Chapter 8
The Pattern. Coincidences. A Test of the First Amendment.
Weighing a Man’s Character. Rumors of Impatience. Attack.
Chase. Helicopter.
1.
Cornelia decided that she would not turn to one of their cameras and reflect on her mix of emotions any time soon. At least not without a script.
The truth would be such a cliché anyway, she mused. Well, OK, maybe not entirely a cliché.
She was in the middle of the story of a lifetime—the lifetime of any journalist anywhere in the history of journalism—and her mind kept wandering to Rick. To his guest apartment back at Travis.
No, definitely not for the cameras, she decided.
Some TV critic would lambast Confirmation for perpetuating a negative sexist stereotype. “Why does the strong female lead have to be hung up on a romantic dalliance in the middle of the story of the century as she sits in the macho, metallic confines of a transport plane at thirty thousand feet over the Pacific and on the way to Hawaii?”
Maybe because the strong female lead is also a human being, she retorted in her mind as she stood by one of the windows of the ironically named Boeing C-17 Globemaster, and studied the green-blue ocean below melting into the cloudless horizon.
And because Rick, the strong male lead, is also hung up on the same things, she added as she felt a hand at the small of her back. It touched her just momentarily, but she could sense it was Rick. She thought it felt clandestine, yet self-assured and firm.
And, indeed, he moved to stand next to her a moment later, a light crease of a smile in the corner of his mouth. “So have they solved the mysteries of the universe yet?”
“They think they’re close,” Cornelia found herself saying with very dry sarcasm.
Since the last news reports they saw in the command center back at Travis had offered no good news from around the world, the mood inside the plane had settled on full-bore apocalyptic.
“Let’s check it out,” Rick said.
They might as well, Cornelia thought, and stepped away from the bulkhead. Once again, there was the welcome feel of Rick’s hand on her shoulder for a moment as they headed toward the gathering closer to the front of the plane.
The cavernous cargo-bearing aircraft had become the mobile headquarters for the Travis-based branch of the government’s globe-phenomenon study unit. Since the military had somehow concluded that Hawaii was a hotbed of globe-sensitive individuals, they wanted to dispatch a team with as much equipment as would possibly become necessary to use in the field. That equipment turned out to be two Humvees, a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter, along with pallets full of medical testing equipment.
As for the personnel, Kristine Murakami had been tasked with selecting a group of doctors to go with her—mainly neurologists, as Cornelia recalled—and provide enough hands and sharp minds to try and get to the bottom of what afflicted people like David Kwan. Along with the scientific team, they were matched with a Navy SEAL platoon and a team of the air force’s special operations troops, the Combat Controllers. And if their plane wasn’t loaded tightly enough with their crew—leaving only the sidewall seating as the rest of the belly of the C-17 held the hardware—a small and carefully selected press pool from the four networks and CNN also crowded the plane.
As she and Rick made their way further forward, Cornelia noticed that the serious discussion about the latest globe developments around the world took place next to the helicopter. That was the section of the cargo hold that afforded the most space between the bulkheads and the hardware.
“…This is classic. I’m telling you,” she heard Knight’s voice among the gathering. “It’s easy to see the pattern.”
“What pattern is that?” asked a female reporter.
Cornelia couldn’t recall which network she was with. But each representative group of a media outlet, Cornelia saw—including their very own techies, Matt, Tony, Lacy, and Melinda—were recording the discussion from every possible angle.
Of the study unit’s leadership, only Sam Rutkowski and the navy’s Frederick Graham had joined this away team. Colonels Franciosa and Robinson stayed behind at Travis, coordinating operations with the Pentagon and the Chairman of the Joint Chief’s of Staff.
“It’s a test. And it’s a part of a pattern,” Knight said.
“But there is no precedent to this anywhere in history,” one of the other reporters said.
“In a way there is,” Knight said with an intense glare.
“Like what?” a voice asked from the crowd.
“I think this is testing us,” Knight said. “And provoking us.”
“I can see that perfectly,” Cornelia heard Ian say, and saw him elbowing his way closer to the nucleus of the gathering. As a special effects technician, he might have had some strong opinions, Cornelia surmised, about perceptions being manipulated and audiences being provoked.
“Is this the conclusion they reached?” Cornelia heard Rick’s voice close to her ear.
“Apparently so,” she replied.
“Look,” Knight said, “just ask yourselves how far people would go if surrounded by chaos and anarchy.”
“How violent they are willing to become?” a reporter from NBC News asked.
“No,” Knight said. “Just the opposite.”
“What do you mean?” the reporter asked.
“How far they are willing to go for peace and security? What are they willing to do to make all the anarchy stop?”
The group around Knight appeared to be stumped by the question, because no clear, determined response came from the professor. There were murmurs of quiet discussion and speculation all around, but no one was willing to offer any self-assured theory to match the question.
But Cornelia knew why. She knew why the taut fear had settled over the group. Maybe what Knight was proposing was even more disturbing than the chaos rising all around the world.
