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CHAPTER 34

Near Tampa, Florida

Task Force HQ

Monday

3:05 p.m. Eastern Time


“Remote viewing has been used by the CIA since the 1970s to varying degrees of success,” Banks explained, trying not to get heated. “Hey, none of this is admissible in court, but it is data!”

“I can’t make heads or tails out of any of this gobbledygook.” Dr. Grayson smirked as if the concept were too fringe and not real science for such a serious individual as himself. “Have you actually gotten actionable intelligence from this in the past, Ginny?”

“Many times,” Ginny said softly as she sank back into her chair.

“I’ve seen stranger shit,” Mac added. “But I’m not sure where, Dr. Banks.”

“But do the words or drawings mean anything to any of you?” she asked. “Some of it does to me.”

“Yeah, but they had all the information about the missing nukes so that part was easy.” Grayson laughed. “Fortune-tellers.”

“Not at all! I neglected to explain this to you. No. No, they didn’t. Each of the three viewers is trained through the CIA school, but live in locations in different states. They couldn’t have cheated because the only information they were given was the case number. All other data pertaining to this case number is in a file folder locked away in my safe in my office with this case number written on it. They don’t even know it came from me—well, except for Paul. I sent the number to him. But he is bound by contract not to reveal any information but the case number to the other analysts. And—I repeat: and—the viewers encrypt the packages and send them to a certain shared drive. That is all the common knowledge they have.”

“How in the fuck could that even work?” Major Thompson was sincerely amazed, by the look on his face. “Look, I’m not a nuclear physics guy, but I know the drawing of a fission-fusion-fission bomb when I see one and all three of these people drew it! And all three of them said there were six of them in some form or fashion.”

“I agree with you, Major. And nobody has developed a testable theory, yet, as to why this works. But we’re desperate. And it won’t hurt to take a look and see if these efforts help us.” Ginny nodded. “Anybody have ideas on the rest?”

“Uh, sirs, ma’am?” A1C Shannon raised her hand.

“What you got, Sonya?” Frank asked loudly, trying to get some order back to the table.

“Uh, well, um, Colonel, I was watching this old video the other night. Man of Steel. Ever seen it? Was the old Superman movie made back, forever ago,” Shannon started explaining. Her description was clearly showing her disparate age in comparison to the others’ as there was a mutual groan about the table.

“Seen it, airman. Keep going.” Frank motioned his hand in a circuitous motion.

“Well, there’s a very short scene in there where Clark Kent rescues people on an offshore oil well out at sea, and…”

“Son of a bitch!” Mac shouted while slapping the table with his right hand. “Oh, sorry. Airman, you’re right. I’ve done enough practice raids on offshore rigs to know this is exactly what is drawn here. Look here, we have the four pillars each standing on a wavy line. Water. All these rigs have cranes on them and the oil tower in the middle and so on.”

“Okay, that narrows it down to like a billion oil wells.” Grayson was beginning to sound more interested but from the tone of his voice he still wasn’t ready to buy in to the whole remote-viewing thing. “But I’ll start a search. Any parameters to narrow that down would be good.”

“Look at this list,” Dugan added. “Black, water. Black Sea, maybe?”

“There are many offshore rigs in the Black Sea,” Frank noted. “Why not start there? It is close to the last known location of the nukes. Mac, you might have been right about getting to the Black Sea rather than the Caspian.”

“Pretty sure that was your assessment, Colonel,” Mac said humbly.

“Anything else?” Ginny asked the group.

“Well, I’m still getting up to speed on everything,” Captain Shelly Ames of the U.S. Space Force interrupted. She was new to the team but seemed highly skilled and knowledgeable about missile and space systems. Frank noticed she was adorned with a patch of some sort of wings like pilot’s wings but he’d never seen that particular patch before. He made a mental note to ask some day. “But I’m pretty sure these curves here are the same launch and orbit trajectories in the notes from Watkins. Dr. Castlebaum, wouldn’t you agree?”

Everyone turned to look at Amy, who had been completely quiet and totally absorbed in the reports, scribbling notes and doing math on the page. She flipped to another page, comparing the drawings and numbers by pointing to one with her left pointer finger and the other with the pencil in her right hand as she turned her head back and forth between them. Dugan elbowed her lightly.

