Alien Secrets. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ were backlit, and Hunter could see no details at all. No, that wasn’t true—one shadow looked distinctly human, though it was nothing more than a shadow. The other shapes were smaller, shorter, with large heads.

      The human shape raised a hand … fuck!

      It was waving at him!

      Distantly, Hunter was aware of the guards in front of the tunnel shouting, followed by the sharp rattle of AKM automatic rifles. The saucer continued moving past the SEAL position and took up a stationary vantage point almost directly over the tunnel mouth. He held the binoculars steady while risking a quick glance away to see what was happening. A dozen DPRK guards stood in front of the tunnel, firing up at the intruder. When nothing happened, several dropped their weapons and ran. Hunter lowered the field of view on his binoculars to capture their reaction, as the remaining guards emptied their magazines into the sky. They then stood there, blank astonishment on their faces. Hunter brought the binoculars back up to the hovering craft.

      And then the real earthquake began.

      Hunter felt the vibration beneath his body, heard the growing rumble from the mountain in front of him. Again, he dropped the angle on his binoculars and zoomed farther back, trying to get the entire panorama into his field of view. An immense cloud of dust exploded from the tunnel mouth as the remaining guards fell flat on the ground.

      Mantap Mountain was collapsing; Hunter could see the top of the mountain subsiding slightly, could see an avalanche of rock and soil cascading down the mountain’s southern flank. Above it all, the silvery UFO seemed to be silently taking it all in.

      The quake subsided, as did the billowing dust.

      And the UFO was … gone.

      Hunter had not seen it go. His attention had been on the dust and the guards on the ground, and he’d missed its departure. It should be on the video he’d shot, though.

      “Radiation levels are climbing, Skipper,” Brunelli said. It was, Hunter thought, a tribute to the man’s nerve that he’d continued monitoring his instruments throughout the encounter. His voice was shaking, though. He’d seen it, too.

      Several prisoners stumbled out of the dust swirl filling the tunnel entrance. One staggered and fell, lying next to one of the guards sprawled in the dirt. An Army truck raced up, and more soldiers began piling out.

      It was definitely time to leave.

      One by one, they left their hides and inched back up the slope. It took another hour, but they managed to get over the top of the ridge without being spotted.

      As Hunter crawled, flat on his belly and still shrouded by the tangled mess of his ghillie suit, all he could think about was that spaceship. Hell, that’s all it could 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 СКАЧАТЬ