A Glint In Time (History and Time)

by Frank J. Derfler

  HOMING IN ON MIAMI

  Saturday, Sept 15, 2001

  1500 Eastern

  Homestead ARB, Homestead, FL

  * * *

  Excerpt from the Personal Narrative

  of Brig Gen Fred Landry, PhD, (USAF Ret)

  Recorded July 2006

  CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET/TA

  "Ted and Sally provided the operational insight, the power and perspective we needed to stay balanced. Bringing them in on short notice was a surprise for them, but they were the only people in the world with the experience."

  * * *

  Lieutenant Colonel Ted Arthurs and his wife Sally arrived at the main gate of Homestead Air Reserve Base and presented their orders and ID cards to the augmented security patrols still jumpy after the attacks. The gate guards even opened the back doors of the Grand Cherokee to look over their three year old son Patrick who was asleep in his car seat. They made the drive from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina with only short stops, so they were stiff and tired. It had been a long slow drive because the highways were jammed with people fleeing the threat of nuclear fallout over New York and Philadelphia. A gate guard gave them a map and they followed it to a new building on a far corner of the base. The sign outside identified the

  Homestead Detachment of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Neither one of them was surprised to see a windowless building with its own fenced electric power substation. The power feeders went off toward the Turkey Point nuclear power plant that could just be seen in the distance.

  Ted was almost too tall to be an F-16 pilot. He always carefully pointed out that he had a long trunk. The distance from the hip to the knees is critical for fighter pilots because you don't want the canopy frame to kneecap you if you have to eject. He led his squadron's pilots through weight room activities and could grunt through the G forces of combat with the best of them. But, because of his time in special forces, he could swim and run too. He referred to his wife Sally as a "Statuesque Brunette". She was a slim five eleven Atlanta-Italian who hadn't put on much weight during pregnancy and had immediately lost it by swimming in the Seymour Johnson Officers' Club pool every morning. They both had engineering degrees, she was electrical and he was aerospace, and they were both quiet and analytical. When their analysis was in sync, they were extremely effective together. Their few arguments tended to have more proof statements and less invective than those of most married couples.

  Sally had what she called a "virtual" consulting business. She analyzed telecommunications requirements and problems and her clients paid her well for her advice, but she didn't have a work space outside of her home. She actually made more money annually than her fast-track husband did from the Air Force, but he could retire in a few years with

  great benefits. As long as, she always reminded herself, he lived to enjoy them.

  Although she didn't like the "we have to be there tomorrow" orders Ted had just received, she was relieved. First, they were nearly 700 miles further south of the threat of nuclear meltdown in New York. But just as important, six months in South Florida was six months that Ted wasn't in com bat. Whatever the United States was going to do in response to the 9/1 1 attacks was going to involve massive force and Ted and his F-16 would be happily flying just ahead of the point of the spear. Maybe this temporary assignment would keep him at a desk when the bullets were flying.

  Sally shouldered a bag and carried their sleeping son from the parking lot. The roar of two F-15s taking off from the base's single runway didn't disturb Patrick. Ted stopped to watch the takeoff, mentally grading the wingman's spacing from the lead and noted that the fighters carried white missiles on their wings. He didn't comment to Sally, but the "white ones" were real armed missiles, not the usual blue training devices. They walked under a portico together and then Ted stared into the slot of a retinal scanner next to the steel door. The door opened with the loud snap of a lock and they entered into a small room facing a security officer in civilian clothing behind thick glass. "Good afternoon, Colonel, Mrs. Arthurs." she said, talking into a microphone and sounding like a drive-through teller. "I just called Doctor Wirtz and he said he would be right here."

  A few seconds later an interior door opened and Bill Wirtz rushed through. "Oh my gosh, you are all so beautiful!Well, maybe not you Ted, but I am glad to see you! Come in for a few minutes and we'll get you settled."

