The Captain, during his long career, had been on many boats, and traveled all over the world, under the sea and on the swells of the open ocean. He could not fathom any reason for the Admiral to want to reposition the Pennsylvania that far South.
He felt uneasy following this particular order but knew that if he were to object officially, it would likely prove to be a career limiting move.
The Captain undressed, showered, put on a pair of skivvies, set a clean set of overalls next to the bed and went to sleep, still troubled by his instincts.
“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.”
-- Edwin Powell Hubble
“The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure.”
-- Christopher McCandless
“The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.”
-- Joseph Campbell
Chapter Fourteen
FIVE WEEKS AFTER WAVE IMPACT ON EARTH
GUANTANAMO BAY – CUBA – HOLDING CELL 400’ BELOW THE SURFACE OF THE OCEAN
Daniel Anderson was performing his morning routine.
He had a set ritual he followed precisely.
He would wake at exactly 5:26 am, each morning.
He would open his eyes, completely alert.
He would rise, stretch, and walk the eight steps to his toilet.
He would urinate, and then wash his hands and face with the soap provided, courtesy of the United States Marine Corp, Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
The water was always cold, with the hot water faucet always left completely closed. He would wash for two minutes, then rinse the night-taste from his mouth with the small bottle of mouthwash provided.
He would swish it around in his mouth for exactly two minutes and twenty-four seconds, and then spit it into the lavoratory.
The first week he had been in captivity, Daniel would not use the sink, and spit the mouthwash on the wall.
Each time, in less than ten minutes, a humorless weather-beaten Marine, wearing a very humorless firearm on a perfectly creased uniform with the rank insignia of a Master Gunnery Sergeant and one time a Sergeant Major, would come in and clean up the spittle and mess from the wall, silently and in a very workmanlike manner. He would enter, and motion Daniel to the side of his cell, where the Marine would handcuff him to an iron cleat welded to his bed. Then, after testing that the cuffs were indeed secure, he would do the thankless job of cleaning the wall.
It was spotless when he had completed the duty.
He then un-cuffed Daniel, put the handcuffs into the cuff-carrier on his belt, and then exited, without a word passing between them.
Once or twice, Daniel had attempted to speak to the Marine, but nothing happened. The Marine just ignored him and cleaned the wall. Daniel wondered why such senior ranked marines were taking care of him and performing the most disgusting duties but figured that the secret of this place was entrusted to only the most experienced personnel.
Once, Daniel had shouted out “Hey! You jarhead asshole! Look at me!” and the Marine had stopped.
He stood, looked directly at Daniel, put a ham-sized fist on his sidearm, and unsnapped the Cordura loop that secured the hammer of his Beretta F92. He glared briefly at Daniel, who was pleased to have gotten a reaction.
Then, the Marine replaced the snap and turned back to his work. When Daniel continued yelling, the Marine ignored him.
When he left, the door shut with a fearsome finality.
Three days later, when it opened, Daniel was thirsty and hungry and dirty.
His toilet was filled with his waste.
The water had been shut off to his holding cell, to the lavatory and water closet. His shower did not work.
No food had been served to him, nor removed.
His clothing was untended, and smelled of the sweat he had excreted over the three long days when he had realized that the air conditioning had been shut down, and the heat increased to over a hundred degrees.
Gasping, he slaked his thirst at the proffered water bottles and took a long refreshing shower that seemed to last for hours.
He ate the food he was given and took pains to urinate exactly into the center of the toilet bowl.
He did not spit on the walls again.
*****
The third week he had been interrogated by a rather blank-faced officer, a Colonel.
The meaningless words he spoke served only to explain nothing and offer nothing in return.
After a few hours, both men were bored, and the officer released Daniel back into his quarters. This routine was repeated several times over the next two weeks, but nothing substantive had been learned by either man.
One afternoon Daniel had been reading a book. Some wag had left a copy of the Count of Monte Christo in the cell. Daniel had read it 16 times during his incarceration. However, since there was no other reading material made directly available to him he took to mentally editing the book.
Shortly after he had finished the part where Edmond Dantès had escaped, he heard a commotion in the cellblock.
The CO was arguing with one of the other officers, but it sounded as though two boys were yelling at each other. Then two other boy’s voices joined in the argument.
Daniel stood up and looked down the length of the cellblock where he saw the men arguing. Or rather a young man and three barely teenagers. They were having a heated discussion and kept pointing in his direction. He was relieved to see they were not pointing with guns; only with their fingers. He thought about attracting their attention and was about to say something when they all marched in his direction.
The CO unlocked his door and asked him to step out. The CO, Chief Warrant Officer 5 Powell, escorted Daniel to their usual meeting room. The other three teenagers, if you could call them that, followed. Oddly enough, Daniel did not seem surprised by their presence.
“Sit down,” said CWO5 Powell.
“There’s been an event,” said the CWO5 “a very strange occurrence.”
Daniel looked at him with innocent eyes his face a blank mask with no expression.
There was a cup of water on the table, and he picked it up and sipped it.
“What kind of occurrence?” he asked.
The CWO5 pointed to the three teenagers.
