Solar Weapon

by David Capps

  “And they won’t have to. Here’s why.”

  The President’s Chief of Staff pressed a button on the remote. The main viewing screen lit up with an image of the earth and red lines circling the planet emanating from the North and South Poles.

  “This is the normal size and strength of the magnetic field that typically protects the planet from severe solar storms,” the President said. He nodded and his Chief pressed the button again. “This was the size and strength of the magnetic lines of flux during the last solar storm.”

  The red lines had been reduced dramatically. “And this,” the president nodded again and the screen changed. “This is the projected magnetic field during the next storm.”

  The red lines almost completely disappeared. The realization of what they were facing settled in over the people in the situation room like the gloom before an approaching hurricane.

  “After the end of World War Two, our military did some experiments with the generation of very intense magnetic fields. What we learned has led to this.”

  The screen changed again. A satellite appeared on a direct line between the sun and the Earth. “This satellite is currently under construction and will be launched in seven days. It is named MagGen One. This satellite is powered by a nuclear generator and will create a massive magnetic field between us and the sun.”

  “That field looks too small,” General Davies said. “That will protect only part of the planet. What about the rest?”

  “That will be accomplished with satellites MagGen Two through Seven, placed as shown here.”

  The new screen showed six more satellites positioned in a honeycomb pattern around MagGen One, but closer to the earth.

  “When the CME arrives, this is what will happen,” the President said.

  The next screen showed the material from the sun being deflected by MagGen One toward the next six satellites. The screen after that depicted the solar material being disbursed in a cone that would miss the Earth altogether.

  “This is the plan we will be presenting to all of the other countries around the world.”

  “How much are Russia and China doing?” the Vice President asked.

  “Russia and China have both agreed to build and launch two MagGen satellites each. We will place two in orbit and the European Space Agency will launch one. These satellites will remain in permanent placement between the Earth and the sun and will protect the planet from any and all future solar storms.”

  The President fielded a number of questions from his inner circle, and then asked who was in support of the plan. Peter Steinmetz raised his hand in support, knowing how little it would take to destroy all seven satellites with one of their saucers.

  * * *

  Ken Bartholomew felt a hand on his shoulder, which woke him suddenly.

  “We’ve been at this all night,” Honi said. “You fell asleep around two-thirty. I figured you could use the rest.”

  “Thanks. Just makes me one sorry excuse of an agent.”

  “No, it doesn’t. It just makes you human. If it makes you feel any better, Stafford conked out before you did.”

  “And Jake?”

  “About ten minutes after you.”

  “Well, I reckon a shower, clean clothes and some food will help.”

  “I’m headed out for the same,” Honi said. “See you back here, then.”

  Ken drove back to his apartment just outside of D.C., showered, dressed and ate a light breakfast. When he left he glanced down at the pavement next to his front driver-side wheel. A one inch long chalk mark was on the concrete perpendicular to his tire. Chen’s mark, indicating something was at their dead drop. He drove to a small hole-in-the-wall mail box business on the outskirts of D.C. He twisted the knob, lining up the dial to the letters used for the combination. When he opened the small door, he saw the envelope. He glanced over at the business proprietor, an old man who sat with his back to the boxes. Ken pulled out the envelope containing the thumb drive, slipped it into his pocket, and drove to the NSA building.

  Even with his new ID card, he still felt a little strange not needing to check in and have an escort at another agency, especially at the NSA of all places. He made his way down to B6, area 4 and handed the thumb drive to Brett. “Same encryption as the one you made yesterday.”

  Brett pulled a laptop computer from his desk drawer and plugged the USB drive into a slot. “Virus and malware check. Wifi’s been removed from this computer, so if the file’s infected, it can’t travel to any of our other computers.”

  “It won’t be infected. But you should check it anyway.”

  “Always do. Okay, it’s clean. Let’s see what we have.” Brett added the file to the database. “Names, but they’re all in Chinese characters.”

  “Right click one of the names.”

  “Ahh,” Brett replied. “Select English, American. There we are.”

  “So where are we on names?” Honi asked as she entered area 4.

  “Thanks to Ken, we have a lot more Chinese names on the plot. But we still have a lot of holes.”

  ‘Locations?”

  “Some government buildings, some private residences; those are the easy ones. Most of them are in open spaces or large commercial establishments, and quite a number are located on university campuses. We will have to start cross-referencing security tapes to find these people.”

  * * *

  Jake arrived and stared at the screen and the list of names that were being added.

  “Can we start plotting these locations on a world map?”

  “Sure. Screen over there,” Brett pointed.

  “Wow. Look at how these phones are clumped.”

  “All of the power centers of the world,” Honi said. “Washington, London, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing…”

  “Since when did Brazil and Argentina become power centers of the world?” Jake asked.

  “And Paraguay,” Honi said.

