The Tethys Report (The Rise of the Chirons Book 1) Read online

  “What’s going on?” I ventured.

  “We’ve been getting some intel that the Russians are here and snooping around. Maybe they’re onto you. I don’t want you to screw up the whole operation.”

  “Onto me? I didn’t even know I was onto something until a little while ago.”

  “I wouldn’t want them knowing that. It may prove harmful to your health.”

  “That’s touching of you,” I said in my mind. I knew it was better to hold my tongue. Krafty didn’t take jokes very well.

  “Good,” he said, mostly to himself. “Jake, this is Hal ‘Red Beard’ McGrady. He’s the one leading the team” He nodded at a huge bear of a man who looked more like a gentle giant. He had the beard to go along with his chiseled face and long red hair. The military stopped being strict about their rules for the operators long before.

  “Just call me ‘Hal’,” said the man who had come to my room to pick me up. “You snore by the way.”

  “Funny, you’re the first to say that,” I said, casually. Then I thought about it more. “How long were you observing me by the way?”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t tell your sweetheart,” he said without mirth.

  I looked at our mutual ‘benefactor’. “I told him that you had a personal interest in this Jake, and so he knows about Jen and you.”

  I stood there dumbfounded. What had just a few days ago been one of my most intimate relationships—and private for the most part—had become a briefing to a military strike group. My apprehension started to grow.

  “And this guy,” Krafty said pointing at the man who had driven me, “is Lance. He’s a no-nonsense type, so don’t give him any trouble.”

  “Howdy,” Lance said with a slight smile. “Pleasure to meet you.” After studying his face, I felt I had gotten him wrong. Before in the car, I had dismissed him as just another foot soldier. But he impressed upon me that he was the kind of soldier who had more than a bit of thoughtfulness inside him. He was shy and respectful.

  “Pleasure’s all mine,” I replied.

  “On that note, let me introduce you to the others in the group,” Hal said. “Hey guys, come here.”

  At that moment, three men came forward. One of them had been in the back seat on our way over.

  “This is Alex. He’s amazing at hand-to-hand, killing insurgents and baking Thanksgiving turkeys,” he said indicating the first man. He looked rather short, but built like a powerful machine. His arms bulged, and he looked like he ran about twenty miles a day, or more than me at least. The other two snickered. It must have been an inside story. Alex seemed to have a good sense of humor though and shrugged off the subtle jest with a grin. I noticed though that Alex refused to make eye contact with me for very long. It was as if he wanted to keep some thoughts hidden from me. I wondered if he were putting on an act of sorts.

  “The other two are Bret and Ross. Two ex-jarheads who got nothing better to do than go on these wild geese chases.” The two tall, powerfully built men stood there, turning off their laughter as if by a switch. They looked like football running backs—their muscles were so chiseled that I could see them through the thick clothes they wore. They looked excited and nervous, as if waiting for their name to get announced calling for them to go up on stage.

  The one named Ross, a little later, pulled me aside and said, “Hey, if you get in the way, and put my team in danger, I’ll drop the dead weight, you know what I mean?”

  I just looked at him with a blank look and said nothing. To say I was getting doubts, was to make a huge understatement.

  Kraftburger later explained to me how I was needed to evaluate and assess the geology of the site we were going to, giving me a bit more information than he gave earlier. I was an expert on paleogeography. My focus was on the supercontinent Gondwana, but while that interested me, I had worked with governments on natural resources, namely of the plebian variety: coal, copper, and so on. These days, very few geologists were getting into this realm of research, so it was great to finally get started on something that interested me, even if I didn’t know exactly what it was yet.

  “You’ve got to keep your eyes open, and I want a full assessment of what you see down there,” he told me. “Remember, we’re particularly interested in what kinds of geological resources are available—think energy—oil, natural gas and so on, and also if there are any effective ways to exploit those resources. But we’re also interested in if there is some dangerous stuff down there—or something completely unexpected.”

