"Certainly you believed aliens would make an appearance at some point, Mr. Mackey?"
Tikhonov piped up, "If my guess is correct, we are going to Area 51 because it is the current base for the 106th Tactical Fighter Squadron, equipped with PA-111 Sleet ground attack aircraft."
"Everyone is more of an expert than me," Mackey said glumly, "so I suppose I'll just sit quietly and take whatever surprises come."
Tikhonov smiled and bumped Mackey with his elbow. "Come now, Fred. You are the star of our last mission! You confirmed that the drone jamming pods target P-car radar sensors, and then engineered our escape under fire."
"Some escape." Mackey shivered. "Running into traffic on the arterial. We're incredibly lucky we weren't ground to paste underneath the wheels of twelve successive P-car formations."
Hopper smiled at the engineer, dismissing his morosity. "Some of the most important missions have the most inelegant patterns to them. But if you discovered what you needed to find and no one got killed, that is what counts at the end of the day. And besides, with your information, plus what Parsons and Ross have discovered, we now know enough to take the final, decisive step."
"About that," Mackey suddenly said. "It just so happens that plot we have discovered focuses on P-car radar systems, as near as we can tell."
"You know that is correct," Hopper said, looking down to read the files in front of her at the executive desk, cradling the telephone handset against her ear.
"And it just so happens that I am an engineer who specializes in P-car radar interference issues."
"You are also aware of the veracity of that statement." Hopper continued turning pages of a report.
"When you came to my office at the Electromagnetic Bureau, you said I was the nearest engineer with a Bureaucratic Literacy Level of G."
"I said that."
Mackey folded his arms in front of him. "What I would like to know is how it was that you were so lucky as to randomly pull an engineer who happened to be a specialist in the exact nature of the plot you were investigating, which you supposedly did not know at the time."
Hopper paused reading, and stared out the window for a moment. Tikhonov and Mackey both looked at her, wondering how she would respond.
"Contrarily to what you are implying, I did not know that P-car interference was the central element we were searching for. There were a great many unknowns when I began investigating this case. It's not surprising that often there are more unknowns than knowns. Often luck has a great deal to do with it. But what is true is that in this case, my finding you was not entirely up to luck."
Hopper turned in her seat and looked directly at Mackey through her thick glasses. "As you've no doubt seen, some of the information that I use in my work comes from—unconventional sources. Some of these are very distinct, like Eliza. In its way, Eliza provides direct information. Others are not so distinct, and come from a variety of lesser sources, which are then collected, compiled, and collated together. I cannot tell you where or from whom I got the information, because in fact there is not a where, and there is no whom. But information came to me that suggested a person knowing about P-car radar interference might be useful at some point. I did not know if it was true, or in what way it would be true. But I decided to act on that particular information by way of recruiting you."
Mackey wasn't sure how to respond to this. "You can't tell me how you knew?"
"I can't tell you, because there is nothing to tell. The information was obscure and incomplete. I didn't have foreknowledge, I played a hunch. I merely acted on the information at hand as best I could, just as we all have. I could tell you the path and source of every bit of information that I've encountered over the last week, but frankly, that would be quite boring, and a waste of the very short time of this supersonic flight when I would be better off reading these Bureau reports from the Secretary's office which I am told I must sign today."
And with that, she went back to reading, listening to whatever voice or sound or silence was coming through the handset, leaving Tikhonov and Mackey just to look at each other. She also neglected to fill them in about what Ross and Parsons had discovered, assuring them that they would all get together for the briefing upon arrival.
Tikhonov was not off his mark about the reason for going to Area 51—upon landing, Mackey could see the Sleet attack aircraft lined up on the flight line, swarming with ground crew servicing and arming the machines. De-boarding the Valkyrie, Tikhonov and Mackey followed Hopper into the command building and directly into a crowded briefing hall.
At the back of the room, already packed to capacity with Postal Bureau pilots, the commanders of Inspector detachments, and a number of higher level Bureau executives, they found Ross and Parsons, whom they greeted with firm handshakes.
"Heard you had an exciting escape, Fred!" Parsons pumped his hand. "Wish I could have been there for the fireworks, rather than playing technician for Mary's computer gymnastics."
"You were happy enough to find yourself a new explosive toy," Ross reminded him.
Parsons' eyes lit up. "Wait until you see this! The Skunk Works chappies call it a Wizard's Hat, of all delightful names, and it—"
He was interrupted by the Assistant Secretary calling the room to order.
"Thank you. This is a secure, detain, and intervene mission, under the auspices of Executive Branch Procedural Violation Codes, defined in Title 53. I am in command. Everything that will happen here today is classified Top Secret, zero disclosure. In the event of Congressional or other legal inquiries that may occur in the future, you are to refer to these instructions, at this moment, as your Constitutional primum movens, and all culpability and justification from this point forward falls to me, Assistant Secretary for Innovation of the Department of Transportation."
