The roomful of people sobered entirely, and quickly. It was as if a relative, long expected to die, finally had. The grief bore no surprise. People had already gone over, not just the death, but what the life had meant. Not that New Afrika had been diseased. But it had been vulnerable, and it was done in before its time. Like most who lived on Oakland’s deadly inner city streets. All had hoped, but none had expected more. The receptionist stared off in shock, tears forming up in her large, dark eyes. Greg did not feel too well himself as he squeezed the bridge of nose, now to hold back the tears. He slept fitfully, waking to on-and-off rain on the Center’s high warehouse roofs. He dreamed, tossing and turning on his cot, a recurrent dream of strong hands violently ripping open an inchoate dark object by wrenching open its clasps. He kept waking in a cold sweat when, in his dream, the last, its seventh seal, popped.
***
Sumner threw Marable into damage control immediately, but by Friday the Chronicle newspaper’s crotchety, 90-year-old Herb Caen savagely quipped: “Is the FBI’s Operation Anvil helping out our fair city with the homeless problem by dusting winos in the business district?” Steven McCaffrey, himself bled dry by unsuccessful damage control in the Alameda County Sheriffs Department, confided in Edward on Saturday that the vultures were already circling for the FBI man. And the Director called early Sunday morning. Some VIP had complained about Sumner’s handling of both the riemanium and Oakland, so now Washington had to do its own damage control. Nothing to worry about. After all, the Director had no intention of changing quarterbacks in the middle of a play. No doubt the wino’s death was justifiable, but the Bureau had to account to the Justice Department, and the Department to the President and Congress. The Justice Department had scheduled its investigation for Monday, the day before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing.
Two days, Edward thought to himself as he watched the San Francisco Bay fall away through the jet window. Clouds to the west, their tops smeared with setting sun, formed a carpet on the floor of the world as the jet turned east. Two days away from his job, to deal with politics.
He had no doubt that this read as a black mark on his record, to be erased when Operation Anvil delivered the riemanium. He had more than his share of reprimands as a regular field agent, in large part due to attitude. But in his present position, he no longer had the luxury of either sarcasm or flippancy with regard to his superiors. When Cisco hit the deck, Edward honestly thought he had seen something about the wino that Sumner had not. So, he had flashed the sign. The bum’s sudden, threatening movement was reason enough however. Edward needed no more cause. The need to kiss ass for political reasons galled him however. Exactly what he had always criticized his superiors for, and now he had to do it. To have to take two days off this crucial Solidarity Brigade case in order to justify Operation Anvil and cover Bureau butt infuriated him. A good offense is always the best defense, he told himself. Edward planned to come out punching at the national office; demanding an immediate appointment to fill the San Francisco office so that Stunner’s efforts were not so administratively short-handed.
The jet roared into bleak night. Best to relax, he thought as he ordered a drink. The jet lag on this one was bound to be awful. He removed a blue Nepenthe capsule from the prescription vial in his pocket, swallowing it with his whiskey. He had not been sleeping well lately. A nerve relaxant, Nepenthe was one of the few tranquilizers that did not dog the REM cycle. His ambassador-class seating was plush enough to serve as a comfortable bed in a pinch. The blank, dark west scrolled out below.
Oakland was a surprise. He had geared down the Bureau’s counter-intelligence operations against Black Nationalism partially prior to Thursday because there was every indication that the Solidarity Brigade was a creature of the white Left, and because he had needed the manpower. Its support for Oakland that afternoon in a faxed communique, a copy of which Edward had seen before leaving for the airport, had been tepid, no more than weak white-guilt solidarity. Oakland had occurred entirely on its own, and nothing from the field had anticipated the insurrection. The unfolding of events in Oakland had left the Bureau virtually helpless in turn. Sumner authorized efforts to foment splits in the New Afrika Coalition and “neutralize” militant leadership. Oakland was neither FBI responsibility nor its fault he reminded himself, a stance he would maintain while in Washington.