  I waited a while for him to elaborate, but he didn’t.

  “What do you mean ‘dangerous’?”

  His eyes rolled around as if searching for some stock phrase that would seem to say everything but reveal nothing new. “Oh, you’ll know it when you see it. We’ve lately found some evidence to suggest that there might be something down there to make a weapon of.”

  “Uranium? In Antarctica?”

  “We don’t know,” he said, turning away.

  “Why all the firepower? From the surface, this seems to me more a military, cloak-and-dagger type of operation. Anyone can be trained to look at uranium, and at least take pictures of the material for later study.” I decided to try the question again: “What do you really need me for?”

  And it was then that I think Kraftberger came closest to telling me the truth. “Jake, we simply don’t know what you’ll find down there, or if we’ll get another chance to see it. This whole place looks simply unstable. You’re right. I could get these guys to take pictures, but I want someone down there who is an expert. I need not only someone who can take pictures but someone who also knows what the right kind of pictures are. I need someone who can help advise my team in a real-time situation. That’s what you’re really going in for.”

  “Did JANNUS have anything to do with this mission?” I asked. I knew it was a sensitive topic, but I wanted to try and get an answer. It was a risky question.

  A flash of anger and annoyance flashed across his face. “I’ve told you all you need to know. Don’t go politically on me now goddammit,” he said facing away from me.

  It was as honest an answer as I was going to get. Even with this murky response, I felt that there was something else unmentioned that he was leaving out. Indeed, later I would realize that he must, in fact, have known a lot more than he was letting on.

  During our flight from Bangkok to Florida, I got to know Alex better. He was the most intelligent of the soldiers, and actually I learned one of the least gung-ho. He talked a little of his days in Afghanistan, and how he still had dreams that haunted him, reminding him of the horrors that he faced. He had to take nearly a year off from service in order to cope with the aftermath. We both expressed our disbelief that even in the year 2077 and all that was going on, the government had forces there-albeit at a much-reduced presence after the political disaster I had been involved in.

  He told me a story of a woman he fell in love with while he served in Afghanistan. Her name was Khadija, the same name as the first bride to Prophet Muhammad. He didn’t say where he met her, but it seemed apparent that she was some sort of outcast—perhaps left without a family due to the wars that had gone on. He talked of her wonderfully acute intelligence, and how she would show her the traditional dances of Afghanistan when they were alone together.

  “She was the most caring person I had ever met,” he said to me while we were flying on the plane. There was joy and bitterness in his eyes.

  “How did it end?” I asked feeling just a bit rude.

  He didn’t seem to mind though. “It ended when I was called in to do a strike behind enemy lines. Little had I known it, but she was working for a faction that was resisting the government. I was simply a pawn in her efforts to extract information. She was killed and that was the end of it.” He pulled a long drag from his cigarette and exhaled then. There was something funny about that look. I got the feeling that he didn’t give me the whole truth.

  “Did you do it?” I
asked.

  “No,” he said simply.

  I waited. He began to speak again. “Although I wasn’t the one to do it, she was actually killed just before the strike—a bullet through the head.” Through enhanced imaging via the satellites, he had seen her body there and heard from the locals how she had cooperated with a brutal warlord.

  He stopped for a while. I could tell emotion was overtaking him. I looked away embarrassed that he would feel ashamed. I didn’t want that for him.

  He continued again. “I searched for answers as to why she had done it, but always came out with conflicting accounts. I think I blamed myself for this, and if given a choice would have taken her away from that village and tried to change her.” He looked out the window onto the dark clouds that had lost the warmth of sunlight. They looked like a frozen wasteland out there beyond the wings of the plane. “It happened when I was young and stupid—maybe ten years ago now. I’ve tried hard to forget it. Life’s a lottery of random chances. Plenty of undeserving people get the short end of the stick.”

  I listened to the story with a quiet morose gaze at my drink.

