As he read through the set, he used a one-time decoding pad to record key phrases. After about ten minutes of transcription, he stopped. He drank a deep draught of his drink, coughed once, and then sat back to reflect on what he had discerned. He was puzzled, in that the orders were referencing coded protocols that had not been used since the end of the Cold War. As he sipped, he read the orders as if for the first time.
There was notice of high-level diplomatic discussions surrounding an unknown extra-solar system phenomenon. Observations by Russian astronomers validated that something was on a collision course with Earth. The expected impact was going to be within a fortnight. Based on analysis of Chinese, North Korean and Israeli chatter, and intercepts from the United Kingdom and the NSA, military leaders were organizing Russian forces to react to the possibility of adverse consequences due to the impact of the observed anomaly. This made some sense to the Major, but he sipped his vodka and ruminated about the unwritten messages in his orders. He was to position his squadron at Fail-safe points with fully armed aircraft. He would wait for confirmation from his superiors that the anomaly was detected and the effects understood. If these proved detrimental to Russia, then his orders were clear. Protect and defend the Motherland.
But, if the effects were tolerable and proved adverse to the enemies of Russia, he was ordered to follow flight plans that targeted major population centers in the United States.
He drained his drink and set it down.
He re-read the orders again and came to the conclusion that someone high up in the Russian Federation had convinced the commanders of the military to conduct an unprovoked attack on the United States of America.
SOMEWHERE ON THE SURFACE OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN –
The Captain waited for his coffee before he decided to read the transmission. They had intercepted the ELF transmission, and it had been decoded.
The Captain hoped it would simply be more data regarding the radiation patterns from the Fukushima nuclear reactor effluents, and their effects on the marine mammals in this area of the Pacific. Or, perhaps it was instructions as to how to adjust the top-secret sonar arrays to correct recent anomalies that had begun to plague their ships.
Lately, instruments onboard US Naval vessels had been acting erratically, and it was thought that the radioisotopes being borne on submarine currents across the ocean were the cause. The instruments of an experimental new sonar array were especially sensitive to beta rays. Particular coatings were applied to enhance detection of atomic radiation by-products that were ejected from the submarine reactors as part of the cooling water cycle. This was an ordinary occurrence usually, and not cause for alarm. However, the combination of the new coating combined with the radiation from the Japanese current, and the decaying atomics were playing royal havoc with some essential gear.
Methods were being developed to mitigate these effects, but in the meantime, the operators of this equipment were frustrated and some were getting upset by the false readings caused by the situation. The Captain expected the message might be related to that predicament, but his earlier intuition about the Ironkey orders gave him pause.
The Captain ordered the hatches secured, and told his XO to make depth of 200 meters, and hold. The submarine hissed and shot some geysers of water into the air, then dropped out of sight.
Now, as his submarine sat at a depth of 200 meters, motionless, the Captain looked over the message. “Fuck,” he said out loud. He was being ordered to take a position off the coast of China. He knew the importance of such an order, and coupled with the previous orders, knew that his greatest concerns were validated.
His submarine was being positioned for a first strike attack on Beijing.
“A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.”
-- Anatole France
“Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution yet. “
-- Mae West
“When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn't a sign that they 'don't understand' one another, but a sign that they have, at last, begun to.”
--Helen Rowland
Chapter Five
CHEVY CHASE COUNTRY CLUB, GLENDALE, CALIFORNIA
Date night, again.
Harding was listening to his wife, Jennifer, speaking to her father on the phone. He looked out the window and noticed that it was getting darker. He sipped his drink, a Rob Roy. A nice warm fire was crackling, in spite of it being only about 55 degrees outside. To him, that was one of the beautiful things about living in California, in the hills. The evenings tended to be cool most of the year, regardless of the season, with only July and August indeed taking on the hot summer temperatures. He could light enjoy a nice fire on occasion, and watch as the flames consumed another fragrant log. It was a guilty pleasure, but he found it calmed him to decompress with a drink and just look at the burning, not thinking about much else.
He had a lot on his mind, recently, he reflected. He took another sip, and swallowed, wishing there was more Scotch in it.
He thought for a moment and decided to do something about that. He got up to go to the bar for reinforcements.
As Harding moved away from the window, he found that The Beast had once again laid claim to his favorite easy chair. The chair was a relic and looked much like the one from the old television sitcom “Frasier”. It was hideously colored, stained, and the only piece of furniture that he steadfastly refused to have re-upholstered or thrown out. He had an irrational liking for it, and unfortunately for him so did The Beast.
The Beast was the name he secretly called the feline monster that his wife called “Major Tom.” It was an old cat and had seen better days. He remembered the day Jennifer had brought home the little kitten, a small little furry ball of energy and curiosity.
Before a month was out, he hated it.
Harding was not a man who lightly held rancor in his heart, and it puzzled him mightily on exactly why he had such enormous depths of hatred for this animal. Oh, there were the many and varied ways the Beast toyed with him, to be sure. It was an unusual day when he did not discover some dead animal or torn papers or even the occasional turd in his den. These were the typical and minor transgressions of any house pet. He could excuse that behavior, for after all, it was just the behavior of a dumb animal.
