“They’re big in transportation and energy,” Ben said, “but their strength lies in the aerospace and defense sector. This is a company whose CEO met with Adolf Hitler prior to World War II, whose subsidiary owned a twenty-five-percent share of the German aircraft manufacturer that built Luftwaffe fighter planes. To show you how well connected they are, ITT received $27 million in restitution from the United States for damages inflicted upon their Luftwaffe plant as a result of the war. What a set of balls on these guys. They invest in our enemies, then sue America for fighting their German allies. And the bastards win! They were involved in the 1964 CIA coup in Brazil, the 1972 Republican National Convention scandal, the 1973 Pinochet coup in Chile, and in 2007 Ming’s sponsor became the first major defense contractor to be convicted of criminal violations of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act when they transferred classified information about laser weapon countermeasures to China.”

“How do you know all this, Ben?”

“It’s public record.”

“Let me rephrase that. Why do you know all this?”

“I know it because their defense sector is a front for MAJESTIC-12, a tightly wound group of puppet-masters who profit from war and are committed to maintaining the status quo when it comes to our energy supply. Big Oil, Monsanto, the military industrial complex, and a select group of bankers… don’t roll your eyes, Zach. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Discover a new clean-energy source that can free us from fossil fuels and these boys will deny you a patent, steal your technology, and crush you like a bug. There’s a reason they’re funding this little venture, but it has nothing to do with marine biology. Oh, and you can bet the farm it was their GeoEye-1 satellite that pinpointed our location when we splashed down a million miles off-course.”

The satellite… Vostok Command can’t send help unless they know where we are!

Spinning my chair back around to my command console, I powered up the Valkyries, creating a heat signature for their thermal imaging sensors.

Ming and Ben continued wasting our air supply. “My job in organizing this venture, Captain, was to procure enough funds to cover the technological expenses. So what if a defense contractor invested in our mission?”

“Vostok’s huge. Yet somehow you managed to select a splashdown site where the magnetic anomaly is at its strongest?”

“It’s a geological phenomenon. I’m a geophysicist.”

“A geophysicist who recruited Zachary Wallace as a front, to fool the Russians into believing the mission’s aim was to discover new life-forms. Of course, you never said what kind of new life-forms.”

The conversation was getting heated and more than a little weird. Perhaps I might have cared had we not been running out of air.