by Terry James
Jeddy sat, listening intently, but still antsy to get on with his routine. He licked at her right cheek when she got too close trying to straighten the rounded collar at the back of his thick neck.
Morgan’s face lit up in a wide smile when she saw him standing on corner 50 feet across and down the street. She stood, and raised her left hand, bouncing up and down on her toes and waving to get Blake’s attention.
“Blake!” she shouted in controlled volume, wanting his attention, but not wanting to make a spectacle in front of the increasing number of pedestrians. “Over here!”
She watched him cross with the foot traffic, his tall figure easy to follow, since he stood at least a head above most. He raised his hand and smiled while he crossed, acknowledging he had seen her.
Jeddy suddenly stood from beside Morgan’s right leg and strained forward. He bristled and emitted a low growling sound.
“Jeddy!” Morgan scolded. “Sit!” She knelt by the dog and held his leash close to the collar. “No, Jeddy. It’s okay, it’s okay.” She stroked his head and ears while she assured the rottweiler.
Blake Robbins stopped a few yards in front of them, waiting for Jeddy’s mistress to lay the groundwork for the dog to accept his company.
Jeddy relaxed, but kept his eyes upon Robbins, who returned the favor, eyeing the rottweiler warily.
“Is he okay with me now?” Blake Robbin’s words were halting, unsure.
“He’ll be okay. Just approach him gently. Hold your hand palm-up, if you want to let him get to know you,” Morgan said, surprised that Jeddy had spotted Blake so soon in the crowd, then immediately had gone into the bowed-up, pre-attack position.
“Good boy,” Robbins said, squatting and reaching his long fingers toward the dog’s muzzle.
“That’s a good fella,” he said, while Jeddy strained to smell the offered fingers. The dog relaxed a bit, and sat, turning his head to look at Morgan, as if asking, “Did I do okay?”
She patted and hugged him, kneeling, like Robbins, and smiling, first at the dog, then at Blake.
“He will get to know you, and like you,” she said.
“So will his mom, I sure hope.”
“I like you,” she said with an over-emphasized and teasing inflection.
They stood, and he moved slowly around the rottweiler to take Morgan’s hand. He surprised her then with a quick, gentle hug.
A rush of not unpleasant, though startled, emotion ran through her body.
“Thanks for inviting me on your morning walk,” Blake said.
“Thank Jeddy. It was all his idea,” Morgan jokingly lied, her nose wrinkling in a coquettish expression.
“Well, Jed, you and I are going to get on just fine,” Blake said, again kneeling and reaching carefully to let the dog smell his fingers, then patting the rottweiler gently on the nose and head.
“You really think he will get to like me?” Robbins looked up at Morgan and realized her attention was elsewhere, her mouth slack, her eyes unblinking in an expression of disbelief.
“What’s wrong?”
He got to his feet and looked in the direction she was staring.
“Oh, no!” Morgan’s words issued in almost a whisper.
“What’s wrong, Morgan?”
“That man…” She pointed at a crowd of people walking, passing each other. Just behind them was a little bald man with a long white beard. He was dressed in a white robe…white clothing that she could see hung from his shoulders to the sidewalk.
He held a placard. The same words as before, in blood red letters painted upon its surface: “The Kingdom cometh.”
The prophet-like figure raised his hand and pointed at her and Blake. Though the noise was great from the early morning rush, she heard the angry-looking man shout, “Beware, daughter of man! Beware. The kingdom cometh…Beware!”
“What’s wrong, Morgan? What do you see?” Robbins reached to hold her arm while she continued to stare, as if in shock.
He gently shook her arm to get an answer. She blinked, her thoughts cleared, and she looked into his eyes.
“What? Oh, I don’t know. That little man with the sign.” She looked at the pedestrian crowd again. The robed figure and his sign were gone.
Crestone Needle, the highest of the spires, jutted into the bright Colorado sky just ahead. The big chopper thumped its way northwestward, its powerful engines at near-full throttle while it leaned into the wind that had kicked up sometime in the mid-morning hours.
His conversation with Bruce Wilson, before catching the helicopter to an unknown destination, replayed in Clark’s memory.
“What’s this all about? What does this have to do with the Bigfoot reports?”
Bruce Wilson’s gruff question was laced with swear words. He was clearly not happy with the expenses his reporter was accruing on this trip.
“All you’ve told me so far is that you’ve had a look at some government videotape about some Star Trek-type thingamajig. You can’t even verify its authenticity. You say it could be faked,” Wilson growled, then paused to hear his reporter’s retort.
“Yeah, well, it sure appears to be the real thing. It’s just that the stuff I find on the Net about teletransportation is antithesis to the current knowledge of the physics involved.”
There was silence on the line for several seconds.
“What the hell, exactly, does that mean, Lansing?” the editor-in-chief of the New York Examiner said, finally.
“What I saw, or thought I saw, defies the law of physics.”
Again, the silence.
“It’s impossible that the technology is authentic, huh?” Wilson said after a few more uncomfortable seconds.
“It’s the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle that presents the problem,” Clark said.
“The what? What the blazes is that?!”