The angry night outside the jet raged with stars. Sumner had new, gut level sympathy for Bureau solos like Heidelburg, whose renegade actions had been motivated by deep, true patriotic sentiments. He felt like an ancient Roman soldier whose loyalty to Consul and Senate during the late Republic had been questioned as a consequence of Senatorial faction politics, the demagoguery of Tribunes, slave revolts, military uprisings; all that had turned Rome into an Empire. As pharmaceuticals mixed with alcohol to race on the heals of legions carrying eagle standards across his mind, Edward’s eyes fluttered shut. Dreaming of Empire.
PART FOUR
SILENCE IN HEAVEN
THIRTY-FOUR
Excerpted from
The Enemy Behind The Enemy”
None Dare Call It Betrayal: The Loss of Southern Mexico
by Lieutenant-Colonel David Burns, USA (Ret.)
2016, Hoover Institution, Stanford University Press
(Electrostraca #: USFP/IR-043562-147-331-1455)
...The United States intelligence community came upon the San Cristobal connection in late 2003, the U.S. military already three years deep into the Mexican civil war. By then San Cristobal had developed and deployed photon displacement fields to conceal, first their home valleys, and then their floating ocean colonies from aerial and satellite observation. So while, as soldiers, we knew that we were fighting not only ZLF terrorists, but also shadowy San Cristobalan forces, we never knew the extent or power of this “hidden enemy” until the end of the war, when our government was concluding a cowardly peace with the enemy ZLF in Paris.
To date, no world power has successfully penetrated either the valleys of San Cristobal or its ocean colonies. The CIA attempt to “hack” San Cristobal’s cybersome from 2003 to 2009 is particularly instructive. Apparently, San Cristobalan science never abandoned analog information systems, and the country’s advanced silicon, photon, biological, and quantum computer network has interactive digital and analog components that made it impervious to the Agency’s best hacking efforts during our involvement in Mexico’s civil war. US intelligence was not content with the brief portfolio of “facts” about her country presented to the Paris Peace Conference by the San Cristobalan representative, Maria Dominguez. in 2010 however. And so the CIA managed a small coup by capturing a San Cristobalan DIS military advisor to the ZLF, one Jose Miguel Casca, outside of Minatitlan in January, 2011. What we know about this extremely radical nation high in the Andes comes from the chemical interrogation of Casca...
...Landlocked, isolationist, autarchic San Cristobal first turned to the seas before coming to terms with any landed, national territory. San Cristobal used the relatively open period of the second World War and shortly thereafter (from 1940 to 1950) to parlay a portion of its large gold and silver reserves into sufficient capital to make some strategic purchases and to do some significant war salvage. The country gradually constructed front businesses and corporations. It slowly accumulated flags of convenience, havens of incorporation, and anonymous banking arrangements. This financial camouflage San Cristobal used to function in the world, without being of the world. This much San Cristobal’s extremist government was willing to concede to international involvement by the middle of the 20th century.
San Cristobal also concentrated upon salvage from the Korean conflict, the numerous Middle Eastern, African and southern Asian wars, up to ‘Vietnam, Afghanistan and the Gulf Wars. This war salvage was directly recycled. Combined with several discreet commercial purchases, it went to construct three primitive ocean colonies, fully operational by 1960. The colonies began as scientific research platforms, labeled by the US inte
lligence community Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu for the mythic sunken continents in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans in which the three platforms floated. Their environmental data collection contributed to San Cristobal’s Draconian “Green Revolution,” which in turn brought the colonies into greater prominence. Besides acting as environmental research faculties monitoring the state of the biosphere, by 1970 the entirely self contained colonies engaged in fish farming, breeding and processing projects. Lemuria became an entirely woman staffed, woman run colony.
