else up. It was described as a dark, tumbling object in a highly eccentric orbit that wasn’t ours and didn’t belong to the Soviets either.’

  Nellis pressed a button on the remote and an image of something in orbit around the Earth appeared on the screen behind him.

  ‘The Navy explained the detections away as the casing from an old Discoverer satellite launch, a half shell about eight yards long. Trouble was, the casing they used as an explanation was in a slightly different orbit to Black Knight’s. Most people didn’t notice that and the general public bought the story, which disappeared into obscurity once again until 1988.’

  Jarvis moved closer to the screen as he spoke.

  ‘When the Space Shuttle Endeavor made its first flight to the International Space Station during mission STS-88 in 1998, the astronauts aboard took photographs of a strange object which were widely available to the public on the NASA website for a brief time. This is what they saw.’

  The image on the screen changed to a bizarrely shaped, black object that looked almost like a giant camera suspended in orbit above the curved surface of the Earth. Ethan leaned closer to the screen as the scientists around him gasped in amazement, peering at the object’s unusual shape, almost like some kind of sculptured undersea creature.

  ‘That’s Black Knight?’ Hannah asked. ‘It looks a lot like space junk to me.’

  ‘That’s what NASA said it was later,’ Nellis replied. ‘Unfortunately, NASA took every single one of the images down beforehand. They reappeared later and it didn’t take long for the conspiracy theorists to notice that the images had new URLs and had been digitally altered, along with new descriptions having been added explaining the images as space junk. A few of them asked NASA why astronauts would take some many photographs of a piece of junk that had supposedly already been identified, but NASA remained silent. That, of course, only fuelled the suspicion that the astronauts had photographed something real and mistakenly uploaded their images to the Internet.’

  Ethan leaned back in his chair.

  ‘How come this Black Knight’s causing so much fuss now, if we’ve known about it for so long?’

  ‘It’s the signals,’ Jarvis explained. ‘All previous signals from Black Knight have been basic beeps and whistles. NASA has been trying to decipher them for decades with no success. But the new signals are completely different and are being emitted four times per orbit in all directions. The only reason they’re not being detected by Russia or other global powers is because a prior space shuttle mission placed a small satellite alongside Black Knight designed to block most of those signals and direct them to only our own listening posts.’

  Nellis sat back down at the table as he went on.

  ‘Black Knight’s orbit has begun to decay at a greater rate than we predicted, likely as a result of micro-meteorite impacts over thousands of years that have reduced its velocity. In short, it’s coming down and soon. Our mission is to secure the object before anybody else can reach it, because while we can veil signals intelligence from Black Knight nobody is going to fail to see the re-entry burn when a fifteen ton alien satellite comes down through the atmosphere at hypersonic speed.’

  ‘How come we haven’t brought it down already, in the Space Shuttle?’ Vaughn asked.

  ‘Too big and too heavy,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Believe me, we would have had this thing down here long ago if it had been possible. There was apparently some talk in the 1990s of tethering it to the International Space Station for long-term study, but the International bit of that equation prevented us from doing so. Even today, nobody wants Russia or China getting their hands on whatever technology might be aboard that thing.’

  ‘What’s the plan then?’ Ethan asked. ‘Where is this thing going to come down and why are we here talking about it? Surely this is a military situation?’

  General Nellis shifted uncomfortably in his seat and gestured for Jarvis to continue.

  ‘Black Knight’s signals are getting a reply,’ Jarvis announced.

  The scientists at the table almost erupted in shouts of delight and excitement, their faces beaming with astonishment.

  ‘A reply?’ one of them uttered, a young woman with brown hair in a neat bob whose name tag said her name was Amy. ‘From where?’

  Jarvis switched the image on the screen from one of the Black Knight to an orbital satellite image of a region of the globe that was instantly recognizable.

  ‘The Antarctic,’ he announced. ‘The signals travelling up are much weaker than those coming down but there’s no question about it: somebody up there is talking to Black Knight, and we have absolutely no idea who it might be.’

  Ethan stared at the image of the return signal’s source as Nellis spoke.

