by Carl Rackman
They both flinched at a loud concussion before realising it was a stun grenade being thrown on the floor above. Tac One had sent his troops upstairs to the top floor.
“Ross One-Five, this is Tac One. Are you on level three?”
Brad whispered back, “Affirmative. We are preparing to breach the last room.”
“Okay, stand by, Ross One-Five. I’m coming down with Tac Two.”
Brad noticed Monica’s shoulders slump with relief. She’s scared, he thought and suddenly realised he had forced her beyond her limit, and that was why she had made a critical mistake.
“Okay, Mon, we’ll sit tight.”
She gave a strained smile.
The black-clad figures of Tac One and Tac Two, wearing respirators, appeared cautiously from the first room.
Tac One shook his head. “Who the hell are these guys, Barnes?”
Brad shrugged. “Not the bunch of geeks we expected.”
“Tac One, this is Tac Three. Level four is clear.”
Tac One raised his eyebrows at Brad. “Guess it’s on us. Let’s suit up. We make the breach, standard room clearance, you guys straight in on our tails. Grenades on three, okay?”
Brad and Monica gave the okay.
Tac One and Two stepped up to the door. Tac One counted down before smashing in the door with his foot, and then Two tossed in the grenades.
There was a solid concussion accompanied by clouds of gas. They both swept in through the smoke, disappearing into it like a Vegas vanishing trick.
Brad and Monica burst in after them covering the main room. They peered around urgently, the laser pointers of their rifle sights scything through the smoke as it quickly cleared.
Brad’s eyes settled on nothing until they saw the body of their last comrade.
The man was stripped of his fatigues, and his ankles and wrists were taped flat to the floor of the empty room with duct tape. His white skin was heavily marred with bruises and ugly breaks in his limbs.
He stared at them, very much alive, but in terrible pain.
“Dear Lord, son, what have they done to you?” Tac One was appalled. “Where are the sons of bitches?”
The man gasped in pain before managing to utter, “Get away! They’re not people! Run!”
Brad felt a chill down his spine.
Tac One was straight on the radio, rattling out the words. “Ross One! I need EMS and backup now! Agents down! Suspects have escaped!” He turned back to the broken agent on the floor. “Son, where are they? How could they escape? We’ve secured the whole building!”
The man’s eyes strained up towards the far wall. They all looked.
A gaping hole led through to the fire escape. The wall must have been about eight inches of masonry. It looked as though a clean man-sized hole had been punched through it.
The assailants were gone.
“Mack Two-Five, do you have eyes on the exterior?”
“Affirmative.”
“Are there personnel out there?”
“Negative, Tac One.”
“Have you been watching the whole time?”
“Sir, we had eyes on the stairwell exit to the roof and the fire escape. Nobody came up.”
Tac One sounded increasingly desperate. “Keep searching! I need a chopper with a searchlight up here now! Cover the fire escapes. I need a point search of the surrounding blocks. Two male suspects, tall, muscular build, probably armed. Find them!”
Monica was talking quietly to the injured man as Tac Two tried to tend to his immediate injuries. “Sir, he keeps saying the suspects are not people. What do you think he means?”
“What the hell do I know? As far as I can see, he’s right. They’re ghosts,” replied Brad.
Monica gave Brad a searing look. Whether anger, disgust or simply rebuke, he couldn’t tell.
He fought his own anger, which burned in his gut, causing the blood to rise in his face. He was also mad that Monica was making him feel ashamed when she accidentally shot their only reliable witness. What had happened to suddenly turn this quiet group of UFO nerds into professional killers? Without the informant, it would be an uphill struggle to find out. Brad felt impotent and struck out at the only thing he could.
“Why did you shoot him, Diaz? That informant was our only link to these bastards!” he asked.
“He was armed. Or that’s how it looked when we breached the room. I told you we should have waited!” Her voice was rising.
Brad had pushed too far. He suddenly felt the anger deflate, chased away by an unwelcome sense of shame.
“Okay, Mon. I’m sorry. Let’s just get this guy safe and see what we can find out. We’ll talk about it at the debriefing, okay?”
Monica nodded, but her fists remained clenched.
Chapter Two
Friday, 2nd September 2016
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
La Canada Flintridge, California
Dr Callie Woolf sat in the Red Planet Café in Building 167 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, known to the world as ‘JPL’ and to its denizens simply as ‘The Lab’. It was a sprawling, 177-acre campus set in a bowl-shaped plateau just north of Pasadena.
The café was modern, airy and functional, unlike the rest of the Lab, which was a jumble of the old and the new. The area had grown organically. The blocky, flat-roofed industrial buildings arranged in winding streets followed the contours of the terrain rather than the gridline pattern of the city beyond it. Each building occupying the untidy arrangement of lots was identifiable only by its dedicated number.
Despite the utilitarian aspect of the campus, it still had a collegiate feel. Many of the staff were recent postgrad or postdoc students and assisted in various projects; after all, despite the NASA bankroll, the institution was still run by Caltech, the California Institute of Technology.
JPL staff, mostly young and in shirtsleeves, nursed iced coffees or smoothies in the surrounding grassy spaces girded with mature trees, tall palms, sweet smelling gardenias and other fragrant flowers, small oases furnished with picnic tables and sun umbrellas.
