by Don Hoesel
Richards followed Brent’s line of vision to the cleanup effort underway in the corner. “If you think this is something, Dr. Michaels, you should see the lab.”
—
“So what kind of colonel are you?” Brent asked once he’d seated himself opposite his host’s desk.
Richards raised an eyebrow, not a trace of humor on his face. “The regular kind,” he said.
The dry delivery caused Brent to release a nervous chuckle. He gestured toward the closed door of the colonel’s office, referencing the activity beyond. “There’s nothing normal about what’s going on in that room.” He paused, shook his head. “Did I see someone out there levitating metal balls?”
“Strong magnets,” the colonel replied.
“And the pile of junk that looks like a disassembled bomb?”
“Is a disassembled bomb.”
“Who are you people?” Brent asked. “I mean, if it’s not classified.”
“Actually, it is classified,” Richards said. “But not rigorously so for outside consultants.”
The colonel’s phone rang, and after a glance at the caller ID, he waved an apology to his guest and picked it up. “Richards,” he said.
While Brent couldn’t hear the other end of the call, he could hear the sound of the caller’s voice. Whoever it was sounded excited—and loud.
After listening for several seconds, Richards cut into the caller’s monologue. “Alright, follow secondary protocol until I get down there. Keep the room locked off. Understood?”
Brent didn’t say anything after the colonel had hung up. From what he’d heard, he expected the man to bound up from his chair and go running from the room. Instead, the military man leaned back in his leather chair as calm as could be.
“We’re army officers, Dr. Michaels,” Richards said. “In addition to that, we’re scientists. What you see going on out there is science, but with a twist.”
“A twist,” Brent said.
Richards nodded. “At your university, you have a science department, right?”
“Of course.”
“And they’re busy dealing with all the things that people are interested in—things that can either be marketed and sold or can put your school in a good journal somewhere, right?”
“Right . . .” Brent said, his responses coming slower now.
“Yes, well, we deal with the other stuff,” the colonel said.
Brent attempted to parse that.
Richards, seeing the confused look on Brent’s face, asked, “Are you familiar with Roswell?”
“You mean you investigate UFOs?”
“No, Professor,” the colonel said flatly. “UFOs don’t exist. You don’t seriously think there are little green men at a military base in New Mexico, do you?”
“Well . . . I . . .”
“There aren’t. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t investigating the possibility.”
Brent let that sink in. When he felt he had a handle on what the colonel was saying, he said, “So your team investigates unexplained phenomena. You’re ghost hunters. At least the army equivalent.”
“My team investigates anything my superiors ask me to investigate,” Richards said. After a pause he added, “And there are no such things as ghosts.”
Brent pursed his lips and nodded, thinking this may have been the most interesting interview he’d ever experienced. “I’m confused,” he finally said. “Why exactly do you need me?”
“Because we need a sociologist, Dr. Michaels.” Richards leaned forward then, placing his elbows on the desk. “And from everything I’ve heard, you’re the best.”
Although it was flattering to hear something like that, what Brent was most interested in was what Colonel Richards hadn’t said. Brent had been in the colonel’s company for going on an hour and still he had no idea about the job he’d been called in to do. He was just about to bring this to Colonel Richards’s attention when the colonel’s desk phone rang again. Richards glanced down at the display and then back up at Brent.
“Now if you’ll excuse me, Dr. Michaels, I have to go see about a fire.”
—
“You realize I can’t show you all of it.”
“Classified?” Brent asked.
“Classified,” Richards said.
From what he could gather through a combination of Colonel Richards’s comments and his own impressions as he’d walked through a series of narrow corridors and past several nondescript rooms, the section of the subbasement the colonel’s team occupied was a small portion of a much larger space. In fact, Michaels was now certain the perimeter of the subbasement—the Pentagon’s basement’s basement—expanded beyond the boundaries of the building above. Yet the professor had no idea how many other levels existed beneath this one.
What he did know was that the “all of it” the colonel couldn’t show him must have been something, because what Brent had already been privy to was enough to keep him wondering for years. In one room—the first through which they’d passed after descending from the last of the official Pentagon floors—piles of disassembled hardware, computer parts, books and scattered papers, balls of wiring, copper coils, and electronic bits and interfaces he couldn’t identify. And what looked like an Apollo-era space capsule occupying perhaps seven hundred square feet.
“What is this place?” Brent had asked.
“The Junk Room,” Richards replied without breaking stride.
Now, having passed through a number of different but equally bizarre rooms, the professor realized that whoever Colonel Richards was, and whatever the purpose of his team, the job they had for him was also likely to be bizarre in nature.
The room they were in now stood apart from the others, primarily because of its cleanliness. The surgical table and the specimen jars filling the rows of metal shelving units spoke to the need for order and precision. As Brent followed Colonel Richards into the room, a woman dressed in scrubs was sliding a jar into place next to other jars just like it. They contained a dark, viscous substance. Brent couldn’t begin to guess what it might be. But the truth was that he didn’t need to understand everything he saw—didn’t even need to know where he was in the building. He was there to entertain a job offer; whatever else happened around him was incidental.