“What are we willing to give up to make the riots stop?” he asked, and probed the people around him with a flinty glare. “It’s classic, isn’t it? What was Germany willing to give up in the 1930s? The Russians after the collapse of communism, when the crime and chaos swept in?”
“After 9/11?” Someone among the reporters said. “Patriot Act anyone? NSA spying. Warrantless wiretapping?”
“So take all that to the hundredth power,” Ian now spoke up forcefully.
Cornelia noticed Rick shifting uncomfortably beside her. Then she felt his hand take hers and give it a quick squeeze.
“You know what this sounds like, don’t you?” he asked.
Eyes and a couple of cameras shifted in his direction.
“Every conspiracy theorist’s hard-on!” Rick said.
Cornelia thought she heard some snickering in the crowd.
“Come on, we can’t put ‘hard-on’ on network TV,” a voice spoke up.
“Oh, yeah,” Cornelia heard Jerry’s voice now. “The end of the world is coming but we need to censor TV. So we don’t corrupt the impressionable youth. You can put it on your web page, can’t you?”
“Look, people!” Rick’s voice rose. “The point is that this is exactly what all the conspiracy theorists—those people out there in their balloon, the ones throwing rocks, setting fires—this is exactly what they are saying. Do you want to confirm their paranoia?”
“It’s not quite the same thing,” Knight replied.
“It’s real close,” Rick insisted. “There are enough people out there already pointing at every government in the world, claiming this was done as some kind of a grand plan to enslave everyone. Who else but governments have something to gain from this?”
Cornelia could imagine all those protesters around Travis wanting to launch rockets at their plane instead of blocking it with a hot-air balloon.
“But what I’m a
sking,” said Knight, “is what if we can prove one-hundred-percent, we can prove without a doubt, that all of this is coming from somewhere else? Just look around the world. At all the insanity people are capable of doing. Who has any faith in humanity left?”
“We’re all nuts,” Ian exclaimed. “We’re a bunch of animals. This is humanity at its worst. We’ve just been exposed for what we are.”
“Now just consider how long this might go on,” Knight said. “How many more days of this? Weeks? Months? When is the chaos, the anarchy going to stop? So now suppose whatever Wizard of Oz is behind all of this steps out from behind the curtain….”
“You mean like an alien or something?” Melinda asked.
Cornelia noticed Knight wince at the word “alien.”
“Maybe,” he replied evenly, however. “At this point aliens are as good a guess as any.”
“And the point is,” Ian said, “that what if the…alien, this whatever, this thing offers to help us put an end to all of the insanity?”
Knight nodded, looking at Ian like a prize pupil who had done his professor proud.
“Why don’t you get a load of this?” a young female reporter in the crowd waved her iPad around. “Listen to this! This is coming off of a blog.” With all eyes and cameras on her, she proceeded to read, “‘Humanity doesn’t even deserve a chance any more. We’re killing ourselves because we’re so stupid. First it was concentration camps. Then nukes. Then terrorism. Then we destroy the environment. Now we have these globes show up, and what do we do? We fight and kill each other. I can’t wait for whoever created these globes to come and clean up this world.’”
“Need I say more?” Knight asked.
“We can’t ignore this,” Ian added with grim determination. “And I mean everybody. The world. All of us. This is the real threat, and we have to bring attention to it.” He paused and nodded at cameras. “With everything we have.”
“So you seriously think,” said Rick, “that this is some kind of a…what? False flag operation? Isn’t that what the conspiracy nuts call it?”
“Someone setting this up on purpose just so they can profit—so to speak—from it?” Cornelia heard Lacy’s voice rise from amidst the gathering.
There were a lot of nods to her question.
But she shook her head. “I think that sounds far fetched. I’m with Rick on this. I think we’re trying to force our own…you know, behavior, our way of thinking, onto something that’s totally out of this world.”
“Yeah, I think she’s right, too.” Cornelia found herself more thinking aloud than adding her voice to the discussion.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” a youthful-sounding voice joined the conversation.
Cornelia quickly noticed it was the physicist they had met at Travis, Vincent Rafferty.
“You’re completely right about the out of this world part,” he said. “However, I don’t think that rules out the possibility of us trying to figure out its reasoning.”
There was a general inarticulate grumbling rising from the gathering, and Cornelia found it hard to guess who was taking which side.
“Whatever is behind the globes,” Rafferty continued, “has to be intelligent enough to know what sort of an effect all of this is having on us.”
“You think so?” Lacy replied, already skeptical of Rafferty’s position.
“I think it’s a reasonable guess,” Rafferty said.
Cornelia noticed Knight nodding his head in definitive agreement.
“I think,” said Rafferty, watching Lacy closely, his inflection almost sounding sheepish, “that whatever force is behind this is watching us, monitoring us, our culture and our reactions, and probably calculating its own reaction to our behavior right now.”
“So we have aliens out there monitoring our broadcasts? Our Internet?” said one of the reporters. “And coming up with more ways of manipulating us?”
“Maybe,” said Knight with a glum matter of factness.
“But I’m having problems with that,” Lacy said.
“I think I do, too,” Cornelia said, making the effort to speak louder now and insert herself into the conversation.
