In The Company of Wolves_Follow The Raven

by James Michael Larranaga

  “Thanks, we’ll see you tomorrow.” He hung up on Lopez.

  Jimmy and Hawk agreed that made sense; the tunnels should be relatively flat, so giving up torque for speed should be an easy trade-off. He gave Jimmy the go-ahead to make the necessary adjustments before they would drag race the carts alongside Quin’s truck. He went around to the front of the house and started his vehicle, cranking the air-conditioning to high and waiting for the cab to cool. He remembered sitting in his father’s truck as a boy, holding his hands over the vents, cooling his underarms as his father steered out of the driveway to take him on a delivery run.

  “You hot?” his father would ask.

  He would nod. “Yeah.”

  “Out there it’s a hundred degrees…in the shade,” his father said, shifting gears, staring through the dusty windshield. “Imagine if you had to walk across that sand today. Heat like that can kill a man, much less a kid.”

  And then he’d turn on his radio, singing along to country music. Quin’s job was to monitor the radio, punch the dial anytime a station went to a commercial break, and find the next song. He never questioned what was in the trailer behind them and he never saw it unloaded, either.

  He parked his truck next to the golf carts, revving his engine as Jimmy and Hawk each drove circles around Quin, testing the tight turning radius of the carts. Jimmy pulled up to Quin’s left and Hawk to the right side of the truck. Through his side window, he spotted Candace standing on the front step of the house. She was drinking a bottle of water, ready to see what came of all their hard work. This drag race would show the top speed of each cart and he would lead them up an incline to a butte to see how the carts handled the relative lack of torque. He revved his engine again and waved to Candace.

  She raised her arm into the sky as if she were the starter. When she dropped her arm he punched the gas, racing forward too fast, leaving Hawk and Jimmy in a cloud of dust behind him. He eased off the accelerator until he saw both golf carts emerging through the dust storm, Hawk slightly ahead of Jimmy, both of them squinting and bouncing in their seats. They caught up to him and they drove three abreast, with Quin in the middle, over a dry riverbed, weaving around cacti and boulders. Jimmy was a reckless driver, plowing over sand dunes that tossed him out of his seat. Hawk, on the other hand, kept his skinny elbows locked, his hands clinging to the steering wheel. He was winning, not by much, but his cart was either faster or he was the more efficient driver. Their top speed was an impressive forty-eight miles per hour on the flats. So Quin led them up a red clay slope, an incline of possibly ten percent grade. The carts slowed, Jimmy’s more than Hawk’s, and it was obvious that their speed deteriorated rapidly on an incline. He had to test them in the real environment so he led them to the tunnel entrance that Agent Lopez had shown him. Walls of rock stood before him, casting long shadows on the sand. He parked and stepped into the shade as Hawk and Jimmy pulled up.

  “Congrats, Hawk,” he said. “You’re the better driver after all.”

  “It’s not the driver, it’s the motor,” Jimmy protested.

  “Or maybe you’re heavier,” Quin said to Jimmy. “Hawk really pulled ahead on the incline.”

  “Go on a diet, would ya?” Hawk teased.

  “Let’s test these vehicles in the tunnel.” Quin walked to the backside of the rock as they followed in their golf carts. He found the metal door and pushed it back, a burst of musty air emerging from underground.

  “Gentlemen, whenever you’re ready.”

  “Cool,” Jimmy said, driving ahead of Hawk into the tunnel, which was barely tall enough to fit the cart.

  Quin sat in the passenger seat of Hawk’s cart and Hawk drove into the darkness, more cautious than his grandson.

  “What’s wrong?” Quin asked.

  “It’s haunted,” Hawk said. “Lopez said it’s a mass grave.”

  “Ah, she’s exaggerating.”

  “Since when does a bureau agent exaggerate about stuff like that?”

  Quin hadn’t considered that Hawk would have so much fear of the tunnels. He was counting on Hawk and Jimmy to bring the carts through. “You want to wait here while Jimmy and I explore?”