By 1980, the corporate/financial front set up for the colonies allowed them to sell their packaged products, often to Third World nations, for cheap. The economic activity, in turn, permitted San Cristobal to launder additional sales of gold and silver reserves. The largest colony in 1990, Mu in the Pacific, comprised one industry/factory/processing ship, one research ship, two hydroponic/park ships and one community ship docked together around a flexible flotation platform. Two to three dozen crewed fishing trawlers were moored on its outer floating arms. The main colony was electronically up-to-date and armed to-the-teeth, primarily in defense against pirates. Each trawler possessed the latest in sensor and communication technologies, not to mention the most sophisticated weaponry available. The main colony surrounded its own dry-dock, and a lattice of submerged fuel and water storage tanks. Photo thermal systems evaporated and simultaneously desalinated sea water along the flotation arms, to create a false fog for much of the day, one sufficient to obscure satellite viewing if a satellite happened to be observing the middle of one of the world’s wide oceans in the years before San Cristobal’s application of photon displacement fields as camouflage. Yet the colonies, the periphery, remained finely tuned to the core, the valleys of San Cristobal, via independent satellite link. They permitted San Cristobal to launch its satellite system in the first place, as they then facilitated San Cristobal’s subversion of southern Mexico.
The position of San Cristobal, outside of the international body politic, the body digital, allowed its government to develop an eccentric perspective on world events. The twentieth century’s last decade witnessed accelerated ecological degeneration, obvious to many besides those resident in the Andean valleys. As well, the country’s extremist government claim to have detected the Third World economic collapse in 1995, almost three years before the actual breakdown. San Cristobal decided that it could no longer remain aloof from global affairs. It established the Department for International Sabotage in Symbiosis with Popular, Indigenous and Aboriginal Autonomist Liberation Struggles; DIS for short. And DIS found the ocean colonies ideal platforms from which to stage their terrorist operations.
The ever tragic plight of the Kurds and the Basques, and the growing despair and militancy of Europe’s Gypsies attracted DIS’s modest attentions at first. But when Leftist revolution emerged across southern Mexico, run by the Zapatista Liberation Front, San Cristobal found the demon child it wished to adopt. Atlantean trawlers fielded by DIS traded openly, although at some risk, on Mexico’s Atlantic/Gulf coast. They came in through the Caribbean islands, with their own cargoes of “appropriate technologies” and what they purchased from port to port. They traded all along the ZLF-held and sympathetic Mexican coasts for food stuffs, hand products, and a growing variety of industrial goods. These were either resold in the Greater and Lesser Antilles on the trawler fleet’s way out, utilized by the floating colonies or San Cristobal, or reprocessed for sale again to the rest of the world. The substantial profits were returned to the ZLF.
The US Navy and Coast Guard attempted to blockade all trade to and from southern Mexico from 2004 to 2008. Not only did this raise an international protest, what with nations of the Caribbean, South America, Europe and Africa strenuously objecting to their ships being stopped and searched, but it also lead to armed confrontations on the high seas. These “incidents” we in the US military found difficult to explain, let alone to win.
The first time a destroyer and its battle group tried to intercept a large San Cristobalan trawler fleet heading out from Mexico on June 3, 2006, the deceptively slow fishing ships revved into high speed and kept the US Navy vessels preoccupied while guerrillas on shore launched wings of exocet missiles to sink most of the battle group. Wiser the second time, a second battle group approached a second large fishing fleet well off shore on January 21, 2007, with an eye to intercepting anything from the mainland. The San Cristobalan trawlers had also been prepared, and succeeded in sinking most of the battle group with mini-exocets, hand launched torpedoes, and portable battle lasers, suffering the loss of only one trawler. The intelligence community determined circumstantially of San Cristobal’s involvement with the trawler fleets after this second incident, but the fleet’s flags of convenience, havens of incorporation, and business front maze of ownership kept the US government sufficiently cautious. Unfortunately, the US government backed away from enforcing the full blockade a year later, giving in to the general international hue and cry over trade interference.
