by Mark Donovan
Ron accelerated his Ford Explorer to put some distance between him and the Lexus. As soon as he rounded the next corner in the road, he pulled off onto the soft shoulder of the road and stepped out of his car as if he was going to go relieve himself. A few seconds later the Lexus and the dark blue SUV passed him. As they pulled away from him he quickly got back into the Explorer and pulled back onto the road. While accelerating to catch up with the two vehicles he reached over and opened the vehicle’s glove box, and pulled out his Ruger LCP 0.380 ACP handgun. His head was still hurting from his attack yesterday. Today he was going to be prepared to defend himself if it came to it. He wedged the gun between the passenger seat and backrest support, as he continued to catch up to the trailing SUV.
Lazaro watched in his rear view mirror as Ron’s vehicle caught up to them and then trailed him one hundred yards behind. Aftonio sat in the front passenger seat with a Glock 9mm Model 17 handgun in his right hand, and keeping his eyes on the Lexus in front of him. After dropping off his second man Carlos at the Boise, Idaho airport yesterday with the evidence they had collected at the NSurv facilities, Lazaro and Aftonio had been monitoring the NSurv facilities ever since. Though they were unsure where the two NSurv vehicles were headed, they had figured they were enroute to catch up with Henson and the brunette beauty Dana Cogswell who flew out of McCall last night.
Lazaro had been in contact with Barbas the previous evening. He had explained to Barbas that Henson and a few of NSurv’s employees were packing up vehicles with various pieces of lab equipment and that Henson and Cogswell had flown out of McCall around 6:30pm. Barbas asked Lazaro to sit tight until he heard back from him. At 3:00am in the morning Barbas had contacted Lazaro and given him explicit orders to take out the vehicles, but in a discrete way, and preferably in a remote area. As Lazaro drove through the winding and mountainous roads, he couldn’t help but think to himself how perfect a location the Clear Water National Forest was for taking out the vehicles. They hadn’t seen another vehicle in the past fifteen minutes and they were paralleling a steep mountain ridge. Beyond the road’s shoulder was a drop off into the forested abyss below. It was now or never. First they’d get rid of the vehicle ahead of them.
“Aftonio, we’re going to send the Lexus over the cliff on the next bend in the road. Be ready to take out their tires after I give it a nudge or two.”
As they approached the next switch back in the road, Lazaro stomped on the SUV’s gas pedal and the vehicle surged ahead. Joe had been watching the SUV constantly in the passenger side mirror and saw the SUV start to accelerate towards them. Immediately he shouted to Dr. Gillian to floor the Lexus. Dr. Gillian had responded instantly to Joe’s command. As a result, what would have otherwise been a hard rear end collision with the dark blue SUV was instead only a slight nudge.
Lazaro was not deterred, however. He continued to floor his vehicle and wedge it up behind the Lexus, attempting to forcibly push it off the road. Dr. Gillian used all his strength and skill to keep the Lexus on the road as he continued to keep his foot on the gas pedal.
As soon as Ron had seen the dark SUV accelerate and slam into the back of the Lexus, he knew he was going to have to take immediate offensive action if he was going to save his friends lives. Whoever was behind the wheel of the dark SUV was trying to run them off the road and over the cliff edge. He opened his window and then reached over and grabbed his Ruger. He fired two rounds into the dark SUV’s rear driver side tire and then into the rear window. The rear window exploded into a million pieces but apparently he missed the tire. The vehicle was still under control, but now weaving like on a slalom ski course. A second later two shots came through his front windshield. Unlike the rear window in the SUV, his front window did not shatter. Instead there were two clean holes in the passenger side of the window.
Lazaro let off the gas on the SUV and Aftonio immediately pushed the upper portion of his body out of the passenger side of the vehicle to enable him to get a clear shot at the Lexus’s back tires. As Aftonio squeezed off several rounds from his gun, Ron took a couple of shots at Aftonio. Ron’s shots didn’t find their target since he was holding his gun in his left hand out the driver’s side window, but they had at least caused Aftonio to cease firing and crawl back into the SUV.
