UNSEEN FORCES: SKY WILDER (BOOK ONE)

by Ed Kovacs

  A mile from the burning station, he pulled over and removed the micro memory card from his digital camera, then stuffed his backpack, fanny pack, and everything else that might somehow be implanted with a tracking device into a culvert. From his sock he removed the tablet etchings. The tracings of the tablet’s faces, he put back in his sock; the tracings of the edges of the tablet, he hid under a large rock.

  He kept the deerskin pouch into which he secured cash, Hui’s stone tablet and the memory card. As for his lucky gold Hathor pendent, he’d never taken it off so she couldn’t be corrupted, and he rubbed her reverently. Thankful to be alive, but unsure what to do next, Sky Wilder drove away into the darkness.

  CHAPTER 8

  The small, sweet irony of sneaking into Building 2561 didn’t escape Captain Diana Hunt. She knew that these rooms had hosted every incarnation the remote viewing unit had ever seen, at least every incarnation leaving a paper trail. But those pioneering old days were long gone; attrition from deaths, transfers, and retirements had decimated the original roster.

  Like her, the remaining members had gone deep black, to escape the anti-RV budget cutters, so technically, elements of the program were still operational. She knew firsthand that supporters like Klaymen, believers at the Pentagon, National Security Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, still secretly made use of the talents that first shone under the name Gondola Wish.

  “Let me know when you’re ready.” There was a heaviness to Klaymen’s tone, and an insistence she'd never heard before. His words hung in the air, deadened not only by the bricked up, plastered over windows and other surveillance-evading soundproofing, but by his own angst. It was clear some great weight had been dropped onto him.

  Hunt intuited the general hadn’t had a good day, but she had her own concerns. Like what was Simon Forte up to, and should she get involved? “Let’s do it,” she said.

  Using a technique perfected in the 1970’s at Stanford Research Institute with CIA funding, she sat upright at a table with her eyes open. She slowed her mental process and induced relaxation. Almost ready now, she visualized a beautiful white rose—this was her own little personal touch—dew on the satiny petals, hovering in the air several feet in front of her. She willed herself to release tension, worry, fear of failure. Anything that might obstruct the process. She put it all into the rose, then, in her mind, blew it to smithereens. Her nod signaled they could begin.

  “Latitude fifty-nine degrees, fifty-four minutes, twenty-six seconds north,” he said, watching as she wrote down the coordinates. “Before I give you the second set of coordinates,” said General Klaymen as he pulled out a sealed, #10 business envelope from his shirt pocket and held it for her to see, “be advised there’s additional target information in this envelope that you’ll need to key of off.” He didn’t hand her the envelope, nor did he open it. He put it back in his pocket.

  They sat across from each other over a simple wooden table that hadn’t been dusted in years. There was a stack of typing paper, some pens, and a micro-cassette recorder that the general switched on.

  The chill in the old wooden building, used during the Korean War as a school for army bakers, didn’t bother her. At 4:00 A.M. and change she sat wide awake breathing crisp, stale air and feeling jazzed at having a middle-of-the-night rendezvous with a major general in civilian clothes, in an unoccupied and legendary building at Fort Meade, Maryland.

  “The second set of coordinates is longitude eight degrees, forty-four minutes, thirty-two seconds west.”

  She carefully wrote down the numbers, took a deep breath, slowly exhaled, then got an immediate burst of perception as she always did when Stage One began. She drew flattish, wavy lines on the paper, then a series of random dots. The challenge, as always, lay in separating the “psi signal,” or the psychic connection to a target, from “noise,” the mental activity, emotional incursions, ego intrusion, or analytical overlays. Capturing the visual gestalt of a remote viewing target was the goal of Stage One. It had to be kept simple at this point. She wrote the word up next to the dots she had drawn and flowing next to the lines.

  Hunt gazed somewhere to the left and above the general, but she wasn’t focusing on anything in the room. “It’s ah, a feeling of nothingness. A thinness.” She paused for several seconds. “I’m not getting much, so I’m declaring a miss.”

