Mecrats

by C J Klinger

  It served Abdullah’s purpose to have them believe in the cause of creating an Islamic State. It was also his goal, but his primary purpose was to get back at America for years of abuse against him and his family. He wanted to draw America into a land war where he knew he could inflict heavy casualties on her soldiers.

  Abdullah waved his hands at the damage. “These were not monsters or angels; they were the latest American combat vehicle.”

  Moussa face took on a skeptical expression, but he didn’t say anything. He knew, as did all of the fighters that Abdullah had spent his youth in America. Perhaps the leader knew something that he did not.

  “What should we do with the guards?”

  The guard who was still babbling about the Angel of Death was a problem. He would never shut up. He would retell his story to anyone who would listen and the ignorant among them would pick it up and repeat it as the truth. In a week he would do more damage than all the American bombs.

  “Help him along to his just rewards. Tell the other one to keep his mouth shut.”

  Within seconds a shot rang out and the babbling ceased.

  Chapter 14

  General Emerson glowed with unabashed pleasure. It wasn’t every day that he got a congratulatory phone call from POTUS, The President of the United States. The president had been jubilant that the General had “Pulled the cat out of the hat.” The country’s chief executive officer had a reputation for mixed metaphors, but in this case the general was pleased to be the recipient of one.

  “I’ll expect you at our next National Security meeting, General Emerson. We will want to discuss what else these wonder boys of yours can do.” With that, the president had hung up, but had left a wake big enough to sink some careers and boost others. There was a war of another sort going on in the pentagon; one that had been going on for years. Some of the pundits in the big building on the Potomac called it the Drone Wars. The American military, the most powerful force the world had ever seen, was inexorably becoming a remotely controlled drone force. The air force was already well down the road to becoming a pilotless fighting force. The planners in the military and their counterparts in Congress and the White House had discovered that American’s distaste for war was directly related to first, the number of American casualties, then to the lack of results and third to the cost. A distant fourth was the moral correctness of the cause. The umbrella excuses used to justify all of these military actions was called, “National Interest”, which had never been clearly defined by any administration since Abrahams Lincoln made the Gettysburg Address.

  General Emerson’s Mecrats were the perfect compromise, part drone, part super American soldier. No one was proposing an army of Mecrats, but the steps had been taken toward the day when remotely controlled, fighting machines could storm an objective while minimizing the first great obstacle, American casualties. Careers had been staked on which direction the military was headed. General Emerson had just had his view endorsed by the Commander in Chief. It was an endorsement that could lead to one of the top military positions. For a moment he considered staying in the military to take advantage of his position, but he knew a position on the Joint Chiefs of Staff was not the road to the White House, his ultimate goal. That path lay through the Senate. The same accolades that made him a candidate for the Joint Chief would also propel him to the senate seat he wanted. In six years his sight would shift to the White House. The ideal place to start building a base of future support for that ambition was in the next national security meeting.

  With an almost giddy feeling of anticipation he pushed his intercom button. “Captain Broker, would you ask Major Labour to come to my office.”

  A line from the book, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, which the general had studied extensively came to his mind, “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.” It was time to plan another thunderbolt.

  Chapter 15

  Cathy decided to run more than her allotted five miles that morning. Sleep hadn’t come easily the night before and after a fitful night she got up and started her morning routine a half hour early. Because it was still very dark when she started, she ran in the lighted tarmac area for the first half hour. For now, the area was deserted, but soon it would become busy with arriving airplanes and then she would move over to her traditional running spot. Groom Lake had a passenger service of sorts. Two, sometimes three Boeing 737s made regular runs to and from Las Vegas International airport. The military personnel stationed at the base stayed here full time, but most of the civilians, the engineers, contractors and scientists lived in and around Las Vegas or Southern California. Cathy had elected to live on the base in the modest apartment provided to her so she could be close to her work. Over the past seven and a half years it had become her home.

  As she ran, she thought about the recent events in Israel. As Colonel Westover had predicted, she had started getting inquiries from people she hadn’t heard from in years. Some of the calls were from people she didn’t know. Those she directed to the number the colonel had given her. To her former colleagues and friends she had explained she was still doing the same research as she had been doing for her doctoral theses. She didn’t tell them she was doing it in a top secret military base, instead she used the phrase, “Out West” to describe her location. Her friends and colleagues told her they had been getting inquiries from different sources and were just checking to make sure she was okay. She had reassured them she was just fine, but in fact she was not. She was worried about her Mecrats and was at a loss on how to handle her concerns.

  Toward the end of her morning run her thoughts were becoming increasingly distracted by the sounds of arriving planes, but by then she had decided the best people to talk to were the Mecrats themselves.

