Authors: Robert Doherty
"I'm not crazy, you know." The twitch under James Forrestal's left eye seemed to contradict that statement.
"Of course not," the young doctor said. The small nameplate on his white coat indicated his name was Lansale.
This late at night, just before midnight, the normal sounds of Bethesda Naval Hospital were muted. A corpsman came by every fifteen minutes and peered in the small window set in the steel door of Forrestal's room. "Cell" would have been a better term, but no one used it out loud, at least not around the former Secretary of Defense. The occasional sound of a car on the road outside was muted this high up on the sixteenth floor.
"It's been a bad year, two years," Forrestal said, taking Lansale's agreement as an indicator to keep talking. He'd been denied visitors for months and he was desperate to share with anyone, even this new night shift psychiatrist.
"The goddamn Air Force," Forrestal began. "Money. Money. Money. That's all they want. And Truman wants a damn balanced budget, yet he keeps signing allocations pouring the money out. And they hate me. The Joint Chiefs. They hate me. They have me followed. Followed me right to the doors of this place.
"Men. Dressed in dark suits. They were everywhere. Watching me. And then when Truman removed me, fired me, replaced me. They were in the car after the ceremony. Waiting. Drove with me back to the Pentagon. They told me."
Forrestal fell silent, and Lansale waited with the patience of a man who was working the graveyard shift and had nothing better to do. But after the silence stretched into several minutes, he finally bit. "Told you what?"
"The truth," Forrestal said simply.
Lansale fired up a cigarette and offered Forrestal one. He shook his head. Lansale inhaled. "About?"
"Majestic-12."
Lansale's eyes narrowed. "What?"
"They wanted to scare me, and they did. I was a loyal fellow. Loyal."
"I'm sure you were," Lansale said.
Forrestal snorted. "Aliens. That's what they used as a smoke screen. Even Truman bought into it. Fool."
Lansale glanced down at the medical folder. "It says you tried to kill yourself not long ago."
Forrestal's head snapped up and he stared at Lansale. "That's what they said. But I didn't. Never. I was a loyal fellow. Always will be. No matter what they're planning on doing out there."
"Out where?"
"In the desert," Forrestal said. "And in the icy wasteland."
"This also says you tried to jump out of the car several times on the ride over here last month."
"I was a prisoner," Forrestal said. "I am a prisoner. They won't let my family see me. My friends."
"You're a patient, not a prisoner," Lansale said. "You have involuntional melancholia."
"I have a mind that knows too much," Forrestal countered. "My brother told me that Truman's men took my diaries. They've been reading them."
Lansale became very still. "When was this?"
"On the phone yesterday." Forrestal smiled. "My brother is coming tomorrow. He told me that also. He's getting me out of here. I've been better. They know I've gotten better. Tomorrow I leave this prison."
"We know about your brother coming," Lansale said. He closed the file and stood. "Would you like to go with me and get some food in the diet kitchen across the hall?"
"A last meal?" Forrestal joked as he stood up. He tightened his bathrobe around his waist with its cord.
"Yeah," Lansale said as he pulled out his key ring and unlocked the door.
They crossed the hallway to the small kitchen that served the floor. Lansale let Forrestal go in first, and then locked the door behind them. As Forrestal went to the small cabinet near the window, Lansale reached out and pulled the cord from the small loops of the bathrobe. Forrestal turned, confusion on his face, one hand holding the robe closed, the other holding a can of soup.
"What are you—" Forrestal never finished, as Lansale looped the cord around his neck and stepped behind him, back-to-back, and bent, lifting Forrestal off his feet with the cord. The former Secretary of Defense flailed about, gasping for air. Lansale had already prepared the room: the window was wide open, and he hauled Forrestal like a sack of potatoes on his back toward it.
Forrestal grasped at the edge of the window and managed to get a momentary grip as Lansale spun around trying to toss him out. The former Secretary of Defense teetered in the window, half unconscious from the cord around his next, one hand holding on.
Lansale let go of the cord, stepped back, and then snap-kicked Forrestal in the stomach. With a strangled shriek, Forrestal flew out the window and into the darkness, arms flailing. Seconds later there was the dull thud of his body hitting the ground sixteen stories below.
Lansale exited the room and briskly walked down the corridor, removing the white coat as he did so. He pocketed the small nameplate and tossed the coat in a trash bin. He went down the fire stairs, all sixteen floors. He ignored the growing commotion and walked over to a dark sedan that was waiting, engine running, across the street from the hospital. He slid in the backseat and the car pulled away.
"Any problems?" the man in the front passenger seat asked without turning around.
"None in the mission," Lansale said. "But he said that Truman has his diaries. And I think he's talked about both Area 51 and the Citadel in there."