Though the pleasant outdoors appealed, Callie remained inside the air-conditioned comfort of the Red Planet Café. As the grandly titled Project Manager, Voyager Interstellar Mission, she was preparing to meet the Associate Director for Flight Projects and Mission Success – an even grander title for the respected William Trask who currently held the post.
The Voyager Program was due for another Senior Review, the process by which the mission was assessed for its future value. NASA measured its projects in ‘science per dollar’. Voyager was nearing the end of its lifetime, but Callie was determined to secure enough funding to see it through until the old guys who had walked the probes from their infancy through to dotage were finally retired. This review was still a big deal.
For Callie at least, coming to the Lab was a welcome break. Her programme was probably the least sexy spaceflight mission in NASA. It was a reflection of Voyager’s current status that the programme had been moved off-campus to a dull business park several miles from the high-tech glamour of the Lab. Known as Woodbury, after the street on which it unobtrusively sat, it was designated JPL Building 600 and treated as part of the campus.
In reality, Woodbury was separated from the Lab by more than geography. These days JPL was all about Mars. Right at that moment, four incredibly expensive robotic probes were roaming the dirt and rock planet mapping every inch of the surface and sniffing the meagre atmosphere in preparation for a possible human exploration mission.
Such a mission seemed laughable in the current budgetary bind. The next generation of probes would be focused not on outer space, but on the Earth itself to obsessively chart the onward trend of climate change. Like the political imperatives that drove it, NASA’s dwindling budget was focused inward – not outward.
Callie remembered the almost limitless appetite for imagination and exploration that existed when she joined JPL as a twenty-one-year-old postgrad on the staff
of the greatest exploration programme ever attempted by humanity: the Voyager Interplanetary Mission, later expanded to Interstellar Mission or VIM for short.
That was twenty-five years ago. Callie had barely started on the programme when they switched off the cameras for good to save power. The famous ‘Pale Blue Dot’ photo was Voyager’s valedictory. After that, the tiny probes faded into obscurity.
The Mars Program would have been better for her career, but Voyager suited her personal philosophy of space exploration. She had fallen in love with the two tiny robotic probes and in the process developed a deep affection for the now elderly group of men who monitored and looked after them. They had grown old together like an orphan girl with a bunch of favourite uncles.
The trilling of her phone on the table abruptly stirred Callie from her reverie. Conversation in the café was muted, and at this point unusual; many of the people there wore headphones, while others idly played with smartphones and tablets. Callie self-consciously answered the call to silence the ringtone without looking to see who it was. “Callie Woolf.”
She instantly recognised the voice at the other end: Jerry Pascoe was one of the Project Voyager originals. He was almost seventy and still at the heart of the project. If the Voyager probes could have a big brother, it would be Jerry.
“Callie, hi. Uh – listen, I need you to look at something here. I don’t want to talk about it over the phone.”
Callie felt a pang of irritation. “Jerry, seriously? I’m meeting Trask in about ten minutes.”
“Well, okay. Look, I’m getting an anomalous signal from Voyager One.”
“Can you patch it over on the DSN feed? I can get to the Spaceflight Operations Facility in a few minutes.”
There was an uncomfortable silence; she could hear his old man breathing during the pause.
“I can’t send it on the feed. It’s coming through as a one-way request for storage download. There’s nothing in the Handbook for this.” The Handbook was shorthand for the Science Mission Directorate Handbook – the JPL bible for all things spaceflight.
Callie was immediately focused. Voyager was a product of the mid-1970s. When it was launched, Star Wars had just been released, pocket calculators and digital watches were the height of consumer tech, and Space Invaders arcade games were still a year away. The smartphone in the hands of the young postgrad at the next table had about 200,000 times the storage and processing power of the probes 12 billion miles away in outer space. Their tiny 22-watt transmitters were faint, almost imperceptible whispers in a background of noise. Picking up their transmissions was like trying to discern a single candle light floating in the Pacific Ocean from space. And yet NASA’s Deep Space Network, DSN, could do it – its gigantic radio dishes were positioned across the globe to pick out the tiny electronic peeps of the remotest man-made objects in existence.
Although her team made contact with the probes daily, the data the Voyagers collected was recorded on storage tapes on board the probes themselves. At appointed times, several months apart, Callie’s team would send a communication signal via the operators at DSN to wake up its storage download. A return stream from the probe would then be picked up and decoded to reveal the content of the stored data. The whole process could take up to a week and required uninterrupted time at the listening arrays. DSN had to carefully co-ordinate its arrays to ensure that the download was achieved; therefore, the two-way signal was scheduled rigorously.
It was for these reasons that Callie was surprised at the call. An unscheduled interrogation from earthside was a major breach of protocol. An unscheduled interrogation from the probe itself was unheard of. It would only have happened if the storage tape was about to hit full capacity. But the Voyagers were only recording plasma sample data – there was no way the current amount of data could have maxed out the storage since the last download in June.
“Jerry, I’ll be right over. Record everything on solid state if you can.”
