Project Aura

7

A metal field was growing in the middle of a brutal Alaskan winter, braving the harsh winds coming off of the Wrangell Mountains. Eighty acres of metal sprouted from a surface of loose gravel and blowing snow-last year it had been only sixty acres. Over 540 towers, each exactly seventy-two feet high, were spaced eighty feet apart in a rectangular grid pattern. Each tower was crowned with two pairs of crossed dipole antennas. Lower down, fifteen feet above the gravel, an elevated screen of mesh went from tower to tower, forming a reflector and allowing room for maintenance workers and trucks to travel underneath. There were eighty transmitter stations also hidden under the screen, each one linked to a master control room ten miles away on a foothill of the Wrangells, where it could safely overlook the transmission field. In the highly classified books that listed expenditures in the American government’s Black Budget, the facility was known simply by the acronym HAARP-High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program.

Snow-covered peaks reached up to gray clouds all around. HAARP was in the center of United States ’ largest national park, bigger than New Hampshire and Vermont combined. Nine of the sixteen tallest mountains in the United States were in the park. Four of those mountains were over sixteen thousand feet, higher than any peak in the continental United States.

The park comprised over thirteen million acres, with another million acres of private land inside its boundaries, yet less than one hundred people lived in the area. They were a tight-lipped group of prospectors and hunters, rugged individualists who valued their privacy and who knew better than to inquire into or stray too close to the strange fenced compound hidden in the midst of their domain.

Inside the two-story concrete building that controlled HAARP, on the top floor, a cluster of scientists and military personnel were gathered around monitors, each doing their assigned duty. Overseeing all of them, in a small room at the back of the control center, a man in civilian clothes sat behind a desk, looking through a one-way mirror at the workers. He was a distinguished looking man with thick white hair combed straight back atop a patrician visage. His eyes were the most striking feature, deep, icy blue with flecks in them, that some who had peered into had sworn were silver. He watched as his chief scientist-Dr. Woods-grabbed a piece of paper as soon as it was clear of a laser printer and came into the office.

“What do you have?”

While HAARP was primarily designed to be a transmitter, it could also receive on the same frequencies. Picking up activity on the virtual plane was a passive action, and they had been trying to perfect their ability to pinpoint such activity for over a year now. The problem was that while they could get a direction, determining the distance to such activity was more difficult, as it was not clear what the transmission’s power level was. Boreas’s initial recommendation had been to build a second HAARP site so they could get two directions, and where the lines crossed would be the location they sought.

However, as with everything associated with the virtual plane, the scientists informed him that it wasn’t that simple. They were like drunks wandering in a forest, trying to map it by bouncing into trees. Another, more immediate problem was that building another HAARP site would bring them more attention than they wanted.

The door opened and the lead programmer walked in with a computer printout.

“Did you find it?” Boreas asked.

In response, Woods put the paper on the desk. “We have a track line for the new transmission.”

Boreas ran his finger along the dark line. It crossed the location in Colombia where the ambush had been set. More importantly, it didn’t cross the transmission track they’d had for the attack on the Coast Guard cutter. Which meant that there were two transmitters. Or, Boreas realized, Souris had developed a portable one. Or both. Looking out his window at the field of antennas and considering that the Ring might have designed a portable version of what he saw made him accept that the option of using Psychic Warriors to investigate was much more desirable than it had been. They were too close now to have a group of drug dealers screw things up.

He was still pondering the problem when the door to the room opened and two men, one dressed in civilian clothes, the other in the green uniform of the United States Army, walked in. Three stars adorned the officer’s shoulders, and rows of medals were stretched across the left side of his chest. His face was well tanned, a curious anomaly here in the great white north. The civilian was a middle-aged, well-built black man with a shaved head. He wore a pair of dark slacks and a collarless black shirt buttoned all the way to the neck. A pair of thin metal glasses framed his eyes.

Boreas dismissed Dr. Woods and greeted the newcomers. “General Eichen, Agent Kirtley, welcome to HAARP.”

