The Citadel

The Citadel Read Free

Book: The Citadel Read Free
Author: Robert Doherty
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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

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