‘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 files 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.
‘Where’s the fire?’ Riggs asked, standing up.
Ethan reached the edge of the nearest submarine pen, and then he reached down onto the dock and pulled free a chunk of ice. He turned and lowered the ice into the water and watched as the rest of the team joined him on the dock.
Ethan stared down at the chunk of ice in the water before him, and as he watched so it began drifting down toward the tunnel entrance. Hannah watched it go with him, and understood immediately.
‘The warm water channel isn’t in the fissure in the wall,’ she said. ‘It’s passing beneath the pens.’
Ethan nodded, watching as the chunk of ice slowly began to melt before his eyes as it travelled south down the dock.
‘If Black Knight came through here, it went below the base. It’s somewhere down there,’ he said as he pointed toward the frigid black water.
Lieutenant Riggs cursed as he peered down into the dock.
‘How the hell are we going to get it out?’
Ethan was about to answer when another of Riggs’ men called out in a harsh whisper.
‘Enemy!’
Ethan whirled to where he could see Del Toro and Saunders near the tunnel entrance, their weapons pointed down into the impenetrable darkness.
There, just visible to the naked eye, Ethan could see the flickering of distant lights as the MJ-12 soldiers advanced toward them.
‘We’re running out of time,’ he said to Riggs.
Another voice called out to Riggs from up on the command center.
‘Lieutenant? You’d better take a look at this!’
XXVIII
Ethan hurried up the stairwell in pursuit of Riggs as they rushed toward the command center. Riggs had placed two fresh SEALs near the tunnel entrance to relieve Saunders and Del Toro, ready to ambush the MJ-12 troops once they arrived, and now they dashed into the command center to see Sully beckoning them to follow.