Eichen took Boreas’s hand. “Hell of a trip to get here, but I enjoyed it. Great country you have. I imagine the hunting is spectacular.”

Kirtley shook hands without comment.

“Depends on what you are hunting.” Boreas turned to a small cabinet. “Can I get you gentlemen a drink?”

“Hell, yes,” Eichen said. “Scotch if you have it.”

Kirtley declined. “No, thank you.”

Boreas poured the general’s drink, then his own. He sat down behind the desk and slid the glass across the pitted surface.

Eichen glanced at the window. “Busy as heck in there.”

“Yes, they are.”

“I’ve read the documents you sent the expenditure oversight committee,” Eichen said.

Boreas steepled his fingers and considered the general. An investigator arriving now couldn’t be coincidence, not with the project as close to completion as it was.

Eichen looked out the window. “HAARP. The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program. Fancy name. Two billion dollars in research and development money over the last two years. And reading between the lines, nothing really accomplished.”

“Reading between what lines?” Boreas didn’t wait for an answer. “We’ve gathered valuable research information and-”

“The ultimate goal of HAARP isn’t research, is it?” Eichen cut him off. “You briefed the congressional oversight committee that this entire complex was designed to allow full-time strategic communications and data link with submerged ballistic missile submarines.” The general paused to take a sip of his drink. “You and I know that was bullshit, correct?”

“A good cover story, don’t you think?” Boreas said.

Eichen downed the rest of the scotch and slapped the glass back on the desk. “What is it really?”

“It’s a weapon, of course,” Boreas said.

“A weapon from radio antennas?” the general was skeptical. Kirtley had yet to say a word, his dark eyes going back and forth between Eichen and Boreas like those of a spectator at a tennis match.

“A weapon beyond anything you could imagine,” Boreas said. “With it the United States can control the world.”

Eichen snorted. “A bold statement. I’ve been in uniform since I was seventeen as a plebe at the Academy. I’ve fought in Vietnam, the Gulf, and half a dozen other pissant places our President decided to send us. I heard my colleagues in the Air Force say the Stealth fighter and bomber would totally change air warfare, but they didn’t. They said smart bombs would do the job, but they didn’t either, contrary to what CNN and the Discovery channel tout on their specials.

“There’s always a new weapon that will change everything, but in the end it’s always the poor grunt with a rifle in his hand who has to take the ground from the enemy who determines the outcome of war. That’s the ultimate weapon. Always has been, always will be.”

“This weapon is different than those you mentioned. It targets here-” Boreas tapped the side of his head. “What is a soldier without a mind?”

“A good soldier, according to some,” the general replied sarcastically. “One who will follow orders without question. I don’t agree with that, of course. How exactly are you going to affect minds with a bunch of antennas?”

Boreas glanced out the window. A dark part of him appreciated the irony of the questions the general was asking. Plus this was information he needed to brief Kirtley on, so it wasn’t a waste of time. “A radio sends a wave through the air, the distance determined by the power and line of sight for frequency modulated waves-FM. Certain waves, such as high-frequency or amplitude modulated-AM-can bounce off the atmosphere and even go beyond line of sight, again limited only by power of the transmitter.”

“I have worked with radios,” Eichen said patiently.

“This transmitter is on a different frequency than those,” Boreas said. “We have determined that there is a frequency that affects the human mind.”

“Affects it how?” Eichen asked.

“Do you know how your mind functions?” Boreas didn’t expect an answer or wait for one. “Most people haven’t a clue. Do you know what a thought is? Is a thought real? It is real inside your head, isn’t it? But is it real outside of your head?”

Boreas was frustrated after years of trying to explain their work to idiots who only believed in things they could see and touch. The Priory didn’t need the money from the Black Budget-it needed the access to the land to place HAARP on, the satellites that were also to be part of the system, and the scientists the United States could provide.