  Sally first met Bill in a Destin, Florida beach house and unlikely research center in 1995. That meeting led to her being chased by thugs into a fetid stream, hiding underground, and being rescued by Ted. At first it seemed that she might have something going with Bill, but Ted had turned out to be the better choice. They all had worked together for a year, during which Sally and Ted had married, but the inability to prove that they were doing anything other than interesting physics experiments and the needs of the Air Force had taken them off to other assignments.

  Bill Wirtz led them into Colonel Landry's office. Ted and Sally had worked with Landry for a few months before leaving the project in 1996. He had attended their wedding. Landry moved the operation under the wing of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, found funding, and built the facility at Homestead.

  The original Homestead Air Force Base had been flattened by Hurricane Andrew in August 1992. Right after the storm the Air Force closed the active duty base and moved most of the units and military families. The base housing, golf course, and other facilities were given to the local governments while the core of the base around the runway was reconstituted as an Air Reserve Station with a small infrastructure. In 1997 things were just starting to come back at Homestead and the Air Force was happy to

  have DARPA fund a building on the base. By 2000, US Navy, Coast Guard, Customs, and Florida Air National Guard units had all started to populate the facility. It was raised back to the level of an air base with a new control tower, a new fuel farm, and expanded hangar space. DARPA's building now occupied a prime location and Landry had been asked more than once "What do you do in there?" by other facility commanders. His stock answer, "You wouldn't believe me even if I could tell you." usually kept them at bay.

  Colonel Landry welcomed them and said, "We've got you setup in a rental house about five minutes from the base. We put the basics in the refrigerator. The base daycare center is excellent. When you both are ready, we'll give you a tour and get to work."

  Sally, the practical one, asked. "Am I being paid and what's the mission?"

  Landry raised his eyebrows and smiled. "Absolutely, you're being paid. We do standard DoD consulting contracts all the time. We have a boilerplate statement of work and there is no problem with funding right now.

  The overall mission, is to see what this unit can do about the attacks on New York and Washington. Right now, we need an intelligence operation. We need hard facts. Ted, you'll be our liaison to the joint DoD-FBI-CIA task force doing the who, what, when investigation. I suspect you'll spend a lot of time on video conferences and maybe some time flying around the East Coast.

  Sally, you'll keep Ted plugged into all of the channels of communications, scan message and communications, and do your own digging in our databases. The two of you will work with Bill and I'll feed the physicists what they need to know. Just like before, the physicists aren't fully in the loop on the specifics of operations. I'm the need-to-know gatekeeper. They need to interact with the world wide community doing basic sub-atomic particle research, so the less they know about our operations the better our security will be. They don't need to know exactly what we are doing every time we do it."

  Ted and Sally both nodded. Some physicists had just come onboard as Ted and Sally left the project in 1996. The project had borrowed facilities at Sandia Labs in New Mexico, but it was evident then that they needed their own secure facility. Landry had delivered the hardware, but the people running the hardware didn't have to know exactly how it was used.

  "Okay," Landry said. "Get settled in. We'll see yo
u in the morning."

  As Ted and Sally strapped Patrick into his car seat, a man watched them from the outdoor cigarette break area next to the building. He appeared to be making a phone call on his cell phone, but he also used the phone to click a few pictures, although they were upside down, of the family and their car. He watched them leave, stubbed out his cigarette in the Air Force provided butt bin, walked to the door, stared into the retinal scanner, and waited for the door to open.

  They found their furnished rental house in a small golf course community a few miles from the base and were pleasantly surprised by the house and its furnishings. It was a spacious single story home only a few years old. The exterior was white Florida stucco with a red tile roof and a two-car garage. In the back, sliding glass doors opened onto a screened pool. A four foot high cloth child safety fence circled the pool. The screen enclosure had a door leading out to a small yard backing onto a drainage swale and the golf course fairway. Similar houses with fenced pools all backed into the fairway behind the house.