There was just the sound of the car's engine and tires on asphalt for several minutes as the man in the front seat considered that. "Area 51 is already on the radar. The whispers are out. We've got an excellent cover story for it." He fell silent once more, and Lansale waited in the backseat. "But the Citadel. That we cannot even allow whispers about."
Lansale leaned forward. "The plan was always to make the Citadel 'disappear.'"
"Yes," the man agreed, "but the plan was for that to happen six months from now."
"I will accelerate the plan," Lansale said. "All links to the Citadel will be severed within seven days. I'll personally take care of it."
Antarctica, Approximately 575 Miles
East of High Jump Station
28 May 1949
"The last load," the young captain in the gray parka remarked.
"Amen to that," Captain Vannet muttered. Through the scratched Plexiglas windshield, he glanced at the frozen runway splayed out in front of his plane. To his left rear, a staircase descended into the cargo bay of the massive Martin JRM-Mars transport, where his loadmaster was securing the few pallets of luggage the passengers had carried on board. Along the walls, soldiers bundled up in cold weather gear were seated on red web seats, ready to get started on the long journey out of here in the world's largest seaplane, which had been converted for use in the Antarctic by replacing the pontoons on each wing with large skis.
Capable of carrying over sixteen tons of cargo or 133 people, and with a wingspan over two hundred feet wide, the JRM-Mars was a workhouse that had allowed them to haul more cargo back and forth to this spot than a squadron of smaller planes.
Vannet couldn't blame the soldiers crowded in the cargo bay. He'd brought them here four months ago via High Jump Station set up near the Ross Ice Shelf, then spent the intervening time flying back from the station every opportunity the weather gave, bringing in equipment and supplies to these men for whatever they were building here in the frozen wasteland of the Antarctic. A week ago that process had hurriedly been reversed with an emergency order, and he started bringing equipment and people out. The outflow in equipment and supplies had been considerably less than the inflow.
The sky was clear and the wind had died down. The weather report from High Jump Station written down by his copilot looked good, but Vannet had long ago learned that the Antarctic was one place where weather reports could be counted on about as far as the report itself could be folded into a paper airplane and thrown. The only constant in the weather here was change—and the change was usually for the worse.
Vannet wasn't sure who the captain—Whitaker was his name—worked for. All he knew was that four months ago he had been ordered to do whatever the man said. Captain Whitaker had been here waiting to receive their cargo every time they'd landed at the Citadel—the code name they knew for this unmarked location. Today even Whitaker was going out with them. If anyone was remaining behind, Vannet knew not and cared even less. It was their last flight from the Citadel, and successfully completing it was his only concern.
Vannet shifted his gaze back to the "airstrip." The plane sat in a large bowl of ice surrounded on three sides by ice ridges and intermittent, towering mountains punching through the thick polar cap; the strip pointed toward the one open side. The bulky MARS with four turboprop engines mounted on its wings was a powerful aircraft, and Vannet felt confident in its abilities. Bracketed over the plane's pontoons were sets of skis that allowed them to negotiate the 2,000 meters of relatively level ice and snow that these people called a runway. He would be damn glad to never see this place again.
"Closing the ramp," the loadmaster announced in Vannet's headset. In the rear of the plane the back ramp lifted from the thin, powdery snow as hydraulic arms pulled it up. Descending from the top of the cargo bay came the top section of the ramp. Like jaws closing, the two shut against the swirling frozen air outside. The heaters fought a losing battle against the cold as they pumped hot air out of pipes in the ceiling of the cargo bay, ten feet overhead.
Vannet turned to Captain Whitaker. "We're all set, sir."
Whitaker simply nodded and clambered down the steps to take his seat in the rear.
"Let's do it," Vannet told the copilot. Carefully, they turned the nose straight on line, due south. As Vannet increased throttle, the plane moved, slowly gathering momentum as the propellers and skis threw up a plume of snow behind.
Vannet waited until he was satisfied they had enough speed, and then pulled in the yoke. The nose of the MARS lifted, and the plane crawled into the air. Once he reached sufficient altitude to clear the mountains, Vannet banked hard right and headed west. In the distance, out the right window, the ice pack that hugged the shore of Antarctica could be seen as a tumbled mass of broken sea ice that extended to the horizon.
Vannet turned the controls over to his copilot. Four hours and they'd be at High Jump Station, the temporary sprawling base established under the auspices of exploring Antarctica; they would refuel, and then he and his crew and passengers could begin the long stop-filled flight back to their home base in Hawaii. After four months down here they were more than ready to see loved ones and bask in the sun.
The whole mission had turned strange after the initial order to support Operation High Jump, a massive exploration of Antarctica by the military. Almost their entire squadron had received the tasking and deployed south. But on arrival at High Jump Station, a cluster of Quonset huts set next to another ice runway on the shore of a large ice-covered bay, their plane had been detached from the others and given this strange mission to support Captain Whitaker and the Citadel. They'd been warned, in no uncertain terms, that they were not to discuss the mission with anyone.
