by C A Bird
Detection and tracking devices used by these various agencies represent some of the most sophisticated monitoring devices on the planet, and include magnetic, thermal, chemical and acoustical sensors, radar and sonar, laser beams and high-resolution optical devices that use both natural and artificial illumination. This equipment resides on the ground, in the air, at sea and on satellites. The monitors at the front of the room display that information, as well as the current locations of U.S. military vessels and aircraft. The entire defense system is computer-controlled and Leroy was one of the guys it reported to.
He looked up from his terminal just as the indicator light on the wall changed to Defcon 3. He hadn’t been too concerned when it changed from Defcon 5 to Defcon 4 following the Chinese test the day before, but he was definitely concerned now.
“Oh my God,” he muttered under his breath, as he fought down a surge of panic, and swallowed convulsively to force the acidic bile back down where it belonged. Cold sweat broke out on his ebony forehead, his stomach lurched, and he realized he seriously needed to take a leak.
“Easy Leroy,” he told himself, “It’s been there before. It’s been there lots of times. Even worse.” He had seen it at Defcon 3 and even Defcon 2 in drills. He knew it had reached Defcon 2 once before, for real, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. DefCon 1 would indicate imminent or actual attack. The indicator, of course, had never reached Defcon 1.
“Maybe it’s another drill. Yeah, that’s it. It’s probably a drill. Please God, let it be a drill. It’s almost time to quit buddy, you can make it,” he babbled under his breath, trying to get control of his racing heart. Sweat ran down his sides from his armpits and he prayed none of his fellow workers would notice his violent shaking.
August 19, 4:30 p.m.
Denver, Colorado
The psychiatrist leaned back in his expensive leather chair, hands steepled before his face, staring at the small black box resting on his desk. Why would someone send this to him? It must be a joke, he decided. He straightened the pen set on his desk and reread the letter to determine if he had possibly misunderstood it. Sterling Harrington was a careful man and he didn't want to make a mistake here.
The side of the box had, what appeared to be, a speaker. He turned it over and examined the back, or maybe the front, where he found a hinged door. It was fastened by some unknown method and fit snugly but there was a tiny crack around the perimeter. Other than these few features it was a plain black box weighing very little, perhaps a pound and similar in size to a paperback book.
He picked up a screwdriver he had procured from the garage and tried to insert it into the tiny crack, but it was way too big. Going to his study closet, he searched through a small toolbox until he found a tiny flat blade screwdriver, used to repair glasses, that he thought might fit. Going back to his desk, he made another attempt, inserting the screwdriver and applying as much pressure as possible, considering he was completely unfamiliar with the use of tools. He succeeded in making a small dent along one side of the panel. Inserting the larger screwdriver in the indentation and putting the box on the table to prevent stabbing himself, he pushed with all his might.
“Aha!” he cried as the lid of the box popped open. He had fortuitously placed the blade directly over the point where it latched on the inside.
“Ohhh, Shit,” escaped from the lips of the usually reserved doctor. Inside the small compartment was a broken glass vial and burned remains of what appeared to be money and possibly a map.
Being careful not to touch the contents he dropped the remains into the wastebasket next to his desk. He certainly wasn’t going to berate himself about it since, as a psychiatrist, he knew guilt was self-destructive. He shrugged and left the study to have an early dinner before attending the opera that evening.
August 19, 6:00 p.m.
Denver, Colorado
The screen door slammed behind them as Lori Arnaud, carrying a bag of groceries in her left arm, and pushing Ashley ahead of her with her foot, pulled Kevin into the house. “Hurry up guys, we’re running late. Go watch T.V. while I get dinner going. Daddy will be home soon.”
With everyone safely inside, she hurried to the kitchen to stash the groceries and get dinner started, thinking of the statement “the faster I go, the behinder I get.” She hurried to finish her chores before her husband arrived home. The situation had been worse these last few days, since she’d been gone four days last week while attending her mother’s funeral in New Mexico. John had been very angry. She told him originally she would only be gone three, but her father was so distraught she didn’t want to leave him alone, and even now she wished she could be there to comfort him and keep him company during his bereavement.