Ron could see, however, that Aftonio had hit one of the tires on the Lexus. He could see Dr. Gillian was struggling to keep the vehicle on the road as it was swerving and slowing down. Fortunately it didn’t look like the Lexus was going to go off the road. However, if Ron didn’t act swiftly and effectively, his friends could end up being executed while sitting in their lame vehicle. Ron decided it was time to play hardball with his vehicle and came up fast on the outside line of the dark SUV. As he did so, he slammed the passenger side nose of his vehicle into the backend driver’s side of the SUV. Immediately the SUV shot off towards the left and in the direction of the road edge and cliff.
Lazaro slammed on the brakes to try to get control of the SUV and prevent it from going off the road and tumbling into the steep ravine below. Just as it looked like the vehicle was going to fly over the edge, Lazaro was able to get control of the car again and turn it back onto the road. As he did, Aftonio began firing back at Ron, who was now weaving his Explorer to avoid getting hit. Ron heard one bullet slam into the right quarter panel of the Explorer and saw another one blow off the passenger side-view mirror. Again, Ron stuck his gun out his side window and pulled the steering wheel hard to the right to get a good angled shot. As the front of the Explorer turned to the right he emptied his Ruger’s magazine clip into the SUV in front of him. The shots apparently had some affect. The man who had been hanging out of the vehicle shooting at him was now slumped unconscious over the SUV’s passenger door half hanging out. A sick feeling raced briefly through Ron’s brain, but at the same time he saw the dark SUV accelerate again and slam into the back of the Lexus and turn it nearly sideways before Dr. Gillian straightened out his vehicle again.
Ron heard Joe yell over the radio, “Get the bastard off our backs before he kills us!” Instantly Ron floored the Explorer and once again slammed the nose of his passenger’s side front quarter panel into the back quarter panel of the SUV. The SUV rocketed off towards the left again, and as it did Aftonio’s body fell completely out the passenger’s side of the vehicle. As it did, Ron had no time to react and ran the Explorer over the body. There was a brief thud and crunch as the vehicle passed over Aftonio’s lifeless body. As Ron flinched at the sound, he saw the driver of the SUV make another attempt to prevent his vehicle from flying off the road and into the rocky void below. Unfortunately this time the driver was not so lucky. The vehicle slid off the edge of the road, in what looked like slow motion to Ron, and into the abyss below.
Ron stomped on the Explorer’s brakes next to the edge of the road where the SUV had slid off and jumped out of the car. He ran to the road’s soft shoulder and carefully looked out over the precipice and into the rocky and wooded valley below. The car had fallen nearly a 1,000 feet and lie upside down engulfed in flames. Joe raced up to Ron with Dr. Gillian trailing just behind him.
“Jeez, they nearly killed us,” Joe blurted out in between breaths.
“That apparently was their plan,” said Ron in a disgusted and slightly unsettled look.
“Do you think we should call the police?” asked Dr. Gillian.
“No, I don’t think we need the attention right now and I have a pretty good feeling these guys were well connected in Washington,” responded Ron.
“Well what do we do with him?” asked Joe as he pointed over to the mangled corpse lying in the road.
Ron grimaced for a second at the thought of what he had to do. “We need to dispose of it immediately.”
Ron ran over to the twisted body and grabbed it by its feet. He then dragged the body to the edge of the road and pushed it over the edge of the precipice while Joe and Dr. Gillian looked on in dismay. Ron looked up at the two of them and asked, “Well did you have a
better idea? Do you really think this guy was any cleaner than the other one that had gone over the cliff in the SUV? Hell, he was shooting at us. He had no intention of taking any of us in alive. They were certainly no law enforcement. They were hired guns, plain and simple.”
“You’re right,” said Dr. Gillian. “They would have killed us if Ron hadn’t done what he had done. I would bet my bottom dollar that they were connected to Barbas and indirectly to the administration in Washington.”