Mackey blinked, swallowing the full meaning of what the Assistant Secretary had just done. She had put her entire career, and even her freedom, on the line. If there was to ever be a person to blame for whatever was about to happen, she had just declared that person to be herself. She had stepped out of the shadows of Orthogonal Procedures into the light of potential Congressional hearings, and whatever criminal charges might lead from that. She had placed herself on the prow of the ship.
"Here is the situation. The Department of Commerce has a technology under its control that allows them to jam the analog radar group-scoping functions of P-cars. When this jamming technology is applied, the automatic safety controls of any P-car are rendered null and void, with deadly consequences."
She paused a moment as the room filled with murmurs. What Hopper suggested took a moment to sink in. This room was full of pilots and armed Inspectors who risked their lives on a regular basis. But the idea that the P-car system—the technological basis of Transportation power in the world—was now vulnerable was enough to make them all feel the floor fall out from underneath them.
"This is true, Mackey?" Ross whispered. "You're sure?"
"We saw it," he whispered back. "I've never seen anything like it. Blocking all bands, completely masking projected images, and at the same time not triggering interference detectors. We saw a car slam itself into a track end barrier at nearly two hundred miles an hour."
"It is one thing to feud with another government Department," Ross spoke through gritted teeth. "But it is another thing entirely to put public lives at risk by breaking carefully engineered safety measures." She put a hand on Mackey's shoulder. "We'll make sure we put a stop to this. As engineers, first and foremost."
She looked back to Hopper with a cold expression on her face. Her words stuck in Mackey's mind. She was right. The Department of Commerce was, in a very literal way, destroying the work to which Mackey had dedicated his career. This jamming technology risked the very lives that he held in his hands every day at work. If there was a single fiber of professional ethics in his body, he needed to help put a stop t
o this. Perhaps, when it came down to it, he had more of an internal ideology than he thought he did.
The Assistant Secretary was pointing to the projection of a slide, showing a diagrammed map of the United States with a number of points marked. "We believe their intention is to identify particular locations to apply this jamming technology, and to do so simultaneously across various locations in the United States. These locations will be identified on the fly using a deep space listening satellite, and relayed through their network via a ground station."
Now it was Mackey who turned to Ross for confirmation. "It's a bit more complicated than that," she explained. "Their tracking isn't meant to be done by the Crystals—that was just for their first round of reconnaissance, which you and Hopper discovered. For the actual run, working visually would require a person examining each Crystal photo to find the P-car targets within the photograph, after first rectifying the image to map coordinates. All of that would take far too much time.
"But when Hopper said you and Tikhonov discovered a P-car connection, it clicked. P-cars use radio waves to self-identify themselves to the track signals. The track signals then relay this information by radio to other nearby cars to aid in formations. These signals are also captured by Mass Transit Bureau monitoring systems, and then relayed to Postal Bureau satellites. The Crystals need to be in low earth orbit in order to take photographs, but the relayed P-car signals can be heard from anywhere. Just one high-orbit eavesdropping satellite could listen in on many of the Postal Bureau satellites that relay signal information for the Mass Transit Bureau. A single satellite can do that for the entire continental United States and then relay it to the ground.
"That is what is going to happen. That second set of birth charts, which translate to orbital positions all occurring at the same time—those will be the positions of particular Postal Bureau communications satellites, which then will be targeted for eavesdropping by a single deep space satellite."
"The Postal Bureau doesn't encipher the track signals?" Tikhonov frowned.
"Why would they?" Mackey shrugged. "The Mass Transit Bureau doesn't. It's anonymized, and the Postal Bureau figured the information was available to any P-car on the ground. No one ever thought there would be value in listening to every anonymous P-car signal at once. But when Commerce has tapped into all that data, they can mine it for specific information, if they know what they are looking for."
"Like the location of any particular P-car, anywhere in the United States, once they had already isolated its anonymous meta-identifiers," Tikhonov whispered.
"In this case, the meta-identifiers of the personal P-cars of various mid-level executives responsible for various functions of track network safety across numerous Bureaus," Parsons said. "Once they know exactly where these P-cars are, they can jam their safety sensors specifically using drones flying overhead. Not only do they make the P-car system look dangerous and vulnerable to accidents, they take out those responsible for the P-car system in a series of seemingly random disasters. That bit of analysis Hopper discovered with the help of Eliza while you two were breaking and entering."
"How did Hopper get to Washington DC and back so quickly?" Mackey asked.
"I have a feeling," Parsons spoke slowly, "that there is more than one Eliza. Maybe quite a number of them."
"If that's the case, why did we have to fly back to DC?"
Parsons sighed. "Sometimes with Grace it's better not to ask. She always has her reasons. Maybe the other instances of Eliza are secret. Maybe they are in places we can't go. Or maybe she just wanted us to be back where the astral projection tanks were, because she knew what was coming next. That's the thing about Grace—for as long as I've known her, no matter how much you think you see what she's up to, she's always making twice as many moves behind your back."
Hopper had been continuing her briefing while her team whispered among themselves. "The ground station relays to a programming station," she explained to the room, "which will equip local teams with the location information they require to make synchronized jamming attacks."