Her girls’ high school pre-season track meet had taken considerably longer than she’d anticipated and she’d picked the kids up from the day care facility at five-thirty, thirty minutes later than usual. The track meet was held after the summer session classes, and ran late into the afternoon, contributing to her being behind schedule.
Practice meets started in mid-August before the regular semester and the girls were making excellent progress toward getting in shape for the regular season. The girls did exceptionally well today and she’d felt obligated to treat them to McDonald’s as a reward. Kimberly Seaver won the 5K cross-country for the third time this summer and, since Kim’s a senior, several colleges were showing serious interest in recruiting her. Kim was Lori’s first really good runner. Lori desperately wanted to coach at the community college level, and having coached a national class runner in high school would definitely increase her chances.
But now she was late, and if dinner wasn’t ready when John got home there would be hell to pay. She carefully put away the groceries, “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” John hated clutter and could be very unpleasant if he couldn’t immediately find whatever he was looking for. She threw the pork roast in the pressure cooker and got out the potatoes. As much as she would have loved to fix something quick and easy, she didn’t dare - John wouldn’t allow her to use prepared foods. She loved to cook, but it would have been convenient to use prepared foods on occasion, especially on days like today.
She returned to the living room to check on the kids and found them watching a talk show host humiliate several groups of people on national television. Daughters were surprising their mothers with the revelation that they knew their mothers had been sleeping with the daughters’ husbands. The husbands were waiting in the wings to be humiliated in turn.
“Ashley, you know you aren’t allowed to watch those shows. Turn to the cartoon channel. I’ll be checking on you in a minute and if it’s not cartoons, it’s the dungeon for you.”
“Oh no, mommy, not the dungeon.” Ashley laughed at her mother’s fierce scowl. “Anything but the dungeon! Make Kevin go too. He’s watching it with me.”
“Am not! Please don’t make me go to the dungeon!” he wailed. He tried to act frightened but couldn’t hold back a giggle as his freckled face broke into a delighted smile.
Then, in a know-it-all tone, Ashley said, “Except he doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”
Lori, en route to the kitchen, paused in mid-stride and raised her eyebrow at Ashley, “Do you know what they’re talking about?”
“Of course. I’m six years old you know. I would be mad too, if you were sleeping in my bed with my husband. I would have to sleep on the couch and that wouldn’t be fair.” She gave her mother a what-else-could-it-be look.
Lori brushed back a long stray wisp of dishwater-blonde hair that escaped her hair clip, falling in front of her pale blue eyes and agreed it wouldn’t be fair at all. She quickly returned to the kitchen, listening at the door for a moment until she heard the voice of Sponge Bob. She thought for the hundredth time how wonderful her children were, considering the difficult conditions they were growing up in.
The kitchen was cramped, and boasted few modern conveniences. She and John had purchas
ed this house, a small, three bedroom, two bath, tract house, when they first moved to Denver nine years ago. John used one of the bedrooms as an office so the kids shared a bedroom.
The back yard was tiny but Lori had landscaped it whenever she could squeeze money from her meager allowance. It consisted of a play area with grass and the “dungeon,” a playhouse that looked like a castle. Her small wooden shed contained her gardening supplies, her mountain bike, and a few hand tools. She had installed a drip system for a few plants and flowers.
John didn’t allow her to use the garage. It was his “space” where he tinkered with his electronics. He owned every tool known to man but the majority of them had never been used. He bragged to his co-workers that he kept his house in terrific shape and that he seldom needed to pay for repairs. He was unaware that Lori fixed almost everything herself, or paid for repairs out of her allowance. She was painfully aware of how difficult it would be to live with him if anything went wrong and he had to deal with it himself.