  Hawk nodded, got out of the cart, and walked out of the tunnel entrance. Quin slid into the driver’s seat. He drove forward and parked next to Jimmy at the top of the ramp that seemed to vanish into darkness. They sat there for a moment waiting for their eyes to adjust, relaxing in the cool air. They turned on their cart headlights, illuminating the narrow and low ceiling.

  “Where’s Hawk?” Jimmy asked.

  “He’s taking a break. Let’s see how these vehicles handle the ramp.”

  Quin drove forward and Jimmy trailed him down the dirt ramp, swerving around tires and a pile of wool blankets. At the bottom, they turned around and faced the ramp and the halo of daylight. Quin used his phone to set a timer. “You go first.”

  Jimmy impressed Quin by stepping on the accelerator and leaping into a jackrabbit start. Halfway up the cart slowed, and two-thirds of the way it almost stalled and had trouble holding traction in the sand. He made it to the top in one minute thirty seconds. Quin reset the timer and raced up the ramp, slowing earlier than Jimmy had, plodding to the top in almost two minutes.

  “Hawk’s cart is faster on the flats and yours is stronger on the inclines,” Quin confirmed. “We have to equip the vehicles with brighter lights so we can make a practice run.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight, if possible,” he said. “But you have to talk with your grandfather, give him the courage to do this.”

  “He’s afraid, huh?”

  “Extremely. I’ve never seen him like that before.”

  Jimmy sighed. “He’s been on edge the entire trip, always talkin’…”

  “About what?”

  “Old days and old ways. We can do it without him, leave him back at the house.”

  “We need two drivers, one for each cart,” Quin said.

  Jimmy got out of his cart and stretched. “What about Candace? Heck, she drove most of the way down here.”

  Quin had thought of her, too, but he had other plans for her. He needed Candace to figure out what was happening to the remote viewers who were removed from the program. “I want Hawk with us on the entire journey. Whatever you can say to him to ease his fears, I’d really appreciate it.”

  Everything Candace needed to know about remote viewing was already on Quin’s laptop. He’d given her the password to open files he’d collected over the past six months. He was meticulous, if not obsessive-compulsive in gathering background data. It was obvious to her that he had invested his free time in gathering files to share with somebody. Agent Kruse had given him training materials on remote viewing. And Quin had downloaded hundreds of pages from the web.

  She learned that during the Cold War, the Soviet Union pioneered the field and during the 1970s, the United States caught on and began experimenting with it as well, launching Project Stargate. The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) spent more than twenty years testing and perfecting remote viewing. The Pentagon considered an army officer and Vietnam War veteran named Joe McMoneagle to be one of its best remote viewers; he had uncovered hidden Soviet submarines and underground nuclear test sites. The military’s early success in Project Stargate allowed it to invest as much as $25 million in psychic warfare with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.

  According to scientists in the field, everyone has some ability to remote view, to see beyond, but most people are unaware of it. With enough practice, a person could hone his or her sixth sense, but researchers discovered that certain people could reach a deeper level of viewing. In a common entry-level RV test, a soldier would watch images appear on a video screen while researchers measured his heart rate and overall anxiety level. Some of the images were pleasant, such as a beach scene or a puppy, while others were more traumatic, such as a car wreck or a corpse in a battlefield. Naturally, the most unpleasant images ev
oked the most anxiety, a rapid heart rate, and increased perspiration. What surprised researchers, however, was that some test participants actually displayed anxiety even before the computer had randomly selected the traumatic image. A small percentage of test subjects could actually see into the future, reacting emotionally before a traumatic photo was selected. In other words, they were seeing across time and space, and those soldiers were the best remote viewers, the most successful spies.

  Candace remained at the kitchen table, poring over online documents, clicking on websites, copying and pasting blocks of text into her own notes. There was plenty of historical information through the 1990s, but she found very little after that period. Project Stargate had lost funding. The CIA and DIA had seemingly scuttled remote viewing research, thanked the soldiers, and moved on.