The Priory had always used existing political structures for its own end. In days of old when a Prior could stand behind a king and whisper in his ear, it had been easier. It was difficult now but even in a democracy there were ways to manipulate power. Out of the paranoia of the Cold War and the legacy of the Black Budget, the Priory had found an avenue to operate within the shadows of the U.S. and Russian governments for decades.

Boreas rapped his knuckles on the edge of his chair. “To you, this is reality. But you will also agree that the voice you hear over your radio is real too. But you can’t see it, can you? What does a radio wave consist of?

“There are levels to reality. And the mind operates on one of those levels, which we call the psychic plane, or the virtual one. ‘Virtual’ means something exists in essence or effect but not in actual form.”

The general, as others Boreas had briefed, focused on one word. “Psychic? You mean like those people who advertise those 1-800 psychic hot lines? Or that fellow who claims he can bend a spoon just by looking at it?”

“All ‘psychic’ means is something that pertains to the mind.” Boreas held his anger in check. “Why do scientists constantly ignore the power of the thing they use the most? The core of our being, that which makes us different from the animals? And why do you military men ignore the vulnerabilities of the mind? Control the mind, you control the man. Destroy the mind, you destroy the man. Target the mind with a weapon, and every man is vulnerable no matter if he is in a highly armored tank or flying at Mach 2 in a plane.

“What we are doing at HAARP is taking warfare to the virtual level. This weapon-the waves that will be broadcast from these antennas-will work in effect but not in form. Once we fine-tune the proper wavelengths for the psychic or virtual plane, there are numerous directions we can pursue research in. There’s so much we don’t understand about the virtual plane, the physics of it. For example, what is distance in the virtual plane? If I can visualize in my mind a place a thousand miles from here, have I traveled that far in the virtual plane?”

Eichen didn’t seem satisfied. “Wasn’t there something on the Russian end like this that caused the recent snafu in Moscow? The nuclear weapons going off?”

“Something like it,” Boreas acknowledged. He knew the general probably wasn’t briefed on Bright Gate or the Russian’s SD-8 and the recent battle-there were only a couple of people in the hierarchy of government who knew of the existence of both Bright Gate and HAARP. In the Black Budget world, everything was compartmentalized so that the left hand rarely knew what the right was doing. Or did the general know about Bright Gate also? If Eichen had been recruited by the other side, he might know much more than he was letting on. Or if he was Nexus, he also might know about both.

“What exactly is a radio wave?” Kirtley asked, breaking his silence. The question surprised Boreas. Everyone he had briefed had either been too embarrassed to ask such a simple question or assumed they knew the answer, which Boreas knew to be wrong in the vast majority of cases.

“A radio wave is the electromagnetic modulation of particles we call photons. Photons have zero mass but we know they exist because of their effect. The study of them is part of what some call the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Photons are all around you, but you can’t see or feel them. At least not consciously.

“When you are in a big city, do you know how many radio frequencies are going through your body? Hundreds, if not thousands. And all of them you don’t even notice, but every so often, while driving your car, do you ever have a certain tune in your mind, and then you turn on the radio and that song is playing? How do you account for that? It’s because parts of your mind, mostly in the subconscious, are attuned to the virtual plane. Some minds are better at that than others and can even project some power into the virtual plane, but all humans are capable of receiving.”

Boreas had been forced to give this spiel several times to those who controlled the purse strings in the Black Budget-the 160 billion dollars the Pentagon spent on classified projects each year.

The general was once more looking at the antenna field. “How far can you transmit?”

“Currently line of sight,” Boreas said.

“Why so many antennas?”

“To affect the mind requires much focus and much power,” Boreas said. “It would be difficult to explain the exact physics to you.”

He didn’t add that he himself didn’t really have an idea of what the physics were. The scientists were like children walking in a dark room, reaching out with hands and feeling things in it, trying to figure out what they were. And they were scavengers, trying to work with what they’d stolen from others who knew the virtual world much better.