“The Heisenberg indeterminacy principle… Has something to do with individual molecules and momentum,” Clark said. “Has to do with quantum physics, and the theory of molecular or atomic particle movements through space and time. In other words, I don’t know exactly what it means. But, according to what I’ve been able to gather from what I read about attempts at teletransportation and that sort of thing, it is not possible, based upon present technologies.”
Again, silence reigned over the cell linkage.
“Then why the ruse? Why are they stringing us--stringing you--along?” Wilson’s tone had mellowed to one of curiosity rather than angry impatience.
“That’s what a reporter’s job is, isn’t it? To investigate these things, and find out the answers to the cover-ups and all that?”
“Yeah, wise guy. And you ain’t doing such a hot job of it so far, despite all the big bucks we’ve been throwing into all of this travel.”
“We’ll just call it off, and I’ll stay at my own expense. I will sell it, I guarantee you,” Clark retorted with feigned irritation, knowing Wilson was blustering.
“No, no--we’ll see this thing through to the end.”
“Okay. But, we’re taking chances, talking by cell like this. Don’t think we should talk again until I can get to a land line–one not located here.”
A sudden jolt shook Clark from his memory of earlier in the morning.
“Sorry about that,” the military ‘copter pilot said over the ship’s intercom. “There are some strong bursts going on between these mountains. Everything is fine.”
Clark looked around at the men and women who accompanied him on the flight from just outside Alamosa. Each seemed busily engaged in reading materials or looking at laptop screens. None seemed perturbed over the turbulence. Obviously, he surmised, the trip was almost routine to them.
He watched the sharp-edged rock formations whisk by, deep crevasses between their angry projections providing beautiful, though deadly reminders of how close he was to death, spared only by the pilot’s skills and the chopper’s mechanical integrity.
But he couldn’t think of the lethal consequences of p
ilot error or mechanical failure. He had learned long ago to tune out such things when helplessly encased within the planes or choppers that flew him to assignments around the world. He recalled his father’s words: “Better above the madness than down there in the madness.”
His Dad had often taken his sister and him along on flights, when Delta allowed such privileges. Usually, it was to deposit them for summer visits at their grandmother’s house in Santa Fe, or at their other grandmother’s in San Antonio. Flight was second nature. Still, he had seldom flown through such rugged terrain with such powerful winds whipping violently about the big helicopter.
Thoughts of April Warmath brought his mind back into his remembered conversations, the conversations they had while awaiting this trip deeper into the rocky crags of Colorado.
She was a beauty, and he did all he could to make himself forget she was almost mesmerizing in her loveliness. He was a reporter with a story to write. He had to get past his attraction to her unintentional allurement to his lustful side.
“You are taking a risk, Clark. I can’t lie to you,” she had said on that brisk early morning while the two of them walked in the copse of trees just behind the vacation cabins.
“What kind of risk?”
“More than just a risk of your job, I’m afraid.”
“You mean like a James Bond type risk?” Clark had said with a chuckle.
“You aren’t that far off. There are people who are part of the project who would do whatever necessary to protect their efforts. And, I do mean they would do anything.”
“Well, I’ve got some experience with danger,” he said, speaking with a best-he-could-muster James Bond-like voice that displayed teasing bravado. “I was in the mountains of Afghanistan while the fighting with the Taliban was going on in 2003.”
“Looking for Bigfoot?”
He was pleased she could return the banter and felt closer to her in that light moment.
Clark said, after several seconds of studying the pretty face, “Yeah. Osama bin Laden.”
April’s demeanor seemed to melt just a bit, and a rapprochement seemed to have been accomplished. They turned from their face-to-face discussion, then began walking slowly down the little path leading deeper into the forest.
“So, if I’m asked, I am to say that I’m there to gather information, so I can report that America is being well served by the goings-on in the area. Is that the story?”
“Yes. We’ve got clearance for you to check out what they will allow. And they will allow you to check out the technological control nerve center that was completed about a month ago. They will allow you a look, to some extent, at least,” April said, her face turned downward toward the path while they walked.
“But the thing I’m actually here to do is investigate the treatment of the prisoners from Guantanimo…From Gitmo?” Clark said, like his companion, watching the path just in front of them while they walked.
“We’ve got to make the world aware of these abuses. If we don’t stop this torture, then we’re terrorists every bit as much as those who flew those planes into the Trade Towers.”
“What about the creatures? When will I get to investigate them?”
“The creatures are part of this horror. You will see.”
The helicopter leaped in a sharp upward lurch, leaving Clark’s stomach somewhere below. The violence served to snatch his mind from the pathway conversation. He watched the walls of the mountains from his porthole seat as they climbed, hoping with all that was within him that the pilot hadn’t suddenly realized he must gain altitude to avoid crashing.
He watched, then, while the chopper topped the rim of a peak, and a deep depression opened into an expansive valley. From 9,000 feet, he could see the several silver-blue lakes, surrounded by a lush forest that looked to spread for miles to the north and west. Gargantuan peaks of lavender and dark purple-shaded gray surrounded the evergreen floor toward which the copter now descended. Within two minutes, the bird swung its tail toward the northeast, then settled onto a landing pad he had not seen on the way down.