"Submarines." Mackey figured it out for himself. "They must send the information via ELF radio to submarines, and then program and launch the drones from underwater."
"Seems very haphazard." Tikhonov sighed. "Too many links in the chain, and one had to eventually give way."
"It's the only way to not be caught," Ross said. "If you had ground teams launching the drones, communicating over standard radio equipment, someone would be discovered."
Suddenly, Mackey could see it, clear as a bell. "If they aren't discovered, people won't know it was jamming. They'll think it was a failure of the P-car system itself. They won't blame unknown attackers, but the Department of Transportation."
"Whose fault it is, in a way," Parsons said. "The system was vulnerable. But there is a difference between vulnerability due to attack and vulnerability to accident, in the eyes of the public. If the Department suffered an unprecedented electronic conflict attack, that would give them a mandate for war. This scheme is designed to make Transportation look incompetent."
Hopper signaled for a new slide, showing a list of aircraft and attack group assignments. "Our strike will be two-fold. We will take out the deep space listening satellite with a High Virgo anti-satellite missile attack. Meanwhile, a strike team will land at the ground control station, to collect evidence of the plot and secure the site. The strike team will be supported from the air by the Sleet squadron. I'll let the Commander take over for the specifics of the strike."
She came and sat amongst the team while a uniformed Postal Flight Officer took over the briefing. "We'll be going in with the strike team, in vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Not—" Parsons closed his mouth, as Hopper finished her sentence "in the Vail."
"Where's the ground station?" Mackey asked.
"In the end, that was the easiest part to discover. There's only one Commerce ground station with the equipment necessary to communicate to the high orbit that Ross concluded they must be using. It's at Mount Shasta, in Northern California."
☆
In the white, blinding heat of the Nevada desert, the team made their way to the aircraft along with the hustling Postal Inspector assault platoon and the attack aircraft pilots. Although relieved to know they would not be in the Vail—which he had seen parked on the runway as they were coming in—Mackey was not much more convinced by their new conveyance, a PC-142. It looked enough like a normal cargo plane from a distance, except with shorter wings. But then he was informed that the ability of the vehicle to hover was enabled by the entire wing tilting backwards, until the four propellers were spinning vertically. The Vail's flight mechanism made it look like it was powered by a quartet of desk fans. The PC-142 at least had real turboprops, but Mackey would have much preferred the wing to be permanently attached to the airframe.
But once again, Mackey was onboard an unconventional vehicle, with Hopper, Ross, Tikhonov, and Parsons, and a complement of Postal Inspector troops, and they were lifting off into the sky above the hot dry lake bed, before forming up with three other PC-142s into a small flight heading northwest towards California. He supposed that at this point flight was no less safe than the P-car network with which Mackey was much more familiar. If there was technology that cast aside even the most relied-upon safety measures of the P-cars, then a tilt wing aircraft didn't seem quite such a gamble.
Out over the arid mountains of Nevada, the PC-142s were met by the squadron of PA-111 Sleets, to give them cover until they reached the target area. After the attack on the hovercrafts on Lake Superior, Hopper was taking no chances. Out of one of the small windows, Mackey could look up to see the cover aircraft overhead, flying in close formation some thousands of feet above them, keeping an eye out. The Sleets were slick, aerodynamic fighter-bomber aircraft, with variable-geometry wings that slid back and forth for different amounts of lift. They were a
bit far away to make out clearly, but Mackey could see from the silhouettes that the undersides of the Sleets were loaded up with ordnance, bombs and missiles of various size and purpose.
The Postal Inspector troops on board their aircraft were all fully equipped, carrying assault weapons of various specifications that eluded Mackey. But his knowledge as a Department engineer, as well as a bureaucrat, informed him that if there was one thing the Postal Bureau designed for, it was specificity of mission. Not one for catch-all solutions, the many generations of minds behind the development decisions made in Postal laboratories looked for artful solutions: technologies that did one task better than any other alternative. Whatever it was that Hopper had in mind, these vehicles and the troops inside of them would be ready for exactly that. The dazzle pistol and the electro-blast had succeeded exactly, on his and Tikhonov's mission in San Diego. The hovering hybrid plane they were riding in would probably fit their landing site equally precisely. Certainly, a quick and dirty solution would work in a pinch, but if there was a weapon or a vehicle to be deployed by the Postal Bureau, it was more likely to come out looking like a scalpel than a mallet.
Unless, of course, it was a very large scalpel. Parsons was sitting in a jump seat, checking his new hardware, the so-called Wizard's Hat. Mackey wasn't sure what it was supposed to do, but he could only guess it involved large amounts of flame and smoke. It did appear to be a cone, which he supposed accounted for the name. But it was a dark green, three feet long, made of some sort of composite material, and yet seemed very light in Parsons' hands. There was a small control console on the outside of the cone, and the wide end, most certainly what might be called the ‘business end,' showed a trio of dark holes, each about three inches wide, arranged in a triangle over the one-foot diameter of the wide end. Mackey was curious about what might come out of those holes, but also didn't really care to get closer for a look.
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