The ops room was starting to
buzz. The base commander had arrived ten
minutes after the call from the Pentagon on the red phone, an entourage of
officers and supporting non-coms in tow.
‘Good work Jim,’ he’d said, patting the lieutenant on the back. Mildly surprised he’d been recognised, amazed
that his name was known to the base commander, Jim chanced his arm.
‘Sir, do we know what’s going
on?’ he asked, not expecting a meaningful answer. The commander paused before speaking in a low
voice.
‘Nothing we can put a finger on. Look, there’s a sit-rep meeting in five for
the senior team, come along, you may pick up some tasks for the next couple of
hours.’
Five minutes later Jim stood
at the back of the room, desperately aware that he was the lowest rank by
several bars and that at best he was about to witness a briefing he wasn’t
strictly entitled to hear. The base
commander stood at the front, a lectern to his side, an attempt at portraying a
casual demeanour failing.
‘Gentlemen, the situation we
have at the moment is that there have been two separate sets of radio
broadcasts across several bandwidths tonight, emanating from a location
believed to be strategically close to this base. So far we don’t understand a great deal about
the broadcasts except that they appear to repeat a code several times on each
frequency before moving up a notch on the band to repeat the exact same
message.
‘The Pentagon has requested
the help of Langley, who’ve started to run the code through one of their Cray
supercomputers. It’s early days but their
cryptographers are stumped; they say it’s more like an arcane language than a
code.’ He paused to take in the mood of
the assembled officers before continuing.
‘The first incursion was a low
power broadcast across a few commercial shortwave bands and at least one
military band as well as the emergency service bands. Concurrently the same code or message was
broadcast on two of the CB frequencies briefly. There was a short interval of approximately
fifteen minutes before the second incursion began, seemingly from the same
location but at a much higher power output and over a greater range of
frequencies.’ A hand raised, eyes
followed the gaze of the base commander to the officer sporting intelligence
corps insignia on his tunic.
‘Is this a call to arms,
perhaps to Soviet sleepers? Are we
getting any reports from anywhere else in the States? What’s the Def Con?’ The base commander looked at the notes he
held in his hand briefly.
‘As far as we can tell this is
the only occurrence of this nature but a call to arms has not been
excluded. There’s been no increase in
military activity in Europe and the likelihood of Soviet sleepers targeting
only one geographical area is considered unlikely. To that point Def Con is set at 3, but the
situation is fluid – it could move soon.
‘Other options that have been
considered range from peace activists providing a nuisance to the locality to a
targeted terrorist cell preparing an attack on our communications, perhaps
preceding a physical attack on us or a major civilian target.’ The mood in the room floated like a dark
cloud before a storm; electric, oppressive.
One of the senior team raised his chin, an action that the base
commander accepted as an opening to speak.
He strode up to the lectern.
‘Given the range of possible
threats we can’t afford to sit back and wait, we need to be proactive. The information we’re getting is that the
broadcasts are all from one static location – it’s not clear if the earlier
broadcasts were from the same coordinates as they were relatively weak and
unexpected, we didn’t start to triangulate until too late. We do know they are from the same rough area
and consider that they were a trial which has been extended to more powerful
transmitters.
‘One consideration is that
this second phase may also be a probing trial, there may be an even larger,
more powerful application scheduled, who knows?
What we do know is that the location of the current broadcasts is in an
unpopulated part of the desert and that the only people officially residing
there are a bunch of Exxon roughnecks surveying the locality for drilling
opportunities. These are professional
people who are highly unlikely to fool around with the communications networks,
but we can’t eliminate the possibility that they have been over-run, captured
and held hostage.
‘Perhaps the Arab terrorists have
moved one step beyond hijacking planes, maybe now they’re bringing their
regional disputes over here. Unlikely, I
agree, but we have to consider the possibility that we may have a Middle East
terrorist cell operating within the US with the sole aim of harming US
citizens.’
*
Winston pulled up outside the
FCC building and waited outside of the car, the warm evening breeze wafting
over him. As the thin, pale man exited
the front entrance Winston pushed his hand out while holding up his FBI badge
with his left. Maurice scanned the ID
but overtly ignored the proffered hand, irritating Winston immediately.