  She wrote nothingness, thinness, then miss on the paper, took a few long deep breaths, then wrote the coordinates again. “Black, or darkness, I should say. This feels unformed.” She autonomically noted a series of dots and wavy lines.

  She felt confident in her skills, well aware that she was one of the best remote viewers in the American arsenal. Of course, she wasn't 100% accurate. No one got close to that kind of consistency, it wasn’t possible. And there had been a few remote viewers in the unit who were, quite frankly, terrible. But when she zeroed in, amazing results transpired.

  She'd been fortunate enough to work with the late Ingo Swann, the legendary grandfather of remote viewing. Swann spoke of the psi signal or the signal line as a flow of information through an aperture. Sessions always began with a small opening, but on good days, if the session went well, the aperture opened up and the information flowed in a torrent. And Diana Hunt had engendered her share of torrents.

  “Okay, I’m at Stage Two now... it’s cold. I feel a sense of motion, a streaming. It seems high up somehow.” She wrote the words cold, motion, and high up, then quickly sketched a constellation of stars. “It feels like nothingness, an openness, almost like space. I’m seeing these vivid dots of light which resemble stars. That’s an AOL, analytical overlay, so I’m declaring a miss.”

  AOLs were usually ignored if they came early. They were qualifiers, comparisons the brain forced the viewer to make, usually accompanied by words such as “like” or “seems to be.” Stage Two was all about basic sense perceptions. To note “cold” would be appropriate, but “snowcone machine,” would not.

  Hunt took thirty seconds for deep breathing, then started the procedure from the beginning by writing the coordinates on a fresh sheet of paper. She moved through Stage One into Stage Two. “It’s not space. Upper atmosphere maybe? It’s night, partly clear.”

  “Look in the opposite direction of the stars.” The general wasn’t an experienced monitor, but he knew how to guide a viewer well enough.

  “Wait a minute, there’s something approaching.” She sketched what looked like a bird. “This is white. No, white on top, a darker color on bottom. Elongated body, with appendages.”

  General Klaymen pressed his lips together as her pen flew over the paper. This was Stage Three, where a sense of dimension entered the picture, and a viewer often rendered large autonomic drawings. She had the scent.

  “It’s freezing here. Movement. The object is moving. There’s a roar.”

  “What direction is it coming from?” He kept his voice soft.

  “South... from the south-east. I’m some distance above it.”

  “Approach closer to the object.”

  “All right, it’s definitely white and black, or maybe blue. Dots on the side, sources of light lined up in a row. This object is hard, metal. The roar is much louder now.” Tangibles and intangibles flooded her senses—classic Stage Four. “I sense engines, fuel, electronics. There are things happening inside this object, voices. General, what I’m going to say is an AOL, but—”

  “That’s all right, you’re in Stage Four.”

  “This resembles an airplane to me. A jet. But not a big one. It’s smallish, more like an executive jet.”

  “Can you see any writing on the side of the plane?”

  “There’s something there... blue, but I can’t make out the writing.”

  “I need you to go inside the plane. I think you know what that means. Will you do it?”

  He was asking her to make a mid-session shift from remote viewing a target to going out-of-body. In remote viewing, the target is accessed with the mind only;
out-of-body targeting, extremely difficult to master, is when one’s consciousness arrives at the objective as if there physically. Animate and inanimate objects are seen with clarity.

  Remote viewing was easier to master and a less threatening paradigm for the military than the concept of leaving the physical body, but RV sessions took longer to gather information, which came in drips and drabs, and interpretation could be problematic. Out-of-body targeting was superior since simply seeing a target, exactly as it existed, required no interpretive guesswork.

  Captain Diana Hunt had pioneered the process of shifting from remote viewing to out-of-body targeting to provide the best of both worlds. The initial remote viewing of a target presented an anchor point for her disembodied consciousness in a way that the bare coordinates didn’t provide. No other viewer had been able to master her routine, putting her into a class all by herself. It was a physically and emotionally draining protocol she had developed. She always paid a physical price for having performed it, and hence, didn’t agree to it lightly.

