by Greg Enslen
After a while, she stopped and rested on a large rocky outcropping that stood out next to the trail. Her right shoulder was still hurting. She glanced around out of habit – even though she knew that no one was there to see her – and unzipped the back of the dress and pulled the lacy bodice and top down to around her waist. She was wearing a silky white bra underneath, and her skin was very pale and white in the darkness of the forest.
There was a hole in her shoulder.
She could clearly see through the hole. The hole was not ragged or bloody, but simply a large hole in her shoulder. She put her finger up to it and gingerly poked it inside the hole in her shoulder. The insides of the hole felt glassy smooth and unnatural. As she moved, she could clearly see through the hole as the trees and rocks behind her moved also. The whole thing made her nauseous.
Sally reached around and put her left hand behind the hole in her right shoulder. She could see the wiggling fingers of her left hand. She stared at the hole in her shoulder for a long time, and then she pulled the top of her dress up again.
Strange things were going on, that much was obvious. People didn’t just walk around with a big hole in them; it just wasn’t done. So why wasn’t she bleeding or dying? With a hole that size in her, she should bleed to death. So how could she be up and walking around as if nothing was wrong?
For the first time, she wondered if maybe she was dead.
Yeah, that would explain it. Waking up here in a strange place, wearing a wedding dress that she had only just picked out last week. Nobody around, and yet she got the overwhelming feeling that other people were standing around her, watching her, interested in her progress through the forest.
So if she was dead, was this heaven? Hell? Was she on this trail because it would lead her somewhere, or would she just walk and walk and walk until she dropped from exhaustion?
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimmer of white movement. She glanced up and saw the fog again, the slow moving, churning mass of cloud, moving down the trail towards her. It was coming for her from the direction of the clearing where she had been, and it was swallowing up the thin forest trail. It was moving slowly but it seemed unstoppable. It would catch up to her in a few minutes.
She hopped up from the rock and moved on quickly, jogging for several long minutes on the rough trail, her heart pounding and her breath ragged. She looked behind her but saw nothing except for the trail.
Sally continued on. She would not stop again, not for a while. She would have to pace herself if she was going to avoid having to sit down and rest. She wanted to stay ahead of that fog; it wanted her, she knew. If it caught up with her, she had the feeling that she would never feel or see or experience anything ever again.
She crested a hill and followed the trail down, down as the path widened and she came into another clearing, this one much bigger than the one she had come from. The trees and undergrowth stood back far enough for her to stand in the middle of the clearing and look around, and she clearly saw trails leading away from it.
Two trails.
The trail on the left led back up and into the dark forest. The other trail, the one on the right, led down, and the forest in that direction seemed to be thinning out.
Sally stood thinking about it for a minute. She turned and looked directly behind her at the third trail leading out of the clearing, the trail behind her, looking for the fog, but there was none yet.
Sally turned and chose the downhill path, starting down it. Almost immediately, she got a momentary glimpse of sky, blue and lovely, between the dark branches. The trail quickly turned steep and she carefully picked her way along the rocky trail, thankful for the sturdy, solid boots on her feet, even if that annoying silver chain kept jingling every time she took another step.
Finally, up ahead, she saw a bright arch of light at the edge of the forest. She picked up the sides of her dress, now dirty and torn in places, and ran. She could see a vast field of grass, green and swaying in the breeze, beyond the trees, and she ran even faster. The fog was all but forgotten.
When she reached the end of the trees, she jerked to a halt, amazed.
A spacious green plain of grass spread out before her like a huge emerald blanket, dipping and sloping down away from her. The plain was vast.
In the distance stood a huge mountain.
Birds flew against the blue sky, the only living things she could remember seeing since waking, small and black against the bright sky. The gray mountain was gigantic, casting a ragged shadow over the plains of grass. A layer of snow that looked as light and fresh as powdered sugar coated the top third of the mountain.
And atop the mountain, she saw a building.
For a moment, Sally thought her eyes were playing tricks on her. Maybe it was all that time spent in the darkness. She blinked and shook her head and rubbed her eyes with dirty fists, and looked again.
A building stood at the very top of the mountain, although from this distance she could only make out few details on the strange, squat building. It looked like some other building she had seen before, with its flat roof and huge columns, but she could not remember where she had seen it.
She sat down.
Why was there a huge mountain in the middle of this easy, sloping plain? She knew that mountains came in ranges and chains – she could never remember seeing a lone mountain, standing by itself on a flat plain, absent of even any attending foothills.
She had a sudden thought.
Maybe this is Heaven, and that other trail from that last clearing, maybe that one had led to Hell? The other trail had been dark and forbidding, and she had known instinctively to come this way. Did that mean she was a good person, one who naturally took the ‘good path’?
She didn’t know. She didn’t anything, except that some very strange things were going on here, and she was going to find out what was going on.
