The Black Hole

by Hammond, Ray

  ‘Eat,’ Reisgo told his new recruit and Floyd had taken a portion of chicken and beans from the grill and found a space to sit a short distance away from the other men.

  Two others in the group were not regular FARC soldiers, Floyd spotted. Although they too were wearing FARC fatigues, they were older, their skin was pale and, like him, they carried no weapons.

  ‘Humans First?’ Floyd asked the first of the pale skinned men when he had finished his meal.

  ‘Rod Kantor, from Ontario,’ the man replied extending a hand. ‘Arrived last week.’

  Floyd identified himself as Gary Tipton as he shook hands with the Canadian. Then the second man had said, ‘I am Hans Hoogervorst, from Holland.’

  Now, as Floyd stood with his back to the gunwale of the FARC patrol boat he knew they were speeding downstream towards one of the rebel army’s many training camps. In the bow, a watchful FARC soldier sat behind a mounted machine gun as if expecting an attack from the shore, the air or even from the other vessels that passed by occasionally.

  ‘They say we’ll be there by noon,’ said Kantor, arriving at Floyd’s shoulder.

  Floyd nodded and glanced upwards. The patrol boat was hugging the shore, trying to find maximum cover under the tall trees which crowded down to the waterline.

  Where are we, Maria? Floyd thought, before recalling she was no longer there.

  *

  U.S. ARMY RECORDS: STRICTLY CLASSIFIED

  General Rodney Marshall Stone (deceased)

  2017 – 2025: Director of new weapons development, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon. RECORD REMOVED

  2025 – 2035: Field Security Supervisor, Redundant Munitions and Ordnance.

  2035: Retired on full benefits. Deceased 2044.

  Nicole Sanderson and Carl had now read through what was left of the paper file twice – no digital version had been allowed. They had learned that after the Indiana Project had been abandoned Stone had been abruptly and humiliatingly sidelined. From being in charge of a multi-billion dollar budget for the development of new secret weapons, he was suddenly put in charge of checking that mothballed missile silos were being maintained safely.

  The file contained printed copies of many of Stone’s own weekly schedules and Nicole had discovered that the man had been reduced to flying and driving all over the USA to verify personally that redundant cold-war launch pads were operable and not being vandalized.

  Quite a come down, Carl remarked. Nicole nodded. It had indeed been a very harsh punishment.

  But, from the file, it looked as though Stone had carried out his irksome duties diligently right up to the time of his retirement.

  Her thoughts were disturbed by a knock on the office door. Then Alain Nagourney poked his head in.

  ‘Am I disturbing you?’ he asked.

  ‘Not at all, come on in,’ said the agent, closing the file. ‘How was Arizona?’

  ‘Boy that’s some crater down there,’ the physicist told her as he sat in a chair on the other side of her desk. ‘But there’s no trace of any radioactivity.’ He nodded at her wall screen. ‘May I?’

  Carl handed over audio-visual control to Bob and images of a giant crater flickered onto the display.

  ‘That dust there is so fine that the army’s desert vehicle got bogged down,’ Nagourney told the ATA agent.

  ‘And that enormous crater was made by the black hole weapon?’ mused Nicole, with a small shake of her head. ‘No wonder President Weeks cancelled the project.’

  They watched the video run for a few more moments then Nagourney told Bob to switch off the playback.

  ‘I’ve been reading up on the general who was in charge of the Indiana Project,’ Nicole said, flipping open the file once more. ‘The poor guy was reduced to driving around old missile silos to check that rats weren’t damaging the wiring. Must have driven him mad.’

  ‘He’s another of the dead guys, right?’

  ‘Right,’ confirmed the agent. ‘His body was discovered in his burned out car eight days after his family had reported him missing. It took a DNA check to establish his identity – he was pretty badly burned up.’

  ‘Obviously suspicious,’ said Nagourney.

  ‘Obviously. But after a three month investigation the police could not prove that he hadn’t set fire to the car himself. There was no evidence pointing to the involvement of anyone else, and nothing in the man’s life that suggested anyone would have had a motive to kill him. In the end, the coroner recorded an open verdict.’

  ‘The curse of the Indiana Project,’ suggested Nagourney in voice of mock-doom.

  ‘You could say that,’ agreed Nicole absent smile. Facts were suddenly connecting in her brain. She flipped through the papers in the general’s personnel records.

  ‘One thing that has been puzzling me is the frequency of the trips Stone made to an old silo in the Midwest. I can’t think why he would need to keep checking on the same disused site.’

  ‘Perhaps he had a woman in the area,’ suggested Nagourney.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said, riffling through more of the papers. ‘But I also think he may have been buying chemical storage containers – would you need those to maintain an old Minuteman silo?’

  ‘What sort of containers?’ asked Nagourney.

  ‘I found this little catalogue,’ said the agent, pulling a paper brochure from the file and handing it across the desk.

