The Noah Satellite

by Allan E Petersen

  The guardian of the secret archives was a young officer with a small hat and big ears. Although young, Waldorf recognized the cold stare and demand to procedure. Standing at the entrance to the secret files, a stern hand reached out demanding the index and research file numbers given to Waldorf by Professor Vlad Novokoff. The knowing that all the security protocols had been met upstairs and seeing the correct numbers, Waldorf was quickly marched down rows of shelves and stacked boxes filled with what he knew would be of great interest to Maria and the House. However, that would be for another time. For now, it was one secret at a time.

  With lights dangling from electrical cords onto the research table, the young keeper of the records placed an old and dilapidated cardboard box in front of Waldorf. The information he wanted was not in a file or book but rather in a series of papers, some yellow with age. Taking them out of the box and placing them under the light, he began to casually flip the pages. The young man thought it odd that he was only looking at them, not reading them. It was as if he only wanted to see the pages. How was he to know that Waldorf was recording every word?

  ***

  General Boris Petrov was a stern man, as were most of the men in his high position of security. It was a hazardous position of quick demotions and terminations if strict compliance to orders and procedures were not exactly met. He was old, gray haired and large in height as well as girth. Demanding to be obeyed to all whims and orders was also the main reason for his life of bachelorhood. Sitting at his desk, the sharp ‘ping’ of his computer got his attention. Seeing the alert, his Russian soaked vodka blood boiled with rage. This was highly unacceptable and far off the page of exact procedure.

  He immediately snapped up his cell phone and called the source of the infraction. He demanded,

  “What is the meaning of this breach?”

  Recognizing that he was in trouble, the guard at the door of the Russian Defense Ministry Building meekly explained,

  “But General, he had proper papers issued from the Russian Federal Security Service, complying precisely to proper security procedures.”

  General Boris Petrov was irate and spit into the phone,

  “I am the head of the Russian Federal Security Service and I issued no such papers nor would I ever have. Apprehend that spy and bring him to me immediately.”

  ***

  Santo was sitting in his D-wing hovering miles above the Russian Defense Ministry building monitoring all communication channels. When hearing the General’s order, he snapped alert and called down to Waldorf. It was eerie for Waldorf to hear Santo’s voice coming from his eye socket and transmitting to the neuro-receptors. It sounded more like an echo chamber in a hollow head blaring a warning.

  “You’ve been discovered. Evacuate immediately.”

  The best thing about the timing of the alert was that Waldorf had recorded all the pages and was about to exit the room anyway. The worst thing was that his exit strategy was now compromised. It was then that the young guard heard through his mike the orders to arrest the spy. Fortunately Waldorf also heard it and reacted quickly. Before the guard could reach for his side arm, he was felled by a massive punch to the jaw. Knowing that to be heard, all he had to do was speak, he called back to Santo saying,

  “I need a new exit strategy.”

  Santo quickly programed for the building’s engineer specks and instantly on the screen came up the only two exit routes available to Waldorf. One was through the way he entered the building but was now impossible and the other was an exit through a series of stairways in the middle of the building leading to the roof. Apparently and lucky for Waldorf, the security of the building covered the way in, not the way out.

  Santo rapidly transmitted instructions.

  “In the far corner of your room is a steel fire door accessing stairs to the various floors.”

  That was all he needed to hear and so set a quick pace toward it. Because he was too deep in the bowels of the building, Santo was not able to get a ‘heat’ reading location on him and so quickly reported,

  “At the top of every staircase, turn right and continue up the stairs until you get to a dead end. The steel door there leads to the roof. I’ll be waiting there for you.”

  Burning lungs and objecting legs due to age were now becoming a problem. When only half way up the staircase, through heavy gasping he heard Santo report,

  “Hurry up. They discovered your escape route and are giving chase. Can you hear the gunfire?”

  It was impossible to hear anything through deep gasps and heavy breathing. He managed to report back,

  “No but I believe you.”

  Finally at the top of the staircase, with bullets ricocheting off steel banisters and concrete walls, he reached for the door latch. It was locked. A quick scan saw the combination panel and without a miracle he knew all was lost. Through gasps, he reported the hopeless situation to Santo. Adding to the dire situation, Santo reported back,

  “There is no place on the roof to put down. Every square foot is occupied by satellite discs and aerials.”

  That was not Waldorf’s immediate problem. Racing security guards were getting closer as were the bullets. Santo came back with a possible solution.

  “Stand clear of the door.”

  In stealth mode and hovering above the aerials and satellite discs, Santo quickly programed for a laser blast at the door. There was a danger of exploding shrapnel hitting Waldorf but there was no doubt that bullets would soon find their target anyway. It was a chance he had to take. The laser beam shot out of the D-wing hitting the lock mechanism right on target melting circuits and levers. Acting fast, Waldorf reached up and flung the door open. The approaching guards only had a few steps to go before getting a clear shot at him.

