The Shocking Conspiracy Behind Shadow Moses, By Gary McGolden
A News Reporters adventure after recieving an optical disk from Max Smithson of MegaSurprise.
IN SEARCH OF NASTASHA ROMANENKO
A quick search of the Web turned up a few illuminating facts about this elusive writer. Nastasha Romanenko was at one point with the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency). At the time of the Shadow Moses incident, she appears to have been a freelance military analyst, having already resigned from the Agency. Nuclear and weapons technology would certainly be right up her alley, and in the disc she states that she took part in Solid Snake's mission support. Her exact role was as a member of NEST (Nuclear Emergency Search Team), providing field expertise via the radio. Her intimate involvement in the mission gave her a complete and clear grasp of the facts surrounding the case despite the government's successful cover-up. A look at Romanenko's curriculum vitae and body of papers makes her anti-nuclear stance more than obvious. That, along with all the other facts about this person, suggests that unless she suffered a sudden chemical imbalance or is plotting a second career as a Hollywood screenwriter, Nastasha Romanenko does not indulge in expounding conspiracy theories for its own sake.
All very interesting. So where is Nastasha Romanenko now? I decided to give Global Elements Inc., the book's publisher a call. Below is a complete transcript of the conversation.
Me: "Hello. Listen, you leftover carnival prize, what do you know about a woman named Nastasha Romanenko?"
Whoever it was: "Hey, your village called. They want their idiot back. And watch your language, freak." Click.
Clearly, they're hiding something. Why else the abrupt response and the hasty hang-up? I was on the trail of something important. Something dangerous. If the content of the disc was true, this Nastasha Romanenko was definitely the Woman-Who-Knew-Too-Much. Her life would be in danger, and she must either have gone to ground or was already dead. That brief telephone conversation spoke volumes: there was contract out on her life! If this was the price of speaking the truth as described in that disc, the picture was complete. But was everything she wrote really true?
I went back to my apartment and packed a bag. I was headed for Shadow Moses.
THE COLDEST PLACE
I took a plane out to the northernmost domestic airport and went to see my cousin John-Dee.
John-Dee is a hardcore Alaskan and a big-eye tuna fisherman. When I asked him to drop me off at Shadow Moses Island during one of his trips out to sea, he turned pale and a nervous tick started up at the corner of his eye. "Shadow Moses? Are you nuts? All the other guys say the place is crawling with the military. If you get even close to the shore they shine these huge searchlights in your face, and some of my buddies even got interrogated once!"
I felt the sudden chill of fear along with a certainty that I was on the right track.
"You're a wuss, you know that? Try being abducted by a UFO, that'll teach you what's really scary."
"I got a family, you know? I'm not about to go messing around with The Man!"
"OK, you get me as close as you can then. I'll swim the rest of the way."
"Swim? You're gonna turn into frozen tuna treat."
"Don't worry about that. I have an idea."
We sailed out for Shadow Moses Island that day.
THE TRIP TO SHADOW MOSES
It was colder than the dairy section and the boat pitched like a subway derailment on caffeine. I shook constantly from the cold, retched peanut butter into the sea, then downed some more to keep warm. A few days passed in this pleasant fashion until John-Dee, drawing lines on his charts, turned to me.
"I'm sorry man, but this as far as I can go. If you really want to do this thing, you're going to have to find your own way."
There were at least 20 miles to Shadow Moses according to the charts. But John-Dee was already a blubbering wreck, and I didn't have the heart to strong-arm him. I steeled my nerves.
"It's okay. Help me get ready."
The plan was brilliant. I'd gutted a super-size tuna and stuffed some inflated balloons inside, along with a small oil lamp to keep the interior toasty. I would cover the length of my body with the fish and dog-paddle my way to the island. Any oxygen shortage could quickly be remedied thanks to the balloon, and my landing would appear to be nothing more than a large dead fish swept ashore. All I had to do was slip out of the tuna undetected and investigate the hell out of the place. Absolutely brilliant.
I bore the fishy stink of the tuna skin with proper journalistic aplomb and walked to the edge of the ship's deck. The Arctic wind was numbing even through the wetsuit, but I bade John-Dee a hearty farewell and jumped into the sea. But right then, disaster struck!
Actually it was the tuna spine. Its bony mass conked me hard on the back of my head from the force of the landing. I tried to right myself, but I was jammed tight against the balloons. The tuna started to sink rapidly, and I kicked my legs wildly as about a gallon of seawater rushed into my lungs. To add insult to injury, the lamp fell over, shedding its cover. I could feel the heat of the exposed flame dangerously close to my face, and smell the singed hair. This is why I hate traveling.