Joe shrugged his shoulders in agreement. With the three somewhat calmed down, they went back to the Lexus and replaced the blown out tire. Ten minutes later they were back on the road and continuing on their way to Cut Bank, Montana to catch up with Dave and Dana. The entire time that had passed, from when they were attacked by the two men in the dark blue SUV, to when they completed the Lexus SUV’s tire repair, not a single vehicle had passed by them. They had been very lucky thought Ron as he followed behind Dr. Gillian and Joe. Lucky that they had survived, and lucky that no one had witnessed the incident. A chill ran down Ron’s spine though when he completed his last thought. He realized it wouldn’t be very long before the two men in the SUV were missed, and most likely they had at least reported the direction of their travel to their superiors. All he could do was hope that a helicopter or plane wouldn’t end up on their six o’clock position, or an overhead satellite identify and track them before they got to Cut Bank.
Fortunately the rest of the 10 hour journey went much smoother and they had no additional issues up to Cut Bank. Though all three were on constant high alert for the remaining part of the trip. They had kept in constant radio contact during the rest of the trip, and kept close eyes on any vehicle passing them or trailing them. Fortunately no one else seemed to have any interest in them as they drove on.
They made it into the Cut Bank, Montana facility around 3 pm that afternoon. Dave and Dana greeted them as they drove into the parking lot. Dave couldn’t help but notice the damage to Ron’s precious Ford Explorer. Ron had always kept the vehicle in pristine shape. Looking at the dented quarter panel and holes perforating the front windshield Dave immediately knew something had happened to them on their trip.
Ron explained the entire incident to Dave and Dana as all of them unloaded the vehicles and brought the equipment into the building. It was obvious now with two attacks in as many days on NSurv that the administration and its partners were onto them and were making every effort to quietly take them out.
“Dave, we’re not going to last much longer doing this before we get killed,” said Dana. “We have been marked for termination by the administration, without prejudice.”
“I realize this,” responded Dave somewhat gruffly to Dana. “We reviewed some very good field recordings today. I think we have enough ammunition to take the administration down at this point. We just need to build the case around the evidence and pitch it to the public over the next couple of weeks. We just may need to do some of it on the run if they locate where we are. But for tonight, we will release our next video to the public from the confines of our new operations center here in Cut Bank. And we’ll continue to release new videos every other day, exposing the corruption in this administration and the general media, until the public is screaming revolution and this administration is thrown out of office and tried for treason.”
Chapter 60 (March 26, Tuesday 6:00pm Eastern Daylight Savings Time)
General Jarod and Ken Hardy were standing in front of Doug Spade’s office at the NRL in Washington DC. They were waiting for Doug to give them a complete briefing on his findings with the canisters the general had left with him the night before. Doug was still in the same clothes he wore the previous night and looked completely worn out and exhausted. His eyes were blood shot and his hair was a mess. His voice for the briefing was slow and slightly labored, however, it was thorough as he faced the two men.
“General Jarod, as I had thought last night, the analysis that I performed today on the contents of the canisters you left me with, confirmed what I had expected. There were trace amounts of nanotechnology carbon structures, or nano-dust, to make it easier for conversation, in them. Their structure was much more complex than any nano-dust materials I’ve seen before. Consequently, there is still a lot I don’t know about these particular nano particles. However, I can say that they have the basic molecular structure to virtually enable any type of sensor, or object for that matter, to be constructed or shaped into, given enough material.”
“What do you mean by the construction of a sensor or object?” asked Ken Hardy.
“I’m saying that given a large enough hive of nano-dust material, and the intelligent software to control it, virtually any type of recording device or sensor could be contrived from the hive. Similarly, it is even conceivable to construct an object such as a glove, ball, weapon, or any other object if the nano-dust is sufficiently controlled. Think of a 3D printer where critical AR-15 assault rifle components today are created out of a small square vat of liquid epoxy. Likewise, the nano-dust can be controlled and shaped into virtually any type of object. However, unlike the 3D printer, this type of nanotechnology can be taken much further to create objects that have much more functionality than a glob of shaped plastic. Not only can the nano-dust be configured to take on a particular shape, it can also be controlled to perform a particular function, such as a video recorder, tape recorder, chemical sensor, etc. And on top of that, it can do it at the nanoscopic level, making it virtually undetectable to the naked eye.”