‘Too good to shake hands with
a black man?’ he asked, trying to suppress his anger. Maurice’s sallow complexion flushed at the
comment.
‘If I grip your hand, you’ll
need to prise my fingers off again,’ he said, continuing, ‘it’s a rare and
extreme version of Paramyotonia congenita; a genetic, neurological condition. Causes
localised paralysis.
‘I don’t shake anyone’s hand,
ever,’ he said, opening the passenger door.
*
Winston’s teeth rattled as he
pulled the car off the interstate onto the roughly made-up road, red and white
oil drums marking the edges as the track curved around to the right, abandoned
workers’ tools reflecting the headlights haphazardly. He figured the road was to precisely nowhere
and deep down he hoped Maurice Sands hadn’t fucked up in his map reading.
The conversation between the
two men had been stilted, restricted.
Sands had shown a keen interest initially in the FBI issue radio gear
but the talk had died down because Winston’s disinterest matched Maurice’s
occupational and professional curiosity exactly. After several minutes of bouncing along the
track Maurice broke the silence.
‘I know we’re in the ball
park, but how will we know we’ve reached the spot?’ Winston pointed to his left.
‘I think the massed ranks of
the US cavalry over there are a fair clue,’ he said.
*
Fifty minutes after arriving
back at the Exxon survey base HQ, Chuck sat in front of a long stainless steel
bench with the core samples laid out in the correct order, tags hanging
down. He had methodically transcribed
the essential data onto several sheets of paper in rough and had dragged a
typewriter in front of him to begin the painstaking task of lining all the boxes
on the forms up. As he fiddled to align
the first box the lights flickered, then shone bright before plunging the room
into complete darkness.
‘What the …’ he spluttered, then
waited a few seconds to see if the generators recovered themselves, before standing
up and walking across to the window to look outside to see who would be the
first to investigate the failure, guessing correctly it would be Sam. He saw the side door swing open and Sam’s
muscular frame step out onto the dark dirt-laden area where the ancillary
equipment was stored, noticing that he carried a long wrecking bar across his
chest.
Chuck knew that Sam frequently
took his bar on any emergency task, swearing blind that experience had
conditioned him into the belief that it would be needed sooner or later, so may
as well take it. That much was
expected. The hail of bullets that
ripped Sam’s body apart and tore through the walls of the Exxon survey base HQ
smashing windows, shattering equipment and tearing into Chuck’s left leg wasn’t.
His ears bursting with the
sound of automatic rifle fire, trucks roaring, helicopters circling and sirens
screaming Chuck fell to the ground and dragged himself towards the scant
protection of the scarred and mangled stainless steel tables covered in broken
core samples. The last thing he heard
was the sound of the air to ground missile before it struck.
***
Reuter’s newsfeed, Los Angeles, May 5th, 1978
Federal agents from the FBI
and DEA, assisted by military support from Edwards Air Force Base attempted to
rescue nineteen Exxon oil workers held captive by a Communist sect calling
itself the ‘Sons of Russia’ in the middle of the Mojave desert last night. FBI Director Jack Robinson reported that the
sect members, who numbered ‘twenty or thirty’, were heavily armed with ground
to air missiles, heavy calibre machine guns and had a stash of fertiliser
explosives. It was also believed that
they had a large quantity of illegal drugs with them at the time of the raid,
which resulted in the sect members engaging the Federal agents in a pitched
battle before detonating explosives that destroyed the Exxon camp, killing all
the Exxon employees and the sect members.
Director Robinson stated that several Federal agents were injured in the
explosion trying to rescue the Exxon employees, although none of the injuries
were life threatening.
An Exxon spokesman declined to
comment on the raid but stated that Exxon’s thoughts and prayers were with the
families and loved ones of the employees that had been lost.
*************************************************************************************
Digital Life Form will be back with part 5 soon. Can't wait? Like all of my books Digital Life Form is available as an eBook and paperback on Amazon and can be read for free if you're an Amazon Prime or Kindle Unlimited customer.
No comments:
Post a Comment