They had planned to buy a larger, more modern home after having children but John’s career had fizzled and their plans stagnated. John had earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in electrical engineering and was pursuing his doctorate when they’d met at the University of Arizona. He was so handsome, with dark hair and eyes and he spoke with a slight French accent, left over from his early years in Quebec, which she had found irresistible.
Lori fell in love with him almost immediately. She was a PE major and he told her he liked women who were physically fit. Soon after they met, he insisted their relationship include frequent sex and she realized why he was interested in a physically fit woman.
She helped him in his studies by typing all his papers, wishing he would put more work into their relationship, but knowing he was completely involved in research for his thesis, “The Effects of Ionizing Radiation on Electronic Equipment.” It looked like he would go far as a scientist. He expected to quickly work his way up in a big company, supervising research and making tons of money.
Madison Electronic Supplies in Denver, Colorado manufactured motherboards and other components for sale to computer manufacturers and John had received an offer of employment right out of college. Companies were well aware of the fact that new graduates were willing to accept a much lower initial salary. Arnaud’s credentials had been excellent and it appeared he had a future in the Research and Development Department. Although computers weren’t exactly his area of expertise, he knew they were the wave of the future. He and Lori married and bought their small house in Denver to start their new life.
Nine years later he was still employed in the same job. Although an adequate researcher, he had significant problems with authority, was arrogant, and failed to put company interests ahead of his own. Twice he’d been passed over for promotion to Research Department Assistant Supervisor. He told Lori the first time that the individual promoted was a woman who was sleeping with the boss. Lori knew the woman, Jenny Harper, and she was extremely competent and happily married. The second time, the man promoted, according to John, was an ass-kisser.
Although she had obtained her degree in Physical Education, Lori hadn’t worked until a year ago. John made decent money, but his habit of spending it on his hobbies, computers and electronic toys, had kept them financially strapped. He drove a BMW while Lori drove a Honda Civic. He finally agreed to let her work part-time, if it didn’t interfere with her duties at home, and she obtained a part-time high school coaching job. After a year, she was offered and reluctantly accepted, a full-time position as track coach and PE teacher, not daring to tell John she had gone full-time. She rationalized that as long as she managed to accomplish her chores he wouldn’t notice and everyone would be happy. Sometimes she was so tired she could barely function, but she loved coaching and she loved the girls, and helping Kimberly Seaver to obtain a track scholarship would make it all worthwhile.
Lori finished fixing dinner; pork roast with small red potatoes, string beans prepared by hand, and a fruit salad, and was setting the table when the phone rang.
“Lori? I have to finish some work on a project. I probably won’t be home until around midnight.” This was the third time in two weeks he’d worked late, which was unusual. She could only remember his working late one other time in nine years. “Make me a plate of whatever you prepared for dinner ‘cause I’ll be starved when I get home.”
Suddenly Lori felt a distinct shock. She could hear a woman laughing in the background. This wasn’t particularly unusual but somehow she realized why John would be late, knew it as clearly as if he’d said, “I’m going to screw my secretary and I’ll be craving dinner when I get home.”
“Lori? Did you hear me?” She realized she hadn’t answered him.
“Yes John.” Completely taken by surprise she hung up before he could say anything more. Although she’d thought of leaving him every day since their marriage, she never expected this.
“Mommy, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, honey.” She quickly wiped tears from her cheeks as she turned to see Kevin standing in the doorway, big brown eyes close to tears. “Go wash up for dinner, sweetheart.”
Kevin turned and ran for the bathroom. Something was wrong. Mommy usually only cried when daddy was home.
August 19, 7:35 p.m.
