by Hunter Shea
Chapter Twenty-One
Chet was never so nervous in his life. He felt like a world class lunatic recounting everything Jamel Abrams had told him about HAARP and the Russian’s experimentation with mind control. Ivan and Raquel listened to him without saying a word. He was pretty sure they didn’t even blink, such was their shock.
The Captain and Lieutenant Commander asked him questions when he started to sputter, unsure if he should go on. They prodded him like interrogation experts, letting up only when it was apparent he had nothing left to say.
Through it all, Rosario kept her hand firmly planted on his knee, pressing it reassuringly as he babbled on.
Captain Stanson had been taking notes the entire time.
When Chet was done, he slumped back in his chair, exhausted and embarrassed.
“You say the Russian installation is in Karach, correct?” the Captain asked, looking down at his notes.
Chet waved him off. “No, I don’t say it. Jamel Abrams said it.”
“Right. And again, how did he come about this information?”
“I told you, he said he worked at the HAARP facility in Alaska.”
“As a janitor,” Wolf said.
Chet deflated even more, if that was possible. “Yes. If he’s the same Jamel Abrams from Connecticut, he’s also possibly a scientist.”
“Who decided to become a janitor,” Wolf said.
“Exactly.”
“He could have been messed up,” Ivan said. “Drugs, breakdown, divorce. I’ve seen worse things happen to smarter people.”
Rosario sat up straighter in her chair. “Or he could have used his job as a janitor to sneak around. He’s a conspiracy guy. Maybe he thought the only way to get the truth was to be given the kind of access to the facility that only a janitor would have. Don’t secret bases have a whole need to know policy? That would mean the left hand wouldn’t always know what the right was up to. You keep them within their tracks with blinders on. But a janitor, who cares where he goes or what he sees? Brilliant people can be elitist, which can lead to major blind spots. A janitor is obviously too stupid to even have a simple grasp of what’s going on around him. Give him the keys to the whole place because garbage cans need to be emptied, floors mopped and toilets cleaned. It’s not like the chimp with a push broom will be able to put two and two together.”
“Unless that chimp is a scientist in his own right,” Chet muttered.
“Do you have his number?” Captain Stanson asked, seemingly hooked by Rosario’s theory. Chet was as well. It was the only one that made sense. Not that much of what had happened over the past week made much sense.
“Yes.” Chet took out his phone and scrolled through the log. When he found Jamel’s last call, he showed the man the number, which he then wrote down. At this moment, Chet wished he’d called Jamel and heard him out more. Little did he know, the man’s theory, wild as it was, might be the closest to the truth.
The Captain consulted his own phone.
“That’s an Alaska area code,” he said.
“So this is why you were asking me if concentrated radio waves could affect an orca brain,” Raquel spoke up for the first time since Chet had spilled the conspiracy beans.
“Look, I was grasping at straws.”
“We didn’t want to believe it, but we have to explore every possibility,” Rosario added.
The Captain consulted Chet’s notes. “Including a virus from Mars?”
“Look, we’re not crazy,” Chet said.
Only crazy people insist they’re not crazy, he thought.
“You guys invented HAARP,” Chet said. “You should know its capabilities more than anyone. Why ask me about it when I only got the information secondhand?”
“I assure you, HAARP was not developed for mind control,” the Captain said, eyes down at his notes.
“Yours and the Soviet’s governments also denied remote viewing for decades, but now we know you were lying through your teeth,” Ivan said, coming to Chet’s rescue. “You poisoned prisoners with LSD in the fifties and sixties in mind control experiments. So forgive us if we’re not falling all over ourselves to believe you this time.”
Wolf pounded his fist on the table. “What would be the goddamn point in scrambling the brains of a bunch of killer whales?”
“You said it yourself,” Chet said. “Disrupt the economy and military of nations around the world. This could just be the first step.”
An overhead speaker squawked. “Requesting the Captain report to the bridge.”
Captain Stanson closed the file and stood. “I told them to interrupt me for one thing only. Ladies and gentlemen, if you will please follow me. I believe we have another cluster fuck on our hands.”
He wasn’t exaggerating.
A bank of monitors showed the four splintered pods from above. Hundreds of orcas were cleaving through the ocean, heading to all four points of the compass. Even though each pod was a quarter the size of the mega pod, they were no less awe inspiring and terrifying to watch.
Next to each image was a graphic on a map showing the estimated location each pod was heading for. If they stayed on course, ports in Morocco, Turks and Caicos, Brazil and Iceland were in the line of fire.
Of course, the Atlantic Ocean was vast and the orcas were fast and versatile. They could change course at any time. It was really all guesswork on the part of the Navy.
“That’s not all,” the Captain said, handing his tablet over to Chet. Rosario, Ivan and Raquel peered at it over his shoulder.
“My God,” Chet mumbled.
There were reports from every marine park around the globe of orcas attacking trainers. At one park in China, their orca had leapt over the safety glass during a show, crushing a dozen school children in the front row on a class trip.
