Alien Secrets. Ian Douglas

loop.”

       “Absolutely, Mr. President.”

      “I know the scientists think they got a wrecked spaceship out of the Pacific near LA, but I’ve always thought that whole incident was just war jitters, okay? That, or some kind of long-range Jap reconnaissance aircraft. We just don’t know. We can’t know.”

       “We know the Japanese didn’t have anything that could reach us at the time.”

       “Floatplanes off a submarine?”

       He shook his head. “They didn’t have anything like that in ’42. The I-400 class wasn’t in operation until ’44.”

      “Well, this whole thing sounds pretty damned iffy to me. But if we’re being invaded from out there, we need to know about it. And we need to be able to fight back if push comes to shove.”

       “Yes, Mr. President.”

      “Now get the hell out of here and let me get to some nice, safe, normal world problems. Like what Stalin is doing in Europe, and what we’ll do if he gets the bomb!”

      The bomb.

       Nuclear weapons were nothing compared to this. And as Hillenkoetter walked out of the Oval Office, he wondered how much the President knew about the Nazi Haunebu saucers, their atom bomb experiments, or their other secret, almost magical weapons … and how close the Allies had been to total annihilation.

      HUNTER WALKED up the sidewalk of the apartment complex on Witherspoon Way, located in the small and quiet Californian community of El Cajon just seventeen miles from downtown San Diego. At the door to the lobby, he stopped and looked up and down the street.

      Nothing. Damn, he thought. You’re getting way too paranoid.

      Of course, he remembered the old dictum: just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you!

      His debriefing at Yokosuka had been a lot less exciting than the interview with Walters on board the Illinois, at least to start with. They’d put him in a room with a bunk, desk and chairs, and its own head. He presumed the other SEALs in the squad had been sequestered this way as well, but he never saw them while he was on the base and so didn’t know for sure.

      The next day, a couple of suits with badges identifying them as DIA—the Defense Intelligence Agency—had received him in a small and dingy office and questioned him about the mission. They’d asked him about what he and the others had seen, but when he told them truthfully they’d just nodded and jotted down something in their notebooks.

      As he’d stood up to leave, however, one of them had stopped him. “I would keep your, ah, sighting quiet, if I were you, Lieutenant,” he’d said. “There are folks here who really, really don’t want you spreading wild stories about spaceships, y’know? Especially if you’ve been ordered to keep your mouth shut.”

      “I saw what I saw,” Hunter said, his voice almost a growl. “I have video to prove it!”

      The other DIA man had given him a tight-lipped grin. “Not anymore, you don’t.”

      Of course. Everything they’d brought back from the mission—video, seismic and radiation readings, isotope sample—it all had been taken off the submarine at Yokosuka. Hunter was positive he wouldn’t see or hear of those recordings again.

      “So—are you certain of what you saw?” the other agent said.

      “Of course I am! Are you calling me a liar?”

      “Absolutely not. But … well … your eyes could have been playing tricks. Or … just maybe … what you saw was some sort of very secret US aircraft. You know we have massive black projects going. Maybe someone way up the chain of command decided to send one in to have a look around.”

      Hunter did know about black budgets and black projects. As a Navy SEAL, he operated in and around those shadows himself.

      “What I saw,” he said, angry and stubborn, “was technology that must have been centuries ahead of anything we have now! Okay?”

      “But how do you know that, Lieutenant? I understand they have some really spooky things going down back in Nevada. Real Star Wars stuff! Hey, you told us yourself you saw a human through that porthole, right? What would a human be doing on a spaceship if it was from another planet?”

      The other agent nodded. “And you know … if you’re so certain it wasn’t an American secret aircraft … I don’t know. Maybe it was Chinese! Beijing was extremely concerned about the possibility of radiation leakage from that test site. And they could have some supersecret black-ops assets as well, stuff we don’t even know about.”

      “Then God help us all,” Hunter had told them. “That thing we saw would fly rings around the Lightning II or anything else in our inventory!”

      “Well … so you believe.” The agent opened a briefcase and handed Hunter several documents.

      “What are these?”

      “An oath of secrecy. You’ll swear not to tell anyone about what you saw.”

      “But I’m already under oath. When I got my security clearance. I never de-oathed!”

      “I know. But if you would, please.”

      “Wasn’t my promise to Walters enough?”

      “Who is Walters?”

      “The CIA man—”

      “There is no Walters.”

      Hunter had looked at the two agents warily. They were serious about this fiction they were making him participate in. Serious enough to go to all this trouble.

      The agent seemed to pretend the last part of their conversation hadn’t even happened, pulling out more papers. “And these are documents informing you of the national security aspects of this mission, and of the penalties you face if you divulge any information to anyone. We need you to read and sign them.”

      With a sigh, Hunter had glanced through the papers … then signed.

      “And initial here, please. And here. And here …”

      Hunter had done as he’d been told, grumbling to himself a bit ungraciously, but obviously he would get nowhere with these people. They were nicer than Walters had been, certainly, but just as determined to enforce his cooperation.

      The SEALs were reunited again when they were given orders to return by first-available military transport. Twelve and a half hours later, they’d touched down at Naval Air Station North Island and the complex of naval bases at Coronado, the Silver Strand just across the bay from San Diego.

      And once again, he and his men had been separated, given solitary quartering, and interviewed by both military and civilian personnel. No one had even alluded to the UFO this time, and he just played ball to get it all over with. He read and signed more nondisclosure papers, and was reminded again both of the importance of national security interests, and of the severity of the penalties should any service member violate his oaths.

      By this time, Hunter knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that whatever he and his men had seen out there at Mantapsan, it had been real—real as in a genuine spacecraft from some other world. Everyone who questioned him insisted that it might have been something out of some secret American program, something so secret it would be devastating to national security if he revealed it.

      “Everyone knows,” one guy with FBI credentials had told him, “that the military has cooked up some pretty strange stuff. You know … Area 51, and all that.”

      That secret base in the Nevada