  “I still am in love with her, but I was later told not to tell anyone else about her—and of course all the others that died because of our presence there. She died to me that day. I knew she didn’t have any family left. They had all been killed. Later, I found her body. Somehow it had been remarkably undamaged. The assassin hadn’t even bothered to bury her properly, which of course is a grave offense. It was left to me to carry out the task. When I buried her, I erased her entire existence.”

  “Except for you,” I said. “You remember her—even if no one else does.”

  As a response, he just gave a sardonic grunt, got up and walked away. We didn’t speak again until the plane landed.

  Chapter 3

  After a quick stop in New San Francisco, we arrived in Florida at a large air force base near Tallahassee, and it was announced that we had one night before departure—no later. A super typhoon was making its way north, perhaps one as big as the super typhoon that had finished off Miami. They didn’t give names to the storms anymore of course because the government figured that people were coming up with informal names like the Storm of Judgement and Windy Apocalypse. Alex offered to take me around the city next to the base, and I agreed. His company was the most welcome, and no one else seemed to care.

  There was a bar just off the base, and he offered to buy. I said nothing, as I was stingy by nature, but when drunk, I often opened up. At first we talked of things most single men in their mid-thirties talk about: lost loves, famous drinking stories (which I didn’t have that much of, so I sometimes made these up) and where the world was headed.

  “So Kraftberger makes it sound like you know one of the people we’re going to rescue,” Alex said.

  “Rescue? I thought we were doing some search and report mission,” I said, realizing that it was very likely that Alex had been far better informed than I was. I didn’t want to deliberately deceive him, but I did want to learn as much as I could.

  “Well that’s what I was told. They don’t tell me much, mind you, but this whole thing was supposed to go over to the Navy SEALS, but command wanted this whole operation completely off the books.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning there could be some real UFO shit going on here. If it’s the usual Navy SEALS plus marines you’ve got a whole bunch of people who will remember what’s going on, but with us it’s different. If Uncle Sam wants to pull the plug on this operation, only Kraftburger will know what’s up. That’s why we’ve been pulled from our regular commands for this ‘special’ outfit. You’re from the STARS Program—you’ve got technical skills.”

  Ross spoke up. Until then, he had been listening to our conversation quietly. “Hey remind me what ‘STARS’ stands for anyway.”

  “Specialized Technical Assistance Reconnaissance and Stealth,” I said dryly while trying to put my proud face on. I had to explain the same information on many occasions.

  “Stealth?” said Ross. “What do you guys got that we don’t.”

  Before I could answer, Alex chimed in. “I heard they got some specialized technical equipment that makes them invisible—all sorts of crazy shit. I heard they’re gearing up for the next big war.”

  “Well we are in the supposed Second Cold War that could turn hot at any moment,” said Ross. “The land’s getting smaller, people are getting poorer, no jobs, no food, no future, and all the remaining countries want to grab what’s left. They’ll need some more high-tech units to do all that stuff. We—we’re just grunts.”

  “We’re not exactly ‘just grunts’,” Hal said. “We’ve been trained with the world’s best resources.”

  “Yeah?” said Ross. “Well, look what’s happening to our budgets. They’re getting smaller and smaller. We get less gear, less support, less pay—hell, the way things are going, we’ll be replaced by something cheaper—drones.”

  “Things aren’t that bad,” Hal said.

  “The hell they aren’t,” Ross said. “You tell me why my gun’s ten years old and the ammo sometimes is unreliable.”

  “Because no one up there likes you,” Alex said. “You’re just an ass kisser in search of ass.” Everyone but Ross laughed.

  “I’m serious. They’ve got all the money back home. But they’re not willing to spend it on us. It’s all lost in corruption or greed. No one wants to pay for war anymore. They just want the butter.”

