The Shocking Conspiracy Behind Shadow Moses, By Gary McGolden
A News Reporters adventure after recieving an optical disk from Max Smithson of MegaSurprise.
The island of Shadow Moses lies due north of Alaska's Fox Islands, deep in the Arctic Circle. Above one of its rocky cliffs stands a cabin normally used for meteorological surveys, and it was here that I found myself, seated on a chair with my hands bound behind my back and a burlap sack covering my entire head. A blizzard rages outside, and the cabin was a dark, silent patch somewhere inside the storm. I could sense at least four men around me.
They had been interrogating me for what felt like hours now. The burlap sack is pungent with the traces of coffee beans. In the biting cold of the cabin, images of Brazil come to me unbidden; alleys coiled through with vivid, untended profusion of flowers, children with skin like frothy chocolate, sunshine capable of burning out the cornea, erupting between palm fronds.
I can feel my sense starting to fail.
The man in the front of me asks for the second, or the hundredth, time. "I'm going to ask you again. What's in the optical disc?" "Told you, I don't know. I just found it, okay?"
"You're lying, you bastard!"
A fist explodes into the pit of my stomach, bringing up a peanut butter sandwich of many hours ago along with the rusty taste of blood. The relentless beating and numerous knife cuts of the past hour have my whole body screaming with pain, but I refuse to tell them what they wanted. I had too much invested at this point, too many days of dangerous investigation into the story of a lifetime. There was no way I was going to give it all up at this point.
"That's enough."
A voice spoke up from somewhere in the back of the cabin.
"We have the disk back. Just get rid of him so we can get out of this place."
Even in my current sorry state, I was still a journalist. He had said, "We have the disc back." That meant that my hosts were the original owners of that optical disc. The last piece of the puzzle was in it's place; I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that everything recorded on the disc was true, and that the conspiracy I had suspected did in fact exist.
At that moment, I heard a window shatter.
The raging storm outside seemed to gain entry to the cabin in an instance, and I heard thin screams from the captors that encircled my chair. The next second, they had already fallen heavily onto the floor.
The brief confusion ended before I regained enough presence of mind to even panic. Whoever was now here, whatever had happened, my tormentors were obviously out of commission. But now I could hear measured footsteps approaching across the floor.
If this person had just saved my life, who was it? Or was I about to share the others' fate? The footsteps came to a halt in front of me, but strangely enough, I did not feel any sort of a presence nearby.
The burlap was slowly lifted from around my head, pulled off by an unseen hand. The stinging night air cooled my face, and my eyes gradually regained focus in the darkened room.
And I could finally see who it was that stood before me.
Just out of the sight of most of its citizens, a massive conspiracy determines the working of this nation.
Weapons of mass destruction secretly developed by the military.
Super-soldiers re-engineered into war machines through genetic manipulation.
A killer virus that only targets specific individuals with deadly accuracy. Tanks that walk rather than roll, and carry a nuclear payload.
A covert organization, the third and the most powerful political party, my encounter with which landed me in this chair in the Alaskan winter...
All of these are a part of the truth I found sealed within the optical disc, and I intend to share what I have learned in the pages to follow. That includes everything I now know about our government, and the secret arena where an even greater power pulls the strings. This is the truth many have glimpsed but never dared to talk about.
Everything detailed in this book actually happened, and after I lived it, my world was no longer the same safe place I knew. Neither, I promise, will be yours if you have the courage to keep going.
It all began a month ago –
THE POSTMAN RINGS
A month before my dramatic escape from death on Shadow Moses, I was having late breakfast in my apartment in New York.
Ever since and alien abduction episode in my childhood, I'd been plagued by a persistent ringing in my ears.
A large patch of mud was my undoing. I slipped, fell and was knocked unconscious. When I came to, it was already dawn.
Later, I was trying to see the bump on the back of my head in the mirror when I saw "IT" instead. A small hole, about the size of a pinprick, had been made behind my ear. You learn a little something when you watch as much TV as I did. There was no doubt that I had been abducted by a passing UFO, and had spent the hours while unconscious with alien beings! Unfortunately, no one in the area recalled seeing a UFO, and not a single person had the sense to listen to my story realize now that this was the day I decided to uncover truth for a living, and become a journalist.
But back to the present day. It turned out that the ringing wasn't in my ear, but from the doorbell. The thing shrieked somewhere south of a baritone bat sonar, barely within the range of human hearing. Blame the mangling it took from a particularly displeased visitor. Outside the door was the mailman, and in the mailman's hand was a thick manila envelope.
On the envelope was a label, addressed to me.
A letter bomb!
I pressed my ear against the envelope and concentrated hard. But not a tick from the thing. Of course, no one uses analog watches in bombs these days. That's why they call it the Digital Age. In fact, why would there even be a watch in a letter bomb? The point is that the unlucky recipient opens it, and the bomb goes off. Which means that it's actually the completely silent envelopes that are dangerous. I knew that opening that flap would send my eggs to the big omelet in the sky, but you don't get to be an investigative journalist for thinking inside the box.
