Rear Admiral Parker Whitehurst
The Pentagon
Upon returning from lunch, he sat behind his big polished desk in an office that was part of the vast honeycomb of rooms in the D-Ring. It was typical of the warrens they reserved for the guys who’d served well—the military’s version of the fancy CEO suite. Parker Whitehurst liked where he’d ended up so far, but at fifty-five, he wanted to believe he wasn’t done yet. And he hoped his superiors felt the same way. Although he still had a shot a Full Admiral’s pension, he also knew time was running out. As the head of the Navy’s Deep Sea Rescue Ops, his assignment represented the final stepping stone to getting his own fleet. But there were more candidates than fleets to go around, which was the way it should be, he supposed.
The topic of his pension was never far from center court in his thoughts, but there were always plenty of other tasks to keep him occupied. In the hour and a half he’d been away from his desk, a new stack of call-memos had accumulated and twice as much e-mail on his screen. Absently, he shuffled through the small sheets, recognizing all the notes except one—Dexter McCauley.
He hadn’t seen that name in a few years, but it jogged memories of a guy who had been one of the finest men who’d ever served under him. Why would he be calling? And how did he ever find me?
Picking up the memo, Parker read its contents carefully: I have information on the following: Station One Eleven, U-5001, and coordinates Longitude 39.49 W / Latitude 69.60 N. Very important I speak with you.
Now what the hell was that stuff all about?
Checking his watch, he had a meeting coming up with a budget advisor within the hour. He knew Chief McCauley extremely well, and the man wouldn’t have called him to just say hello or see if he wanted to play eighteen holes. McCauley knew he wouldn’t get an immediate call-back unless he did something to get Parker’s attention.
He looked at the three items, casting about in dimmer corridors of memory for some meaning to attach to the words. Station One Eleven. He vaguely recalled seeing something on that, but what had it been? The other two references meant nothing.
But they must mean something important to McCauley or he wouldn’t have included them in his message. And that was enough for Parker to take action. Calling in his aide, he instructed Commander Hanson to get all the information he could on the three subjects from the memo. ASAP.
By the time he finished arm-wrestling with the budget wonks, maybe he’d have some answers.
Almost four hours later, when Parker returned to his outer office, Pye Hanson looked up anxiously. “Admiral…that stuff you wanted me to check on?”
“Yes? What about it?”
“Sorry it took so long.” Hanson grinned. “But there’s plenty in the archives. Look at this…”
Parker regarded a stack of files as thick as the New York phone book. No way he would have the time to go through all that shit—even if he took it home, and he’d made a habit of doing that as little as possible. Not so much he cared what Karen might say, but more to guarantee himself some down-time from his job.
“Pye, are you kidding me?”
“No sir.”
“Well, can you give me the condensed edition on any of it?”
Hanson stood up, nodded. “I can try…”
“Inner sanctum,” said Parker. He headed into his private space with Hanson lugging the stack of folders right behind him.
They moved to the small conference table by the window and Commander Hanson spread out some of his paper. “Okay, let’s see—Station One Eleven is the code name for a secret Nazi base in the Arctic region. It was—”
Parker snapped his fingers—an old habit he hated, but couldn’t break—and nodded. “Of course. I knew I’d heard that name. We never found it, right?”
“No sir, not a trace.” Hanson shook his head. “OSS swore it was real. But it was never located and a lot of people believed it might have been mythological. Disinformation, maybe.”
Parker recalled some of the stories surrounding One Eleven, linking it to its Antarctic counterpart, Station Two Eleven. The latter had been very much a real entity, and had been the target of a post-WWII task force called “Operation High Jump.” Parker knew many details from the Top Secret files—in 1947, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal sent 40 ships under the command of Admiral Nimitz, Admiral Krusen and Admiral Byrd to find and destroy a Nazi base under the ice that had survived the end of the war in virtual autonomy.
Parker gestured to his aide. “What do you have on the other things?”
Hanson picked up a single file folder. “Not much on U-5001. Not much at all. It doesn’t fit any of the standard German submarine designations, and officially never existed. There is one report—undocumented—which suggests it was the prototype of a new class of U-boat that never got off the drawing board. Some kind of secret weapon.”
Parker nodded. “That it?”
Hanson grinned. “As far as our records, yes. But there’s been an item on the news—I guess you didn’t catch it—about some divers who found a Nazi sub in the Chesapeake Bay, and—”
Parker made a habit of never watching any news programming. Most of it was so editorially skewed as to be worthless. “Let me guess. It’s called the U-5001.”