  As he ran out onto the roof, Santo was right. It was cluttered with satellite discs and aerials. There was no place for the D-wing to land. A second later a series of bullets whistled past his head. The only thing he could do was run helter-skelter around the obstructions and hope a bullet didn’t get lucky. He knew there was only one chance for survival. Santo too understood and called down to him,

  “Do it.”

  With bullets tearing through the disks and bouncing off the steel aerial supports, Waldorf was lucky enough to reach the edge of the roof. With toes dangling over the side and looking sixteen stories far below, all he saw down there was parked cars, concrete and death. The guards were now getting a clear shot at a spy standing on the edge of the roof looking down. When a hail of bullets just missed his head, Waldorf jumped.

  With howling wind whistling past his ears and eyes wide, he plummeted through the air to concrete below. However, he knew the procedure, knew what he had to do. Although it had been practiced many times, it was years ago as a mere soldier. With the wind tearing at him, he had difficulty getting into position. However, after a clumsy struggle he finally managed to crouch into a sitting position. It was only then that he stopped falling.

  The guards up on the roof ran to the edge and watched a suicidal spy leap to his death. They all knew that it was a kinder death than what was waiting for him in prison. With shocked and bulging eyes the guards watched as the infiltrator did not plummet to the concrete far below. Instead, they saw him mysteriously disappear into thin air. When it was done and they were staring at nothing but empty air, all wondered how General Boris Petrov was going to react to their report.

  With the D-wing in stealth mode, Santo looked over to Waldorf who was sitting in the passenger seat, smiled and asked,

  “Were you worried?”

  Shaking his head, Waldorf answered,

  “Talk about a leap of faith huh? Nice catch.”

  As the D-wing canopy closed and they soared high into the clouds, Santo said,

  “Thanks. I used to play baseball in the academy.”

  Still in a jesting mood or perhaps simply wanting to lighten the serious situation, Santo asked,

  “Why are you huffing and puffing like that? Get
ting old?”

  Between the gasps, Waldorf struggled to say,

  “Shut-up.”

  Chapter 41

  It didn’t take long to return to Headquarters, just long enough for Waldorf’s heart to stop pounding and settle down. He loved the thought of assignments, anything to get him away from administration duties but as he had just learned, he hated the reality of danger. Perhaps his new position of organizing laboratories and scientists wasn’t too bad of a duty for an old man after all.

  Knowing that Maria was anxious to download the information he had acquired from his spy eye, he hurriedly left Santo with the tedious duty of inspecting and signing in the D-wing. He may not have been Head of Security any more but he was still smart enough to evade extra paperwork. Who was the senior officer now?

  Maria was still in her laboratory pounding keys trying to get the damn quantum harmonic computers to do as programmed. The alien computers were not only finicky but as she had discovered, also down right ornery. In the most frustrating cases it was a misinterpretation of the English commands and the way the Great Gray computer language interpreter understood it. More often than not, she wished she had her more earthly transistor driven computers back. At least they understood English and obeyed her programming efforts. However, when she did manage a coexistence with them, the only way to describe the result was ‘magic’

  There was a rude knock at the door and she looked at the surveillance monitor to see Waldorf patiently waiting for an invitation to enter. She smiled. Apparently old dogs can learn new tricks and she buzzed him in. As he entered, he had made up his mind to report that all went well. He had already asked Santo to leave out of his report the close call he had escaping the facility. Such a request did not come easily for he knew just by Santo’s smirk that such a request would come back and bite him in the butt at some later date.

  After a vocal report, leaving out bullets zipping past his ear, he was ready to let the ‘spy eye’ tell the rest of the story. It was his thought that she would simply pop the recording out of the socket and she would down load the information. However, getting the data was not going to be that easy. She got up from her desk and walked over to another series of computers. Pointing to a chair, she indicated for him to sit. Obeying the command, he sat and waited for her to pull the eye out.

  He was surprised to see her approaching with wire leads rather than a scalpel. Seeing his one good eye bulge just a bit, she explained,

  “Sorry Waldorf, but I can’t physically extract the eye. It is organically attached to your superior and inferior oblique eye muscles. You will have to go back to that pretty young technician you were complaining about for that.”

  Then holding what looked like needles attached to thin wires, she added,

  “Also, there is no wireless download capability in that system. It will have to be a wired data extraction.”

  His one good eye watched as she gently brought one of the needles closer. Thankfully, he was not able to see her poke the needle deep into the eye. By the time she was finished the connections to the Nano processors there were five needles in his eye, all attached to wires leading to the main download computer. Sitting still and somewhat impatiently, he saw her access the download. Although looking like a form of torture, in fact he felt nothing.