Ganado, Arizona
With one foot on a boulder, his arms resting across one thigh, Gregory Whitehorse leaned forward and squinted toward the setting sun. The giant yellow fireball, flattened on top and bottom, shimmered in the desert heat and slowly disappeared as it descended below the horizon. The red spires of Monument Valley, throwing lengthening shadows across the valley floor, reached up to kiss the brilliant crimson and gold clouds that glowed with a fiery radiance above the horizon. As the distance from the horizon increased, the clouds faded to silver and were laced by a cobalt blue and emerald green sky. As it always did, the beauty of the sunset choked him with emotion.
This was his favorite time of day at his favorite place on Earth. A light breeze fanned his straight black hair back from his shoulders and he gazed across the domain of his forefathers, this high desert region tucked in the northeast corner of Arizona. His tribe, the Navajo, had lived in this area for hundreds of years.
With a Ph.D. and a full professorship in geology at the University of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, he spent considerable time there, but his real home, the home of his heart, was here in Ganado, a small town at the reservation’s southern edge. He was Arizona’s foremost geological expert on the land of his people, although Gregory looked at it with a different eye than most Navajo. He saw the history of the land, knew its foundations, its characteristics and its future. Gazing out across the Colorado Plateau he saw buttes and mesas formed by erosion of the horizontal layers of limestone, sandstone and shale. The brilliantly colored layers were the remains of ancient sea bottoms and sandy shores of a once great inland sea dating back over two billion years. This land, between 5000 and 8000 feet in elevation was cut by magnificent canyons, The Grand Canyon, Oak Creek Canyon and Canyon de Chelly, among others. The land had emerged and re-submerged repeatedly over the eons, creating metamorphic, sedimentary and igneous rock, the latter representing prehistoric volcanic activity in the region. Many of the mountains around Flagstaff and into Northwestern New Mexico, are all that remain of once mighty volcanic cones. The Painted Desert, with its kaleidoscope of color, alternating stripes of red, yellow, purple, blue, brown and gray, extends south from the Grand Canyon down to the Mogollon Rim. To the east, the Colorado Plateau butts up against the Southern Rocky Mountains in Northern New Mexico and against the Sangre de Cristo mountains just beyond them, a range that contains the highest peaks in that state.
As the evening wore on, the mountains faded to purple and the colors of the sky evolved through the spectrum, until, as the light diminished, the land and sky turned to shades of gray. Gregory sighed and reluctantly turned his back on the spectacle, winding his way down the stee
p, dirt trail, his heavy leather boots digging in for traction. He swung his leg over his Harley Davidson Dyna Low Rider and felt the rumble of its 1450 cc engine in his bones as he hit the starter and it roared to life. Swinging the Hog in a tight circle, he rode his modern steed down the road toward home. A small paper-wrapped package was tucked in the right saddlebag of the bike.
August 19, 7:40 p.m.
Newport Beach, California
It had been a very long day and Mark was relieved to be home. Will had received the call from Washington just before four a.m. that morning and had called Mark immediately. Since then Mark had flown to Washington, met with the President of the United States, waited at the airport for Miles and Heinrich, flown back to Los Angeles, gone to the plant for a couple of hours and finally returned home.
This afternoon’s brief meeting seemed like a pronouncement of doom. Mark spent two hours at the plant putting things in motion and fretting over Will’s indifference to the possibility of new contracts. Will hadn’t stayed at the plant when they returned from D.C., but had left immediately after the Gulfstream landed. It reminded Mark of the “dark years” after Katherine’s death when Will neglected his business and spent all of his time on “the project.”
Closing the door behind him, he let out a sigh. The security system automatically slid the deadbolt and reactivated the silent alarms as he crossed the tiled entry, through an archway into the living room. Pulling off his already loosened tie, he threw it, and his coat, over the arm of the sofa and checked the answering machine for messages. There were two. The first was from the plant production manager asking for clarification on a job order and the other was from Chris Hargraves. She would be leaving town soon and “was dying to see him before she left.” The latter invoked his lopsided boyish grin and his heart quickened in anticipation of seeing her tomorrow. He tried to return her call but Ernest, Will’s butler, said she had gone out for the evening.