  That was when former military remote viewers began writing. David Moorehouse wrote Psychic Warrior and Russell Targ wrote Limitless Mind, among many more. Quin had found that one remote viewer nicknamed PsychicChic had blogged about her post-traumatic stress from her years of remote viewing work. Her symptoms included:

  Changes in circadian rhythm

  Insomnia

  Unexpected visions or images of target locations or people she had never met

  Waking nightmares of traumatic events

  Paralyzing daydreams

  Her blog updates ended in 1999 when a family member posted that she had sadly taken her own life.

  The military officially now labeled remote viewing as junk science, not as reliable as the National Security Agency (NSA) tactics of eavesdropping on global phone calls and later hacking over the sprawling Internet highway. But Candace wondered if the claims by the military that remote viewing had been abandoned were actually an exaggeration. Obviously, Agent Kruse was still actively training Quin and others using the same technique. And, according to Quin’s notes, Kruse did it within the walls of a hospital psychiatric ward. How interesting.

  She heard the front door open. Quin stepped in and removed his boots. “Almost ready. Hawk and Jimmy are adding lights, and then we can explore the tunnels…what’s wrong?” he asked, staring at her.

  “Is all this real?” She pointed at the screen.

  He joined her in the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “Ah, the research, it’s very real. A lot to take in, I know.”

  “The military uses psychics?”

  “Did at one time, maybe still does,” Quin said. “Homeland Security is testing us now.”

  “How many psychics are there?”

  “In Minnesota? Only three left that I know of. Dillan, Rachel, and me.”

  “You’re one of them? You can do it?”

  “Not the way they do,” he said. “Traditional remote viewers spend hours sitting in dark rooms, sketching. I can’t hunt like that, I need to move around.”

  “From your notes, Agent Kruse seems intense. Do you like working for him?”

  Quin nodded. “Even though he and I have our issues, he and the team helped me find my sister.”

  “If you’re not like the other viewers, what’s your method?”

  He sat with her at the table, twisting the cap off his water and guzzling it down. She could see that he was tired and there was still much work to do.

  “I view into the other side even while I’m mobile.”

  “Other viewers can’t do that?”

  He shook his head, his feathered earring swaying. “No, they establish the location or the objects while sitting in a quiet place. I’m better in the field, and sometimes view while I’m mobile.”

  “Even after reading all your research, I still don’t understand how it works.”

  He nodded with patience. “There are obviously other dimensions we don’t see, but our subconscious minds are able to tap into one of those spaces. Kruse calls it a ‘matrix’ where all information is stored. And while we have brains to process information, our minds are made of thoughts, emotions, and memories that exist outside our bodies. By focusing your mind on something, you bring it forward into your present reality, just like a memory. You see it; you know where it is.”

  “Like a dream world?”

  “Similar, yes. Have you ever had a dream where you knew that you were dreaming? That’s when you’re pushing through to the other side.”

  “Why do the remote viewers sketch?” she asked.

  “Makes it easier to bring the details forward, to literally ‘draw’ them out of their subconscious mind. And it’s how they document the location as it comes into focus.”

  “Wow, this isn’t bullshit?”

  “Agent Kruse found my sister using RV,” he said. “That’s proof enough for me.”

  She nodded and sighed, still trying to make sense of it.

  “What’s wrong, Candace?”

  “It’s not what I was expecting. I came down here to interview you, a bounty hunter searching for his sister, and now you’re handing me a totally different story.”

  “You’re disappointed?”

  “You could’ve told me what this was all about back in Minnesota.”

  “I haven’t lied to you.”

  “You withheld information.”

  “You wouldn’t be here now if I had told you a week ago.”

  “How do you know? Oh, that’s right, you’re psychic,” she said with irritation in her voice. No need to disguise it.

  “Very funny—”

  “If you can see into other dimensions, you could see into the future.”

