2024
“I was a whaler in those days. Don’t judge me. I was young, I needed work, and I didn’t know any better. One did what one had to do.”
Dmitri Katkov, former citizen of a Soviet Socialist Republic, spoke to them remotely from his current residence in Cape May, New Jersey. He was an older gentleman, with craggy features weathered by sun and sea, a thick gray beard, and a Russian accent. He’d reached out to Cetacean, claiming to have had his own remarkable experience, involving a pair of humpback whales no less, on the day Gillian vanished.
“Understood.” Melinda sat on the couch, facing her laptop at the approved Room Rater height. As ever, Dennis stood off to the side, staying off-camera. “Trust me, we’re not here to question your choices back then. We just want to hear your story… about a huge invisible UFO?”
There’d been a time, not too many weeks ago, when she wouldn’t have bothered responding to such a “lead,” consigning it to the kook folder instead, but that was before their investigation (and lives) came to entail Miracle Milly, unearthly happenings in the park, ray guns, Russian spies, and, possibly, an obsessed biotech tycoon who hadn’t seemed to have aged over the last thirty-plus years. Beneath the professional poise she’d assumed to interview Katkov, Melinda was still reeling from the fact that Jane Temple, once Melinda had managed to get hold of her, had also positively ID’d Orlando Wilder as Wilmer Offutt, which defied all logic and biology. At this point, a retired Russian whaler reporting yet another UFO encounter was pretty much par for the course.
“Da,” he said. “I remember it well, even after all these years. I was serving aboard the Moryana, out of Vladivostok, hunting for whales in the Bering Sea, when we sighted two young humpback whales breaching the surface. In hindsight, perhaps the ‘George and Gracie’ you mention on your series. This was indeed the thirteenth of May in 1986, the same day your Doctor Gillian Taylor was last seen.”
And when the whales’ radio transmitters abruptly went silent, Melinda recalled, somewhere in the Bering Sea.
“We closed in on the whales, expecting easy kills. Indeed, the whales did not seem alarmed by our approach at all, as though perhaps they had been raised by humans in an aquarium? We fired the harpoon, which shot toward the nearest whale. It was just about to make a direct hit when… klang! The harpoon struck an unseen barrier and fell into the sea, leaving the whales untouched.”
Thank goodness, Melinda thought. “So you couldn’t see what the harpoon hit?”
“Not at first. From where we stood, on the deck of the boat, it looked as though the harpoon had somehow been blocked by empty air, but then the sky above the waves shimmered like a mirage and this… vessel… materialized out of nowhere, many times larger than poor Moryana, hovering before us like some great metallic bird-of-prey.” Awe filled his voice at the memory. “It was like nothing any of us had ever seen, before or since.”
Off to the right, Dennis’s eyes were wide. He was hanging on the old whaler’s every word, barely monitoring the sound levels. Melinda braced herself for his reaction, after the interview was over, even as she tried to hang on to her skepticism. Despite herself, she immediately recalled the deep indentation at the park, the flattened trash can, the sudden blasts of air out of clear days, and the way Gillian and her accomplices had somehow escaped Mercy General unseen. Almost as though spirited away by an invisible aircraft?
“Can you describe what it looked like?”
“I can do better than that, young lady. I’ve been drawing and painting it for the better part of my life now. From memory, yes, but such a memory!” He leaned forward to fiddle with a mouse or keyboard at his end of the transmission. “Feast your eyes on this.”
An oil painting took over most of the screen. The striking image depicted an exotic, thoroughly unidentifiable aircraft hanging in midair, dwarfing the much smaller whaling ship caught in its immense shadow. The ship was dark green in color, with twin wings flanking a long central hull. A glowing red ring stood out upon its bulbous prow, like a cyclopean eye. Stylized renderings of feathered pinions, vermillion in hue, adorned the undersides of the wings, conveying indeed the impression of some mammoth avian predator, like the mythical roc that menaced Sinbad in the Arabian Nights. Melinda could only imagine what it would be like to suddenly see such an apparition looming before you, way out on the open sea.
“You say it… materialized? As in it abruptly descended from the clouds, or perhaps rose up from beneath the waves?”
Katkov’s image now occupied a small window in the upper righthand corner of the screen. He shook his head vigorously.
“Nyet. The air wavered and blurred, as above hot pavement, then there it was: as big and solid as anything I’ve ever seen, putting the fear of God—or the Devil—into every one of us.” He crossed himself instinctively. “From out of nowhere!”
Just like the doorway Javy Valdez saw hovering above the park one day earlier. Maybe not a portal through time or space then, but… an open hatch on an invisible stealth aircraft? If such a thing was even possible, that was.