That resolution remained with him for exactly two seconds, disappearing just as the colonel was about to step through the door opposite the one they’d entered. Before Colonel Richards could clear the doorway, a man met him going the other direction, holding a jar similar to the ones the woman behind them was arranging on the shelves. To avoid a collision, both men came to a sudden stop. That was when Brent got himself a good look at the pair of eyeballs sloshing around in the murky liquid, bumping up against the glass.
“Whoa. Sorry about that, Colonel,” the man said. He looked past Richards to see Brent’s eyes fixed on the jar in his hands. Glancing down at it, he said, “Almost lost the little beauty.”
Richards stepped back to let the man pass, and Brent watched as he handed the jar to the woman, who then mounted a small stepladder to place it next to an identical jar on the room’s highest shelf.
The professor turned to the colonel. “Okay, what was that?”
“What was what?” the colonel said.
“That,” Brent said, pointing to the jar on the shelf. “With the eyes?”
“Ah, that.” After a pause, the colonel added, “How about we just agree you didn’t see that, okay?”
Brent stared at Richards for a moment. “Classified?” he said.
“Classified.”
“The eyeballs are classified. . . .”
The colonel nodded. “That’s right, Professor. The eyeballs are classified.” He stopped then and turned to face Brent. “But you didn’t see any eyeballs, did you?”
The professor shook his head. “Nope.”
Richards started off again, but Brent tossed a question after him.
“Are there any other body parts I should be on
the lookout for?”
When less than twenty steps later their trip ended in a nondescript conference room, complete with a rectangular table, ten chairs, a laptop, and a ceiling-mounted projector, Brent almost felt cheated, his expectations growing with each new strange thing he’d witnessed on the way. Nonetheless, he took a seat in the chair the colonel indicated and waited for his host to join him at the table.
Once in the chair, positioned in front of the laptop, Colonel Richards tapped a single key and the projector sprang to life, casting the image of a large world map on the wall, color-coded to correspond with a legend displayed in the map’s corner. What he noticed right off, though, was that the colors were confined to landmasses, and that they crossed both national and continental lines.
Brent shifted his attention to the legend, looking for anything that would help him decipher the nature of the map. He found that the only piece of information matching any particular color was a number. The numbers followed a straight count from one to ten; number one went with the color black and number ten with red. Each of the remaining numbers was given a color, and while Brent was no expert in this sort of thing, he suspected the black/one combo was the desired state of things, whereas the red/ten combo signified something extremely problematic—with varying degrees of undesirability in between.
“What am I looking at, Colonel?” he asked.
“Consider it our version of a Poincaré map,” the colonel said.
Armed with that information, Brent looked at the projection again. Now that he understood more about the map’s meaning, it seemed strange that the colonel and his team could plot Chaos Theory so neatly like this.
“I’m going to need a list of your initial conditions,” Brent said. “And your topological mixing progression, if you have one. Plus the actual Poincaré data.”
“Of course.”
“Since all of your measures are land-based, can I assume you’re using the Ricker model?”
The colonel nodded. “While we’re not measuring population growth, we thought Ricker most closely matched what we’re doing.”
Brent studied the map once more. After a few moments, he said, “So what exactly are you doing, Colonel?”
Colonel Richards didn’t answer right away, and when Brent pulled his eyes away from the map to glance at the man, he found Richards staring at the projection. Finally the colonel spoke.
“Tracking the breakdown of civilization, Dr. Michaels,” he said.
December 4, 2012, 4:40 P.M.
From his spot in a small depression atop the escarpment, Canfield looked out over the oil field, a land as flat as any he’d ever seen. He could see them only because he knew they were there—the men in his employ crossing the quarter mile of brown grass separating the Hickson Petroleum field from Canfield’s elevated position. Hickson Petroleum was but one of the many oil companies that leased space to drill in the Southwest’s Spraberry Trend. Yet it was the one with the lightest security, which made it perfect for this operation.
Canfield stifled a yawn. He was in desperate need of sleep, but after the complications at Afar, he’d decided to give this one his personal oversight. He’d done a decent job explaining Ethiopia to his boss, though he doubted the man would accept two failings in a row—a belief strengthened by the tone of their last meeting.
“What happened at Afar, Alan?” Mr. Van Camp had asked him.
At the question Canfield had sunk back into his chair and drew in a deep breath. When he expelled it he shook his head.
“No one knew our government had anyone operating in the area,” Canfield said. “Our liaison with the ONLF thought they were a research team.”
He shook his head again.
“What have you heard out of Washington?”
Behind Canfield—who only a few days ago had shared a drink with a mercenary who knew him by the name of Standish—a series of monitors flashed a continuous stream of news feeds. Van Camp looked past Canfield, taking in the events captured by countless cameras, many of them owned by him.
“There’s little coming out of the Beltway,” Van Camp said.
“I imagine they’ll keep it quiet until they know what they’re dealing with.”
It was the sort of statement that didn’t require a response. Instead, Van Camp said, “Have you been able to find out anything about the military unit that surprised your mercenary?”