  After a shower and a light breakfast, Cathy headed to her lab. The Mecrats had been out most of the night training in the desert and mountains around the base. They usually came in about the time she was starting her morning run. Their normal routine was to hook up to their cafeteria rack and then hibernate for five of six hours. After they awoke around noon, they would spend the afternoon with whatever engineer or technician wanted to go over the results of their download. Lately it had become their habit to play a form of table tennis using tennis rackets and tennis balls on a twelve by twenty foot improvised table. These matches had become must see for the men and women who were part of the Mecrats Project. Cathy had gone to a couple of the matches and described it in her work diary as a combination of Jai Alai, tennis and rugby. It was noisy, boisterous and serious business to the Mecrats. Their speed of play amazed everyone.

  At the lab she checked the prototype transmitter the project engineers had devised to help the Mecrats hook up mind-to-mind. She tested it by hooking her head band to the device and sent a series of images to a recorder. She reversed the process and listened in amazement to her own thoughts and images. She began to understand the problem of perception versus reality even at the mind level. What a person says or thinks is not always what they mean. The true meaning lies behind the conscious mind. Intuition told her that constant use of this device would lead the Mecrats to develop a form of mind-group-speak that would exceed any cognitive form of communication humans had ever employed. Ever the student, Cathy began again to think about the psychiatric possibilities of mind-speak. She made a note to talk to some of her colleagues about the possible therapeutic benefits of using this unique form of communication. She was reminded once again that war time, or weapons development had created many medical advances in the past. The Mecrats Project was promising to be a gold mine of medical innovations.

  Her lab phone beeped bringing her out of her day dreams. It was a message from the base communications officer telling her she had a confidential message waiting for her at the base commander’s office. Cathy did not often interact with the military personnel at Groom Lake. There were two types at Groom Lake; the branches of the military who were involved with special
projects and those who kept the base running and provided security. The base commander was responsible for operations and security. He and his men generally kept to themselves and rarely interacted with the other base personnel except on security matters. More curious than concerned, Cathy left her lab and decided to walk the half mile to the base headquarters building, a nondescript white building like most of the other structures at the secret facility. “This was a mistake,” she thought as the sun began to beat down on her head. As if reading her distress, George Zimmerman pulled up in one of the carts used by the research personnel to get around the complex.

  “Going to the base commander’s office?”

  She climbed in gratefully. “Yes, how did you know?”

  George stepped on the gas and drove on. “I got a call that a message was waiting for me, so I’m guessing you got one also. Either that, or you’re trying to get heat stroke out here walking without a hat.”

  “That was dumb, wasn’t it?” They rode the rest of the way in silence. Recently Cathy had avoided engaging George in small talk. They had different views of the Mecrats and she didn’t want to stress the relationship by discussing something where they had diametrically opposite views. To George, the Mecrats were an experiment that had resulted in a better soldier. To Cathy, they were a medical miracle that had saved ten soldiers’ lives and had in the process created enough medical advances to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, especially paraplegics. George and many of his colleagues had a cavalier attitude about their future life expectancy, while Cathy was constantly thinking about how to improve on what they had already accomplished. She supposed their different views reflected their different career paths; hers in neurology and his in electrical engineering. The Mecrat program had been one of the very few places where their chosen profession would intersect.

  The commander’s aide, a poster card for the ideal American soldier handed each of them a brown manila envelope with the words, “For your eyes only.” They had both signed the many forms required by the Secrecy Act when they had joined the program, and for seven years had lived and worked under a cloud of security measures that were at times invasive, but most of their secret communications had come from General Emerson or his staff. Cathy was curious why the sudden change. Why was the base commander involved?

  “I’ll be damned.” George had opened his first.

  “Congress?” Cathy said, stunned by what she was reading. She had been expecting some document related to the ongoing Mecrats program, not a subpoena to appear before the Senate’s Armed Forces Committee on special weapons projects. An image of people being grilled before a congressional committee raced through her mind. Intellectually, she immediately dismissed the image as a Hollywood hangover from a Godfather movie, but something deep inside her was not comfortable with the idea of testifying before a group of senators who, at best would have a yeoman’s knowledge of her specialty.

  George Zimmerman however was grinning from ear to ear. “We’re going to be famous, Cathy.”

  “So was Manson,” she said with a trace of sarcasm. It went right over George’s head. Since she had known him, George’s ambition had been to get a tenured position at his old alma mater, Stanford. Apparently he thought appearing in front of a bunch of vote hungry politicians was stepping stone in that direction. She reread the summons. “Maybe not, George, it’s a closed session.” Without cameras there, it might be an actual fact finding meeting. Cathy was slightly relieved, but not much.

  Back in her lab she had another message waiting for her, this time from General Emerson. Cell phones didn’t work on the base. They were not allowed in any case. She returned his call and waited for it to go through.

  “Dr. Williamson, I’m sorry to bother you at work. I just wanted to warn you that you are going to have to appear before the Senate Armed Forces Committee.”

  “I’ve just been handed a subpoena, Sir. Is there anything I should be worried about?”

