The Templar Conspiracy

16

Lieutenant John Charles Fremont sat at the communications center in the basement of the Pentagon, scrolling through that day's orders from the Joint Chiefs. The particular bunker he and a dozen other men and women occupied was officially known as a Crisis Control Operations Center, and on this particular midnight-to-eight shift he was the designated communications watch officer. In other words, in Pentagon-speak he was the DC-CWO of the JCS CCOC. Unofficially, he was King Rat of the Big Cheese Rat Hole. Sergeant Knox Bellingham, the man seated beside him, was a senior console operator, more simply known as a Big Rat.

"You been noticing a lot of traffic for something called Prairie Fire?" Lieutenant Fremont said.

"Yes, sir," said Bellingham. "I've got personnel tickets for a whole bunch of people en route to Colorado Springs, Houston, and Sunnyvale, California."

"You notice anything weird, Sergeant?"

"Yes, sir," answered Bellingham, squinting at the screen in front of him. "They're all O-one to O-six. And they're all SOCOM."

Fremont sat back in his chair and looked at the screen pulsing in front of him. All of them on duty were officers, from lieutenant to lieutenant colonel, and all were part of the Special Operations Command. Colorado Springs was NORAD and the Consolidated Space Operations Center, Houston was NASA and Sunnyvale was the Air Force Satellite Test Center. Put them together and you had the complete command-and-control capabilities for every military communications satellite in the sky.

"What's the transit coding on the orders?" Fremont asked.

"USTRANSCOM." Bellingham responded, checking the file on his screen. That made sense, sort of. USTRANSCOM stood for United States Transport Command.

"Subcoding?"