Grudge: Operation Highjump Read online

  “Did you know, Herr Hamm, that there is a legitimate concern amongst the Japanese people that the country will become communist after the Americans leave?”

  “No, I didn’t, sir.”

  “They see how the Soviets have prospered from communism, feeding the masses who live in the snowbound wastelands—not unlike the hell that we are forced to endure in Neuschwabenland. The writing is on the wall in China as well. The communists won their civil war earlier this year and are implementing their ideologies nationwide. Even the conflict that’s enveloped the Korean Peninsula for the past two months is a fight between the communist North and the capitalist South. Do you think the communist model would work for Japan, which faces a lot of the same economic problems as the Soviet Union and China?”

  “I don’t—”

  “It won’t. Communism itself is flawed. There can be no true egalitarian society. There will always be the haves and the have nots; those who govern and those who are governed. It is the way of mankind.”

  “I—”

  “But, I digress, Sabastian. I did not mean to discuss my personal beliefs on the theory of communism or the Soviet dogs who practice it, in name. What I meant to say before I departed on that tangent is that the Japanese government—or at least some in the government—are ripe for the picking. This is our opportunity to re-forge a partnership with them in secret.”

  “I understand, sir, but I go back to my original question. Can they be trusted? Or are they too far down the road of dependence upon the American occupational army for their livelihood? Our entire existence on the Southern Continent is dependent upon remaining secret until the time to strike is at hand.”

  “That remains to be seen, doesn’t it?” Hauptmann Mueller answered. “The reports that we’ve seen say that a complete economic collapse is imminent. That fool MacArthur has made it his mission to break up and destroy large Japanese companies. Those companies stand to lose millions of yen—the Japanese currency—annually. You don’t think those business owners have an axe to grind with the Americans?

  “We can promise them retribution, both for the war and for what is currently happening to their nation under the occupation. We have foodstuffs from Argentina and Brazil, and oil from Venezuela and Egypt. We need Japan’s steel to produce more düsenjägers and panzers.”

  They quieted their conversation as they left the crowded ethnic market and made their way across a small open area. There was a new steel company formed earlier in the month that German operatives had assessed may be willing to work with the Reich since its original corporation had been dismantled by the SCAP.

  The Fourth Reich’s supply of steel had diminished rapidly after building their first ninety-three flying discs, known to the Luftwaffe as düsenjägers. They lost several of them in training and a few more engaging the Americans in ill-advised aerial combat. Mueller thought they should have stayed hidden, but the commander of the Neuschwabenland Base disagreed, choosing to attack the observation planes instead of letting them pass unmolested as the Argus Base commander allowed them to do. In addition to the düsenjägers, the Heer was clamoring for armored weapons and transports if they were to fight a ground war with the Americans any time soon.

  Mueller scratched his beard that he’d allowed to grow for the trip to Japan. All the steel in the world wouldn’t be enough if the scientists couldn’t figure out how to manufacture the Aryan’s regeneration serum. Already, as evidenced by his recent promotion, the older leaders in the Wehrmacht were beginning to die off. They needed a medical breakthrough if they were to carry out the Führer’s plan for retribution.

  But, for the moment, Hauptmann Mueller would affect what he could. That meant negotiating a beneficial contract with several companies in Japan that might be sympathetic to the Reich’s cause.

  Two armed Americans guarded the entrance to the small company front that was the Germans’ destination. It was a common, if annoying, occurrence in occupied Japan. The Americans were everywhere.

  Mueller glanced at the sign over the door before they went inside. Written in both English and Japanese was the name ‘Kawasaki Steel Corporation’.

  *****

  25 December 1946

  Somewhere over Princess Elizabeth Land, East Antarctica

  “Contact!”

  Craig shook his head to clear the fuzz that had built up after hours of flying over snow, rock and ice. “What was that?” he asked into the intercom.

  “I saw something,” Waxler replied. “Off the port side, sir.”

  Craig looked out his window to port. He couldn’t see anything except a few puffy white clouds above the landscape.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t a mountain, Waxler?”

  “I… I don’t know, sir. It looked like an upside down cake pan.”

  “A cake pan?” Private Henderson cut in. “Waxler, we haven’t been out here nearly long enough for you to be missing your momma’s cooking.”

  Craig smiled at the starboard waist gunner’s comment. “Okay, Henderson, that’s enough. If he thought he saw something, he’s doing the right thing by reporting it. We’ll take note and— Holy Jesus!”

  A large, circular object flew directly in front of the Ghost, coming from the clouds below. Craig pulled the yoke quickly, sending the seaplane jerking hard to port as the object disappeared into the clouds once again.

  A chorus of questions berated him over the crew frequency as his men were likely thrown around by his sudden maneuver. He pulled his headset off and slapped his hand against Freddy, the co-pilot. “Did you see that too?”

  The man was white as a ghost. He’d seen it.

  “Fred, I don’t need you losing it. Are you okay?”

  Fred slowly nodded his head. “What was that, Craig?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m thinking we’ve gone about as far as we’re gonna go today.”

  “Sounds good. I don’t think we should push our luck.”