  “Not at all, Doctor, you have been operating under specific directions from this office with the full authority of Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

  Cathy was out of her element once she strayed from academia, but she had learned to ask questions when confronted by military thinking. She wasn’t sure how politicians’ thought, but assumed it was different from the way she approached a problem.

  “What are they looking for, General Emerson?” She had had learned that using a military officer’s rank and name when addressing him helped to bolster his self-worth, and in exchange he tended to respect her more.

  The general laughed; a rare event in Cathy’s experience with the uptight military head of the Mecrats Project. “I would say votes, but that being cynical, Doctor. The truth is your summons comes as a surprise to me. My staff is trying to find out what’s behind it.”

  “Do you have any recommendations for me to follow?”

  This time the general’s laugh was short and carried a tone of derisiveness, probably a result of prior experience. “Answer only the question being asked with just enough adjectives to be clear. Do not volunteer any information that wasn’t asked for.”

  That was clear enough for Cathy. If she could keep her emotions out of her answers, she knew her scientific explanations would be above reproach.

  “I’ll send a plane for you, Dr. Williamson, so you don’t have to spend all day in transit.” The General paused for a second before continuing, “One thing to remember, Doctor is that most of the politicians you will meet will be posturing when they speak, trying to establish a high ground for their position on any subject so they can piss on their opponents. Just ignore it and listen for the real question among the verbiage and answer that one.”

  After the general hung up, Cathy was a little too agitated to work in the lab. She decided to pay a social visit to Randy. He would cheer her up. The affable sergeant had become the Mecrats de facto leader and spokesperson to the military and scientific community. Cathy had kidded him about his leadership role, saying the group would soon become known as “Randy’s Rats.”

  Cathy found them in their hanger squatting on the floor in a group hooked up to each other with the mind-to-mind cords. There was no need for them to be in that position because they didn’t get tired in the typical sense. Randy had explained it was a soldier’s instinct to reduce his profile on the horizon. It was not very smart for a soldier in a combat arena to provide the enemy with an easy target.

  Randy stuck his heavy, four foot long arm up and waved at her. “Come join us, Doctor W. We were just thinking about you.”

  It sounded both odd and natural for Randy to say they had been thinking about her. This was the unexpected, exciting side of the decision to provide them with mind-to-mind connections. She realized a whole new form of communications between humans was being created right in the group. She very much wanted to be in the center of it. For Cathy, most of her work was on the very cutting edge of medical science. Her work was conducted in labs with test tubes and microscopes. In the Mecrats program she had become involved with the subjects of her work and she had discovered this was the side of medical science she really loved.

  The Mecrats made room for her and she joined the circle and handed the cord ends of her three way headband to the rats on either side of her. She braced herself for the flood of images and emotions, but was surprised at how calm the connection was.

  “Wow, you guys have been practicing.”

  8Rat, Corporal Mary McKinsey, who was sitting to Cathy’s right, spoke first. “We discovered how right you were when you warned us about being overwhelmed by the other Rats’ sense of isolation, so we have been creating the rules of contacting and talking to each other.”

  Cathy’s research sense spiked. “How’s it going?”

  1Rat, Corporal John Stueben, Cathy’s first patient and greatest concern spoke up. “Amazingly well, Doctor Williamson, I feel like I’m alive again and have a reason to go on.”

  Several echoing word/thoughts con
firmed the corporal’s words. Cathy was excited at the change in the young man. In the past, whenever they connected mind-to-mind he had almost overwhelmed her, but now he sounded balanced and calm as if his emotions had been let out of a balloon.

  Randy asked her about the wireless device for mind-to-mind communication.

  “I have been told two prototypes will be ready tomorrow for testing.”

  A ripple of emotional excitement went around the group. Cathy was fascinated by the exchange of mental images, some vividly clear, other an impressionistic display. Randy broke into the thoughts being flashed around the group. “Doctor W, we’ve decided to make you an honorary Rat. You’re now officially called ‘MomRat’.”

  Cathy was unexpectedly pleased. As the Mecrats had become more adept at learning how to function in their new body, they had become less dependent on her. She had begun to feel a sense of separation which was unexpected. One of her fellow scientist, Dr. Alice Warton, herself a mother had kidded her about experiencing empty nest syndrome.

  “You’ll get over it,” she had said and gave her some advice that Cathy would probably follow. “Find something else to conquer.”

  In the meantime, she was still part of the team. She was MomRat.

  Chapter 16

  In spite of Abdullah al Sadad’s best efforts to contain the news, the rumor that Isra’il, the Angel of Death had freed the two American women spread among the population in Al Bukamal. Within a week he was receiving inquiries from his men on the Turkish border in the west and from his easternmost outpost in Iraq wanting to know what had happened. A sense of unease began to spread among the people. If Allah had sent his angel to free the Americans, did he disapprove of their Islamic state? The unspoken question was, did he disapprove of Abdullah al Sadad.