“Then what?” she asked.
“What do you think, in the face of such a fearsome sight? Our pilot spun the wheel and slewed the boat around so sharply he nearly swamped us. We raced back to port at full speed, not letting up even after that monstrous vessel was well behind us.”
“So you didn’t see what it did next… or where it went?”
He shook his head. “Wasn’t worth my life to find out. For all I know, it faded from sight as swiftly as it appeared. But that brief sighting? I’ll take that with me until the day I die.”
I’ll bet, she thought, if that painting is to be believed.
Katkov didn’t have much more to tell her. Unfortunately, he no longer knew, if he ever had, the precise coordinates for where his UFO had materialized, so she couldn’t compare them against whatever records the Cetacean Institute might still have of George and Gracie’s last known location. Despite this, Melinda felt certain that Katkov had encountered Gillian’s whales, rescued in the nick of time by a stealth aircraft of unknown origin, presumably the same one that had landed in Golden Gate Park the day before, leaving its impression in the field, and taken off the next day, just as the Dowses had been jogging past. Insanely, all the pieces fit—if you bought into some pretty unbelievable premises.
Invisible aircraft? Spaceships?
Just how quickly had the “roc” traveled from San Francisco to the Bering Sea? If her timeline was right, and the jet blast that had staggered the joggers was indeed the UFO departing from the park, that great green bird would’ve had to have made the trip in no time at all? She was no aeronautics expert, but that seemed like a stretch even for advanced military aircraft.
How fast was too fast to be possible?
Her mind was spinning. After making sure Dennis clipped a frame of the oil painting, she thanked Katkov for his time and story, closed out the interview, and took a deep breath before turning toward Dennis, who was pacing all around the living room, barely able to contain himself. He ran both hands through his hair, like he was trying to hold his over-excited brain in place.
“Holy crap! It’s all true! Gillian didn’t just disappear, she—”
She cut him off, not ready for what was surely coming. “Don’t say it.”
“What? That she left the planet altogether?” He pointed at his laptop where the great green UFO still cast its shadow on the sea. “Open your eyes. Does that resemble any aircraft ever built on Earth? It’s obviously extraterrestrial!”
“Let’s not get carried away,” she said, with less conviction than she would have liked. “Maybe something experimental? Like those ultra-top-secret projects at Area 51 you used to go on about?”
“Reverse engineered from the ship that crashed at Roswell,” he reminded her, taking for granted this was established fact and not just the stuff of rumor and conspiracy theories. “But wouldn’t Halley and his fellow spooks already know all about that? And why would an experimental new design still be unknown today, forty years later? Shouldn’t that technology have filtered out into more mainstream usage by now? And even back then, why would the Feds be parking their top-secret invisible aircraft in a public park… and using it to rescue whales and an injured Russian spy?”
“Why would aliens?” she countered.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Mars needs whales?”
She struggled to bring them back down to Earth. “That UFO decorated its wings with feathers, symbolically. Would aliens do that? Do they even have birds where they come from?”
He shrugged. “Parallel evolution?”
“Seriously?”
“You got a better explanation?”
“No, damnit,” she cursed, breaking her self-imposed embargo on profanity. Everything about this investigation kept steering them into what felt more and more like science fiction, so that she increasingly felt like she was the one being unreasonable for refusing to think outside the box. When had Dennis started sounding like the voice of reason?
She stared at the futuristic roc on the screen. It was just a painting, not a photograph, but she had to admit it didn’t look like any kind of aircraft, experimental or otherwise, she had ever seen or read about. Its exotic design, and seemingly impossible capabilities, certainly seemed like something from (say it, she dared herself) another world.
Literally?
She couldn’t duck the question any longer. Had Gillian been abducted by aliens?
Or even gone with them willingly?
“Screw this.” She needed to get to the bottom of this, one way or another, not just for Cetacean, but for the sake of her own sanity. She had to know what was real in this world and what was mere fantasy. Before Dennis could protest or try to change her mind, she grabbed her phone and called the number from the ancient business card.
“Wait! What are you doing?”
He tried to snatch the phone from her, but she darted away from him, keeping it out of reach as the answering machine played its recorded greeting. Now that she heard it again, she recognized the distinctive bass tones of Orlando Wilder, which only spurred her to take the bull by the horns, despite Dennis’s frantic attempts to forestall her.
“Hello? Willard Offutt? Orlando Wilder? Whoever this is and whatever you’re calling yourself, I know where that precious kidney pill came from,” she lied, “and where it can be found today. Let’s talk, ASAP. You won’t regret it.”
She put down the phone, feeling a rush of anticipation. Dennis stared at her, aghast.
“Crap, Melinda. What have you done?”