The Rogue (Planets Shaken Book 1)

by Lee Brainard

  His mind drifted back to the phrase “Sundown River” and the first time he had heard it . . . he and Jack were at Camp Eagle II during the First Gulf War . . . he with Delta Force and Jack with the Seals. While eating lunch on the tailgate of a deuce-and-a-half—on a rare cloudy day—Jack laid out his head-for-the-hills plan should Earth ever face an apocalyptic threat from the heavens. Whoever learned of the threat first would send the other the warning message, “Time to float the Sundown River.” Then each would make their way to Montana, where they would rendezvous at their favorite campsite on the Musselshell River. Woody grunted and said, “Okay.” He doubted they would ever need the phrase and filed it away in the back of his mind with things he regarded as useless trivia.

  The plan had been modified twice over the years. In 2006 Jack had changed the rendezvous to Bob Reddington’s lodge at the base of the Crazy Mountains. In 2011 he had changed their communication method.

  At the time Woody had regarded the latter change as a pain in the butt. Two years prior to the Snowden affair, Jack informed him that the NSA’s massive invasion of privacy necessitated a change in procedure. Calls, text messages, and emails were too easy to intercept or block. The new plan was to relay the message through trustworthy acquaintances. If Jack got the scoop on a heaven-sent apocalyptic scenario, he would give the message to his acquaintance, who would anonymously email it to Woody’s acquaintance, who would pass it on to Woody. If Woody was the first to learn of an inbound disaster from above, the process would be reversed.

  This plan was definitely more NSA-proof, but it had one vulnerability—their acquaintances would have no idea that they were part of a secret message system until they found themselves playing messenger. That meant that they had to be men of exceptional character and discretion. Jack also specified four other conditions. They couldn’t be friends, for friends would be questioned by the authorities. They must be leery of Big Brother government. They must be familiar with anonymous email. And they must be deeply rooted—that is, unlikely to move. After thinking through this—grudgingly—for several days, Woody chose Joby, his barista acquaintance at the Sierra Coffee Company. Jack picked Thomas “Buzz” Mason, a semi-retired SWAT officer who belonged to the motorcycle club that he rode with from time to time.

  Woody’s train of thought jumped back to the present, bringing a fresh jolt of frustration. The warning he figured he would never hear had just been delivered. The words danced around in his head like ball lighting, “Time to float the Sundown River.” He shook his head at his blunder. Once again, his cousin had been right . . . he was always right. The unthinkable was on its way . . . perhaps the biblical apocalypse would prove to be literal after all . . . and the events in Revelation would shake out in his lifetime. Regardless of what was coming, however, he wasn’t ready. But he would get ready. After dinner, he would sit in his chair with his legal pad and a hot toddy and start making plans.

  38

  FEMA 286, Syracuse, New York

  Late November 2018 to May 2019

  Burrage Krakenhavn had been caught by surprise when federal agents showed up at his studio and detained him for Homeland Security Act violations. At first, he thought he was being pranked by one of his competitors. He laughed at the agents and told them to go tell whoever sent them that they should find better actors next time. When they handcuffed him and ushered him outside to load him in a van, he started panicking and demanded to know who they were and where they were taking him. But they ignored all of his questions. He didn’t find out why he was in custody until his first interrogation session at the FBI field station in Los Angeles.

  He was incredulous when they started asking questions about the Rogue. He tried to tell them that he didn’t believe anything that he said on air, that he did the show because it was a lot of fun and paid well, and that he had a hard time believing that anyone took the stuff seriously. When the intel came in about the Rogue, he thought it was another bogus story that would be fun to tell. He was wrong—very wrong.

  His first month at 286 he nearly went insane. He had lost everything: his upscale house, his baby-blue corvette, his Irish Setters, his art collection, and his brandy cellar. And he had no hope of ever getting any of it back. He despaired of ever having a life of any kind again. But with encouragement and positive redirection from Jeremy Hendricks, a flicker of hope started to glow in his inner man. He saw that he wasn’t alone in his pain. Everyone in 286 had lost everything—possessions, positions, spouses, and family. But they were all there in God’s purpose . . . a tangible purpose . . . a purpose they could discover and capitalize on. Jeremy challenged him to find his purpose and make the best of his opportunity.