  “Look at Bolivia,” Ken said. “You’ve got as many phone connections in Bolivia as you have in Great Britain. How’s that possible?”

  “Probably drug traffickers,” Honi said.

  Jake pulled his phone and called Briggs. “It’s Hunter. How many FBI agents do we have in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia?” He listened. “Okay, I need 100 agents sent to each country, today.” He paused. “Yes, I know that’s a lot of agents to each country. We have over 13,000 field agents and a lot of activity in South America. If we don’t cover those four countries we’re not going to have, or need, any agents at all in fourteen days.” He listened. “Yes. Thank you, boss.”

  “So what are you thinking?” Honi asked.

  “It just dawned on me,” Jake said. “We get so used to being the center of everything that I just assumed this whole conspiracy had to be centered here, in the states. But what if it isn’t?”

  “You’re thinking foreign control?”

  “Yes. I mean, just look at the names we have from China, and the cluster of connections in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The organizational connections in Argentina are higher than Secretary Halleran here in the US.”

  Ken walked over to take a closer look at the display. “Now that we know the gold bearer bonds are connected to this Phoenix Organization, and we have Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia thrown into the mix, I’m thinkin’ the Phoenix Organization goes way back.”

  “The Professor said it went back to 1947,” Jake replied.

  “No, no. I think it goes back further than that. It feels like there are too many things we’re not being told. We need to go back to before World War II. That’s when the largest physical movement of gold the world has ever seen took place.”

  “I think Ken’s right,” Stafford said. “Wars are presented to the public as being religious or ideological in nature, but the reality is wars are fought over resources. Gold and oil are right at the top of the list, and now, so is technology.”

  “So we’re back to the Professor,” Jake said. He pulled his p
hone and called General Davies.

  * * *

  This time General Davies took them to a small abandoned farm house in the rolling hills of West Virginia. The President’s military unit was there guarding the Professor.

  “Why does the President’s Unit use false names?” Jake whispered to Stafford. “I mean, they’re all called Smith.”

  “It’s a matter of security. Every member is single with no living family, so they’re not subject to undue influence. They all lead low profile lives and no one knows what they do for a living. Anonymity is their primary protection. They use a different last name for each mission.”

  They entered the small building. Folding chairs were set up as before with the Professor sitting in a padded chair.

  “Thank you for meeting with us again,” Jake began. “We have more questions.”

  The Professor nodded warily.

  “We believe the Phoenix Organization you worked with goes back farther than your involvement with them. We know there was a lot of money involved, and that doesn’t happen by itself. What can you tell us?”

  The Professor looked at General Davies, who nodded.

  “As a graduate student, I was involved in the Manhattan Project,” the Professor said. “I knew Robert Oppenheimer. He was trained by Max Born at the University of Gottingen in Germany. He was close friends with Werner Heisenberg and Enrico Fermi, did you know that?”

  “Heisenberg,” Stafford said. “That name is vaguely familiar to me. What did he do?”

  “Heisenberg was in charge of Germany’s atomic bomb development program,” the Professor replied.

  “Germany was working on a nuclear bomb?”

  “Oh, yes. In many ways they were months, if not years ahead of us. It was part of Hitler’s wunderwaffe, or wonder weapon program. I worked with several German scientists on the corporate side of the anti-gravity drive reverse engineering. They had a very deep level of understanding of the physics and the machinery we were working with. I initially was working on the broken saucer from Roswell. The Germans recovered a crashed saucer in 1936 in the Black Forest, so they effectively had an eleven year head start in their reverse engineering efforts. Some of them said Germany had successfully developed its own saucer design by the end of the war, but none of them would admit to actually being there.”

  “What about a connection to Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay or Bolivia?” Jake asked.

  “The German scientists I worked with came from Argentina,” the Professor said. “Buenos Aires was a stronghold of Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel, or German SS Officers after the war. They were the most powerful and feared officers in Hitler’s Third Reich. Much of the communications that came to me were sent directly from Buenos Aires. The SS Officers controlled the scientists there, just as they did in Germany.”

  “Was all of your work directed from Buenos Aires?”

  The Professor glanced at General Davies and then back to Jake. “Yes.”

  “So you’re saying there are Nazis behind all of this?”

  The Professor shook his head. “No. You don’t understand. Near the end of World War II everything changed. Germany surrendered, but the SS didn’t. They broke away from Germany and the rest of the world. Many of the people who were involved in the secret SS projects were incorporated into other country’s technical programs. Wernher von Braun, for example, headed the Nazi V2 rocket program in Germany. When Germany surrendered, von Braun was brought over to the US under Operation Paperclip. He ran our rocket development program, and eventually ended up in a top position at NASA. The same kind of thing was happening in Russia. German scientists were recruited to work on special projects, just as I was.