So the building up there – was that Heaven? It made some kind of sense, since it was way up there in the sky. Did that mean she would have to climb all the way up there?
She glanced down and saw the boots, and she suddenly knew that she would climb it, no questions asked. Climbing that mountain might be harder that it looked, but she knew it was something she had to do, because...because Tommy was in that building.
How she knew that was just one more question on a long list she couldn’t answer. She just chalked it up to feminine intuition.
That made her smile.
Tommy never believed in any of that kind of stuff, and so for a while she had made a point of constantly crediting everything she did around him to that mysterious quality, “women’s intuition.” He had hated it for a while until he had realized that she was picking on him. He had reluctantly conceded that there were things out there in the world that could not be explained or rationalized.
The deep, voice-like rumble drifted over the world, but she couldn’t grasp what it said. The voice was deep and, impossibly, it had sounded like Tommy.
She stood up and glanced back once more at the dark canopy of forest behind her and started down the grassy slope towards the base of the huge gray mountain and the circling flocks of dark birds.
Julie was getting used to the idea of being busy in her new closet-sized office. She had plenty of material to read, with the files on Wildfire, all of the documentation and supplementary material on the Cray and the team, and all of the assorted paperwork related to her recent employment. She had no idea the government had so many things for her to sign! Retirement plans, health plans, security clearance applications, and a myriad of other paperwork covered her smallish desk as she tried to wrap all of that up before plunging headfirst into the Wildfire project information. The blue file sat on one side of her desk, unread since yesterday, and whenever she got tired or fed up with filling in all of the little blanks on the forms of this seemingly-endless stack of paperwork, she would look at the file and feel inspired to work faster.
As soon as she finished, she walked the
paperwork up to Personnel, which was also on floor six above her, and then returned to her office. In addition to the Wildfire file, she had also found on her desk this morning when she came in several other thick files, which seemed to have something to do with the Team, its component members, and some of the various projects they had been involved with. She had glanced through them quickly when she had discovered them, but now she picked them up, made herself comfortable, and began reading.
The Team was a group of computer hardware and software experts that were employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist the government in matters related to computers and computer security. It sounded to Julie like an intentionally vague description. The Team was made up of eleven (well, twelve now, Julie thought) people from backgrounds that varied wildly. Most of the Team members had been recruited from other branches of the government dealing directly with computers, and some of them had come from the private sector. Three of the members of the Team had extensive criminal backgrounds, or at least that was what the Team files said, and they were employed by the FBI as part of their ‘rehabilitation’ with the Federal Court system. Evidently, they had worked well with the others during their time with the Team. Only one of them was still on parole, the other two having agreed to stay on even after their ‘governmental obligation’ ended.
The Team leader was an enigmatic man by the name of Peter Turner, and his background as listed in the book was somewhat sketchy and ambiguous. Julie could read between the lines and understand that Mr. Turner had been trained in the use of computers while he was attached to the State Department, and evidently was involved in several ‘incidents’ on that Department’s behalf before being recruited by the FBI to head up the initial formation of the Team. Other than that, Julie could glean no details about his specific areas of expertise from what was contained in the files.
But the interesting backgrounds of some of the Team members failed to compare with the descriptions of some of the intriguing operations the Team had been involved with since its formation six years ago.
One file, a relatively thin one, recounted the Teams’ involvement in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm. From what Julie could tell, the Team had been flown in with some of the first troops stationed in Saudi Arabia and had set up operations in a reinforced warehouse on the outskirts of Hafar al Batin, a small town in Saudi Arabia about 40 miles south of the border with Iraq and Kuwait. Using sophisticated computer equipment, radar and parabolic dish systems, satellite uplinks, and some other unspecified equipment, the Team had done more in three weeks to bring Iraq to its proverbial knees than all of the diplomatic mumbo-jumbo that had come before their arrival.
Years before the approaching threat of war, most of the Iraqi banks and financial institutions had been linked together with governmental observation posts by a telephone-line based communications system. This network, primitive by U.S. standards but still state of the art for the Middle East region, allowed the Iraqi government to monitor all financial transactions going on throughout the entire network.
The Team had managed to establish a clandestine satellite uplink and soon began toying with the Iraqi’s financial system, cleverly posing as banks and other financial institutions that were actually already hardwired into the network. On one day, the information created and infused by the Team would actually appear to be originating with the First Baghdad Bank, and the next day the Team would masquerade as the official Treasury of Iraq’s branch involved with currency exchange. By hiding under assumed names, the Team was able to carry out weeks and weeks of clandestine financial espionage and terrorism, transferring huge amounts of electronic funds to dummy accounts and tying up computer access time for actual institutions attempting to do their own legitimate business. Automated systems within the Team’s warehouse would uplink to the satellites at regular intervals and carry out a host of dummy transactions.