“Amy?” he whispered.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Give me a minute.” Amy got up from the table and ran over to one of the terminal systems that had been set up in the room. “Oh, shit, I don’t have an account on any of these. Could one of you log in for me?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Airman Shannon stood up and tapped in her information, opening a screen for her. “I’ll get you an account today. Sorry, ma’am. What do you want to do here?”

“Type into your favorite search engine ‘International Space Station CO SPAR ID.’ Just like that. C-O spacebar S-P-A-R spacebar I-D.”

“Okay.” A1C Shannon entered the data, then read the return from the search engine. “Says here, ‘1998067A.’”

“Right. Thought so. Now this: ISS Satellite Catalog Number,” Amy said.

“Yes, ma’am. Um, it says, ‘25544.’ Wow!” Shannon replied. “I get it!”

“‘Wow’ is right.” Amy said and she walked back to the table and plopped down in her chair. “I was pretty sure when I saw this second string of numbers here—the 51.6416. Anybody that lives in Huntsville, Alabama, and is a rocket scientist knows that is the inclination angle of the ISS. But double-checking the ID numbers, well, I’m certain.”

“Amy?” Dugan looked at her wide-eyed. “Care to clue the rest of us in?”

“Yeah. Sorry, oh, shit, wait! Shannon, right?” She turned to the airman.

“Yes, ma’am, you can call me Sonya if you prefer.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry, Sonya. Search this for me. Just like this: ‘current two-line element for ISS.’”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sonya started tapping away at the keys. “Okay, here is a bunch of numbers and stuff. It starts like these other numbers with the number 1 and then 25544U, just like those.” Sonya turned and looked back at Amy.

“Copy them onto a doc and print them out for me,” Amy said. “We’ll need to get somebody from Space Command in Colorado to give us the real up-to-date classified data. The U is the ‘unclassified’ version.”

“Of course!” Captain Ames apparently realized what the rocket scientist was talking about. “These numbers are TLEs! I’ll be damned. Ma’am, I can get that from here.”

Ames jumped up and logged into an adjacent terminal and did some searching and typing and dragging the mouse around until she apparently had hit pay dirt. Dugan still looked at Amy wide-eyed and clueless. He wasn’t alone.

“Here is the unclass one, ma’am.” Sonya handed her the printout.

“Okay, great. This is the TLE, the two-line element data that we use to tell us where any orbiting spacecraft is located at any given time. We can project them forward with some accuracy based on the NORAD radar data. You see this first number ‘1’ just means line number one. The second set of numbers is the ISS ID. Every bird up there has its own identification number. All these other numbers in the first row just tell us the orbital parameters of the particular spacecraft that we use to put into our Simplified General Perturbations prediction model. There are a few other models that work better but this one gets you within a kilometer or so of the actual location. You get that close to the space station and you can’t miss it. Hell, it’s damned near as big as Bryant Denny Stadium.”

“So, these numbers tell us its general orbit?” Ginny asked.

“Yes, and between the first and the second lines we can determine where it is now,” Amy said.

“Alright, here are the classified numbers, Dr. Castlebaum. Should get you even closer.” Captain Ames handed her a printout with the word SECRET printed at top and bottom.

“Okay, so here is the thing, it’s this number here in the first line that tells you what year. Okay, that’s us. Then this long number here with the decimal point is the day of the year and fraction thereof. In other words, the date and time,” Amy said. She started looking at the numbers just handed to her and comparing them to the numbers in the remote viewing package. But there was a discrepancy. “Look here. The numbers for now today are 2973.21742528. First two numbers are the year. Next set of numbers is the day of the year and then the fraction. Today is the seventy-third day of the year.”

“Amy, the number in this packet says the seventy-fourth day,” Dugan pointed out to her.

“I will note that sometimes the analysts get the numbers and finite details very wrong,” Ginny added.

“Ha! I can’t believe that,” Dr. Grayson said.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Frank added. “I’m looking at the two that had numbers and they are exactly the same numbers, 2974.31742528.”

“That would be some time tomorrow,” Amy said. “I mean, if this is real stuff. And honestly, I’ve been thinking on what platform these guys were planning on launching to. There aren’t many up there. I was assuming they were going to launch a satellite into orbit. This makes much more sense!”