  She turned the screen so that he could also see it. The first transmitted image was an embarrassment and deserved some explanation. She smiled and said,

  “I see the young ladies are still infatuated with you.”

  One eye lifted to the ceiling. It was the image of Pia attacking him with a great hug. Understanding the tease, he said,

  “I’ll give you one million dollars to erase that and not show it to Helga.”

  After flying fingers entered a command she said,

  “Done. I’ll expect payment in gold bars.”

  The download was painless and only took a split second. After pulling the needles out of his eye she expected him to leave. When noticing the slight hesitancy, she understood that of course he was also interested in what was recorded and she was only too glad to share the info with him. She asked,

  “Would you like to stay and help me interpret what you recovered?”

  It was a pointless question.

  After accessing the translation program and seeing the first few pages that he had flipped, and slowing the images down, both were surprised to see military files scroll up. Waldorf said,

  “Clearly their Air Force is somehow involved with this mystery.”

  Maria added,

  “Yes, and from the looks of it, the large land area in question is heavily protected by them.”

  She pointed to a map and added,

  “There is even an air force base nearby.”

  Instantly, both had the same thought. Why would there be an air force base in Siberia guarding hundreds of square miles of permanent ice and steep mountains?

  As each page was flipped over and they finished reading it, again Waldorf commented,

  “Look at that. Even for their own planes, hundreds of square miles is designated a ‘no fly zone.”

  Maria nodded and Waldorf continued,

  “It must be a very secret experiment to keep people away like that.”

  What Maria then said shocked him.

  “Or it’s a tribe of aliens somehow stuck on this planet. It’s more akin to the Bermuda Triangle and all the other triangles situated all around the world.”

  The next page confirmed her wild suggestion. He quickly pointed to the screen and said,

  “Look at that. It’s a Siberian Triangle. Planes have gone through the no fly zone and never come out the other side. They simply vanished.”

  Maria added,

  “Obviously the triangle is some sort of energy field that can disrupt computers and airplane systems.”

  The next page explained a lot. Wide eyes read what seemed impossible and Maria said,

  “My god! The Russians claim that there is a technology in the triangle alerting ground to air missile silos to shoot down whatever enters the triangle.”

  Waldorf had read a few paragraphs ahead of her and contributed to the astonishment,

  “Just like the underground missile silos that are used today”

  Maria understood that he was referring to a missile silo launch facility, a vertical cylindrical underground structure constructed for the storage and launching of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

  An ancient ability to launch missiles from underground silos launched a wild thought. Maria said,

  “Remember in 1908, the Tunguska explosion that devastated hundreds of square miles of tundra in Siberia?”

  “Yeah, it was supposed to be a comet entering the Earth’s atmosphere that blew up before impact. The resulting concussion leveled over 800 square miles of forest.”

  He then looked at her and asked,

  “What’s on your mind? Are you thinking that it wasn’t a comet?”

  Still deep in thought, she was slow to answer.

  “No, I’m sure that it was. But why it blew up in mid entry is still a mystery. The Tunguska impact area is pretty well dead center of this so-called Siberian Triangle. What if one of those ground to air missile silos was alerted to the trajectory and calculated that ground zero was going to be in the restricted area?”

  With a frown he asked,

  “Are you suggestion that the explosion was caused by a missile protecting the triangle?”

  It was a slow answer.

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Well, for one thing there was no such thing as ground to air missiles in 1908 let alone a technology to detect incursions like that.”

  “That’s my point exactly. It could not be human technology.”

  All of a sudden he realized what she was implying.

  She understood how such a large energy force could be kept secret from the Russian general population. Fifty percent of the largest country in the world is made up of Siberia, a land of
incessant cold and swamp. Invading mongrels who tried to penetrate the swamp and ice were never seen again. Hunters and fur traders never returned. In those days, it was a forbidden land of death and mystery.

  Reading more of the secret files, if they were alien, it was a tribe she had never heard of and certainly was not listed in Zak’s data base. Maria’s curiosity to discover what was hidden there and who they were pressed hard against her determination to find answers. She said to Waldorf,

  “These people under the dome or whoever they are, are at the very least writing a language found on the Black Knight. The Russians obviously know this and are keeping it a secret from the world and I want to know why.”

  It was a subtle look toward the door but Waldorf got the hint and left her to thoughts and planning.

  Chapter 42

  This morning, Belle was in her room busy starting over on her Bulgarian history report. She was alone and not permitted contact with Robert, the great plagiarizer. The only thing the two adventurers were allowed to share was the accumulated notes and dates while at the Royal Library. She was not happy. Not having Robert alongside was akin to a big distraction.