“Not as much as I’d like to know,” Canfield answered honestly. “From what I’ve been able to gather, they’re a small unit called the NIIU, led by a colonel named Jameson Richards.”
“And the acronym stands for . . .”
“Non-Standard Incident Investigative Unit,” Canfield said. He shrugged his shoulders. “My contacts weren’t able to give me much about what that means except that most of their reports are protected by Level 5 security. And apparently they have a science facility in the Pentagon.”
Van Camp seemed to ponder that, his eyes never leaving Canfield.
“I imagine all we can do at this point is try to determine why they were at Afar,” he said. “Although in all likelihood it was an unfortunate coincidence.”
Canfield had thought the same thing but was pleased that his boss had come to the same conclusion without much prompting. Diverting resources to study a small army unit would pull those resources away from where they were most needed; and they were already racing the clock to complete the work at Shackleton. He was grateful, then, when Van Camp switched topics.
“Four dead?” the man asked.
“According to Dabir, yes,” Canfield said.
“And you’re certain they were killed, not captured?”
“Dabir was certain.” Canfield offered a grim smile. “He would have put a bullet in any of them himself had there been any doubt.” He paused a moment before adding, “But in the heat of battle, who knows?”
“Who indeed?” Van Camp said.
It was that sort of question that caused a shiver to run up Canfield’s spine, because it signified a potential lack of faith in Canfield’s ability to accomplish the tasks assigned him. And causing Arthur Van Camp to doubt one’s effectiveness was seldom a winning corporate advancement strategy. Hence his presence on a rock in Texas.
Canfield raised a pair of binoculars and watched his team of three men—dressed like the oil workers teeming over the rigs and drilling platforms—slip through a gate that an exchange of funds had assured would be temporarily unguarded. Once inside, the men set off in different directions, each with a mission to accomplish. As Canfield watched, he marveled at the lack of security. Apparently the thought of domestic terrorism had yet to take hold in the collective psyche of this region. He spotted the single guard walking the north line, but Canfield’s men were by now well away from the gate.
With the binoculars, Canfield followed one of the men as he strolled over to one of the newest production trees. The man bent down as if to inspect the valve, yet Canfield knew he would be pulling the packs of C-4 from the riggers bag he carried, securing the explosives beneath the weld line. The process took less than twenty seconds, after which the man was heading toward the main gate. Thirty yards away, another man finished his identical task and started for the same exit.
Canfield watched him for a few moments longer before moving to locate the team leader, the one tackling the most difficult target—the drilling rig surrounded by almost a dozen men. The man had donned a pair of goggles and found a spot on the periphery of the activity. The rig was active, with the drill bit pulverizing the subsurface rock, the pieces then pulled to the surface by the cycling drilling fluid. In preparation for this operation, Canfield had studied the rig, noting the difficulty of accessing any vulnerable areas within joints secured under the topdrive. In order to blow the well, they had to find a way through the casing at ground level or locate a spot above the action.
Moments later, the C-4 attached to the production trees blew, with a noise sufficient to dwarf the sound of the drill and sending the gr
ound rolling beneath the entirety of the field.
It took a few long seconds before the Hickson employees around the unfinished well moved, but once they started, and once they saw the flames and black smoke rising from the two obliterated production trees, they took off toward the conflagrations.
Canfield, though, kept his eyes on the team leader, a former army officer turned corporate mercenary. The man waited while the drill operator brought the unit to a lumbering stop and then hurried down the small ladder to follow his co-workers. A few seconds later, when the operative started to climb, Canfield lost sight of him. It seemed like forever before he spotted him again, descending and walking away from the rig.
Canfield’s mistake was watching the drill rig a second too long. The flash, magnified through the binoculars, nearly blinded him. But what really shocked him was the power of the blast—sufficient to set the escarpment in motion a quarter mile from the site. His first thought was to wonder if any of his operatives had survived a blast considerably more powerful than he’d anticipated. But even with the possibility of casualties, he couldn’t help but smile. He’d wanted this one to be memorable—to perhaps make up for the failure at Afar. In that he’d succeeded.
After watching a few moments longer, he made his way back to the truck parked on the other side of the rock, started the engine, and pointed the vehicle toward Hobbs, New Mexico.
December 5, 2012, 8:25 A.M.
They’d housed Brent Michaels in a temporary office, and true to his word, Colonel Richards had supplied the professor with all the data he could have wanted. Even better, he’d supplied Brent with someone to help him sift through the voluminous information.
Captain Amy Madigan, a petite blonde with piercing eyes and an easy smile, sat at Brent’s left shoulder as he flipped through a stack of reports—all on U.S. Army letterhead, all signed and dated by Colonel Richards. In the few minutes during which he’d scanned the contents, Brent determined that the bulk of the reports detailed missions undertaken by the team over the last two years, mostly investigative jaunts to the world’s far-flung places. What, exactly, they were investigating wasn’t clear, but from what Brent could gather, few of the mission reports provided anything he would have called actionable data. In fact, most of them ended with a single phrase that the professor was starting to suspect was a motto for this team: Information inconclusive.