  Burrage started attending chapel services and slowly the light came on. God was after a relationship, not religion—the proof of this was the son of God himself becoming a man. With a warmed heart, he began reading the Bible to discover the plans that the Creator had for man and for the world. By Christmas Eve he was smiling again and joined the others in the festivities. He even helped the Norwegian Legion in the kitchen with lefse, julekake, and rosettes.

  ***

  With a new-found appetite for the Bible, Burrage—long a voracious reader—spent many hours every day perusing its pages. What he found was the greatest untold story on Earth. No conspiracy was more villainous than the blindness which kept these exhilarating themes and prophecies hidden from the minds and hearts of mankind. He burned to master this material and make it known.

  In early February he sat down with Jeremy and shared a vision that was growing on him. He wanted to revive the Down the Rabbit Hole show, but this time around he only wanted to cover issues that were both factual and significant in the big picture. His primary focus would be prophecies on the last days—like the Gog and Magog invasion of Israel in Ezekiel. He would also give a significant amount of time to the Rogue, for the massive comet could well prove to be the event that precipitates the loosing of the planets mentioned in the Gospel of Luke, “the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.”

  Jeremy was excited about the project, but he did have a few questions.

  “How do you intend to broadcast your messages from the confines of Camp 286?”

  “I don’t intend to broadcast from here. My plan is to get my messages out to a loyal friend, who would turn my notes into podcasts and my slideshows into YouTube videos. To reestablish and re-identify the brand he would use the Down the Rabbit Hole logo and theme music.”

  “But if he was recognized as one of your friends, then the messages could be traced back to you . . . and 286.”

  “Yeah. I thought about that. He would have to use voice-masking software to conceal his identity.”

  “But how do you intend to get this information out? We have no ability to upload to the internet, call on the phone, or send email. It’s like a black hole here. Stuff comes in, but nothing goes out.”

  “I have been working on an idea that the boys in the shop might be able to help us with. How about setting up our own long-range Wi-Fi system that operates independently of the facility’s communications systems? If we could locate an 18-Db, high-gain panel antenna, some low-loss cable, and a high-power wireless adapter, we would be able to pick up a strong Wi-Fi signal up to a mile away. Frenchie thinks we might be able to tap into the network at Sonny’s Salvage and Recycling. Apparently, they have a pretty powerful network which gives them clear communication between the main office, the shop, and their many barns and sheds.”

  “But wouldn’t people be able to see the antenna? And what about the cameras that focus on the building 24/7?”

  “What we need to do is set up a system in the men’s dorm that is hidden in plain sight. My idea is to build a raised captain’s bed with a cozy office underneath, where I will appear to be busy with a weekly newspaper for 286. In reality, I will spend much of my time preparing material for the Down the Rabbit Hole podcasts and videos. On the window end of the bunk, a bookshelf will conceal a shallow compartment, wh
ere the Wi-Fi stuff will be kept. When we want to send or receive, we swing out the bookshelf, which hangs on concealed hinges, fold down the table, set up the laptop, connect the cables and power, swing out the antenna arm and extend it toward the window, turn the system on, catch the signal, and—VOILA—we can send and receive. I estimate it would take less than two minutes to set up. If we put curtains on the windows, the setup would be hidden from the cameras, and there would be no significant loss of signal strength.” He hesitated for a moment, “But we would have to limit the system to official business. We can’t afford to communicate with family and friends, lest we get discovered and our Wi-Fi system gets shut down.”

  A broad grin spread across Jeremy’s face and he nodded with approval. He was on board. “That’s a smashing idea. I think it could actually work. Let's go down and talk to the maintenance boys and get things rolling. I’ll bet Bryce and his crew can pull this off.” He turned and started walking briskly to the shop. Burrage laughed and got up to follow him. Life is good again.