  “You want to ruin my day, sir?”

  “Your decks will be cleared, I’ll see to that. This has tremendous importance.”

  After a long pause, she signaled her acquiescence by spending two minutes breathing deep, moving into a more Orphic state of relaxation. Her body tingled, an electrical charge raced from head to toe. A brief whiff of vertigo, a flash of nausea, the sense of separation, then snap, she was out and instantly on-site.

  “Okay... it... I’m in.” Passing her consciousness through the fuselage was like swimming through a curtain of gelatin. “Fairly quiet here. And a lot warmer. Some people are sleeping. Nothing special happening.” A part of Diana knew she was razor sharp, knew the details would become even more precise as she sat there, eyes closed, as they must remain for the entire session.

  “Can you describe the people to me?”

  “Okay, here’s two people. Men. One can’t sleep, he’s too excited. They look military. The guy with dark hair, there’s something... tight, he’s holding on tight to something. Can’t wait to get back.”

  “What is it?”

  “Sorry, that’s not coming through. The other guy is... wait, something just happened. Something’s not right.” Diana’s voice tightened. A chill coursed along her arms. She suddenly dropped the pen and grabbed the table with both hands. “Oh no! Everything’s... it’s ripping apart. There’s a sound, a ripping sound. We’re tumbling now, things flying all over. Screams,” she whispered in a sad hush. Tears exploded from both eyes and slid down her ruddy cheeks.

  The session should end now, surely the general must know that. He had already put her at risk; the shock of what she'd just witnessed could easily slam her consciousness back into her body with debilitating force. But the general must have a good reason to continue, so she stayed with the flow of consciousness. She took pride in a penchant for hanging tough during the worst of circumstances and gutting out a session. She wasn't sure what compelled her to press the envelope of psychic endurance. It wasn't as though she had anything to prove; the people who utilized her skills were already keen believers.

  “Go back in time to just before the trouble. Get out of the plane now, please.”

  “Is it vitally important that we continue?”

  “Yes, it is. Now, you’re out of the plane, just before the trouble. I want you to look and see where the trouble comes from. Can you get a sense? Is it mechanical, or is it something else?”

  Professionalism and guts kept her in the structure, the flow of perceptions. She willed herself to stay with it, even though the throbbing, piercing headache that accompanied every viewing session she’d ever done had already begun to attack her brain.

  She paused, then, “This is an attack.” She said it coldly, with finality. “Not sabotage, not mechanical failure. Coming up from the sea. Maybe from a ship. It’s a...” Without looking down, she picked up a pen and drew a series of wavy lines. As she started to go off the edge of the paper, the general slid another sheet next to the first one. “This is weird, because I don’t see a missile. What’s coming is not hard, it’s energy. Waves of maybe microwaves, or electro-magnetic pulse, or... this could be a particle beam weapon. The thing is about to strike.”

  She winced, a pained look on her face. “I don’t want to sketch this, but, the cockpit has just melted. The glass, the steel. I mean, like ice in hot water. The pilots have been fried. I see their flesh smoking like they’ve been cooked. I’m in slow motion now. The body of the craft is breaking up into three pieces. One wing has just ripped off, people are being sucked out of the craft. I... I have to stop now.”

  She put the pen down, took a long breath and her body twitched. She was back inside her own body. Then she burst into uncontrollable sobbing.

  ###

  The stainless steel travel mug half-full of rapidly cooling coffee offered less and less warmth to General Klaymen's fingers. His light cotton jacket proffered scant comfort during this freak early-May cold snap that arrived unannounced and unwelcome to the area around Washington, D.C. Maybe it had been foolish to come here, to this building, since there was no heat or electricity, but he relished the history of these rooms and the mind-boggling work that had taken place inside these walls.