  "This is a vacation rental." Ted said as he looked at a brochure on the coffee table. "We're supposed to be here on vacation playing golf and eating Florida lobster."

  Sally smiled. Their son was exploring the living room and she was watching for objects that would have to be moved to improve the "child proof" livability of the house. "The change of pace is a good distraction for both of us. Too much death. Too much television. I'm happy that maybe we can do something about it, but I hate that those attacks happened. I worry about what's next."

  Both Ted and Sally had friends whose families had suffered a casualty on 9/1 1. They didn't personally know anyone who had died, but in several cases they were only one step removed. It seemed inevitable that more attacks were planned by the terrorists.

  Ted had spent the afternoon and evening of 9/1 I flying armed combat air patrols off the runway of the old Myrtle

  Beach Air Force Base on the coast of South Carolina. Although Myrtle Beach had been converted to a civilian airport several years ago, it is still perfectly positioned to block air routes into Atlanta and most of the major cities of the South East.

  With bases in the North East like Langley threatened by fallout from the Indian Point attack, the pilots flying out of Myrtle Beach had to extend their patrol areas. By mid-morning on 9/1 1 Myrtle Beach International became a forward base for the F-16 squadrons at Seymour Johnson that went on Air Defense Alert. Sally gathered with neighbors that day to watch the non-stop news, but she was grateful to have the distraction of taking care of Patrick.

  That first night in Homestead they broke their own rule and let Patrick fall asleep with them. They were in a strange bed, in a strange house, in a strange world, and needed each other.

  MACHO HARDWARE

  Homestead ARB, Florida

  Sunday, September 16, 2001

  0700 Eastern

  * * *

  Excerpt from the Personal Narrative

  of Brig Gen Fred Landry, PhD, (USAF Ret)

  Recorded July 2006

  CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET/TA

  "The systems we had in place right at the time of 9/11 were primitive, but they were, thank God, unique in the world and at the time we thought they were pretty spiffy."

  * * *

  The family was up with the sun the next morning. Ted dressed in a comfortable Air Force uniform with an open collar. Sally, mindful of her consultant role, was dressed for business including a skirt and low heels. Patrick picked out his own shorts and T-shirt they had packed in the car. They found milk, bread, orange juice, coffee, and cereal in the kitchen and turned it into breakfast. "I'll need to make a commissary run." Sally said. "Do they even have a commissary?"

  "I saw something that looked like a commissary when we turned in the base gate." Ted replied. "Let's get an orientation this morning and pick up what we need this afternoon. Our shipment should be in next week."

  They had been alerted to the priority temporary duty by a phone call on Thursday. On Friday they gathered 600 pounds of personal items and left them on the living room floor of their home in North Carolina. After they left on Saturday, professional movers were supposed to get entry from a neighbor, pack it up, and deliver it to Homestead. Six hundred pounds is what the Air Force allowed for their "extended" temporary duty in Florida. Sally already had plans to return to North Carolina to get their other car and anything important they left behind. Depending, of course, on whether the smoldering Indian Point power plant melted down and how widely the radiation spread.

  They left Patrick at the "Kiddy Hangar," as the Air Force calls its daycare facility, and entered the DARPA building at about 0715. ID cards were waiting for them at the security desk. They entered the facility and walked a few steps down the hallway to the door with a simple sign saying "Operations". Bill was already behind his desk, but he turned from his monitor screen and said, "Good morning!Ready for a tour?"

  "Let's do it.â€Ted replied.

  Bill led them down the hallway saying, "There are two separate parts of the building: operations and. Operations uses essentially the same graphical database application I pulled together when we first met, but it's had a lot of refinement and we have huge database resources to search. Also, the program is running on a parallel processing matrixed server system that makes the old IBM iron look like. . . well, like old IBM iron!"

  Bill and Sally both laughed. The march of Moore's Law continued to amaze anyone trying to harness computer power to do productive work.