  Using their make-shift ordering system Bryce ordered the needed Wi-Fi parts from their contact at the Salvation Army store in Syracuse. They didn’t know who their supply-angel was, but they were grateful. The system had started months earlier when they began finding stuff hidden inside items like couches, ovens, and dressers, and realized that they had a friend on the outside. A note had been attached to one of the first gifts which said, “If you have any requests, hide it inside the thirteenth item on your shipping manifest. I won’t make any promises, but I will do what I can.” On a whim, they requested a bag of Liquorice Allsorts, which they received the next week, to their amazement. Things developed from there. Over the next six months, they procured books, tools, medical supplies, and more candy.

  As usual, they concealed their order inside the thirteenth item on the manifest of repaired items headed to the store for resale—this time inside the motor housing of a blender. Due to the exceptional expense this order entailed, they enclosed two hundred dollars in cash with it, which they collected by asking the camp residents for small donations.

  While waiting for their order, they began preparing the men’s dorm for their secret Wi-Fi station. They covered the windows with green curtains, which they made from dyed sheets. Using salvaged dunnage, and lumber from crates and pallets, they made twelve captain’s beds with bookshelves on one end which they spread out among B, D, and E sections. As planned, Burrage’s concealed a compartment behind the bookshelf, where they installed a fold-down table, a rack for the laptop, a rack for the external hard drive and the Wi-Fi adapter, a mount for the power strip, a swing arm for the antenna, and a loop for the extension cord. Across the top they painted the Down the Rabbit Hole logo and the quote “Fortune favors the bold.”

  On Friday, March 1 the maintenance shop received a load of furniture for repair and found their Wi-Fi treasures hidden inside several couches. The project team began work immediately, and late Tuesday afternoon they had the system ready. Burrage spent the next two afternoons trying to hack into the network at Sonny’s Salvage and Recycling before he discovered that the password was platinum.

  Burrage and his advisors decided to use the Wi-Fi in the afternoon for two reasons. The first was that Bob Drake almost never poked around during the day while the night director, David St. Germain, walked the floor almost every night. The second was their fear that middle-of-the-night logins at Sonny’s would stand out like a sore thumb in their network log.

  On Friday afternoon Krake, as his friends affectionately called him, began operation. He logged into Irina’s Buster account, set up an email account for himself, logged into his Bitcoin account—thankfully his Casper interrogators hadn’t asked him if he had more than one Bitcoin account—and paid for five years of premium service in her Buster account. Then he sent a GASmail to Nicholas Flieger’s secure email account—Nick was a long-time friend—asking him if he would be willing to help with his new Down the Rabbit Hole ministry. The focus would be Bible prophecy, but the two primary tracks would be biblical catastrophism and the geopolitical stage in the last days, particularly as it involved the reunified Roman Empire and the Russian juggernaut. If he was interested, his part would be to turn raw material into podcasts and YouTube slide shows.

  Nicholas was a good choice for this project. He was a retired professor who had taught Russian at Columbia University and had worked as a language consultant for the State Department. His fluency in Russian was exceptional and his expertise in Russian history and foreign affairs was unsurpassed. He was also a Southern Baptist who loved the Bible and had assiduously studied prophecy and apologetics. Many times in the past Burrage had turned to him for help on thorny Bible issues. Now he was turning to him again.

  The next day they heard back from Dr. Flieger. “Glad to hear that the Down the Rabbit Hole program is coming back online, this time with a focus on the apocalypse. Count me in. I definitely want to be part of this.” Burrage was thrilled. He immediately threw himself into the work, devoting most of his time to research, writing messages, and making slides. Once or twice a week he sent files to Nicholas.

  His first message covered the prophecy in Luke 21:26 which states that the powers of the heavens shall be shaken in the last days. He pointed out that much of the prophetic terminology of the New Testament is derived from the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint), that the word in this verse translated powers is dunamai, the plural of dunamis, that this word was often used in the Septuagint to refer to the planets in association with the Sun, the Moon, and the stars, and that the ancients feared and worshipped the host of heaven—the planets—as well as the Sun and Moon.