  He felt bad for Hunt and handed her his handkerchief as she sobbed raggedly, but he felt much, much worse for himself, for what he'd lost. What a bitter day. He took another sip of coffee as if to keep the pain and rage deep down in his belly from surfacing.

  He took a breath and fought to focus. The only unexpected information she'd provided was the type of weapon: he’d expected a missile. He wondered if she got that part wrong, perhaps being too emotionally involved in the session by then to read it correctly.

  He let her cry. He’d already shed his own tears, and knew there were more to come. When she finally composed herself, she opened her eyes for the first time since the session began, and he handed her the sealed envelope from his pocket. Inside was a color photo of a United States Air Force C-37—white on top, blue on the bottom. There was also a three-by-five index card on which was typed:

  51,000 feet, 04:35 Greenwich Mean Time. 07 May.

  “The plane went down last night in ten thousand feet of water. Three of my men were in that aircraft. The dark-haired one you spoke of was—” The general’s voice cracked with emotion. “He was... it was an undercover op.” Although he tried to blink them back, tears streamed down both cheeks. “He was my son, Lieutenant Todd Klaymen. A good man, I assure you.”

  The general worked to choke back tears and swallow the incredibly deep hurt. He finally regained control of his emotions and put a hand on Hunt’s arm. “I’m sorry to put you through this, but I had to know. I hope you understand.” He took a heavy breath. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  He knew she had remote viewed her share of massacres and death scenes, and knew the emotion of it always got to her.

  “General, I’m so sorry about your loss.”

  He nodded stoically.

  “You already know who shot down that plane, don't you?”

  “I could only suspect that it was shot down. You just confirmed that suspicion.”

  “Simon Forte was behind it, wasn’t he?”

  Klaymen had banked on her becoming emotionally attached. He didn’t need any kind of confirmation of sabotage or attack. His son was dead, either via a surface-to-air missile or a laser weapon, it didn’t much matter. What he really needed was her to witness the deaths in order to hook her. Making it more personal, putting faces on the dead would help him reel her in. And he desperately needed to reel her in to provide him some breathing room while he ramped up his hidden resources.

  “I’m very serious in what I’m about to ask you. How would you like to live forever?”

  The question seemed to take her completely off guard. “Do I get to keep this body, or do I have to get really old and ugly?” She deadpanned the delivery. “Sorry sir,
I wasn’t mocking you, but that’s kind of an off-the-wall question.”

  “Perhaps, but legend has it, that whomever consumes a certain elixir, stops aging at that moment. Forever.”

  “That’s a preposterous notion. For argument’s sake, I’m not sure I would want it, but I imagine a lot of people would do just about anything for immortality.”

  “Not ‘just about’ anything, they’ll do anything. Like shoot AMC SPAR 87 out of the sky and engineer the cover-up. And kill four police officers and two paramedics along with two Task Force Orange operatives a few hours ago. They blew up an entire sheriff’s station in Arizona trying to get one man. A man we very much need to keep out of Simon Forte’s hands.”

  Diana shook her head. “How sad. I know that Forte is deep into the occult. And he’ll do anything to win.”

  He needed to keep selling her to get her to commit. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a set of documents. “I’ve got papers right here for you to TDY to Fort Wainwright up on the Arctic Circle. Except I wouldn’t send you, I’d send a Spec-Four out of the Pentagon typing pool who resembles you. My old friend General Skinner at Wainwright will make sure no one becomes the wiser. You will then effectively be sheep-dipped to a front-company I control and hit the ground running in Arizona with no paper trail and substantial monetary resources.”

  “Who would I be working with?”

  “Your end of my larger scheme is a cowboy operation all the way. I'll provide cash and very limited tactical support for you to secure the civilian.”

  “Working alone! But General—”

  “The intelligence and support will be provided by me, personally, but even that’s risky.” She looked surprised for a moment, then some truth seemed to dawn upon her. At least that's the way Klaymen read her expressions.