be! Certainly, nothing like that had ever been constructed by any nation of Earth.
And what the hell had it done to the test site? He’d not seen any beams or missiles, nothing by which it could have attacked Mantap Mountain, but he was certain that it had done something to cause the mountain’s collapse.
A bigger question than how was why? Men had just died in those contaminated tunnels, of that much he was certain. Death in a cave-in, he supposed, was preferable to dying from radiation poisoning.
Still, he’d just watched a goddamned flying saucer kill an unknown number of people down there.
Hunter wasn’t sure what he thought about the whole topic of UFOs. For the most part, he didn’t think about them at all. He was willing to concede that there was other intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, sure, but he was highly skeptical that any of it had made it to Earth. After all, why would they? A civilization that powerful, that advanced—surely there was little they could learn from a planet full of squabbling, arrogant, noisy apes!
They wouldn’t be swarming around the planet like the place was Grand Central Station, if even half of the reported sightings were true.
But he’d just seen a flying saucer.
What else could it be?
It wasn’t a secret American aircraft. It wasn’t Russian or Chinese, and it sure as hell wasn’t North Korean.
So … aliens?
Like most Americans, he was quite familiar with the look of the iconic “Grays” so prevalent on book covers, TV shows, and movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The shapes he’d glimpsed had that look.
One of them, though, had looked human. And it had waved at him. It had seen him despite his camouflage and waved at him!
Mark Hunter’s world was trembling now, threatening to shatter and plunge him into an abyss of unreality, of dissociation, of insanity.
It had waved at him …
THAT THOUGHT followed him fifty-five kilometers overland, winding through deep valleys and along forested ridgetops, took them through the night, through the next day, and well into the following night. The plan originally had called for extraction by means of the stealth MH-60, but someone up the chain of command had decided that trying to sneak the aircraft into North Korea a second time—and this time with the North Korean military thoroughly aroused—was not the best of ideas. The SEALs would walk out, using GPS and darkness to thread their way along a route calculated to avoid all villages, hamlets, and military bases. Forty hours later, they reached the beach north of Hoemun-ri, an exhausting trek that pushed the eight SEALs to the absolute limits of their endurance and conditioning. As expected, a quartet of SEALs were waiting for them on the beach with a couple of CRRCs—combat rubber raiding craft. One SEAL scanned each of them with a Geiger counter, while another checked their personal dosimeters and logged the numbers. Their equipment, securely packed into backpacks, was stored on the boats.
“How’d it go in there, Commander?” one of them, Master Chief Cagliostro, asked.
“You will never believe it, Master Chief,” Hunter replied. He was still shaking, still questioning his own reality. “Hell, I don’t believe it!”
“We saw a flying saucer, Master Chief!” Taylor said, excited. “A fuckin’ flying saucer!”
“Yeah?” TM1 Fullerton asked, grinning. “Don’t tell me—little green men from Mars? Were they helping you or the gooks?”
“Fuck you!” Nielson said. “We got video. Didn’t we, Skipper?”
“We got something.”
“Hop in the Zodiacs,” Cagliostro said, skepticism all over his face. “We’ll sort it all out later.”
The CRRCs took them back through the surf and out to a waiting submarine, a Virginia-class fast-attack submarine, the USS Illinois. The first Hunter saw of it was the gray vertical pipe of the boat’s photonics mast—not periscope—rising above the water in the near-darkness a few yards away.
According to the opplan, the sub was supposed to stay submerged, but would move in close when she picked up the approach of the CRRCs on sonar. Aboard each Zodiac were a couple of sets of diving gear—masks, tanks, belts, and flippers—and one of the beach SEALs would accompany each member of the recon team down to the Illinois’s airlock, taking them down two by two. That way, the sub did not have to surface and risk detection, and men who might be wounded and who certainly were exhausted could be sure of getting aboard.
Hunter was one of the first two SEALs to make the descent. He stepped out of the diver airlock, dripping, and requested permission to come aboard from the executive officer who greeted him.
“Absolutely, Commander,” the man said. “Welcome aboard. How’d it go?”
Hunter drew a deep breath. He wasn’t ready to talk about what he’d seen … not until the video had been uploaded. “It was … interesting, sir,” he said. “I don’t think the North Korean test site will be a problem anymore.”
Commander Rodriguez looked concerned. “Why? You didn’t call in a strike.”
“No, sir … but I think somebody did.”
Hunter noticed a man standing behind Rodriguez. He was wearing a jumper without rank insignia, so likely he was a civilian contractor of some sort. “Lieutenant Hunter?”
“Yes, sir?”
“I’m Walters.” He held up a small wallet, then flipped it shut, but Hunter was able to catch the letters CIA before they vanished. A spook.
“You and your men will be sequestered forward. Under no circumstances will you discuss your mission with the officers or men of this crew … understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I strongly recommend that you not discuss it with each other. I’ll want to talk to each of you, though you will be fully debriefed back at Yokosuka.” He pronounced the port’s name wrong—with four syllables—instead of the way the Navy traditionally pronounced it—Yo-KUS-ka. This clown was definitely a suit, not a sailor.
Brunelli came through the lock behind Hunter, and a sailor led them both forward to what normally was the torpedo room, but which served as quarters for SpecOps personnel like the SEALs during missions.
Hunter looked around the compartment, found a bunk, and sat down. He’d expected the Agency to show up sooner or later. Any op into North Korea would be an extraordinarily risky, extraordinarily sensitive move. The debriefing would grill Hunter and his men about everything they’d seen.
They wouldn’t have heard about the flying saucer, though, would they? They’d want to hear about the guards and the concentration camp prisoners, about the earthquakes and the radiation readings, but they couldn’t know about that huge silvery UFO.
Right?
He decided that it would be best if none of them mentioned what they’d seen in the gray skies over Mantapsan. He would discuss the incident with the others only to warn them to keep quiet about what they’d all seen.
That didn’t stop him from thinking about it, though. Because, the thing was, Mr. Walters, though wearing a blue jumpsuit and a ball cap with the Illinois logo emblazoned on its front, looked like he ought to be in a dark suit and sunglasses, maybe with a receiver earpiece in one ear. One of the quintessential Men in Black.
Hunter had heard the stories. Whispered rumors of conspiracies and secret government groups and agencies, of vast cover-ups concerning UFOs. He’d never believed any of them, of course. After all, this was the government they were talking about: How could anything concerning UFOs be kept secret by more than two people for more than fifteen