  Craig gritted his teeth and steered the seaplane in a wide 180-degree turn and added a little throttle once they were pointed back toward the Pine Island.

  What the hell was that thing?

  *****

  21 March 2020

  Pentagon, Washington, DC

  It turned out that Gloria had a higher security clearance than Sergeant Jacobs.

  “This is much better,” she said, looking around the small space. It was almost exactly like the facility they had back at her headquarters on Fort McNair. They were in a room inside a room, insulated against eavesdropping and they were authorized to discuss up to Top Secret, which should be sufficient. There were still parts about the extraterrestrial threat that she wasn’t authorized to discuss, even in the SCIF.

  “So, we got a little ahead of ourselves out there while I was trying to get you to buy in on Operation Highjump’s real objectives, but that’s okay. To be able to tell you exactly what we’re up against, I need to take you back to 1938.”

  “You mean the final known German expedition to Antarctica?” Bryan asked, clearly referencing what he’d seen on the website.

  She smirked. “Yeah, that happened in 1938. It was led by Hermann Goering, the head of the German Luftwaffe and the President of the Reichstag at the time. Seems like an odd pick to lead a maritime expedition to the middle of nowhere, don’t you think?”

  “Hitler was known for his eccentricities and he only trusted a few people, so it’s not that odd,” Bryan remarked.

  Good, he knows a little bit about the Nazis. That may work in my favor, Gloria thought.

  “True. It was a very important mission—the third that we know of to Antarctica. The official story is that they were looking for new whaling grounds, but again, what was Goering doing there? We think—actually, we know that the Germans built a base in Antarctica, in the Dronning Maud Land. Byrd’s forces fought against them there before being forced to retreat in the face of superior weaponry.”

  “So you’re saying that Americans did fight Germans in Antarctica after t
he war was over. That’s true?” James asked.

  “Yes. It’s one hundred percent true. There were limited ground skirmishes down there over the years, primarily the Brits during their Operation Tabarin in 1943; most of our fights were in the air against the Nazi flying discs. And we got our asses handed to us.”

  “Wait,” Hollinsworth stopped her. “We were engaged in dogfights with the Nazis in Antarctica in 1946? How have I not heard about that?”

  She shrugged again. “People get sworn to secrecy and if enough incentive is placed upon keeping that promise, then it will stay secret forever.”

  “You said we got our asses handed to us—how did we keep casualties out of the news?”

  “People got killed all the time in the military, still do. We have an inherently dangerous job.”

  “So, they were just covered up?”

  “Pretty much. Operation Highjump only lasted eight weeks. It was supposed to take eight months, but they were out of fighter pilots and worried about attacks against the ships, so they returned to the States.”

  “So we just gave up?” James asked.

  “No. The Defense Department launched Operation Windmill over the Antarctic summer of 1947–1948. In addition to overflights of the continent, they also conducted ‘underwater demolition surveys’.”

  “In other words, they were using depth charges to destroy subs.”

  She nodded. “They found Nazi sub pens off the coast of the Ross Ice Shelf on the opposite side of the continent. As far as we know, they destroyed the U-boats. The flying discs continued to dominate the American fighter planes, forcing another retreat.

  “Then, Harry Truman won reelection in 1948 and further expeditions to Antarctica were denied as we faced the growing communist threat,” Gloria continued. “We got embroiled in Korea in 1950 and didn’t go back to the Antarctic continent until 1955 with Operation Deep Freeze I. We’ve been going back every year since then.”

  “When were the nukes detonated again?” James asked.

  “1958,” she answered. “If you know your history, we were once again heading into a war in Vietnam. We had advisors in the country as early as 1955 and the writing was on the wall that we were going to end up in full-scale combat operations. President Eisenhower couldn’t afford to keep fighting a secret war down south and an open conflict in southeast Asia, so he decided to stop dicking around and nuked the Nazi base in Dronning Maud Land.”

  She paused, letting the information sink in. “Until four days ago, everyone thought that the Nazis in Antarctica were an interesting footnote in the secret US military history.”

  “But why is it still secret?” Bryan asked. “That’s the part I don’t understand. If we kicked their asses, why hasn’t it been released to the public?”

  “I have to apologize,” Gloria said. “I’m a historian by trade and I allow myself to get distracted and go off topic. It’s my biggest fault.”

  “You seemed to take us right down a linear path,” James stated. “You started with the 1938 expedition, went through the operations in the intervening years and then the final destruction of the Nazis. I don’t know what else we could have missed.”

  You don’t know the half of it.

  “Thank you. You’re right, to an extent. Those are extremely important and pertinent to the discussion. But, they’re not the full reason we’re in the SCIF. I wanted to discuss the other major event that happened in 1938, before the expedition.”

  Gloria looked over to where the sergeant sat at his computer terminal, trying to appear as if he weren’t listening. “Sergeant Jacobs?”

  “Yes, ma’am?” he responded, spinning in his chair.

  “Can you please give us ten minutes? This information is strictly need to know at this point.”

  Jacobs’ face fell. He’d obviously been looking forward to getting the juicy details of the story. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She watched as he logged out of two different systems and pocketed the cards required to log in. He shut the door securely behind himself and Gloria turned back to the two men. She shuffled through her briefcase for a moment until she found the pages she wanted and pulled them out, placing them in front of James and Bryan.