The huge blades rotated to a swishing stop, and when Clark’s turn came to disembark through the sliding door on the side of the big helicopter, his eyes met those that were familiar. They were the beautiful green eyes of April Warmath.
Chapter 7
Christopher Banyon sucked in the high desert air, letting his breath expel slowly through clenched teeth. The Hungarian Vizsla walked beside his master while Banyon surveyed the terrain composed of plateaus and hills that ascended in the distance to become high ridges. He once thought it would be good to have no trees to interfere with seeing as far as he cared to look. He had gotten his wish, and the winters spent here in western Arizona provided the warmth he had longed for, even as a 17-year-old chopping wood in the forests of his native Maine.
It was always good to come back to the winter home, knowing the snow would soon start flying around Mitford House. He would return to Maine for the two weeks surrounding Christmas--would do it for the children and grandchildren. Arizona just didn’t seem right for Christmas time. But, then it would be back to near Phoenix to settle in the desert home, far from the forests where he long ago had to chop wood for the fireplaces that were the only sources of warmth during those bone-chilling New England winters.
He touched the stick he held in his right hand to the dog’s nose, and teased the canine, who jumped and snapped playfully at the piece of wood.
“Get it, Klaus!”
Banyon threw the stick as far as he could manage. The sleek gold-and –rust-colored animal surged forward in a powerful charge, tearing up the sandy soil when he applied paws and claws to brake. He returned to his master, waving the stick, and teased Banyon, staying just out of the man’s range so that he couldn’t grasp the toy. But, the dog didn’t have the patience to continue the game of keep-away. He wanted the stick thrown again, so let his master take it from him.
Christopher tried to throw the stick farther than before. He felt the twinge in his 74-year-old shoulder, and massaged it with his left hand, rotating the shoulder, then stretching and flexing the throwing arm to lessen the discomfort. He thought of all the former major league pitchers his age. What must their shoulders feel like? He smiled and clapped his hands toward the dog, who raced toward him with the stick between his teeth in a distinctive expression of canine joy.
“Good boy, Klaus! Very good!”
Banyon went to one knee and embraced the Vizsla, who licked his master’s cheek before Christopher was able to avoid the dog’s affectionate action. He wiped the just-kissed skin with the shirtsleeve of the hurting shoulder and ruffled and hugged Klaus’ neck.
Something caught his attention in the distance, and he stared past the dog nestled against his chest. The sky above the sand-colored ridge was in the lavender-gray state of late afternoon, so the oval object hanging above the promontory’s center stood out in a bright point of light.
He squinted to focus better. It wasn’t a star; it was too early for a star to appear so starkly. A planet? Venus? No. Too large for a star or planet…
“What do we have here, Klaus?” Christopher stood, still watching the gleaming object in the southwestern sky. The ridge was no more than a mile, he knew from previous hikes in the area.
“Come on, boy. Let’s have a look-see,” he said, beginning the trek toward the raised terrain and the glowing object that appeared to hang in the sky above the ridge.
The thing seemed to expand horizontally, its light diffusing somewhat while they drew nearer the upraised terrain. When they were within a football field’s distance from the sloping outcrop, the glimmering shape contracted into what looked to be a perfect sphere, grew blindingly bright, and shot upward and out of sight at phenomenal speed.
Christopher stood, looking up, stunned by what he had witnessed. Klaus whimpered and shifted from his sitting position beside his master, glancing nervously upward at the man.
Again, able to see his surroun
dings after following the sun-bright light, Christopher looked at the ridge. A chill of realization ran up his spine. It looked very much like another site from long ago. No. It looked exactly like that place in Qmran in 1967--the cave of the Dead Sea Scrolls!
Was he delusional? Had he and the dog been in the desert so long that he was now seeing things? Was this a mirage? He turned to look behind them. This was not the desert of America’s great southwest. This wasn’t Arizona. But how? It was Qmran, the Middle East. Banyon looked at the slope leading to near the top of the small mountain. There! Near the top! A black hole. The cave…
George Jenkins and two underlings walked in hurried strides down one of the five small tunnels leading to the huge cavern that housed the three-story metal structure. The building under construction was to be identical to the one in Cheyenne Mountain, which housed NORAD, the joint security defense facility for the U.S. and Canada. Like the Cheyenne facility, this one, when completed, was expected to be capable of taking an almost direct hit by a five-megaton nuclear strike and surviving. But, it was deeper, and farther into this mountain. It was believed to be set within much more dependable granite and was sitting upon a series of massive springs that could absorb either nuclear shock or an earthquake of considerable magnitude.
“Do you have things ready for the test, Gerald?” The tone of Jenkin’s commanding question left little room for a negative response.
“Yes, sir,” the small, thin man in the white lab coat and Day-Glo orange construction helmet said. “We are good to go at 15:30 hours.”
Jenkins said nothing but stepped up the pace toward the gigantic cavern.
“Sir, we are a bit confused on the subject of the test,” said the other man, a short, corpulent scientist who struggled to keep up with the two men.
Jenkins cursed, looking toward the first man who had spoken. “I thought you said things were on go.”
“Well, sir, we never received orders on exactly what…who…the subject is to be for this particular test.”