“Are you saying that the recent videos that have been released to the public by this terrorist group came from this so called nano-dust stuff morphed into video recording equipment?” asked the Chief of Staff.
“Yes, I’m saying it’s more than likely the case if you’ve not found any other evidence of recording equipment associated with the sites where the videos were filmed.”
“You said there was the potential that the sensors could be created at the nanoscopic level,” commented the General. “Do you honestly believe they could make complex and complete audio and video equipment at the nanoscopic level, or do you mean very basic sensors, such as heat sensors?”
“No, I mean it is conceivable that NSurv could have the capability to make sophisticated sensors at the microscopic level of an audio or video recording device with this nano-dust. Think of the nano-dust as a utility fog that represents nanoscopic robots that can be manipulated via software commands to assemble themselves into various shapes and properties.”
“Then if this is truly the case, we would never be able to see the sensors,” responded the Chief of Staff. “We’d have no idea where to even begin to look for them.”
“Not only that, the sensors could be purposely dissolved, if you will, after performing their surveillance function,” replied Doug. “The nano-dust fog could then silently disperse into the atmosphere, leaving no trace that it was ever there.”
General Jarod looked hesitantly at the two men before speaking. “Doug, do you think there is any way that the nano-dust could be ingested by humans and somehow controlled in the body to perform sensory functions?”
“Yes, it is possible, at least for basic sensory functions, such as temperature or chemical sensors. I’d be hard pressed to believe though that NSurv could actually control and configure a sufficient amount of hive material ingested in the body to make complex sensors such as video recorders.”
“So you’re confident with that assessment Dr. Spade,” pressed the Chief of Staff. “There’s no chance that we could be walking around with NSurv implanted video cameras and audio recorders in our bodies?”
“Yeah, it’s very highly unlikely that NSurv could be that far ahead of all the other research university and industry competitors out there in this space, even though they are a very gifted team. If for some reason they could, I would think anyone carrying the configured nano-dust in their body the size of a functioning video recorder would experience some type of side effect symptoms.�
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“If that level of nanotechnology could actually exist, how soon would you estimate we are away from it?” asked the Chief of Staff.
“Well first let’s be clear. It is not a matter of if, but when, the technology will exist for having complex nano-functions coexisting in the human body. Make no mistake there are numerous scientists and engineering groups working across the globe today to achieve that goal as we speak. If I had to guess, however, I’d say we’re probably still a decade or more away from seeing it.”
The Chief of Staff stood silently looking at Dr. Spade as he absorbed the enormity of what he had just said.
“I should also add,” said Doug, “that when you add artificial intelligence to this nanotechnology mix the possibilities become even more profound. And again, make no mistake, there are people today working out there in this world attempting to do just that. When they achieve their objectives, which I have no doubt they eventually will, we are talking the possibilities of autonomous hive nano-fog clusters that can morph into whatever structure and function it desires.”
“What kind of structures?” asked the general.
“Virtually anything. Inanimate objects, as well as organic living objects, such as possibly a cloned human being, if you will.”
The Chief of Staff simply stood there shaking his head in disbelief as Doug finished his last sentence. “The future sounds like a very scary place,” he quietly whispered to the two other men.
Doug looked over at the Chief of Staff with a tinge of disgust. “It’s already a scary place for some of us who are more in the know. It’s just that much of the country is oblivious to what’s going on around them,” responded Doug.
The general gave a quick hard glance at Doug before looking over at Hardy to see if he was done with his questioning. Hardy looked up from his pensive stare at the floor as he sensed both men looking at him. Hardy gave a gentle nod to the general and reached out and gave Doug Spade a weak handshake. “Doug, thank you for all your efforts over the past 24 hours and giving us this briefing. Your findings and insight were very enlightening for both the general and me.”