“Yes sir, but that’s not all. The dive boat exploded, killing everybody on board. One of the divers’ names was Dexter McCauley.”
Okay, now this was getting more than strange. “But you said he just called me, left this message.”
“Yes sir.”
“So what the fuck is going on here?”
“Sir, I’m not sure, but there’s more…”
Parker exhaled. When he’d been up to his elbows in Deep Sea Rescue, he used to rely on an internal alarm system that had grown reliable from equal parts experience and instinct. And oddly enough back then, he relished the feeling of possible danger or unpredictability. He’d been out of the game for a while now, and obviously a part of him missed it.
He gestured for Hanson to continue.
“The coordinates pinpoint a position just off, or slightly beneath, the Greenland Shelf. And that location, or ones damned close to it, turned up in a few really weird files,” said his aide.
“Weird like how?”
“I mean, like totally unrelated…and I started wondering what the odds would be of that. And what the connections could be.”
“Go on…”
Hanson flipped through some pages. “Fish-kills,” he said.
“What? What’re you talking about?”
Hanson laid out sets of pages on the conference table. “Each of these are incidence reports from a variety of agencies and private companies. They document a series of fish-kills at or around those coordinates. Large areas in the sea which contain huge populations of fish—dead and floating belly-up.”
“Just fish?” said Jeff. “Or everything?”
“Actually, everything. Every type of sea creature—right down to the plankton.”
“Wow…and how ‘large’ an area are we talking about?”
Hanson shrugged. “Not sure. The estimates vary depending on how soon after the ‘killing event’ has happened. But it’s at least 20 square miles.”
“Hmmmm. Nothing to sneer at. That’s a lot of fish. Could be significant. Depending on how many times it’s happened.” said Parker.
“I agree.” Hanson checked another file, then: “But we can’t be sure about that. We can only work from the instances it’s been observed—the first time was in December of 1946, and thirteen times since then.”
“What? Thirteen’s a lot. Any pattern to the occurrences?”
“A cyclic pattern is suggested of approximately every five or six years. The gaps in the pattern might be times when nobody noticed it.”
“Is it possible there’s some naturally occurring phenomenon causing it? Temperature drops? Vulcanism?”
“From what I can find, nothing much has been done about it, other than make note of it. But funny you mention vulcanism—a routine Geophysical Satellite mapping survey uncovered something strange at essentially the same coordinates.”
Parker’s instincts were humming like a high tension wire in an electrical storm. What the hell had McCauley sent him? “Tell me.”
“The satellite’s instruments detected an unusual heat signature several hundred feet below the surface and also some unexpected data to suggest widely varying densities in a localized section of the shelf.”
“Heat signature like what?”
Hanson shook his head. “Not sure. I didn’t have enough time to dig into it. But I’m telling you, Admiral, there’s a lot going on at those coordinates—if we can pull it all together.”
“Looks like my old Chief McCauley already did.”
Hanson looked a bit sheepish as he picked up another folder. “Well, sir, there’s something else…”
“Are you serious?” Checking his watch, he saw his work day slipping away, but Parker had a feeling he’d be cancelling anything else on the planner. He motioned his aide to keep talking.
“I found an unconfirmed report that the Russians lost a hunter-killer class near these coordinates.”
“What?”
“1981. One of their Alfa class. Naval Intelligence was never able to verify verbal rumors with either documented evidence or SOSUS data.”
“What in hell’s damn does all this crap mean?” Parker sat on the edge of the desk, aware of the alarms in his head. The papers spread before him had a strange and terrible but unknown significance.
“I have a feeling we’ve barely gotten a glimpse.”
Parker nodded, glanced at the chronometer on his desk, one of those engraved commemorative things they give you when they ease you out of an assignment. He looked at his aide. “Time to close up shop, Pye. We can schedule more time for this tomorrow.”
Hanson looked disappointed. He gestured at the spread of files and printouts on the table. “Very well, sir. Should I leave this here, or—”
“You can leave it. No one will be in here to bother it.”
“What about McCauley? If he calls again?”
Parker grinned. “He won’t. He knows he’s given me all I need to get back to him.”
After dismissing his aide, Parker called his driver and told him he may be delayed in leaving the building. Then he called Karen and told her the same thing, but she had long ago stopped caring about things like that.
As he sat down behind his desk, holding the memo from McCauley in his left hand, Parker Whitehurst reached for his phone with the other.