  “Because of their expertise, SS members were brought into the American CIA, the Russian KGB and other organizations. All of the ideological lines that divided the countries in World War II became blurred and intertwined. Enemies became partners based not on nationality, but on their desire for power and control. The SS was absorbed into the Phoenix Organization. German scientists became focused on the advanced technology because of their more extensive experience and natural ability for technical systems. Wealthy families in Asia, Europe and America took over the financial aspect of the Organization. Military commanders became part of the mix, as did aspiring politicians. The Phoenix Organization became an invisible monster, its tentacles reaching inside every aspect of the world’s power and control systems.

  “You still think in terms of political opponents, and military conflicts. That’s not the way it really works. The Phoenix Organization is entwined into every country’s political, military, academic and financial structures, remaining invisible, yet controlling, directing and influencing all of it. Like the old German SS, the Phoenix Organization is composed of people who no longer consider themselves bound to any country or any set of laws or standards of civility. They have broken away from our civilization and are effectively above the law wherever they go. They have their own system of finance and control three-quarters of the world’s wealth, cash-flow and assets. They own your world and you don’t even know it. You have no idea what you’re taking on.”

  * * *

  “What else aren’t you telling us?” Jake demanded of General Davies once they were back in the limo.

  “Nothing that I’m aware of.”

  “How much do you know about the Professor?”

  “I’ve read his debriefing file. It contained a lot of jargon and technical details that I didn’t understand. Beyond that, I have control over him and I’m responsible for his security. That’s about it.”

  “So why didn’t he tell us about the connection to the SS and Argentina?”

  “I didn’t really know about the South American part. As for the rest, I don’t think he wants to be associated with or seem sympathetic toward the Nazis.”

  “We need that debriefing file and Andropov.”

  “They’ll be waiting for you at the NSA when you get there. By the way, the President has put forth his new plan to protect the Earth from future solar storms. The other countries are settling down some. They now stand united as long as the satellites all launch on time.”

  “And how long before the Phoenix Organization sends a saucer out and destroys the satellites?”

  “We’re thinking they will wait until closer to the final solar storm. No point in tipping their hand too early in the game. That way we wouldn’t have any time to come up with another plan.”

  “So the President knows the satellite plan can’t work?”

  “Of course. Your investigation is our only real hope.”

  * * *

  As promised, Andropov was waiting in the lobby of the NSA building, holding a sealed shipping box.

  “I was told not to open this until we were in the room downstairs,” Andropov said.

  “Yeah, about that,” Jake said. “It’s not light reading. We need you to digest the contents and turn it into words and concepts we can understand, okay?”

  Andropov smiled. “That good? This sounds interesting.”

  “I hope so. We need something good to happen, and soon.”

  When the group arrived in B6 area 4, Andropov was given his own cubical. Once he started reading the file he appeared very excited.

  At least someone is entertained by that level of technology, Jake thought.

  “We have a lot of holes in our search for names attached to cell phones,” Brett said. “And many of those are on university campuses.”

  “No big surprise there,” Honi replied. “Tech-savvy and smart–hard combination to crack.”

  Jake stood and looked at the display. “The people at the universities. They aren’t real criminals, are they?”

  “What do you mean?” Honi asked.

  “I mean they’re not criminal masterminds. There’s no real criminal intent. They’re misguided, sure, but assuming we actually get through this mess, they could be very helpful.” Jake called Briggs and arranged for covert FBI surveillance on the
campuses to see if they could identify these individuals. The field agents at each location would be notified when a call is made to or from a known burner cell and that GPS location. With a little luck, that could fill in more names in the organizational structure.

  Jake stared at the dot on the phone and organizational plot on the display. Secretary Halleran was the highest member on the chart within the United States. Secretary Cooper was under him, but then there was no direct connection to General Teague from either Secretary. Is it possible the three of them were involved in the same organization, but it was so compartmentalized that none of them actually knew the others were operatives? Could it be that Secretary Cooper and General Teague were unaware of each other’s participation in the Phoenix Organization up until the moment Cooper was ordered to spring Teague from custody? That could have come as a complete surprise to both men. From an operational perspective, that would have been the perfect setup. But who ordered Secretary Cooper to free Teague? It didn’t appear to be Secretary Halleran. And if not him, then who? If we can find that person, we will have found someone at the top of the Phoenix Organization.

  The universities had phone connections to what Jake knew were shell corporations, but there were also weekly connections between the universities and points in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and the occasional connection to Bolivia. Ultimately, the different branches were connected to the money flow. That was the backbone of any such organization: money. That’s why the banking software had been so critical as an investigative tool. As always, rule number one: follow the money.

  Jake studied the top organizational points on the display; they were all either political or military, as far as he could tell. The GPS locations all came back to government or military offices spread out all over the globe. The problem is, Jake thought. There’s nothing above them. These may be the people who would be appointed as the supreme leaders for each country in the world, but there’s no phone connection between any of them, let alone anything above them.

  “We’re missing the top layer,” Jake said.