“Yeah, Callie, I’m all over it already.” Jerry was a gentleman but also a spaceflight engineer, which meant he operated on a level of directness that ordinary mortals would consider rude. Callie had worked with him for twenty-five years, so she was used to it. Jerry was one of the better ones.
“I have to cancel with Trask first.”
“Good luck with that.” He hung up.
Callie immediately redialled Trask’s extension. The associate director was a twenty-year JPL veteran, but a different order of person altogether from Callie. Trask was a project manager, not a space explorer, and no romantic. He focused almost exclusively on mission success and fiscal prudence – and not necessarily in that order.
The call was answered by Trask’s assistant Maggie Riley.
Callie felt embarrassed having to cancel without speaking to the man himself. “Maggie, I need to get back to Woodbury. There’s something urgent I need to investigate.”
Maggie tried to be helpful as ever. She and Callie had a mutually co-operative history. “Oh. I can buzz him—”
“I really need to look at this. Can you ask him to call me when he’s free?”
“Oh, sure, Callie. I’ll tell him. But I don’t know if he’s going to be free to meet again this week.”
“Thanks, Maggie, I’ll need to call to reschedule. Gotta go. Bye.”
She gathered her laptop and phone from the restaurant table and set off towards the main reception building. Her car lay beyond in the vast off-Lab parking lot. She kept her phone to hand as she expected to hear it ring at any time.
She was almost all the way to her car when it did ring. This time she checked it. Trask’s office. “Callie Woolf.”
“Please hold for AD Trask…”
Callie switched ears as her heartrate quickened. She wasn’t sure if it was from the excellent coffee at the Red Planet or her concern at Trask’s response to her running out on him.
“Callie?”
“Good morning, sir. I’m so sorry for—”
“It’s okay, Callie. You said something urgent had come up?” Trask was brusque, interrupting her, though not in an unfriendly manner.
Just business. “Sir, at this stage I’m not sure. I know Jerry wouldn’t have pulled me out of a meeting with you if it wasn’t serious.”
“Keep me informed, Callie. Directly, please. Voyager Two is going to be giving us some big data on the heliopause plasma measurements next week. I don’t want that overshadowed by any bad news.”
“Yes, sir.” Callie was impressed. Trask seemed to be looking at the big picture after all.
“Thanks, Callie. I’ll get Maggie to try to put us back in on Friday. But call the office ASAP when you have a report.”
“Thank you, sir, I will.”
“Okay, Callie. And good luck.” He hung up.
Callie stuffed her phone into her purse and opened her car, which was a Toyota hybrid – the conscientious vehicle of choice for JPL staffers who drove. Callie would have happily bought American if America built anything like her Toyota.
She hoped one day to get a Tesla, but that likelihood dwindled as she stepped closer to retirement. She still had a sizeable savings account, more thanks to her divorce settlement than her modest government salary, but her kids’ college fees were eating through it at depressing speed. Her ex-husband Bryan, now a partner at a downtown law firm, still kept pleading business difficulties as the reason he couldn’t share the burden evenly.
Callie had almost been willing to believe him. Then last week she saw him tagged on someone’s Facebook page in pictures of a trip to the Bahamas. Callie traced the original poster - a twenty-four-year-old legal secretary at Bryan’s firm. She assumed the shapely youngster wouldn’t have paid for the trip, at least not in financial terms. Callie wondered if his current wife, Laura, knew about this, but because Laura had originally screwed Bryan behind Callie’s back she needn’t lose any sleep over Laura’s feelings. Join the club, sister.
These thoughts caused her to clunk the shift lever in
to reverse a little more savagely than was necessary. She realised she was getting a little too wired about the morning’s events already – she didn’t need Bryan’s messy romantic life to push her any harder.
The drive back to Woodbury was short. JPL Building 600 was on the wide thoroughfare of West Woodbury Road in Altadena, barely two miles from the Lab, and traffic was light during mid-morning.
She turned right into the parking lot and swiped her card to enter the sliding access gate. Once the gate had puttered open enough, far too slowly for her current stress level, she passed silently through and parked in her designated space, close to the entrance.
The city was several degrees hotter than the airy plateau of the Lab, so she moved quickly to the entrance and let herself in by the security door. The guard at reception nodded to her as she swept past, her business-like manner precluding any informal conversation.
When Callie stepped into Jerry’s room, she recognised she was not the first to arrive as two of the mission team were already there. They were both Voyager veterans, neither of them under sixty. They were a similar breed. Both were engineers and gruff men at first glance but had a twinkle in their eyes. Callie was about fifteen years younger than the youngest, but none of the project engineers would ever look down on her. She had earned their trust and respect by being like them: efficient, decisive and, most importantly of all, correct. Voyager had been an almost unbroken success story for nearly forty years – that was down to good tech, close monitoring, and, most of all, sound decision making.
Callie knew better than to interrupt Jerry when he was engrossed at the computer; she knew from long experience that he would speak when there was sufficient information. So she watched the screens, one showing telemetry graphs from the latest communication cycle while the other displayed Jerry’s table of commands for signalling the spacecraft.
Standing next to her was Victor Ortiz whose main discipline was the Voyager propulsion systems.