I tore through the bottom of the envelope instead.
*Riiip*
No!
The contents of the suspicious envelope dropped to the floor with lightning speed!
In this world, you can never be too careful. Let this be a warning to you, readers: when circumstances compel you to open an envelope from the bottom, turn it upside down first. As a rule, I discovered, objects fall down, and this is what happened to the contents of my lethal envelope, straight down into a half-eaten depth of a delivery pizza forgotten on the floor. I don't recall when exactly this food item arrived on these premises, but the thing was definitely a museum piece by now.
Fortunately, it wasn't a bomb but an optical storage disc, now liberally smeared with peanut butter. This disc was the kind that comes in a clear plastic casing, through which the rainbow sheen of the circular unit shone. I gazed into it awhile, thinking of the UFO from that fateful day.
Anyway, I fished the optical disc out, noting the lack of a label. A quick wash at the sink got rid of the crud it had accumulated.
The disc was drying by the window as I hunted through the now-harmless envelope for clues. A single sheet of Xerox paper was stuck to the inside and it read:
"From the desk of MAX SMITHSON, Editor-in-Chief, MEGASURPRISE magazine
I'm mailing you this optical disc that was sent to the edit department. It's right up your alley, see if you can turn up something more. We'll do a book if you get enough stuff together. This is your chance for a comeback, so don't screw it up."
Max is an old friend, and used to manage most of my book deals way back when. We hadn't seen each other much since I gave up writing. Not that that he has the right to tell me about comebacks and screwing up, but I find myself growing excited by the prospect of writing another book. But there was a problem, and it was a big one. How the hell was I going to get the disc's content?
THE SHOCKING TRUTH WITHIN
My next-door neighbor is a starving college student, and I hit him up for the use of his computer now and then. I banged on his door and screamed repeatedly until he scuffled up to the door half-asleep. Once inside, I made a beeline for the piece of junk and stuck the disc into the drive. The icon appeared on the display with a gentle whir. The file name read: "In the Darkness of Shadow Moses".
But an urgent click on the icon only brought up an error message. What nefarious scheme was this!? What secret encryption was preventing me from accessing the data!? I clicked again and again with the same result, and started to gnaw on the keyboard in frustration. The starving student comes running over, wailing about his equipment. He typed in some moon-man language, avoiding patches of my spit, and a frighteningly cheerful application startup screen appeared on the display. Then lo and behold, I finally laid my eyes on the dense mass of text, the contents of the disc!
At the very top it read: "'In the Darkness of Shadow Moses' by Nastasha Romanenko."
The starving student was being scholarly and trying to read the text over my shoulder. I knocked him out with a punch to the solar plexus and devoured the file's content. It was like a blow to the head with a frozen tuna; my brain was reeling from the shock. The file was fill of wild stuff: top-secret conspiracies, incredible genetic experimentation, cold-blooded military deployment of classified weapons. This was the most incredible stuff I had ever come across.
THE UNOFFICAL FACTS ACCORDING TO THE DISC
Most readers should be aware of the series of strange military actions involving an island father north of Alaska's Fox Island, some two years ago. The island was called Shadow Moses, and received a series of well-documented but never-explained visits of obvious significance. USS Discovery, an Ohio class ballistic missile submarine, was ordered away from its designated training area and was confirmed offshore of Shadow Moses Island. It joined an E-3C AWACS that had already and suddenly been deployed to the area, with none other than Jim Houseman, the National Security Advisor, aboard. Sixteen hours later, 6 F117 Night Hawks with full a payload took off from the Galena AFB for Alaska.
Various theories were placed into circulation by the media at the time. Some journalists insisted it had been a foiled invasion attempt by a foreign state, other suspected a coup d'etat by a part of the U.S. military. I myself wrote an opinion piece for a magazine explaining that Shadow Moses was the Ellis Island for the "Greys." This diminutive grey race is after all the most famous of our alien neighbors, notorious for having secret bases all over planet Earth. But according to this file, we had all been off our marks.
What had instead unfolded on Shadow Moses was the most major terrorist incident in history, and apocalyptic scenario born out of a government-developed superman project and a doomsday weapon of the same origin.
On that fateful day, the nuclear weapons disposal plant on Shadow Moses had suddenly been seized by an irregular operations squad called "FOXHOUND", aided by a group of next-generation super-soldiers. And what they threatened was no less than a nuclear strike against the mainland United States!
So how is it that we're still alive? Apparently we have a man known only as "Solid Snake" -- an his solitary infiltration of the disposal facility -- to thank for it.
Believe it or not, this is only the tip of the iceberg as far as the Shadow Moses incident is concerned. This disc contains many more horrifying facts such as a major government conspiracy, a classified weapon described as a "walking nuclear-capable tank", and advanced genetic manipulation projects. Many of these hidden dealings were discovered by Solid Snake as he carried out his mission, and it is now my job to relate these facts to you the readers.
But it is still a little too premature to do so? The content of the disc may after all be nothing more than fiction, or even a delusion. After all, who exactly is this Nastasha Romanenko?