“Wait!” Frank held up a hand, quieting people down. “Dr. Castlebaum, what makes sense to you?”

“These guys are going to use a Russian rocket. Probably a Zenit variant using LOX/kerosene propellants. They are going to launch from, I don’t know, maybe an oil… Holy shit! Sea Launch! They’re copying Sea Launch. Back in the nineties, a private company tried to get started up but failed in the end. They were called Sea Launch. They launched over two or maybe three dozen times using a—wait for it—Russian Zenit-3SL rocket using LOX/kerosene. And they launched from a modified oil rig. They put a bunch of satellites into orbit—even all the way to geosynchronous orbit. A Zenit-3SL could easily do what the Watkins drawings and calculations suggest. Once at the ISS, they could easily do the reentries with the nukes on glide bodies like Dr. Grayson has suggested.” Amy sat up in her seat and crossed her right leg over her left triumphantly swinging her foot back and forth underneath the table. “I think they are going to launch a Zenit-3SL with six nukes onboard, and probably people, from a modified oil rig, maybe in the Black Sea, maybe some other body of water, to the ISS sometime tomorrow.”

“We need eyes on the Black Sea right now!” Frank said.

“I’m on it, Frank. I’ll get with my guys at NRO now.” Mac stood and hurried to a secure phone.

“The Black Sea is damned big,” Ginny said.

“I can start running parameters on imagery of oil rigs through Cascade,” Dr. Grayson said. “Maybe we can narrow it down some. Amy, are there any other telltale signs that might help us discriminate this oil rig from a standard one?”

“Hmmm, let me think. They’d probably have to evacuate the rig before launch so there would be a command or launch control ship nearby. Since the Zenit uses liquid oxygen, it is cryogenic, meaning very cold. So, I bet, like most other land launch facilities using cryo propellants there will be a tower near the launch tower with a cryo-tank on it. How many oil rigs have two towers on them? I dunno?” Amy said.

“I need to call the Joint Chiefs,” Frank said. “Ginny, somebody needs to reach out to the Director of National Intelligence. That’s up your bailiwick.”

“Agreed.”

“Mac, you might reach out to your one-star when you get off that call,” Frank said loud enough for him to hear.

“Copy that.” Mac nodded as he cupped the receiver with his hand.

“Frank.” Toby caught his attention. “Before you call your bosses, I need a minute.”

“Do we even have enough diplomatic relations that we could do a strike in the Black Sea?” Major Thompson asked. “I mean, isn’t part of it owned by Turkey too? This shit might start a war. Maybe someone should tell the Russians?”

“Above our pay grades,” Frank said. “But somebody needs to stop this launch.”

“I doubt we’d have time to get anybody there,” Captain Ames said. “If Dr. Castlebaum is correct, these people plan to launch tomorrow midday.”

“Holy shit!” A1C Shannon said almost simultaneously, covering her mouth as she did.

“Holy fucking shit, Airman,” Major Thompson corrected her.

“Yes, sir.”

“We have to report this up.” Ginny turned to Castlebaum. “Great work.”

“You’re the one with the freaky analysts.” Amy laughed. “How in the hell this works is beyond me.”

“I would say luck, but now I’m concerned my take on the universe is, um, limited,” Grayson said. “This is beyond fascinating and, frankly, very terrifying.”

“I have heard of RV, but never been part of it. Damned hard to comprehend,” Captain Ames agreed. “I’ll get on the horn with Space Command right now and have them start watching for radar tracks. We should contact the high and low infrared asset units and put them on high alert for launch detections. I need to contact my CO also.”

“Please go pass that along to Chief McKagan when he gets off the phone, if you will?” Banks told her.

“Copy that, ma’am.”

“I have calls to make.” Dr. Banks was already folding her things together and was rising to move out on whatever action plan she could manage to put together in the next few minutes. “We have more to go on now. And we’ll take it. Everyone, please keep moving forward on this assessment as it appears we may have little time until something else happens.”

“Toby, with me.” Frank stood and started out the SCIF door with the FBI man in tow.

“Amy, you did it.” Dugan smiled at her. He didn’t budge when Castelbaum turned just enough so that her swinging toe slid behind his right calf muscle and stayed there gently rubbing up and down. There was so much excitement in the room a man in a gorilla suit playing basketball could have walked through and nobody would have noticed it.


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