“We transmit two sets of signals, both in the high-frequency range. One between two point eight and seven megahertz and the other between seven and ten megahertz, both at very short wavelength. We pulse these rays at increasing levels of power. At the correct power and rate of pulse, it will produce a virtual field around the towers.”

“How does this affect the mind?” the general asked. “Make someone think of show tunes?”

“At a certain frequency it is disharmonic to the natural virtual plane of the mind.”

“And what will that do?” the general wanted to know.

“It will kill all within range.”

There was a moment of silence before Eichen spoke again. “So what do you plan on doing?” the general asked. “Set up a massive field of antennas within line of sight of your target? And what, the enemy is just going to sit there and let you do that? Do you have any idea of the pace of modern warfare?”

“We have some ideas for making it a practical weapon system,” Boreas said.

Eichen nodded. “Such as using MILSTAR satellites as retransmitters so the line of sight can cover any place on the planet’s surface?”

Boreas stiffened.

“Don’t treat me like an idiot,” Eichen said. “I just flew from California, where I found out what you’ve been doing. Now tell me-what is the status of the MIL STAR retransmitters for HAARP? You’ve had some work done during shuttle missions, haven’t you? Four missions to be exact.”

Boreas spun the glass in his hand, eyes catching the light reflected through the alcohol. “We had to retrofit the four MIL STAR satellites. That was completed just recently. The entire system, though, won’t be operational until SC-MILSTAR is launched.” Boreas slid his glass away. “But you knew most of this from MILSATCOM. Why did you come here?”

“To let you know that things are bit more complex than you know,” Eichen said. “I contacted Space Command, which will control MILSTAR. They’ve programmed a lock code into each MILSTAR master computer, which will keep the HAARP retransmitter shut down unless the code is sent. That code has been classified at DefCon Four, accessible only to the National Command Authority.”

“We need to test the system,” Boreas said. “I assume we’ll be given access to the codes for that.”

“You assume wrong.”

“Why are you doing this?” Boreas asked. “We work for the same government.”

“Do we?” Eichen shot back. “It’s my job to check on programs like this and make sure they stay within certain parameters. When a weapon system is being developed, especially on such a scale as this, the Black Budget oversight committee requires certain checks and balances.” Eichen smiled coldly. “I’m the check. Consider your system in balance.”

Boreas said nothing as he considered this development.

“There’s one other thing,” Eichen added. “What about Professor Souris?”

“She disappeared over two years ago,” Boreas said. “Why are you concerned about her now?”

“ ‘Disappeared’?” Eichen spit the word out. “What the hell does that mean? Is she dead? Kidnapped? Joined a commune?” Once more he didn’t wait for an answer. “The woman was the primary developer of HAARP and you simply say she disappeared?”

“I run this program,” Boreas said. “The whereabouts of Professor Souris are a matter for the FBI and CIA, I believe. I reported her missing. More than that, I don’t know.”

General Eichen stood and glanced at his watch. “My helicopter is waiting.” He didn’t bother to shake hands with Boreas. “Best of luck with your project. I still think we’re going to need the infantry though.” He looked at Kirtley. “Are you coming?”

“Mr. Kirtley will be staying behind,” Boreas said. “He’s coordinating HAARP with the NSA.”

As soon as the general was out of the office, Boreas hit an autodial number on his secure speakerphone. It was answered immediately.

“Yes?” McFairn’s voice echoed out of the speaker.

“Eichen just left my office,” Boreas reported. He quickly summarized the meeting, ending with the information about the lock codes and Eichen’s inquiry into Souris ’s location.

“So he could be for real?” McFairn said.

“He could be,” Boreas granted. “Have you found out anything about him?” Boreas watched Eichen get into a Humvee outside the building. Kirtley remained in his chair, as still as a predator waiting to strike.

The Humvee was throwing up a spume of snow as it headed for the helipad three miles away, near the edge of the HAARP field. A Blackhawk helicopter squatted there, blades beginning to turn as the crew saw the general coming.

“No,” McFairn said. “Do you think he’s one of your enemies?”