  ‘Ethan, you have suitable experience in dealing with these kinds of phenomena, and with Nicola Lopez out of the picture for now I’d like you to take Hannah Ford down there with a research team and figure out what the hell’s going on.’

  Ethan glanced across at Hannah. ‘I’m not sure that we can be of any help, and what about logistics?’

  ‘We can’t make a major assault force deployment to the Antarctic,’ Nellis explained. ‘The Russians and the Chinese would identify it in an instant and move assets of their own in order to figure out what we’re doing. The best shot we have at this is deploying a small team to intercept and examine Black Knight and the source of the earth-bound signals, while we figure out a way of getting more support to you.’

  ‘What about security, and firepower?’ Hannah asked. ‘It’s not impossible that other people know about Black Knight no matter how well NASA thinks they’ve covered it up. The Soviets got into space before we did and may have some idea of what’s up there.’

  ‘We’ll be dispatching you with a twelve man team from the US Navy SEALs,’ Jarvis explained. ‘They’re trained for Arctic warfare and will be deployed to protect you all. You’ll leave in an hour aboard an Air Force KC-135 bound for Port Stanley on the British Falkland Islands, and from there fly south to join the US Coastguard vessel Polar Star off McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. The SEAL support will likely involve whatever means we can produce of getting Black Knight out of the area and onto US soil.’

  ‘If it survives,’ Ethan said. ‘There’s no guarantee that it will endure the burn-up in descent.’

  ‘We’re acting on the presumption that it will,’ Jarvis admitted. ‘But once that thing hits the atmosphere it’ll be leaving a trail of fire across the entire night sky. We might be able to announce it as a comet or meteor burning up in the atmosphere, but we can’t forecast it or the Russians and others will of course search for it and the whole thing will be blown.’

  Ethan nodded.

  ‘Where is Black Knight predicted to impact?’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ Nellis revealed. ‘It’s slowing down and appears to be preparing to touch down close to the source of the earth-bound signals.’

  Ethan stared at the general.

  ‘Slowing down?’ he echoed. ‘On purpose?’

  ‘Yes,’ Nellis replied. ‘It recently changed direction. We think that it may be under intelligent control.’

  ***

  V

  Pierre Hotel, Manhattan,

  New York City

  Gordon LeMay stood in an apartment on the 39th floor of the Pierre Hotel and looked out over the expanses of the city’s Upper East Side and Central Park. Despite being the Dir
ector of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and having the ear of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President himself, LeMay realized that he was intimidated by the sheer exuberance that he was witnessing.

  The apartment contained five bedrooms, marble floors and walls, voice-controlled lights and facilities and a wall-mounted, concave screen seven feet across that probably cost more than LeMay earned in a year. But he was only in one apartment, of the many that were currently being rented. His employers, a cabal of men who were colloquially known as Majestic Twelve, had rented out the entire top floor of the hotel to ensure absolute secrecy. LeMay knew that the cost of doing so was in the order of half a million dollars per month, the rent coming with a butler service, twice-daily maid service and a chauffeur driven Jaguar.

  LeMay had arrived via that Jaguar to a discreet entrance at the rear of the hotel to avoid being spotted or photographed by any journalists who might be lingering outside the hotel in the hopes of getting a shot of the latest movie star hogging the front pages of the news. LeMay’s graying features and sagging jowls were well known to the media, frequent interviews and sessions in Congress or the Senate a feature of his role within the law enforcement and intelligence community. Likewise he knew that the existing members of Majestic Twelve would also arrive discreetly, even though their identities were unknown even to LeMay and that even were they to be photographed they would not be recognized by the ordinary man in the street. It was a curious irony when compared to the global media presence of Presidents and Prime Ministers that the people who held the greatest wealth and power in the world were virtually unknown and made great efforts to remain that way. Although they normally met only once annually under the cover of the Bilderberg Group meetings, today was an important day and LeMay had been summoned to New York to meet with them for the first time.

  Few people knew of the existence, let alone the relevance, of the Bilderberg Group.