  His second and third messages covered the evidence for planetary catastrophism in the accounts of the Babylonians, Greeks, Norse, Mayans, and other ancient civilizations. He produced passages which indicated that some of the planets once had very different orbits than those they have today. In particular, he demonstrated that Mars and Venus had highly elliptical orbits that intersected with each other and Earth. Their intersections with each other were the source of the ancient tales of trysts and spats between the god and the goddess. Their devastating intersections with Earth led to the ancient tales of the god of war (Mars) trampling Earth and the goddess (Venus) being a two-faced witch, who could be as deadly as she was beautiful. These visitations were the reason that men feared and worshiped these two planets. They were not terrified by the Morning Star and the tiny red twinkle that we are familiar with.

  His fourth and fifth messages worked through the Old Testament passages which support the claim of many ancient historians that the planets once had highly elliptical orbits that occasionally passed very close to Earth. He covered men fearing and worshipping the planets, awful storms of stones and fire falling from heaven, mountains melting, mountains skipping, the heavens bowing down, the morning turning to night (Earth spinning or rolling on its axis), and Jehovah riding a cherub in the heavens bringing judgment with him.

  A sixth message addressed the near pass of a cometized planet which brought the Bronze Age to a close when it rained fire upon Earth from northern Europe to Ethiopia, devastating hundreds of cities and destroying the Mycenaean and Minoan empires. The fire that fell at this time was hot enough to turn stone blocks into ash—as evidenced in the so-called burn layer. This visitation was the means God used to bring fire and pestilence on Egypt at the time of Israel’s Exodus. And it introduced forty years of clouded skies over the entire globe, a dark and desolate time remembered by many ancient cultures around the world.

  A seventh message addressed the planetary visitation that brought the Silver Age to an end when it rained fire across Europe and the Mediterranean region. This near pass also tipped Earth, causing a polar shift that sent Scandinavia and Siberia north to their present location, ending their temperate climate in one fell swoop. This same polar shift likewise sent Antarctica south to its present location, where the entire continent was soon buried under
many hundreds of layers of ice—ice that is now two to three miles thick.

  ***

  Burrage’s sixtieth birthday rolled around on the first of May, and his friends threw him a party—with German Sweet Chocolate cake from a box and ice cream. After blowing out his candles, the cry went up, “Speech!” Tearfully, he shared his testimony . . . how he thought his life was over . . . that he found purpose and joy in his new work . . . that it had taken a harsh trial to open his eyes to the real meaning of life . . . that fulfillment is more a matter of purpose than circumstances. He closed with a line of wisdom Irina had shared with him, which she had gleaned from Pastor Vargas—“The end of the line isn’t the end of the line if you are still breathing.”

  39

  Caltech

  Monday, June 3, 2019

  First thing Monday morning, Ariele walked into Sally’s office and cheerfully greeted her, “Good morning.” Her boss replied a little sardonically, “It’s definitely morning, but the good part is debatable. Would be a lot nicer if CNEOS wasn’t constantly on my back over NEO discovery, NEO cataloging, NEO preparation, NEO meetings, NEO this, NEO that. I’m supposed to be going to Washington again later this month for another NEO meeting. That’s six times since the first of the year.” Silence hung in the air for a few moments. She turned back to Ariele, “Sorry for the outburst. I shouldn’t take it out on you. I’m just tired of this whole NEO thing. I want my life back. I don’t like being at the beck and call of bureaucrats in Washington or their lackeys in NASA. I don’t like sitting in stuffy meetings and listening to windbags telling me what to think, how to think, and when to think.”

  Ariele’s estimation went down a different track—Maybe tired of the whole Rogue thing would be more accurate? She met Sally’s eyes, “Sorry to hear that you’re struggling with pressure from the thrones in D.C. I can identify. I don’t like being told what and how to think either. It’s even worse when men want you to swallow a camel on the plea that it’s best for everyone involved.”