“I don’t know,” Boreas said. “Wouldn’t you have known of him if he was for real?”

“Not necessarily,” McFairn said. “The Select Committee on Intelligence isn’t very trusting of the intelligence community. If he is what he says he is, then we shouldn’t be able to find out who he is, if you follow the logic, skewed as it may be. And if he is with Nexus, they keep a very compartmentalized organization that I haven’t been able to penetrate.” There was a pause before McFairn spoke again. “If you would tell me exactly who your enemy really is, I might be able to do a better job.”

“We’ve been over that. You don’t have a need to know,” Boreas said. “I don’t think we can take a chance. We’re too close to going on-line worldwide. Even if he is just what he says he is, there’s the possibility we could have the plug pulled by the committee. This is bigger than them. We’ve never been this close, ever.”

“Close to what exactly?”

“You know better than to ask that.”

“And the location of the last transmission?”

“We’re still analyzing the data.” Boreas hung up before McFairn could say anything else. He looked over at Kirtley. “What’s your take on the general?”

“He takes his job seriously.”

“A patriot?”

“Yes.”

“And you? Who or what are you loyal to?” Seeing the frown on Kirtley’s face, Boreas amplified his question. “Are you loyal to McFairn? The NSA? Your country? Yourself?”

“All of the above.”

“It’s not possible,” Boreas said. “There’s inherent conflict.” He scanned the black man’s face, reading it, something he had long ago learned to do. “I think you put yourself first. Deputy Director McFairn did and look where she ended up with my help. She was a glorified secretary when I first ran into her. My help got her where she is now.

“I know her well. She wouldn’t have picked you for this assignment if she didn’t think you belonged here.” He leaned forward slightly in his seat. “Would you like my help?”

Kirtley didn’t blink. “At what cost?”

“You help me when I need it. I help you when you need it.”

“And if our goals diverge?”

“They shouldn’t,” Boreas said. He smiled. “My enemies are your enemies, I can assure you of that.” Glancing out the window, Boreas could see the Humvee approaching Eichen’s helicopter. “Are you with me?”

Kirtley’s head barely moved, but there was no mistaking the assent.

“Good. Come with me.”

Boreas walked out of his office, Kirtley behind him, and entered the control room. He gave orders to his staff in a low voice. There were no questions asked-everyone here was sworn to secrecy and absolute obedience to the project and more importantly their own self-centered goals, each of which Boreas had uncovered and used as leverage. It was the way the Priory had worked for millennia. Virtually every person had a weak point where leverage could be applied, and the Priory was expert at applying that leverage.

Switches were thrown and power surged to the transmitters. The towers hummed. The dipole antennas were warming, changing the nature of the electric power, pushing it into the air, changing the sky. A red glow suffused the air over the center of the metal farm, antennas making connection with each other through the field.

“Level one,” Dr. Woods called out.

Boreas was peering through a large pair of binoculars mounted on a tripod. He could see in the bottom of the view that the general was getting out of the Humvee and into the chopper. He indicated for Kirtley to take a spare pair of glasses.

“Level two.” The red glow was now over a hundred meters in diameter, reaching up the same distance into the sky.

The helicopter lifted, banking to the east.

“Level three.” There was excitement in Woods’s voice.

“Increase,” Boreas ordered.

“Level three point five.”

The red glow now covered the entire antenna field and was racing after the helicopter, the crew and passengers of which were unaware of what was happening behind them.

“Level four.”

Boreas adjusted the focus. He could see into the cockpit as the field reached the aircraft. Both pilots jerked upright in their seats and the chopper skewed about as if on a string. There was blood flowing over the pilot’s face, pouring out of his ears.

The pilot slammed forward onto the instrument panel, twitched for a few seconds, then was still. The chopper nosed over and smashed into the ground, exploding in a ball of fire.

“Decrease power,” Boreas ordered.

The red field diminished to nothing until the power was completely off.

Boreas turned to Kirtley. “Now come to my office and I’ll brief you on what I want from you at Bright Gate.”