  ‘Electrically powered magnetic suspension containers!’ exclaimed Nagourney excitedly as he scanned the pages. ‘The sort you would use for storing isotopes. Eureka!’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Look, we know Baxter developed an isotope called Zilerium 336,’ said Nagourney. ‘Now why would Stone be interested in isotope containers long after the Indiana team had been disbanded?’

  ‘Because he kept some of it,’ surmised Nicole. ‘And he probably stored it in old missile silos. But why? What would be the point?’

  ‘My guess would be that he was storing it against the day when, by his lights, the government would come to its senses,’ said Nagourney. ‘The general would have been preserving it for a time when the mamby-pamby liberal pinkos had been kicked out of office and some real men had been put in charge of the country once more – men who wouldn’t be afraid of developing black hole technology.’

  Nicole reached across the desk, retrieved the brochure Nagourney had been reading and closed her file.

  ‘Know what Abraham Lincoln said about the army?’ added the physicist. ‘Trying to reform the US Army is like trying to bail out the Potomac with a teaspoon.’

  Twelve

  ‘COME ON! ATTACK ME!’ yelled Sergeant Ramon Resigo. Floyd watched as a new FARC recruit made a clumsy, half-hearted attempt to thrust the knife in the general direction of his instructor’s torso.

  Along with twenty other FARC trainees and the two other HFDA volunteers, Floyd was seated cross legged in a hut in front of an old, much stained, wrestling mat. The heat inside the wooden building was so great that all of the men had stripped to their underware for this hand-to-hand combat training session.

  Floyd had now been in the FARC training camp for two days. After leaving the patrol boat at a village called La Esmerelda, the men had climbed into waiting jeeps and had begun another long drive through narrow tracks cut into the rain forest. Then they began to climb into the foothills of a mountain range Floyd knew to be part of the East Andes. As they climbed the British agent began puzzling over where FARC could possibly hide a training camp away from the spying eyes of the many Western satellites and reconnaissance drones that passed overhead.

  Then the secret of the school’s location had been revealed. Threading its way slowly up into the imposing, snow capped Andes, the small convoy climbed to over 6,000 feet, through a series of zigzag tracks and winding, hairpin passes. Then they turned north, followed a rocky track for almost two hours before plunging down the far mountainside to enter a large and verdant valley, an alpine landscape comple
tely unlike the rain forest that surrounded the base of the mountain range.

  Floyd had been amazed at how lush and dark the floor of the wide ravine was. Beneath the branches of tall and ancient cedar trees FARC had established a large training school, a camp that would be almost impossible to detect from the air or from space.

  In the shade of the enormous trees Floyd counted a score of low, green-painted buildings. He was driven past assault courses, firing ranges and semi-burned-out buildings that were presumably used for assault training. Apart from the July heat – at mid-day it was close to 35˚ C. – and the canopy of tree branches high above, it looked surprisingly like the SAS’s own training facilities back in Herefordshire, England. There was even an old-fashioned wooden tower for parachute-jump training sticking up through the trees, its upper section draped in camouflage netting. For a moment Floyd’s mind was taken back to his days with the SAS when his combat instructor would put him through extended and painful misery in order to hone his fighting skills and increase his fitness.

  Then, as the vehicles had penetrated further into the camp Floyd had seen three large diesel generators on wheels, like those used by movie units on location and, in a clearing, what appeared to be a medical post and the camp’s main communications centre. Beside it was a satellite dish shrouded in camouflage netting.

  Now, after basic weapons training and a great deal of hard exercise, this indoor session was to provide the recruits’ first hand-to-hand combat training.

  With a hard thump, Sergeant Resigo threw his young would-be attacker to the floor.

  *

  ‘This is it, Mam,’ announced the uniformed airman as his brought the saloon car to a stop. He plucked a flashlight from the glove box and handed it to Nicole Sanderson. ‘It’s down that ramp over there.’

  The ATA agent took the torch, nodded her thanks and stepped out of the unmarked US Air Force vehicle. While she waited for her guide to climb out from the car’s rear seat, she turned and, with Carl, surveyed her surroundings.

  It was early morning and the day was unpleasantly draughty. At this time of year the vast wheat fields of Iowa had been recently harvested and a flat landscape of brown stubble stretched away as far as the eye could see.

  ‘Now, where exactly do we go Mr Haskins?’ she asked as the older man joined her. He too had a flashlight in his hand.

  ‘Straight down there, if you’ve got the right entry codes,’ he said pointing.

  Before taking early retirement Clive Haskins had been a civilian driver – a chauffeur – employed by the U.S. Air Force. Fifteen years earlier one of his duties had been to drive for General Rodney Stone whenever the flag-rank officer was visiting Iowa.

  Accessing the Pentagon’s personnel records, it had taken Carl only a few minutes to track down this man. When Nicole had called the retiree at his family home he had, at first, claimed that he had never heard of a General Rodney Stone and had certainly never driven him anywhere.