  “Remote viewers see in the present, across great distances, and sometimes they can revisit locations from the past. As for seeing into the future, I have done it, but the information is very unreliable. The past has already happened, the present is happening now, and the future is affected by too many possibilities until it enters the present, where remote viewers capture it.”

  She rubbed her stiff neck, reflecting on their conversation; it was strange, so unexpected. “What now?”

  “Fly back to Minnesota and find out what’s happening to the remote viewers at St. Francis,” he said. “Find Dillan.”

  “Wait a minute; is there any chance I’ll get in some kind of trouble? Hawk has nothing good to say about the bureau.”

  “Use caution. Avoid Agent Kruse, which should be easy, because right now he’s focused on me and Autumn.”

  Agent Kruse paced the small, dimly lit conference room behind Dillan, watching him draw on a tattered sketchpad. Kruse knew his recruit was exhausted because he kept circling the target coordinates on the page, 7545Q202, yawning before sketching again. This session was a blend of Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV) and Extended Remote Viewing (ERV), which can last two or more hours, or sometimes through multiple sessions. They had been at it for almost sixty minutes, the meaty edge of Dillan’s left hand black from the lead pencil. Kruse had moved him through the first three levels of RV quickly, pushing him to formulate images faster than usual. He looked down at Dillan’s sketch of a rock structure in the desert hills. Dillan had drawn a tall rectangular box, and now he was shading it in.

  “What is it?” he asked Dillan. “Give me the gestalt again, your impressions, descriptors.”

  “The tall one, metal, steal, rust.”

  “Describe the smaller boxes.”

  “Heavy.” He licked his lips. “Acidic, like battery acid.”

  That made no sense to Kruse. Batteries in the desert? Maybe Dillan was tired and going off on a tangent.

  “Get closer to the large rectangle. Walk up to it.”

  Dillan shaded the rectangular box for another two minutes and said, “Height eight or ten feet.”

  “What’s on the other side of it?”

  “I can’t pass through.” Dillan scratched the back of his right hand nervously.

  “Why not?” Kruse asked.

  “It’s locked.”

  To Kruse’s frustration, some remote viewers were literal in their spatial perceptions. Despite the fact that they could use their minds to t
ravel across the world, some viewers couldn’t easily pass through walls or locked doors, at least not without coaching.

  “Dillan, take a breath.”

  “I’m tired, man. How about a break?”

  “Touch the metal, Dillan.”

  “It’s warm,” he said, gripping the pencil tighter.

  “Is there a heat source on the other side?” Kruse paced with his arms behind his back.

  “No, it’s warm from the sun,” Dillan replied. “The other side is cold, damp.”

  “Relax and move through the heat to the cold.”

  Dillan breathed deeper and dropped his pencil on the floor. “I need a break. Isn’t it Rachel’s turn?”

  “We’ll switch in a minute. First, tell me what’s on the other side of that metal structure.”

  Dillan stood up. “What difference does it make? I give you all these drawings and you never tell me if I’m on target or not.”

  That was the hard reality of remote viewing. Agent Kruse had to keep his viewers in the dark about the targets they were searching for. Strict protocols prevented him from front-loading them with information or clues about what they were searching for. And he wouldn’t share the results of their sessions because the viewers might talk and share them with each other.

  Kruse would document everything for his files and he’d forward the information onto the upper echelons of whatever client had hired him, whether that was the CIA, the NSA, or the FBI. Sometimes they acted on his team’s reports, but most of the time the information slipped into a black hole. The only way Kruse knew he was succeeding, making some progress in the war on terror, was thanks to repeat requests from the bureau or Homeland Security to search for a target, such as a sleeper cell of terrorists or dirty bombs. Tonight’s session was all about Quin and what he was up to. This was a case where Kruse was determined to see the outcome for himself. He might even break with protocol and share the information with his team.

  “When Quin found Autumn, I shared that with you,” he reminded Dillan. “Tell me what’s on the other side of that metal, and then we’ll finish,” he said, bargaining.