ERO
Page 22
In this new and quite exciting (he had to admit) position he found himself frequently meeting with many outside agencies, even in the few short months he’d been on the job. Many times out of uniform, or in conjunction with some other planned—cover—meeting. He’d met with officials at NSA, NRO, the CIA, and of course, NASA.
AT&T.
Bell.
IBM.
On these trips Cherko and Hammond were always probing these companies for their knowledge on technology... assessing whether or not they could work with them. In addition to seeding ET technology, Hammond was also looking for satellite platforms. Satellites upon which to foist Saint and Blue Gemini surveillance and hunter/killer packages. Since ERO wasn’t in the business of actually building satellites, it had to go to those who did... such as the CIA and NRO. ERO only went to government agencies. Not only did it keep it in-house, because they were big enough to do it on their own with their own resources, but also because Hammond felt they were also much more tightly guarded than even a Lockheed or Northrop.
Relentless loyalty to your organization... lack of trust to all others.
So, ERO went to the National Reconnaissance Organization. Got them to build platforms on which to install their black boxes—stuff Hammond never intended on in-briefing anybody.
We lie to them, just like they lie to us.
Cherko flipped another page.
Nobody tells the truth in this business.
To gain their situational trust, Hammond would tell NRO that it was experimental R&D stuff for better spying. Even brought some of NRO’s people to totally fictitious labs and facilities to show them more lies, and they bought every one—insofar as anyone in this business “buys” anything. NRO had the spy satellite business down to an art, so ERO used them.
No need to reinvent the wheel.
It also added another layer of obfuscation to the whole process, something Hammond was very big on.
He’d told Cherko that if ever there was more room to add more confusion, more layers to the Black Onion, as he called it, by all means do it. Can’t have enough. The more confusion the better.
And it worked like a charm.
Black Onion, yeah...
And there was one more task Cherko felt Hammond had for him, though he’d never confirmed it and continually danced around it.
On their last trip to NASA, Hammond was wanting something bigger, more ambitious: to put humans in sustained orbit. On an ET spy space station.
Putting up orbital hardware wasn’t good enough for Hammond. No, he needed an actual—physical—presence up there, and perhaps that was what Hammond had really wanted out of him all along. A pair of boots on-orbit. Cherko stared out across his office and rubbed tired eyes.
He never admitted to it, never said who he had in mind for such an operation, but Cherko was pretty damned sure Hammond was thinking one Lieutenant Jimmy Cherko would make a fine, fine, astronaut spy.
He was sure he’d planned it from the very beginning.
And Cherko wasn’t so sure he was against it. After all, it certainly would be a way for him to finally get that astronaut rating. He just wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it. He’d be a secret. A spy astronaut. Go through all the training as the regular ones, but be unable to tell anyone why and for what. That was what his last Houston trip had been all about.
Such was the story of his life, as it seemed to be unfolding, and was the nature of this business. Always hiding in shadows. Always lying and obfuscating. Smoke and mirrors.
But through it all—his on-orbit operations training, his heavy report reading until his eyes bled—something continually nagged at the back of his mind.
This whole battle-against-aliens thing. That aliens were supposed to be hostile.
Something was inherently wrong with the logic, and he didn’t understand Hammond’s continued defense of it.
What year was it? 1986? And nothing had happened since at least 1947?
If extraterrestrials had really wanted to take us out, wouldn’t they have done so long ago? Wouldn’t whatever we had found out in that desert back in ‘47—if they'd really wanted to off us—wouldn’t they had taken us out the very next day? That morning?
And why?
For what conceivable purpose would a highly advanced—heck, even a partially advanced—race need to rid the universe of the likes of us?
They had control of the skies—space.
Just what kind of threat did Humanity pose?
We couldn’t even get along with ourselves, for crying out loud.
Was that it?
No, nothing about this made any kind of sense.
Unless Hammond was just feeding him a line of bull. Get what he wanted from him and keep him in line, for some reason Cherko hadn’t yet figured out.
Now, that made a lot more sense.
Don’t trust anybody—Hammond himself had told him so.
He did seem to have this ability that, in the wrong hands, could wreak all kinds of havoc—heck, in the right hands—and he wasn’t even all that sure just how real an ability it was. He couldn’t control cars. Or boats.
Animals.
Or people.
How was he able to control apparently alien technology?
And his apparently telepathic communications had ceased, as well. Ever since he’d been shipped to New Mexico.
It was all highly suspicious.
But the job was fascinating enough. He had to stay the course and try to find out what was really going on, find out more.
Then there was Erica.
Good God, he missed her!
Cherko felt he was constantly under surveillance; even more so in Dulce. At his ERO-furnished apartment he wasn’t even allowed a phone. Any calls he needed to make—including home or to utilities—he could make from his office.
Of course, he hadn’t had any chance to take a vacation, but he seriously doubted he would be just “let go” without someone watching him, tracking his every move.
He was even positive his mail was monitored.