As the years went on, he found things that actually made him slightly afraid of The Beast. It had a nasty tendency to disappear right before veterinary care visits. When it needed a flea bath or clipped toenails, The Beast might acquiesce with dignity, or it might decide to draw blood.
If its regular food were not at its usual place at the usual time, it would wait until the food was presented and gorge until it was bloated. Then, it would vomit on the bed, or his desk, or even in the kitchen.
The Beast was never accused of being evil by Jennifer, of course. It was her way to coddle and become even more protective of the cat when these episodes occurred.
So, she made sure that Harding knew the score, and then the food arrived on time, the flea baths became less traumatic (for The Beast) and the toenail clippings were often accompanied by expensive delicacies that The Beast was known to enjoy.
Harding suspected he was jealous of The Beast, but his pride prevented him from believing it.
He scowled in its general direction and swerved around his (The Beast’s?) chair. He made a face and went to his bottle of Macallan Fine Oak 10 to make another drink. As he reached for it, he noticed that the bottles and gear were not correctly aligned, to his liking. He moved everything to the counter adjoining the bar and laid the pieces out in a particular pattern. As he got his kit together, the murmur of his wife speaking to her father in the background rose and fell. He thought he heard the usual snippets of conversation that centered on the old man’s religious zeal. He drained the last of his Rob Roy and rinsed the glass in the bar’s sink. He wiped it dry and placed it back in its space in the rack he had made himself from wood he found in the local fore
st one fine wintry afternoon. He arranged all the bottles and accoutrements from his bar in a distinct order, one that he never varied. Then he began to assemble another Rob Roy.
He reached out and grasped the glass he had been using earlier. It was a very expensive Orrefors Intermezzo Martini Glass, which he had purchased in Vienna. He carefully wiped it with a microfiber cloth and looked for blemishes.
He found none, so he wiped the glass again, more carefully this time. Again, he found nothing on the glass surface, so he now set it down in the center of the black satin napkin he’d set out during his initial preparations.
He reached over to the Scotch, gave it an appraising look, determined it still held several drinks worth of Macallan in it, and wiped it down, following the same ritual as he had with the glass. He repeated this with all the other bottles, glasses and jars - the sweet vermouth, the Angostura bitters, and the jar of Maraschino cherries.
He would wipe the glass, examine it closely, wipe it again, look it over, and set it down precisely where it should reside according to his ordered plan on the black satin napkin.
He took a large wine glass from the rack. It was a Reidel Vinum XL, typically used for drinking Cabernet Sauvignon. He opened his small bar freezer and extracted some ice cubes from the stainless steel bowl just inside the door. He placed the ice nonchalantly into the Reidel, and the cubes clanked dangerously. He swirled the ice in the glass, coating the sides with a bit of moisture. Unlike the other glass, he didn’t perform the cleansing ritual. It was part of his secret that this one piece of the ritual be impure.
When his friends or colleagues came over for a gathering, whether dinner or just a party, it was the usual custom to have a bartender to hand out drinks. Jennifer insisted on this, and Harding often would drink only club soda or water and lemon at these affairs. Once in a while, in an especially intimate gathering, she would allow him to make his traditional three Rob Roys, in his unique way. It amused everyone no end, and even though they would laugh at these antics, it was only a small tic on his nature. His usual brilliance astonished almost everyone he met, and they allowed that he could certainly afford to be eccentric. His wife’s family and their trust funds assured not only financial security but also provided enough fodder for the tabloids that this small idiosyncrasy went totally unnoticed except by the closest of friends and family.
From a small, red-velvet-lined drawer in the bar, Harding took out a graduated glass measuring cylinder, the kind that populates high school chemistry labs across the globe. This one was fairly usual, except he had confiscated it from his own Chem 101 course when he attended CalTech.
Like the chair, the cylinder was a touchstone to his complicated past, and he always took it along when he relocated. It had been part of his bar for almost thirty years. It had suffered a chip and a ding over that time, and the base had a small, hairline crack in it, but it was still very serviceable.
He went carefully through the ritual cleansing, again, paying special attention to the inscribed markings and the red glass band down its side and then set down the cylinder on the black satin napkin. He carefully opened all the bottles and the jar of cherries, in turn; lifting and setting them down again precisely. He set to work.
He grasped the graduated cylinder in his left hand, about half-way up. He adjusted his grip so that his fingers closed now on the top portion only and that the last inch of the top was all that was above his hand. He grasped the Macallan and poured exactly 74 milliliters into the cylinder. He returned the Macallan to its place of honor, then grasped the Carpano Antica Sweet Vermouth bottle by its neck, and poured a generous measure into the chilled glass over the ice.
He set the Vermouth down and then added a capful of the Angostura to the glass containing the Vermouth and ice. He found his tweezers, and plucked a plump cherry from the jar, setting it on the upturned lid.