Chet opened each report, scanning it quickly then moving on to the next.
After the curated list of marine park attacks, there was news of pods gathering in the Pacific Ocean. Orcas everywhere had gone collectively murderous.
A new video was fed into the monitors, this time showing the mega pod they’d been following. The mega pod had circled their wagons around a family of humpback whales. The giant humpbacks were no match for the crazed orcas. Instead of their usual hunting methods, they simply attacked at once, shredding the defenseless whales in minutes. The water boiled crimson as each orca snatched away their pound of flesh and blubber.
“Jesus Christ,” someone muttered.
“They have to eat,” Chet said, horrified by the sheer brutality but understanding the necessity. “They’re burning a lot of calories with this trek across the Atlantic. It’s only going to get worse. With their numbers now, nothing poses a challenge to them.”
“Wait,” Rosario said, taking the tablet from Chet’s sweaty grasp. She walked away from the group, staring at the screen.
“This all happened in the last hour,” Captain Stanson said. “Every military is now on high alert. You understand how we can no longer sit back and wait for whatever it is that’s affecting them to wear itself out.”
Chet rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hands until his eyes hurt.
What hurt even more was that he did understand the Captain.
“So what are you going to do?” Ivan said.
“Blow them out of the fucking water,” Lieutenant Commander Wolf growled.
Captain Stanson gave him a sharp look, as if to tell the man to stand down. Wolf retreated to another section of the busy bridge.
“You can’t,” Raquel said.
“We have to,” the Captain replied, his attention drawn to someone who was handing him another tablet.
“He’s right,” Rosario said. She walked back toward them, gripping the tablet.
“There has to be another fucking way,” Ivan said without much conviction.
Rosario shook her head. “No, not the Captain. Jamel Abrams. He’s right. Here, see for yourself.”
Taking the tablet back, Chet s
crolled through the long list of reports and the links to images and video.
“I don’t see anything,” he said.
Rosario beamed. “Exactly!” Her exclamation was loud enough to garner the attention of everyone within earshot. “What don’t you see? Russia! They have a few marine parks. There’s not a single report of a disturbance there. Also, if you look, none of the herding orcas are anywhere near Russian waters.”
That got Captain Stanson’s attention. He held out his hand for Chet to pass him the tablet.
Chet was slightly buoyed by the news, but he had to play Devil’s advocate. “That may be the case, but the Russians aren’t the best at telling the world when things shit the bed.”
“That may have been the case in the past, but not so anymore,” the Captain said. “Even Russia can’t hide the truth anymore. This is going to have to be kicked up the chain of command.”
Chet pulled Rosario close. “You may have just saved thousands of orcas.”
“I’m afraid to say anything and jinx it.”
“We have another problem,” the Captain said. “One that we may need all of you to attend to.”
Jamel Abrams saw the news and realized he’d have to enact his plan B sooner than expected.
The killer whales had gone collectively insane. At the current count, over thirty-five people had lost their lives in various water park attacks. Another hundred and counting had occurred in open water as the killer whales assaulted anything in their way of congregating to form enormous and fast traveling pods.
He checked his HAARP observation program and saw the high amount of energy being pushed out of Kalach in Russia. He wasn’t sure how they were doing this, affecting such a wide swath of the killer whale population, but there was no doubt in his mind they were behind everything.
Chet Clarke had gone dark on him. Jamel wondered if he had gotten too close to the fray and was now resting in the belly of a killer whale.
He had to talk to someone. He dialed up Sam on the east coast.
There was no answer.
Damn.
He went to the fridge and popped open another IPA. Ever since things had started going sideways, the bottles of local beer had been going down his throat with alarming frequency.
“You can’t get blackout drunk,” he warned himself, taking as small a sip as possible.
Sitting back in his small command center, he scanned the small open windows of various live news reports, each one focusing on a specific and fresh killer whale attack.
The world was in a panic, and rightfully so.
If they knew what was behind everything, perhaps it would lessen their fear. Knowledge was power. Power against the darkness and anxiety.
Lord knows, Jamel had gleaned more than his fair share of knowledge over the years. Graduating high school at fifteen, he had a wide open future before him with endless possibilities. He’d breezed through Caltech, private companies courting him in his junior year for prominent positions within their science divisions. For a time, he was sure he’d end up in bioengineering.
Then he’d heard about HAARP, and the more he learned, the more intrigued he became. His obsessive leanings that had helped him tackle his studies with a burning fervor found a new, shiny object, and they wouldn’t let him walk away. Using some vital contacts in the scientific community, he’d met with several former employees, and what he’d learned changed his life forever.
He supposed the deeper down the rabbit hole he went, he may have had a slight mental break. It had always been the concern of his mother, a maid for a local motel back home. She’d often said the line between genius and madness was thinner than a mouse’s ass crack.