“Do you know these men?” He asked Daniel.
Daniel shrugged. “Should I?”
“Hey punk it’s me – ‘Jar Head’,” said one of the teenagers brusquely.
“Interesting,” said, Daniel. “Very interesting indeed.”
He smiled and sipped some more water.
“Apparently you must’ve been on the surface when the wave hit. Am I right?” said Daniel.
The boy stared at him, his rage building.
“And not only that but I’d estimate you originally were about 54 years old, weren’t you MGySgt. Hicks?” he said.
MGySgt. Hicks glared at Daniel and was ready to jump across the table when CWO5. Powell restrained him.
He smiled and sipped some more water.
“Knock it off, Hicks!” he shouted at the boy. He turned to Daniel and asked “What do you know about them?” He pointed at each teenaged boy in turn.
Daniel sipped the water again wetting his lips.
Daniel was not naïve enough to believe he was being allowed to just get up and walk away once he told the soldiers what they thought they needed to know. He knew he would need to be very careful if he wanted to assure his survival.
The only thing keeping him alive was any special knowledge he had that the soldiers needed.
Once they had determined he could not help them, they could easily make him disappear, with no one the wiser.
He swallowed and looked directly at the other two teenagers.
“Well, to begin with, according to my sources, none of you is currently married,” he said.
He began a small monologue of details
about each of the three teens.
“Hicks here hails from Missouri. He left home to get away from his alcoholic father. He has four brothers two of whom are dead. Maybe more now. His one sister died in a farm accident when he was 14. It really wasn’t his fault, but his father and mother never forgave him for his moment of inattention. It was about that time he considered joining the Marines. Since he was a large boy for his age, he lied and was able to enlist just in time for the evacuation of Saigon.”
“He was decorated in combat three times, including the Purple Heart. Specialist with the M 19 grenade launchers. He encountered a squad of Iraqi Republican Guard in Kuwait City in the waning days of Desert Storm. None of the team survived. Retaliatory attacks by the remainder of the Republican Guard company decimated his platoon. Many of his compatriots felt he was a cowboy and dangerous for their survival,” he said.
As Daniel continued his recitation, the Master Gunnery Sergeant was becoming visibly agitated.
“He used to hold your rank Powell but got busted all the way down to Gunnery Sergeant about 10 years ago.”
Daniel turned to look directly at Hicks. He smiled grandly.
“Nice to see that you worked your way back up a stripe Hicks. Maybe now you’ll have the time to make warrant again,” he said and chuckled.
Hicks reached for his side-arm and was drawing it when Powell grabbed his shoulder and shoved him back into his seat. “You sit down right now! If you get up again I’ll shoot you myself!” he yelled.
“Go ahead, Mr. Anderson. Keep going,” said Powell.
Daniel nodded at one of the other teens.
“Sgt. Maj. Vasquez here hails from the barrio in Los Angeles,” he said.
“He is a former member of the Crips, but copped a plea on a murder one because the quote unquote victim was a bona fide drug dealer from the Bloods. That particular worthy raped at least 15 Hispanic women and bragged about it in jail. Raul here turned state’s evidence. “
Daniel sipped at the water, carefully gauging the reactions of the boys, and Powell.
He had to be careful now.
One slip and he would be at the bottom of the ocean, and no one would ever know.
He continued speaking to them, slowly.
“Vasquez entered into the witness protection program, where he was married to Virginia Celeste Ewing, from Lexington, Kentucky. Social Security number 565 – 14 – 4007. She died in a car accident after they were married for three years.”
Vazquez gave a start.
“She was 26 years old at the time. Rumor has it that it was a retaliation assassination from the Zeta’s. However, no evidence has been uncovered to substantiate that position.”
He looked at the boy. “Was there?” he said.
The boy averted his gaze, his face turning red with hate and anger.
“Raul was relocated again and given a new name. Isn’t that right, Juan?” finished Daniel.
During the time Daniel had been talking, Vasquez's eyes grew in size and shock was all over his face.
The blood drained from him, and he made the sign of the cross and then spit through his fingers as he made the sign of the devil horns.
“He is a warlock! A demon!” he shouted.
“And you, Powell. What would you like to know?” asked Daniel.
Now, he knew he must play his hand, and oh so carefully…
“Would you like me to tell you how your mother died? Or where your father is buried? Or the names of your dogs, cats, goldfish, hamster? Your passwords on all your bank accounts? The kind of porn you like to watch? How many gay lovers you’ve had?” he said, raising his voice.
Powell stood up and drew his sidearm.
“Where they are?” shouted Daniel.
Powell cocked back the hammer on his Beretta 92-F. Daniel stood up and pointed at Powell’s face.
“How much money you have stored in an offshore account in the Cayman Islands and in the other one in Hong Kong? The name of your Chinese boyfriend?” he shouted.
“How about where the four prisoners you personally strangled are buried on this island?” said Daniel, and then he heard a gunshot.
The Chief Warrant Officer sat very still.
He looked from Daniel to MGySgt. Hicks pistol.
Hicks pistol was smoking, and Vazquez was looking at it like it was a snake.