He’d written Erica a letter a week, always expecting to hear back from her, but never—not one response—had he ever received from her since he was pulled out of Colorado.
Yeah, welcome to the Black Onion.
Chapter Nineteen
1
Colorado Springs, CO
8 November 2010
1537 Hours Mountain Time
“Okay,” Alda said, shuffling paper around in hand, as Cherko sat quiet in his usual seat. “Since the free association exercise went so well last week, I’d like to try something similar today.”
“Okay.”
“But first—anything you want to talk about?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Ever since my little ‘accident,’ I guess I’ve felt kinda, well, out of it. Slightly... ‘off.’ Like what’s going on with my life? What’s happened to me?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve always tried to live my life in as happy a manner as possible, and for the most part I really am happy, but all these great dreams and goals I had for my life all seem to have bypassed me. I never seemed to get what I really wanted out of life. Was unable to break through and become an astronaut. These are the best years of my life, and I feel things have left me way behind. Somehow I got off track. A tech writer? How the heck had I become a tech writer? Where the heck had my life so grossly derailed?”
“This had always been a huge goal of yours, becoming an astronaut?”
“I always felt as if I was meant to explore space. Get out there. Spaceships, technology, the Great Unknown.”
“Really?”
“It was always a huge goal. That’s what I originally set out to do. Went to college to get a physics degree, got it... went after an Air Force navigator’s training slot, got that... but then failed actual navigator training, and that’s where all the failures began piling up. The really big ones—the important ones.”
“How so?”
“And that would be...”
“My inability to deal with the real world.”
Alda raised an eyebrow.
“Up to nav training, everything in my life had been theoretical. Academic learning. And it’s not that I was some white-skinned waif who never did anything outside and away from books—I was very much into the Greek saying ‘a sound mind in a healthy body,’ or whatever it was—but, well, when I was in that T-37 cockpit—”
“‘T-37’?”
“A subsonic jet trainer, just ‘under’ the T-38, which was a supersonic jet. But, when I was in there, flying, I had this moment when my IP—instructor pilot—and I were flying a heading, and I couldn’t DR—dead reckon—a new one. Basically, before flight you sit down and plan your flights—your headings—but, like everything else, things change—wind direction, speed, sometimes even your objective—and you have to be able to change with them in the air. So, you do what’s called ‘dead reckoning.’ You come up with a new heading in-cockpit. That involves numbers. And you can’t always whip out your Whiz Wheel—an in-flight slide-rule-like apparatus for flight calculations. You just have to do the numbers in your head. In today’s world I’m sure everything’s computerized. Anyway, I couldn’t do the numbers in my head, and my IP had to course-correct cause we were coming up on some mountains real fast. The IP had actually whacked me upside the head with the back of his hand. Nothing against my Dad, but it reminded me of him. Or, if you really want to get analytical about things, since that is what we do here, it just made me feel like a kid because of how he treated me. Anyway, that’s when I realized I wasn’t cut out for this job... that mountains do come up fast and that there’s really not much room for error. Either you can or you can’t come up with the numbers. And I couldn’t. It was too real.”
“Too real.”
“I realized this just wasn’t gonna happen. I mean, I had a ninety-eight academic average, but that was the book learning part, it wasn’t the out-in-the-world performance that involved lots of numbers. I’ve never been good with numbers—never—it’s always haunted me. As much as I loved to play with them—I actually enjoyed math—I was just never any good at it. No matter how hard I tried.”
“I see.”
“So, now, I’m this technical writer.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that—”
“Can’t you see the irony? Here I am, in a technical field, a field that definitely does require some adeptness with technical material and numbers. But it’s all on paper—not real, not rocketing into space and applying mathematics and physics to real-time situations. My whole life seems to have taken this weird, metaphysical turn back to the theoretical, when all my life I’d been trying to become this man of action.
“And all these self-help gurus keep telling you all you have to do is just wish hard enough, be optimistic enough—persist long enough—and you’ll eventually get your desires. Well, damn it, I’m much closer to death than birth, and I ain’t seeing the fruit of my so-called optimistic ventures.”
Alda nodded thoughtfully, scribbling notes. When he was done, he looked up to Cherko.
“I’d like you to do something for me.”
“Sure,” Cherko said, again sighing.
“I’d like for you to go over there on my couch,” Alda said, and Cherko looked, “and lay down and close your eyes. Relax. I’d like you to think back to your wildly imaginative childhood. Think back to what it was like as that wide-eyed kid with the overactive imagination, where there were no rules, no restrictions.”
“Okay.”
Cherko went over to the couch. Stretched out on it. Alda followed over to another chair alongside.
“You can take off your shoes if you want.”
Cherko left them on.
“Now... relax. There are no rules, no restrictions. Settle in.”
Cherko closed his eyes and relaxed, and it felt surprisingly easy to do—and good. He loved revisiting his childhood; he’d had a great one and loved thinking about it. Did that a lot. In some ways, he was naïve, but he also considered himself somewhat worldly—but mainly because he’d read about real life from books.