It didn’t matter now. Genius or insane, he did know the truth. His time spent undercover at the HAARP facility had confirmed all of his worst fears. He’d had unfettered access to the entire facility, and he spent his time wisely, connecting the dots from snatches of conversations, scraps of paper and glimpses at the endless array of monitors. To a lay person, it would have all just been a hodgepodge of science gobbled-gook. Jamel was not a lay person, though he often envied those who were.
During his two year stint at HAARP, he’d gathered enough intelligence to blow the lid off the whole thing, but the big question was always, who would believe him? That doubt forced him to take risks, to linger too long in labs and strain too hard to listen in whenever several scientists gathered. He noticed they had started to give him the side-eye, this custodian who always seemed to be around, lingering.
Feeling as if they were getting wise to his con, he’d quit, signing reams of NDAs and telling his boss he needed to go home to take care of his ailing mother.
Mom was fine, though he supposed worried every day about her son who could have been anything he wanted and ended up a recluse in Alaska.
Taking a deep breath, he opened up the press release he’d written days ago. It needed a few more passes, and he had to incorporate the latest developments. Once he felt it was ready, and there really wasn’t much time anymore, he’d send it to every single news agency in the world. If he had blown the whistle even weeks earlier, he would have been summarily discredited and dismissed. Now, by tying in the facts with the brutal news that was plastered on every screen, there was a chance they’d listen.
A tiny alarm pulled him away from the document to check his HAARP monitor.
“Uh-oh.”
The HAARP array in his own backyard was not only online again. It was going full bore, but at what he couldn’t be sure.
He gave a quick fist bump.
Maybe Chet Clarke had listened to him and gotten the ear of someone higher up.
“Fight fire with mother fucking fire,” he said, watching the readout climb up and up as more ELF waves were rocketed into the ionosphere.
Chapter Twenty-Two
A series of interconnecting flights brought Chet, Rosario, Ivan and Raquel to an island facility off the western coast of Ireland. To say their lives had been in a whirlwind over the past twenty-four hours was like saying China had a fair number of people living within its borders.
The sun had burned off the morning haze. Only a handful of white clouds were visible on the horizon. The serenity above was in stark contrast to the tempest below.
They stepped off another helicopter, Chet’s stomach in knots, onto the roof of a squat, square building. Unlike on the supercarrier John Adams, there was no one there to greet them. The helicopter powered down, the pilot staying inside.
A second helicopter landed on the other end of the roof.
They had been too late.
Not exactly. The unforeseen had made itself…seen.
A pod of orcas that had not been on their radar had seemingly appeared out of nowhere, descending on the island lab like locusts. The waters around the small island were alive, tossed into whitecaps and foam from the unimaginable battle taking place under and above the surface.
“Where did everyone go?” Ivan said.
Chet looked over the edge of the rooftop. They were surrounded by chaos. Orca bodies, hundreds of them, squirmed and dove, leapt and cried out. He flinched when he saw an adult orca pinwheel into the air. It had not done so of its own volition.
“Looks like they evacuated. From what Captain Stanson told me, they were nothing but glorified babysitters. Funding for this project was minimal.”
Raquel sneered as she watched the battle below. “What did they think they were possibly going to do with them?”
“Study them,” Chet said. “At least until the money ran out.”
“So why hide them?” Rosario asked.
“Because they scare the hell out of people. No one wants to know some of these things survived.”
These things were the remnants of the prehistoric chimera fish, or better known to the public as ghost sharks, that had impossibly sprung from a chasm in the Atlantic several years earlier. They had stormed the coast of Miami, ending in an all out sea battle that ended, at least as far as th
e world was concerned, in the utter extinction of the chimera fish for the second time in their history.
The chimera fish were as ugly as they were fierce, their mottled flesh so corpse-like, wide mouths armed with jaws capable of crushing steel. They looked utterly alien, and in a sense, they were. The holdouts from man’s prehistoric past were a sight to behold.
Chet had known Brad Whitely, the marine biologist who had spearheaded the mission to find the origin point of the enormous fish and eradicate them. Killing them was an easy decision to make. Some of the chimera fish were over fifty feet long. All of them were killing machines the likes of which the modern world had never seen. After millions of years trapped in ice, they came back from the dead ravenous and powerful.
Whitely had disappeared from the public eye weeks after the fish had been hunted down and destroyed. Dead chimera fish were on display in museums all over the world. As far as Chet was concerned, that was that. The crisis had lasted a little over a week, but it was over.
It appeared he’d been wrong.
A band of chimera fish had been accidentally discovered by an oil drilling team, months after the Miami skirmish. Only this time, they had been captured, corralled and kept well fed to avoid another outbreak.
Captain Stanson advised them that there were ten chimera fish in total, the smallest at twenty-four feet, the largest topping out just under sixty feet in length. Only the United Kingdom and United States governments knew of the existence of the holding facility. They’d found out early that testing the fish was difficult and dangerous. They were almost impossible to sedate. They responded to only one thing – food.
When the Captain saw one of the pods headed north toward Iceland, he worried that it could shift course and end up on the outskirts of Ireland. That pod was still going strong toward Iceland.