A bullet hole was in the center of the table, fired from underneath.
The table top had splintered, and there was a matching hole in the ceiling. Powell looked at Hicks, and Vazquez, and the other teen, and then holstered his gun.
Daniel stood, shaking with tension.
He wasn’t quite finished.
“Or how about how the United States Marines implanted all of you with experimental tracking devices and gave you muscular augmentation prostheses after your accidents?” said Daniel.
He watched the Chief Warrant Officer, ready to move quickly to save his own life. Daniel tensed slightly in preparation for a rapid surprise attack.
“How did you from know all of that?” asked Powell.
“You weren’t the only one experimented upon,” said Daniel Anderson. His face darkened and his eyes appeared to focus on something just beyond their visual range.
He looked at the Chief Warrant Officer, and the Master Gunnery Sergeant, and the other teen.
He knew the boy was Private, First Class, William W. Billings, and almost every facet of the boy’s life, as he continuously reviewed all the data his wetware implant was providing.
“Let’s just say that the Six Million Dollar Man and Jonny Mnemonic haven’t got shit compared to what has been shoved into me,” said Daniel Anderson.
*****
ONBOARD THE ISS
Captain Armstrong and the other astronauts had a serious problem.
The food supplies were exhausted. Even then, the astronauts knew they could live another several days, maybe even a couple of weeks, without food.
The water recyclers were active, and there was ample supply in the onboard tanks. So, they would not die of thirst.
The carbon dioxide scrubbers were in perfect condition. They were in no danger of suffocation.
But, the temperature in the ISS was dropping inexplicably.
They had run several different diagnostics, and not identified the source of the heat loss.
They surmised that one of the solar panels must have been damaged during the time the cosmonaut crew was abandoning the Soyuz, and in all the excitement, no one had noticed a collision. It was possible, as the viewing angle was not conducive to observing that particular section of the station from their vantage inside of it.
There were indications that the charging of the batteries was not at the nominal levels, but it did not explain the heat loss.
What had actually occurred was more prosaic – a genuine malfunction of the primary heat exchanger. A leak that was venting to space had developed, on the Earthside of the station.
The vented coolant froze into small ice crystals that trailed the ISS like a comet’s tail. Invisible to the astronauts, it left a marker of their impending doom scratched like a chalk mark across the sky behind them.
Currently, they were comfortable, but they had determined that they would freeze to death long before they died from thirst or suffocation.
Armstrong had ordered that communications be restored with NASA at all costs.
The EMP interference had abated after a month, and they were now getting a better picture of the effects from The Wave, as well as the damage from the limited nuclear exchanges that had occurred.
Ominously, as they orbited the planet, they could glimpse areas that appeared completely devoid of plant life; other sections seemed afire.
When they were circling the dark side of Earth, the lights from cities could still be seen, and the juxtaposition of this bit of normalcy was unnerving. Once or twice, HAM radio broadcasts were made, and some rudimentary information was exchanged.
*****
&nb
sp; They had almost given up any possibility of being able to speak to anyone on the Earth when Sonya had thought of an interesting idea.
In September of 2006, the former head of the Russian Federal Space Agency Anatoly Perminov, had revealed to RIA Novosti that Russia and China were working on lunar exploration as partners.
Sonya had been part of the Advisory Board on the Russian side of the table and had intimate knowledge of the program.
She suggested that it might be possible to use high-orbit satellites in conjunction with the Chinese lunar orbit satellites to bounce signals and retransmit to areas of the Earth that would normally be on the opposite side from the ISS orbit.
GPS and some other satellites had been able to perform this task quickly prior to The Wave, but the subsequent disruption from the Ark Launches and the EMP from the nuclear weapons had rendered them inoperable.
The Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP), had begun with the launch of two lunar orbiters - Chang'e 1 and Chang'e 2. These probes had entered highly elliptical Earth orbits.
In late 2010, Chang’e 2 left lunar orbit and headed for the Earth–Sun L2 Lagrangian point to test the vast Chinese Telemetry, Tracking and Command (TT&C) system.
Using a 50-metre (160-foot) radio antennae based in Beijing and 40-metre (130-foot) antennas in Kūnmíng, Shanghai and Ürümqi to form a 3,000-kilometre (1,900-mile) VLBI antenna, the Chinese had been able to communicate across the vast expanse of space between Earth and Luna.
Chang'e 2 then completed a flyby of asteroid 4179 Toutatis on 13 December 2012, before heading into deep space. As a result, Chang'e 2 was currently positioned in an orbit that might allow for the retransmission of messages to Earth.
Sonya and Mary Cooper set about configuring the communications gear to accommodate the experiment.
As they were scanning frequencies, they detected an odd anomaly – transmissions were being sent from the surface of the Moon!
Surprised, they reconfigured and tuned the antenna to the frequency of 428 Mhz. A woman’s voice came clearly through the speakers.
“CQ. CQ. CQ. Anyone listening on 428 Mhz, please respond,” said the woman.
The astronauts looked at each other in amazement, then clapped each other on the backs and hugged each other in celebration.
Terminal Reset Omnibus: The Coming of The Wave Page 19