Using a strainer, he poured the mixture from the iced glass into a stainless shaker. He emptied the Macallan into the Orrefors Intermezzo glass, and then added exactly seven and a half milliliters of the Vermouth and bitters mixture to his cylinder from the shaker.
He poured this into the Intermezzo glass, and took a small long-handled silver spoon and mixed the concoction slowly.
He added the fat cherry with a small ‘plop’ sound into the Martini glass, and then set it into the refrigerator while he cleaned and put everything back into its place in the bar. He rinsed off everything with a wet dishtowel, then dried everything, then went through the ritual with the microfiber cloth. Once everything had been ordered, he again opened the refrigerator and retrieved his Rob Roy.
He walked over to his chair, where The Beast was glowering at his approach with apprehension. They both knew what would happen next. Some nights, The Beast wanted to fight for the right to own the chair, and often Harding would be left seething as the animal exited the field of battle, having left some more scratched material or worse on the chair. Other times, sensing that Harding would not be trifled with on that particular night, The Beast would depart, barely giving Harding any notice. Harding hoped that tonight would be one of the latter episodes. He sighed under his breath at The Beast standing up, looking down its nose at him, and leaping off onto the reading table next to his chair, where it succeeded in scattering the remote controls, magazines, and doilies onto the floor. Satisfied with its performance, The Beast scampered into the kitchen, where it knew it would be safe from him since Jennifer still was talking to her father.
Trying to not let his anger rise, Harding placed his Rob Roy onto a doily and picked up the remnants from the table. The remote control had been eviscerated by the impact with the floor, batteries and the cover strewn about. He put it back together expertly, and then flicked it at the kitchen, in the general direction of The Beast. Unfortunately, the tiny red light that illuminated only turned on the television. He could still hear both his wife and the cat, alive and kicking in the kitchen.
He tuned to CNN to see what was going on in the world since the last disaster.
The news headlines were all about The Wave, now.
Someone had leaked the story, but he was sure it was no one from SPARTACUS, nor even anyone connected with the United States side of the inspections. He suspected one of his colleagues wanted to make a name for themselves, and decided he was not that interested in introspective review to ascertain whom it might have been. At this point, it hardly mattered. The Wave had impacted Jupiter. Everyone who had needed to know had already seen and analyzed the data around that event.
The Wave was going to hit Mars in the next seven hours. After that, it would likely impact Earth, Venus and Mercury, if there were anything left of it. He sipped his drink and chuckled a little at that thought. This thing was immense and was probably passing through the Solar System unchanged. There were a lot of arguments being made between the various scientific institutions, but it was all conjecture and speculation of the worst kind at this point. Nothing really conclusive had been observed from the Jupiter Event, and unless some major chemical or physical changes occurred during the Mars Event, no one could be sure of what was going to happen when it was Earth’s turn.
He became aware that Jennifer was speaking to him, and that the news was now focused on the latest nonsense from North Korea.
“Hmm?” he said. “David! “said his wife. “I was just mentioning to Dad that maybe it was his turn to be right about the ‘End Times’, and he went off about Revelation, and John 3:16 and all that.” She eyed him for a moment and continued when he did not react. “Only he said that he is certain that this is it. I don’t know why he feels this way this time, but…”
“Evil portents. Always evil portents in astronomical events with your Father.” Harding sipped deeply from his drink, and again thought it needed more Macallan.
Two drinks was his usual limit, but he felt stressed by the interaction with The Beast, and the subconscious unease of the news reports, coupled with this discussion surrounding the apparent sanity of his
Father-in-Law was edging him towards a repeat performance at the Infamous Rob Roy Bar and Casino, featuring Dr. David Harding on graduated cylinder and expensive glassware.
“Well, you know Dad, David. He’s always been that way,” she said. Harding took a look at his wife, someone with whom he had slept, ate, lived and loved for almost twenty years. He supposed she probably had become bored, at some point along that trajectory, but, in deference to her matrimonial vows steadfastly held to the etiquette and ritual of their agreed upon ‘date nights’. At one point, they had almost divorced, as she was lonely and not happy with the secrecy involved in his work. She had a career, at one point, but she really only played at it, since their monetary needs were satisfied from the trust her Father had set up for her. Jennifer had left their marital home, and stayed for six months at her Father’s mission, as a volunteer. She returned, with a short list of demands that, when Harding reviewed them, were not unreasonable.
They agreed to give it another try, and he had acquiesced to the idea of the ‘date nights’. He thought the idea was silly, actually, but it allowed them to remain married, and she managed to keep her end of the bargain, if not lively, then at least comfortable.
Harding suspected that Jennifer’s time-out at the mission was not spent wholly in introspection, or discussing marital duties with her Father. He did not actively pursue the thought, since their arrangement was now mutually satisfactory, most days.
And, so, if she had strayed, he really could not blame her. At least she had been discreet.
Harding knew he was no choir boy, as well.
Terminal Reset Omnibus: The Coming of The Wave Page 5