The trawlers were used for small-scale and non-military trade, a “revolutionary service” offered by San Cristobal, its ocean colonies, and DIS to secessionist southern Mexico. But it was not the way large-scale weapons shipments entered ZLF territory, DIS’s true specialization. San Cristobal’s fanatically secretive espionage agency purposefully separated the two operations, so that the Atlantic trawlers could be held blameless, and if need be, submit to UN search as US liberals often suggested. The arms came through the Pacific coast. DIS organized it from Mu, constructing flotation packets—aerated plastic matrices about one hundred and twenty feet long, thirty feet wide, and six feet thick—in which were packed an assortment of military supplies and ordnance. Sealed entirely in a thin, strong camo plastic, and inflated with inert, buoyant gas so as to float some ten feet beneath the ocean’s surface, each packet sported two robot minisubs. The Pacific DIS trawlers carried these packets up current of Gulf of Tehuantepec and set them adrift. More precisely, they permitted the robot subs to take over.
Packet delivery normally took days, and for most of that time, the subs appeared inert. Yet they mapped their own approach through satellite link, and used large vanes built into the packet’s design to rudder the delivery close, but not too close to shore. At a certain point, they released a regular stream of buoyant sound nodules into the current while edging the packet into the gulf. The minisubs and sound nodules synchronized the next moment, the former cutting in their props to drive the packet for shore while the latter pulsed out false engine rhythms. The subs increased the flotation gases until the packet washed no more than a foot beneath the ocean’s surface. If elements of the US 6th Fleet investigated, they checked out the sound decoys first. In the meantime, awaiting guerrillas paddled out in canoes to intercept the packet, drag it up onto the beach to unload it, strip it, and disassemble it; every part of the armaments shipment and packet disappearing into the ZLF-controlled mountains for reuse.
In San Cristobal and the Colonies DIS was often jokingly referred to as “the Department of the Alpha and the Omega.” It is DIS’s bizarre cataclysmic policy that, beginning from 1995, humanity had fifty years to turn matters around before the planet and the species were so poisoned or locked into destructive patterns that grand scale capital “A” apocalypse was inevitable. This, and the agency’s penchant for staging meta-tech, stunningly successful operations established their backhanded claim to the handle. San Cristobal’s recognition of the ZLF in February, 2007, had been a DIS operation. Through their geosyncsats, the colonies penetrated into most every major and minor media’s internal compunet. San Cristobal’s message flashed un and staved up on computer screens around the globe twenty minutes after broadcast, bypassing some extremely sophisticated internal security in many cases. Additionally, the Department had branded their deliveries to southern Mexico with the symbol that came to be associated with San Cristobal’s international presence in general.
An omega, international symbol for resistance, both
electrical and political, modifies a circle A, international symbol for anarchy/anti-authority/autonomy. It is the 21st century’s hammer-and-sickle for the world’s disgruntled fanatics and marginalized masses. San Cristobal has no flag, not even the black one, but by a fluke the country now has an internationally recognized logo, one on which various national, corporate, criminal and interstitial powers are busy compiling their own data bases...
THIRTY-FIVE
Marcus woke before dawn wrapped in a sleeping bag in the back of his station wagon, parked outside a San Francisco post office. He parted the window curtains to determine that a constant, light drizzle washed the world. He struggled into the front seat, groggy and aching from his bed. At six he watched the post office guard open the lobby to the dreary day.
The detective was on a mission. Two Alabaster policemen, one his friend, had died as a consequence of his work. He would track down Peregrine to the ends of the earth now. At this point that meant sleeping in his car for the next four months, the term of Eugene Wisdom’s post office box. Thanks to Sampson, both the Postmaster and the SF Chief of Police knew about his personal stake out.
He opened an umbrella as he stepped from the car, to yawn and stretch in the light rain. He ate a quick breakfast, just coffee, hash browns and one pouched egg, in the 24-hour diner in sight of the post office. He was not surprised to find a call pending from the Captain on his cellular when he returned.
End Time Page 38