But he liked that.
In the background of his mind he heard Alda talking to him, heard his words, but it was like he was on his own trip now, a trip that didn’t quite feel right... and Alda’s words were quickly fading into the distance....
2
White Sand Missile Range
3 August 1987
0125 Hours Mountain Time
Captain Jimmy Cherko sat in the webbed seating of the NC-130H as it nosed down for its landing. He’d grabbed a hop on it out of Houston after his meeting-that-never-officially-happened with a top-level NASA administrator, who-was-never-officially-there. He’d been told to divert to White Sands instead of heading straight back to Dulce. He was to meet someone at the airstrip who was to further direct him where to go and how to get there....
* * *
Cherko exited the 130 and cleared away from the still-spinning props. He was quickly met by a smartly saluting Navy Petty Officer 1st Class who stepped away from a dark SUV. He carried a small pouch and something else.
“Captain Cherko?” the PO1 asked, saluting and shouting above the prop wash.
Cherko returned the salute. “Yes?”
“I’m to give you this,” he said handing Cherko the slim parcel.
“What is it?”
“A map. Of the base.”
“Okay.”
“You’re to meet at the location marked on the map no later than 0200, sir.”
“Who am I meeting?”
“I do not know, sir. I was just told to give you this. And you might need this,” he said, handing over the other object.
“A flashlight?”
“It gets rather dark out there, sir.”
Cherko looked out beyond the airstrip. “Right.”
“Take the Jeep, sir.”
Cherko looked to it. “Thanks.”
“And sir—this is very important—but, do not deviate off the roads! Unexploded ordnance!” The PO1 again saluted and left.
Cherko turned on the flashlight, a heavy duty thing that, he found out, carried some massive candle-wattage and nearly blinded him. After having been in the dark in the 130 for the past hour or so, his eyes protested against anything bright and flashy. Blinking and looking away, he looked back to the stiff document in hand. The map was made of that durable chart paper that could withstand the elements. He saw two marked end points connected by a heavy dark line that wove throughout the White Sands Missile Range complex. One end was where he presently stood, and the other way off the paved areas of White Sands Proper, tracing into the out-and-out desert of the actual missile range. Odometer markings were placed at various points along the route. The missile range was essentially total desert interspaced with the occasional launch platform, concrete slabs with leftover electronics and other equipment needed for whatever missions had been set up among the cacti and sand—then deserted.
And lots of sand.
He’d been around some parts of the range for various projects on which he’d worked, since being PCSed from Colorado, but not to where he was directed on this map. And, yes, there was, indeed, a grave concern about not leaving the paved (so they called them) dirt roads. There were all kinds of unexploded ordnance hiding out there.
Cherko headed toward the Jeep.
* * *
Colorado.
It seemed more than just a year ago; seemed a lifetime ago. Since he’d been in Dulce, he’d been flying highly sensitive satellites monitoring (he could still hardly believe it) orbital UFO activity, practicing his telepathic UFO control, and seeding alien technology into the world. He’d also been poked and prodded as the government’s best minds probed his in o
rder to find out why he could control UFOs and not cars or people. And not all UFOs, either. He could only control unmanned (unaliened?) craft, not those under intelligent control. So, it was thought that perhaps UFOs were only controlled by one mind at a time—though it was still not understood why he had this ability and no one else did (or so he was told). To this end, interest in his continued UFO-controlling ability was waning, and his most pressing effort was quickly becoming working this orbiting spy space station project of Hammond’s. And he never did find out about any outcomes of his other efforts with Spooks One, Two, and Three.
But Hammond was growing increasingly obsessed with this station idea of his, one populated by their kind. Not NASA, not CIA, but covert ERO personnel.
And, he was told, if he played his cards right, he could count himself among the first crew members.
Finally, Hammond had played his cards.
It was all quite sexy. Extremely sensitive operations. Astronaut rating. Can’t tell a soul.
Astronaut.
So he continued his frequent trips to Houston, DC, Maryland.
It all was so damned unreal.
All at the expense of leaving behind the woman he loved.
Erica.
He hadn’t had any real choice, he’d been told. Told himself. He’d had to leave her, not even for his country, but for the planet. The entire Human Race.
Yes, it was worth it, he’d been repeatedly instructed; continually convinced himself.
And he wasn’t to ever contact her again. Ever. Even with his family he’d extremely measured contact; gave them only his cover story. All his contact with them was monitored. He was in a different place now. For all practical purposes, he had, indeed, fallen off the face of the Earth.
All to save the Earth.
And now he’d been given this diversion to some indistinct location on a map. In the dark.
Always in the dark, always unpaved roads.
And it was hard hiding his singular lone belief in alien innocence in this secretive world of distrust and hostility. Something just didn’t feel right about it all, and he still couldn’t put his finger on it.