  "The physics side of the building will be all new to you. Colonel Landry set it up with the philosophy that the physicists supply services to operations. We tell the physics group to setup a shot, but unless it's purely experimental, Colonel Landry inputs the final coordinates and fires the lasers." The physicists don't know where the item was sent."

  "So, how are you doing in providing proof that this stuff works, Bill? What do you do to justify funding?

  "The people in the physics side publish enough classified research papers to keep DARPA happy. And, we have done some creative things to impress the DoD bureaucrats. I only have a couple of folks in operations, a sociologist and a historian, they're both on emergency leave because of 9/1 1-related family problems, but neither one of them has the level of clearances needed for a 9/1 1 response. That's one reason why you both are here."Wirtz led them through the operations area. The new consoles used thin screens and ergonomic keyboards, the connecting cables were fiber optic, and the consoles had a strange variety of pointing devices, but the layout still reminded them of the systems in Destin and in Indonesia. Sally looked at the equipment, cable racks, and cooling arrangements and was impressed. Everything was up to MilSpec. "You remember Fort Jefferson, right?" Bill asked.

  Ted and Sally both laughed. When they were working out of Sandia Labs, they read that the US Park Service was going

  to tear down a crumbling portion of a wall at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas in order to replace it. The Fort was the largest masonry structure in the Western Hemisphere when it was built in 1846.As one of their first tests of the Project's capabilities, they sent five glass spheres into the wall. They aimed at the same spot, but exactly one year apart in time. They thought it would be easy to recover them and test for accuracy, penetration, heating, and other factors. What they didn't anticipate was that the Park Service would have such strict rules about who visited the Fort during demolition and what they could do. Apparently each one of the 16 million bricks in the building was considered a national treasure.

  Ted finally had to rent a boat in Key West, navigate the 70 miles over open water west to Fort Jefferson at night, swim ashore like a Navy SEAL going into Iran, and steal a very specific hunk of the wall using a hammer, chisel, and night vision goggles. The test proved the capability and accuracy of the project, but Ted almost got arrested as a suspected drug runner in the process.

  "We did the same kind of thing from this facility with the Space Shuttle.We popped some beads into
a container filled with ballistic jell, like they shoot bullets into, in the cargo bay of the shuttle. The shuttle was in orbit and moving at tremendous lateral speed on the other side of the Earth. We got repeat accuracy down to ten centimeters, but we just went back a few seconds in time with each shot. We only briefed the two American military shuttle crew members on the project and they photographed and measured the position of the beads in the jell before they hit the G-force of re-entry. We wanted something showy and cross-agency to get DoD funding. From that demonstration we're sure we

  could put beads on the moon, but we might have done too much. It's too much like a real StarTrek transporter. Now, they're asking us about anti-asteroid capabilities. An anti-asteroid shotgun. We classified the whole thing, but we still have brains spinning and tongues wagging at NASA. That's not a good thing."

  "This is the mission room. It's the land between operations and physics." He opened a bank vault like door to something that looked like an x-ray booth in a dentist's office.The walls were white and plain. All sound stopped dead when it hit what must have been layers of lead. There was a computer keyboard and monitor screen and a little window with an opening that was obviously heavily shielded. A side table held what looked like small ceramic bottles with mostly open sides. "It's not very dramatic. The object, usually a glass or metal bead, is suspended on a one micron thread from the lab dish with a little superglue. The whole thing goes into the chamber. You enter the numbers that might take days of processing to develop, initialize the timer, and exit the room. Then, two other consoles, one in physics and one in operations, have to agree to let the timer fire the laser.There's a huge bang. Everybody on this side of the base calls the cops or the fire department to report an explosion, and we're done.The only impressive thing is the bang. Oh yeah, first we have to tell the nuclear power plant down the road to be ready for some load fluctuations. When the capacitor bank comes up for a charge, it could initially look like a dead short across the power grid leaving the plant. We have to ease into it."