But after what felt like hours, I found myself ashore on Shadow Moses Island. Let's take a moment here to review what happened on the island on that fateful day. Romanenko's disc provides a complete answer.
Shadow Moses was no ordinary weapons disposal facility, but served as a secret military training ground among other things. On that day, the wetworks commando unit known as FOXHOUND and the next-generation Special Forces group were conducting joint exercises.
FOXHOUND is an "irregular" squad of elite soldiers, equipped and armed to the teeth with the latest technology. There were longtime -- and strictly behind-the-scenes -- players throughout recent history, engaging in sabotage, selective assassinations and other covert military operations. Wherever the United States could not officially intervene, whether it was a civil war, regional unrest or other types of low-intensity conflict, FOXHOUND was there. It's unlikely, however, that an average citizen has ever heard of them before; these commandos remain a top-secret government project.
And then there's the next-generation Special Forces unit. This is a cutting-edge anti-terrorist force newly organized to cope with terrorist incidents specifically involving weapons of mass destruction typified in nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare. They drew heavily from former mercenary ranks, and are on a diet of rigorous VR training guided by the FORCE 21 concept. The result is combat capability, which is rumored to surpass even those of the Delta Force and DEV GRU (formerly known as Seal Team 6). Most frightening of all, these soldiers have supposedly been manipulated at the genetic level to increase their combat performance. They were the purebreds among the dogs of war, and they turned on their masters with a surprising demand. Having seized the civilians that were on hand, they demanded that the government turn over to them the body of FOXHOUND's founder and combat genius, the so-called "Big Boss." The government had 24 hours to comply or a nuclear strike would be initiated. But what would motivate them to make such a demand, and how did they intend to make good their threat of a nuclear launch?
With these questions still unanswered, the government decided on a seemingly reckless course of action. For this daunting task of stopping a nuclear strike and freeing the hostages from the clutches of these ultimate soldiers, they sent in a single man. His name was Solid Snake -- no other than a former member of the now-renegade FOXHOUND and a legend among mercenaries for single- handedly bringing down the fortress cities of Outer Heaven and Zanzibar Land.
Your reaction is probably one of incredulity. "Just one guy?" You may wonder. "They decided to gamble the future of the entire world on a single mercenary?" I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. But there is more to this mission than meets the eye, as I was later to discover.
SOLID SNAKE'S REMOTE SUPPORT TEAM
Snake was delivered to the island by USS Discovery, an Ohio class ballistic missile submarine. He may have been the lone field operative, but there was a distinguished mission control team in contact with him by radio.
The overall control of the mission rested with Colonel Roy Campbell aboard the USS Discovery. As a former commander of FOXHOUND and Snake's CO during the 1999 Zanzibar Land standoff, he was forcibly called out from retirement to deal with this latest crisis.
Also aboard the Discovery was Dr. Naomi Hunter, a genetic engineering expert with the commercial biotech firm ATGC Inc. She was in charge of FOXHOUND's gene manipulation program. Mei Ling, the architect of the mission's state-of-the-art radar and communication systems, was the third team member. Apparently something of an engineering wunderkind, she developed this next-generation communication technology while still as student at MIT. At the time of the mission, she may have still been in her teens.
McDonnell Miller, a former FOXHOUND survival instructor, was the only land-bound member of the mission control team. Unlike the other four, Miller was working out of his home in Alaska at his own request.
Lastly, Nastasha Romanenko, the author of "In the Darkness of Shadow Moses," rounded out the team as an expert on nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.
WHAT TERRORIST ACTS WERE COMITTED HERE? THE HOSTAGES AND WHAT THEY TELL US
The first task faced by Solid Snake upon his infiltration of Shadow Moses Island was the rescue of the hostages. Two of the captives in particular were considered top-priority, but neither survived the mission. Though
Snake successfully freed both men, they died suddenly in an identical manner. At the time, the mission control team tentatively attributed the deaths to heart attacks -- a diagnosis that was to prove starkly incorrect.
The first hostage was Donald Anderson, the head of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the R&D body of the U.S. Department of Defense. The organization is responsible for planning and overseeing the development of new weapons technology.
The other VIP hostage, Kenneth Baker, was the president of ArmsTech, one of the largest and most powerful defense subcontractors in the country.