  “These are standard nondisclosure forms. This information does not leave this room. I’ll need you to fill in the information and then you can witness the documents for each other.”

  She waited as they filled out the paperwork. Years ago, she would have felt like an asshole making them fill out forms that they’d already had to fill out for their regular jobs, but now she barely batted an eye. This was some terrifying stuff and if the information got out to the public, then it would be mass hysteria.

  “Alright, that’s done,” Bryan stated. “What’s this about?”

  “In 1938, there was an alleged UFO crash in the Bavarian Alps. It was recovered by the Germans, we believe there was a crew of six, but we know for sure that at least one of them survived and assisted the Nazis with their engineering projects.”

  She’d spit the information out fast, all in one breath, to get it all on the table before the questions began.

  “Uh… I don’t know how to take that,” Bryan mumbled.

  “So aliens are real?” James asked.

  She nodded. “The crew of the Bavarian crash was humanoid, possibly even human. That part is sketchy in the notes we were able to recover after the war. The survivor called himself an Aryan. Sound familiar?”

  “The master race,” James said.

  “It’s what Hitler built his whole ideal of racial purity around,” Gloria continued. “We have no idea where the Aryan came from, whether he was a time traveler or from some planet in space, we just don’t know. None of the German scientists we brought to America after the war had any firsthand information. They told us what they’d been told by others: the generalized details of the crash and a description of the man, but that’s all they knew.

  “The Germans were able to recover an intact power plant, but the airframe was damaged,” Gloria pressed on. “That’s why there were so many radical designs discovered in the engineering and manufacturing facilities of the German plane builders during the war. They had the propulsion, but not the design of the airframe.”

  She took a breath and waited a beat to allow them time for a question. It didn’t come. “We, on the other hand, discovered a basically intact airframe at Roswell, but the power plant was destroyed in the crash—or sabotaged by the crew prior to being apprehended.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Bryan burst out. “I’ve been a naval aviator for nineteen years. I’ve never seen any little green men flying around out there.”

  “You haven’t, but plenty of your fellow pilots have,” Gloria countered. “And they’re not green, they’re grey—at least the ones we know about.”

  “Hold on,” James said. “You mean those stories of little grey men with big eyes who have a fondness for anally probing people are true?”

  She laughed. “Sort of. We’ve recovered two crashed UFOs since the 1947 Roswell Incident and both of them contained the bodies of the Greys, as people call them. We have no evidence of the so-called Aryans. You’ll have to remember, my main area of focus is WWII, and anything outside of a five-year window on either side of the war is just a side hobby for me since I can access the information. From what I gather, we have no way of knowing if they really abduct people or if that’s all made up. I’ve read that some of the people who claim to have been abducted have had interesting medical examinations after the fact, but that’s not official.

  “The Center for Military History’s position is that the Nazis were working hand-in-hand with the Aryan to develop more advanced weaponry and technology. There have been multiple reports across the globe of UFOs with Nazi insignia and the occupants speaking German. Again, this could be paranoia or outright lies, but when you couple it with the reports filtering out of Fort Lauderdale that the soldiers on the ground spoke German…”

  “You think we didn�
��t kill them all when we nuked their base,” James finished her thought.

  “Exactly. We discovered the bodies of almost ninety thousand adults and another seventy thousand children in the base afterwards—”

  “We did?” Bryan asked skeptically.

  “Yes,” she replied. She could tell she was losing him. “One of the benefits of high-altitude nuclear bursts is that it spreads a lethal dose of radiation below, but keeps the infrastructure intact and the radiation from that type of burst deteriorates quickly. We were able to go into the subterranean base in Dronning Maud Land and found a massive complex capable of holding hundreds of thousands of troops.”

  “How did we hide the fact that we killed that many people, including the children?” James asked.

  “It was all ordered sealed and everyone involved ordered to secrecy. The children all appeared to be of uniform age, ten or eleven, and wore Nazi uniforms, so they were likely training them to be soldiers.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “It is what it is. The Nazis had a long history of brainwashing young children to their cause and using them as soldiers,” she said. “Inside the base we found all sorts of beneficial technology that advanced our sciences rapidly. Remember the space race? We went from flying propeller planes at the end of WWII to landing on the moon, in less than twenty-five years. All the unshielded electronics were rendered useless by the EMP, but we reverse-engineered a lot of them to figure out their purpose.”

  “You are so full of shit, Major, that I don’t know how you can justify that paycheck Uncle Sam gives you each month.”

  “I used to be just like you, sir,” she replied. “I didn’t believe my predecessor when he trained me. But there’s simply too much evidence for it not to be real. Yes, there are tons of faked stories, but we have a lot of facts and physical evidence from at least three crash sites.

  “Don’t you think it’s strange how the Nazis—the party leadership of the Nazis at least—were so absorbed with researching the occult? They sought ways to tap into the earth for powers and some of them prayed to deities never heard of before. Not to mention, how did they convince the average soldier to gas millions of innocent people without the promise of something better if they followed through with it? They were absolutely in contact with aliens.”