These actions against the financial infrastructure of the Iraqi economy came close to throwing the entire country into a frenzy, an occurrence that was kept out of the local papers but reported to U.S. government agents through other sources. Had the Team been allowed another six or eight weeks of uninterrupted financial sabotage, the actual U. S. military invasion with troops and planes might have been unnecessary. But the Iraqis somehow got wind of hackers in their computer network and had shut the network down, going back to the even more primitive method of transacting all of their financial business by verbal telephone instruction and messenger service.
But the Team, through their efforts, had managed to put a serious dent into the Iraqi’s war-making ability, and the Iraqis had been forced to scramble to obtain enough funds to continue arming up for the approaching conflict. The members of the Team had received a special citation from then-president George Bush for their actions involving the clandestine financial terrorism in Desert Storm. In a speech presented at the quiet and unobtrusive Rose Garden ceremony, President Bush spoke eloquently, estimating that the members of the Team, by their actions, had shortened the length of the war by several weeks and had saved countless American lives.
Julie was amazed. She had heard nothing, not even at the Academy, of any computer espionage and sabotage on the part of the United States during Desert Storm. Now that she knew about it and knew the strengths and capabilities of the Team it seemed like a logical thing to do, but how could they have kept it secret? How did no one know that the United States had been directly involved in attempting to destroy a country’s entire financial infrastructure, doing it all from an abandoned warehouse in a nearby Middle Eastern city hundreds of miles away? Julie had had no idea that the United States was so directly involved in clandestine subversion plots.
She suddenly realized that she was naive and would probably have her eyes opened very soon to all kinds of new things, but she had not even dreamed that this is what she would be involved with, would be asked to do. This sounded far more exciting, and far more important, than she had ever imagined.
A few more of the files she read involved the Team going into another country, often under the auspices of some type of “computer consultants” cover, and wreaking electronic havoc with the internal workings of other countries. Financial, military, scientific, and humanitarian institutions and causes were most often the targets of the Teams’ missions. Some of the countries the Team had visited in recent years were supposed to be our allies, or so she had thought. England, France, Russia, Japan. All of them, at one time or another over the past six years, had been the victim, or more accurately the subject, of very sophisticated and very secretive espionage by members of the Team.
Most of the projects were here stateside, many of them involving the investigation of computer fraud or electronic espionage. In some cases, the fraud or espionage had been detected by other branches of law enforcement and reported to the FBI, and then the Team had been brought in to find ways to combat the fraud or espionage.
Most big American companies had access to huge mainframes or owned them and used them to access and store huge volumes of information on sales trends, marketing information, and research projects. These corporations guarded this sensitive information very closely, and if their competition were somehow able to gain access to this information, the competition could go a long way towards burying them. Research could be stolen, financial transactions and information on the companies’ monetary stability could be changed, used against the company, or leaked to the press, or upcoming marketing strategies could be stolen or studied and planned against.
More often than not, companies attempted to gain their information on competitors by illegal means. In recent years, the business of professional computer espionage had been employed by many major companies, both here in the U.S. and abroad, in an attempt to steal this information. Evidently, the Japanese were the best in the world at trying this tactic in an attempt to subvert their competitors. It was much cheaper to steal information and technology that to develop it independently. In the last y
ear alone, four Japanese corporations with branches in the United States had attempted to illegally infiltrate and download data and information from their competitors’ mainframe computer systems. The Team had stopped them.
But, as Julie took notes and documented the list of cases on a notepad in front of her, she began to notice that there were gaps, some of them as long as a year at a time, between the cases that she had been given to read. Big gaps where the Team was evidently operational (their budget had gone uninterrupted, as far as she could tell) but she hadn’t been clued in as to what they were doing. It only served to make her more and more curious as she sketched out the missing times and tried to correlate them with known world events. If these were the missions and projects that she HAD been told about, what had they been up to during those other times?
The phone rang loudly on her desk, startling her.
“Hello?” she answered.
There was a momentary clicking sound and then the connection was made. “Miss Nolan, I presume?”
She sat up a little straighter in her chair and set aside the last of the Team files. “Yes?”
“This is Pete, Peter Turner. I’m the Team Leader. Darren Paynod tells me that you’re going to be joining us. I just wanted to call you up and officially introduce myself and welcome you to the Team.” The call was staticky and hollow sounding and accompanied with a lot of white noise, sounding like it was coming from overseas.
Julie instinctively raised her voice, as if speaking louder would carry her voice further through the lines to wherever the Team was at this moment.
“Thank you, sir. I’m looking forward to meeting the rest of the Team, and in working with them and you.” This man had a speaking voice that was soothing and yet somehow at the same time very commanding. She glanced down at the cases spread all over her little desk. “I have just been reading through some of your case files, and they are very interesting.”