"I've got the beacon clear," the copilot informed Vannet.
As long as they kept the needle on the direction finder centered, they'd come in right on top of High Jump Station. That was another odd thing. They'd flown every mission on instruments in both directions, never once using a map, not that there were any maps available. As any good pilot would, Vannet had a rough idea where the Citadel was located, using both flight time and azimuth, but he certainly couldn't pinpoint it, and if it weren't for the radio beacons, they could easily become lost.
Satisfied all was going well, he kicked back in his chair to take a quick nap. He was going to need the rest since he was the primary pilot for the longer ten-hour leg from High Jump Station to New Zealand.
Three hours later he was awakened by the copilot. He could feel the plane descending, and looking out of the cockpit, saw the cluster of huts and tents and mounds of supplies that was the land-based hub of the Antarctic High Jump Expedition. Out the right window he could see the massive form of Mount Erebus, an active volcano dominating the horizon. Below lay the Ross Ice Shelf, the edge more than five hundred miles from its origin at the foot of the Queen Maud Mountains.
The copilot swung them around on approach. As soon as the skis touched the ice runway, he reduced throttle and used the flaps to break the plane. It was a long slow process as they slid down the strip, and Vannet watched carefully as his copilot struggled to keep them on a straight line. They finally slowed enough so the copilot could taxi the plane over to where several other smaller C-119 aircraft were parked along with a cluster of fuel trucks.
As they came to a halt, the copilot kept the engines running, which was against normal regulations during refueling, but they had all learned that regulations developed outside of Antarctica rarely worked well in this forbidding climate. They needed to keep the engines running to keep heat flowing to the cargo bay, and more important, to prevent them from seizing up if allowed to cool too much.
Vannet looked out the window as anonymous figures in bulky cold-weather clothing hooked hoses up to the fuel points and began pumping the precious liquid in.
He noted a man dressed in a red parka standing in the shadow of a parked C-119, simply staring at the plane. For some reason, Vannet felt uncomfortable with that. He turned his head upon hearing a tap at the cockpit door. Captain Whitaker stuck his head in.
"Anxious to get home, I suppose?" he asked.
"Damn right," Vannet replied. "In two days we'll be back in the sun and surf."
Whitaker nodded. "Have a safe flight. You and your men did a great job. My superiors will be forwarding letters of commendation for you and your crew to your headquarters."
That was the least they could do, Vannet thought, to pay them back for spending four months living isolated in a damn Quonset hut buried under the snow at High Jump Station and flying a load every time the weather cleared. "I appreciate that."
Captain Whitaker disappeared down the stairwell, and the loadmaster slammed shut the personnel door behind him. Vannet looked out the window. The man in the red parka was gone. He looked about and then spotted the man walking next to Whitaker, heading toward a C-119 whose engines were also running.
Vannet turned to his copilot and navigator. "Do we have clearance to go?"
The navigator's face split in a wide grin. "We have clearance, and the weather looks good all the way to New Zealand, sir."
"All right. Let's go home."
They turned their nose into the wind and powered up. Soon the seaplane was in the air and over the ice-covered Ross Sea. New Zealand was ten hours away, due north.
Vannet piloted the first three hours, as they slowly left the white ice behind and finally made it over clear ocean, specked with small white dots far below, indicating icebergs. At that point, Vannet turned the controls over to his copilot and got out of his seat. "I'm going to take a walk in back and get stretched out."
Vannet climbed down the stairs. The loadmaster and his assistant were lying on the web seats strung along the side of the plane, sleeping. The eighty engineers that they had supplied for four months were stretched out in every available spot, everyone trying to catch some sleep.
Vannet walked all the way to the rear, where the ramp doors met, rolling his head on his shoulders, shaking off the strain of three straight hours in the pilot's seat and carefully stepping over slumbering bodies.
His mind was on his wife and young daughter waiting for him in Honolulu, when the number two engine exploded with enough force to shear the right wing at the engine juncture.
The MARS immediately adopted the aerodynamics of a rock, rolling over onto its right side. Vannet was thrown up in the farthest reaches of the tail as the plane plummeted for the ocean from 25,000 feet. He blinked blood out of his eyes from a cut in his forehead and tried to orient himself. Men were screaming and there were jumbled bodies everywhere.
Vannet's primary thought was to try and crawl back up to the cockpit, but his legs wouldn't obey his mind. There was a dull ache in his lower back and no feeling below his waist. He scrambled at the cross beams along the roof of the aircraft with his hands, trying to pull himself forward, climbing over other men at times.
Vannet was twenty feet from the front of the plane when the surface of the water met the aircraft with the effect of a sledgehammer slamming into a tin can. Vannet was crushed into the floor, and was dead well before the remains of the aircraft began sinking under the dark waves.