An overseer of the U.S.'s war technology and a powerful arms producer don't just happen to meet in an out-of-the-war military outpost. No one reading this account can fail to realize that these two had no business in a nuclear weapons disposal plant. And since neither Anderson nor Baker was in the habit of enjoying winter picnics, Romanenko's assertion that there was a new weapon secretly being developed on the island rings all the more true. According to her, there was indeed such a weapon, and it was close enough to completion to warrant a field test. But what exactly was this new weapon?
THE MOTHER OF ALL WEAPONS
Metal Gear. I'm not sure it's a term that many of you have heard. I know it only as a kind of a journalistic urban legend while I was still a beat reporter. It was a phantom bipedal tank that moved with unprecedented speed across difficult terrain such as mountains, desert and swamps, firing nuclear warheads from locations that were previously impossible. Once this weapon rolled off the assembly line, nuclear strikes could be made from almost any adverse terrain, and the tactical nuclear map for the whole world would be rewritten.
This nuclear-capable bipedal tank is said to have lurked in the wings of both Outer Heaven of South Africa and Zanzibar Land in Central Asia. One theory holds that the development had progressed to a working prototype stage, but the weapon never materialized on the world arms stage. In a strange coincidence or a casual connection, it was none other than Solid Snake who saved the world from the threat of Metal Gear during both incidents.
But history does indeed repeat itself, and the specter of Metal Gear rose once again -- in the state-of-the-art weapons development program of Shadow Moses Island. When I reached this point in the narrative, I suddenly checked myself. Wasn't Metal Gear's time effectively over? Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union late last century, the idea of mutual assured destruction and the arms race to maintain this dangerous status quo had been fading into obsolescence. The START2 treaty signed by both superpowers had already started to chip away at the nuclear stockpile even back then. In fact, the disposal facility at Shadow Moses had been built to disarm and temporarily store many of these same warheads. With the very idea of nuclear weapons under serious scrutiny, why would the military invest in the development of a nuclear-capable tank? Or was there something more to this weapon?
THE NATURE OF THE BEAST
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Metal Gear REX, the newest of its kind. Almost forty-five feet in height, equipped with Vulcan cannons and laser array and shielded by a cutting-edge composite armor, rendering the unit practically impervious to even HEAT (High Explosive Anti-Tank) warheads. And I haven't even gotten to the truly scary part of this thing.
The crown jewel of this Shadow Moses Metal Gear was its rail gun technology. The gun was designed to fire nuclear warheads clear of the atmosphere, where they would automatically align themselves to the target and ride the optimal trajectory back down to Earth.
"So what?" you may think. "There's a big fat missile flying in from the sky. Who cares where it came from? Just shoot the damn thing down." But here's the catch: You won't be able to find any of REX's warheads, let alone shoot them down. Don't believe me? The facts bear me out.
Normally, ballistic missiles go through four phases from launch to impact. The first is the boost phase, which consists of the time between the missile's launch and the point at which it leaves the atmosphere and exhausts its supply of rocket propellant. Following the burnout, the rocket enters the post-boost pause that concludes with the separation of the reentry vehicle that contains the warhead. The third stage is the midcourse phase, in which the reentry vehicle separates and achieves a controlled descent back into the atmosphere. The warhead's reentry into the atmosphere and its arrival at the target mark the fourth and terminal phase.
Current missile defense systems are alerted to incoming ballistic missiles by detecting the rocket burn during the missile's boost stage. However, Metal Gear's missile technology employs a rail gun rather than conventional rocket propulsion to achieve boost-stage acceleration. As a result, there is nothing for existing missile defense systems to detect.
The rail gun's effectiveness is nothing short of amazing, with a range of over 3000 miles, rivaling that of mid-range ballistic missiles. It reliably homes in within 170 feet of the target 50% of the time, placing it in the same class as high-end ICBM's. The ability of a Metal Gear to conquer virtually all terrain means that the rail gun can launch a stealthy nuclear strike from almost any spot on the globe.
This invisible attack would make it impossible for anyone to pinpoint the origin of a given missile even in the event of a strike. Without a clear aggressor to retaliate against, the concept of mutual assured destruction falls apart. Without the fear of MAD, the existing rules of nuclear non-engagement would no longer apply.
It also wouldn't matter if the whole world knew that a nuclear missile would be launched from Shadow Moses Island; the missile defense system was helpless against the new breed of ballistic missiles. This was exactly what the terrorists counted on in unleashing Metal Gear REX and its all-powerful nuclear weapon against the world.