Knight glanced in her direction.
“Yeah,” said Lacy, “I think you guys are bringing the globe maker down to our level. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“What if the globe maker doesn’t even consider humans any sort of noteworthy creatures on this planet?” Rick added.
Knight shook his head with a look that was somewhere between a smirk and a wince. “I think you’re way overselling the globe maker. And completely underestimating the human race.”
“Now wait a minute,” Rafferty replied. His glance somewhat brightened, Cornelia noted, as he shot a look Lacy’s way. “I do think Lacy has an interesting point of view. You know, the physicist Michio Kaku once said something similar about how aliens would behave if they could come to Earth. You know the old question: if all those UFOs are space aliens, why aren’t they landing on the White House lawn? Well, he said that we probably can’t figure out the aliens’ motives any more than ants in an anthill could ever understand what that highway construction a few feet away is all about.”
“Thank you!” Lacy said. “Exactly! And said much better than I ever could.”
A smile crept onto Rafferty’s face and Cornelia would have sworn that he was blushing. So the boy genius has a thing for our tomboy? she thought, feeling herself smiling inwardly. And in the middle of all this craziness, why not? she told herself as she looked at Rick.
Except Rafferty’s look quickly turned to what looked like a shade of disappointment. “But, the thing is…I’m not sure if we can apply the same principles here,” he said, very obviously studying Lacy’s for any reactions.
While Lacy’s glance remained completely neutral, Cornelia noticed Knight’s face lighting up with an intense sort of vehemence. “And ants don’t have nuclear weapons,” he said quickly.
“Unfortunately…see, the thing is…,” Rafferty said, all the while looking at Lacy as if he was in a private conversation with her, “I don’t see how the violence, all the chaos this world is spinning into, couldn’t be grasped by anything advanced enough to create those globes.” His words sounded apologetic. He even punctuated his last sentence with a sad shrug.
“I don’t know…,” Lacy replied quietly. “Maybe.”
“What I think,” Knight said with a shake of his head, “is that whatever created these globes knows exactly what they’re doing and the kind of responses it will elicit. It wants to create chaos so it can look like a savior when it shows its face.”
Cornelia could tell that Lacy, no matter what she might have said to Rafferty, still appeared to be unconvinced. Rafferty himself was somewhere on the fence, and extremely uncomfortable about it from the way he kept glancing at Lacy. The rest of the press people just looked baffled and scared.
“I don’t know about you,” Rick said, leaning closer to Cornelia, “but I don’t think I can listen to that debate for another five hours.”
“Neither can I,” she replied. “Let’s get out of here.”
As they walked toward the aft sections of the cargo hold to sit and relax in a couple of sidewall seats, neither of them hesitated to hold hands all of a sudden. Just as the unknown had given them the best reason in the world to give in to their attraction back at Travis, so it now made perfect sense not to keep their new relationship hidden. With everything that group had been debating, with the tension passing through this plane, there was no sane reason to keep love out of these cold, fearful confines.
Cornelia just hoped Rafferty and Lacy might realize that too.
2.
The first thing Cornelia did after stepping onto the stairway leading out of the C-17’s forward side-door was to look into the distance, to try and spot the perimeters of the airfield and se
e any signs of trouble.
“No hot air balloons,” Rick said before she could as he stepped in behind her.
Before they had taken off from Travis, Cornelia heard that the base was about to suspend its public tours out of security concerns. She wondered if the same was the case here at Hickam Field.
The air base, officially called the Joint Base Pearl-Hickam, shared its runways with both the Naval Station Pearl Harbor and Hawaii International Airport. In the state’s capital and on its most populous island, the base, Cornelia reasoned, could be a super-high-powered magnet for chaos now that the world press was blaring headlines about people being able to somehow predict the appearance of the next globe. But as far as she could see, everything appeared completely serene as of yet.
“They’re too busy trying to spot the next globe to be bothering with us,” Cornelia soon heard Colonel Lloyd Brubaker, base commander, tell Lieutenant Colonels Rutkowski and Graham, as well as Kristine Murakami, as the globe investigation group was led across the flight line. The blunt-faced, crew-cut Brubaker walked with a slightly noticeable limp, but moved with long, quick military strides nevertheless.
While the airfield might have been peaceful upon their arrival, efficiency and heightened caution were the order of the day. The local man in charge apparently wanted them on their way and doing their hunt for the globe-sensitives as fast as possible.
“And how’s the local population holding up under the circumstances?” Murakami asked, raising her voice to compete with the sound of one of the commercial airliners approaching its runway nearby.
“On edge,” Brubaker, too, shouted over the noise of the aircraft.
Cornelia quickly noticed the press entourage picking up its pace, trying to get as close to the base commander and the head of the procession as they could. Luckily, she thought, the Confirmation team was in a slightly advantageous position in the pecking order of the guests because of Dan Knight. His scholarly credentials still got them all more attention from the military leadership.
“The situation,” Brubaker continued, “is, I suppose, much like in San Francisco. I read the stories about the protesters at Travis. The insanity of all the people trying to get out—”
Confirmation Page 22