  Nicole had reminded him which federal agency she represented and had told him that she had the general’s personal calendar in her possession.

  ‘I see you drove him on six trips to the missile silo known as MX84,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not concerned with anything you may have done.’ After that reassurance she had learned that the man had gone on driving Stone out to the silo at regular intervals, even after the general had retired.

  Now, she glanced down the sloping concrete ramp. A pair of rusty-looking iron doors sealed the entrance, but beside the doors was a stainless steel box that gleamed as if new.

  Walking down to the box, Nicole took the keys that she had been given at Marshall Air Force Base – the local military HQ with responsibility for the maintenance of this site – unlocked the door and swung it open to reveal an electronic key-pad. Carl supplied the numbers

  and, as the large steel doors swung noisily inwards, she refastened the box’s cover.

  Nicole led the way into the entrance of the disused missile silo. Mains power was still supplied to the facility and, as the outer doors closed again, overhead strip lights came on automatically as they walked down a flight of steps and continued on along a downwards-sloping underground passage. The place smelled of old air and damp concrete.

  A large octagonal space with steel doors set into three of its walls appeared at the end of the passage.

  ‘Control room, silos, personnel facilities,’ explained Haskins, pointing to each of the three doors in turn, now beginning to enjoy his role as guide. ‘Want to see inside a silo?’

  ‘I just want to see where the general stored those containers,’ said Nicole sharply.

  ‘Oh, he just stowed ’em in the crew’s personal lockers – in there,’ he told her pointing to the door marked Personnel.

  A few minutes later they were in the residential quarters of the underground facility and Haskins was leading her past rows of dark, empty sleeping cubicles. There was no electricity in this area and they were forced to use their flashlights.

  ‘In here,’ said Haskins pushing open a steel door.

  They were in a locker room, similar to a changing area at any sports facility. Cobwebs filled the room.

  ‘It’s right at the back,’ said Haskins, pulling a large spider’s web out of his way. ‘The General and me would come out and charge up the containers’ batteries every six or nine months. I never came back again after the General died.’

  They both waved their arms before them as they advanced through the cobwebbed storage room. The metal locker units were mounted one on top of another and all were shut and locked.

  ‘Well, they’re sure not here any more,’ called Haskins over his shoulder.

  Nicole walked to the end of the row of lockers and gazed down to where the former chauffeur’s flashlight played on a row of six tall lockers. All gaped open, their locks forced and their bent and twisted doors swinging wide.

  Just to be sure, the ATA agent knelt and shone her own torch into the back of each locker.

  Long gone, said Carl as she stared into the empty lockers.

  Thirteen

  ‘O.K. It is now thirty days since Humans First issued their ultimatum,’ said Robert Brabazon. What should we expect from them ladies and gentlemen? And how should we be advising the public?’

  The American president was seated at the head of a mahogany table in the Cabinet Room, to the east of the Oval Office. On either side of the large table sat John Tredescant, Director of Homeland Security, Mike Ryan, director of the ATA, Faith Gill, U.S. Secretary for State, General Harris Diamand, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a bevy of aides and White House staffers. The people in this room had the use of some of the most powerful virtual assistants on the planet but their counsel had already been provided and for this meeting all had been muted.

  Tredescant nodded for Mike Ryan to respond to the President’s question.

  ‘We are fairly certain that HFDA activists have got hold of at least part of the Project Indiana technology, sir,’ the ATA director began. ‘But we don’t know whether they have actually built a gravity weapon or, if they have, whether they have been able to make it work. Certainly there’s been no physical test carried out anywhere in the world. It would have been detected.’

  Several of the aides made diligent notes.

  ‘Also, we think an isotope necessary for the building of such a weapon has been appropriated by HFDA members. Our investigations have revealed that although President Gerald Weeks ordered everything to do with Indiana destroyed, the Pentagon general in charge of the project at the time secretly stockpiled a quantity of this important material inside a disused missile silo in Ohio. That material is no longer there. He was one General Rodney Stone, now deceased.’

  ‘How would we recognize one of these weapons?’ asked General Diamand, keen to move on from the subject of disobedient Pentagon generals.

  ‘Well, they’re big. That’s why we’re doubtful about HFDA’s ability to actually build and deliver such a
weapon,’ Ryan replied glancing at the general, and then around the rest of the table. ‘The one surviving member of the Indiana team we have been able to locate tells us that the test weapon they built in 2025 filled all the space inside a wide-body passenger jet. In essence we’re talking about a particle collider shrunk down to fit inside a large plane.’

  ‘Well, it would be quite and irony if a group of neo-Luddites like Humans First have built such a thing,’ said Brabazon. ‘But, where would they find the necessary facilities?’

  ‘At the Che Guevara University in Caracas,’ put in Secretary of State, Faith Gill. ‘FARC has been financing a physics department there for the past five years.’