  I sat and thought about the situation for a moment. We were expendable—that wasn’t a big surprise. What was a surprise was to know for the first time that the mission seemed to be much more dangerous than Kraftberger had let on. The soldiers that went with us were chosen, not because they were the best, it seemed, but the least likely to be noticed. Alex confirmed this when he told me his background. Virtually all of his family was dead, and he had no love life, nor very many friends. Even the soldiers he served with were dead, or they had long parted and may not remember or care much if he were to disappear. Bret was the only one who had any relatives, but he seemed to be a last-minute placement.

  “What do you think is going on?”

  “I don’t know Dr. Bloom—“

  “Call me Jake, remember.”

  “Jake—You’re the expert. You tell me.”

  “Well, it’s very likely Krafty doesn’t know a whole lot about what we’re going to see,” I said, not believing it much, however.

  “So you know Kraftburger, then?”

  “I wouldn’t say I know him. I just know how he operates sometimes. That’s it.” Then I gave a few details of our dealings together.

  “They say you know one of the scientists down there.”

  “Used to,” I said. I didn’t really want to engage in on this topic—old memories, but he persisted.

  “Did you love her?”

  “Whoa there hoss. How much did they tell you then?”

  “Just that you knew some brilliant scientist, and that I was told she was cute.”

  “Well that’s very true, but that’s where it ends.“ He nodded and didn’t pursue the matter and we all left to start preparing for our journey. I didn’t really have much stuff with me so for me it was easy.

  Later that night, Alex, Ross, Bret and I decided to head to a small town outside of the air base where Bret had a friend who had practically adopted him and was great friends with his now deceased aunt, and it was likely that Kraftberger knew nothing about her since she was not family in the formal sense. She had been managing an orange farm for most of her life. We still had a day before our plane left for the Falklands where we would hop on another plane to McMurdo base. I wanted to get outside of the military confines for a while, drink some alcohol at a local establishment for once instead of an on-base bar. We would rent one of the self-driving vehicles to take us back after we were too inebriated to drive ourselves.

  Janine was very hospitable to all of us. She took us on a tour of her farm w
hich produced mainly oranges but also tomatoes. It turned out that her farm was pretty dilapidated, and she said that she would have to soon foreclose on it.

  “And over there, that whole area is pretty much dead—can’t grow anything anymore,” she said. “The floods took it. The water brought all that salt in with it from the gulf. Pretty soon, I’ll have to pack up and leave.”

  “Where will you go?” Bret asked, alarmed.

  “Wherever the wind blows me,” she said, sipping on her own concoction of spirits. It looked and smelled like a Bloody Mary with an extra shot of vodka. “Hell, that’s how I met your aunt. We both winded up down here since our families had moved on from weather disasters in other parts of the country.” She laughed. She had a tiny frame, but it all seemed to be involved in the effort to produce the throaty laughter that she produced. Eventually, it deteriorated into gravelly coughs—probably from her cigarettes.

  We sipped our drinks from paper cups containing fresh orange juice and vodka as we rolled around in her tractor. The going was a little bumpy and we each nearly fell off several times after drinking too much. I hadn’t really drunk in quite a while, so it was both refreshing and slightly intimidating to be drinking so heavily. I knew it was an effective way to bond with my fellow soldiers.

  Despite being slightly inebriated, the tour was rather depressing as she was hit with a lot of the flooding that had swept through her farm. “The damn saltwater from the gulf came in and turned everything to shit,” she said before taking a huge gulp of her Bloody Mary. I myself had a swig of a Bloody Mary of my own, thinking of how the tomato juice might be good before venturing off into the cold when she offered it to me.

  “Why not move inland?” I asked. I knew very little about farming. I had studied ancient farming and wheat variants when an undergraduate, but that was all.

  “The land’s not good,” she said with a frown on her face. “Plus, further up north, you start getting into mountain area and overcrowded land. Everything’s more crowded now.” We all knew what that meant. People were moving more inland due to the assault on the coast by the ocean. Many had no money and were simply getting by on day jobs. Education like the one I got was less and less attainable, even if you had the ability.