A Twist in Time (19 page)

“We’ve been doing that since yesterday morning,” was Jose’s reply.  

After they hung up the call, Fred Landry spoke up for the first time, “Okay, if we all go out there and we’re successful, then…”

He was greeted by moans from Bill and Sally.  Janet finished his thought, “Then we didn’t have to go so we never went so…”

“My head hurts.” Ted complained.      

As it turned out, Sally and Fred didn’t think they needed to go to Nevada.  They stayed in Florida to work on closing the Homestead facility and improving the capabilities in Nevada.  Bill and Janet went with Ted to help with targeting.  

Very early on Wednesday morning in Nevada, the crew of the Alternate site and the visitors from Florida gathered in the alternate facility’s multi-purpose room.  Jose took the floor to brief Ted. 

“The blast pattern of the Times Square bomb shows us that it is probably identical to one that was found and defused outside the “Tiger Tiger” night club in London.  As this diagram shows, practically any damage we do to the gas cylinders or explosives with a glass sphere would prevent the bomb from going off.  Almost every bomb, except plastique or special military materials like C4, uses a small amount of fast explosive and a large amount of slow explosive.  The slow explosive in this case is propane. Even if we ignite the propane slow explosive in this bomb, without the fast explosive all we get is a car fire.”

Jose continued, “The open source press and Internet sources have excellent diagrams.  From pre-blast street photos available in open sources we can pinpoint the van down to about a quarter inch on the street corner.  We are ninety-nine percent certain of our targeting.” 

Ted already knew the answer to the question he was about to ask, but he had to ask it. “How long do we keep shooting?  “How many beads?” 

Bill answered the question with a shrug of his shoulders.  “Until time closes us off and we don’t need to do it.”     

Chapter  19:  "Do Nothing"

1900 Sunday, May 2, 2010

Project Headquarters, Homestead ARB, FL

Excerpt from the Personal Narrative of Mr. Ted Arthurs   

Recorded April 2014

UNCLASSIFIED    

"I have no knowledge that we took any action associated with the so-called Times Square bomber.  That was a while ago.”

This time Ted was working late while Sally was at home.  Lately it had often been the other way around.  Only a couple of weeks had passed since their meeting in Washington, but they were well underway with plans to draw down the Homestead facility.  Much of the burden of making things happen had fallen on Sally as the Director of Administration over a tiny staff of three people.  Tonight, Ted was endorsing fitness reports when his desk phone rang.  The duty controller said, “General, there’s a news item that you should see.”    

Ted walked down the hall to the operations room.  The on-duty team had the main screen divided into news feeds from two different networks.  “It looks like someone planted a car bomb in Times Square,” the controller reported tersely.  “But it appears to be a dud.  Smoke and some flames, but no one hurt.  A couple of street vendors alerted a mounted NYPD officer and he called it in, so it was put down pretty quickly.” 

Ted nodded, “Okay. Thanks for the heads-up.  Monitor the situation and take no action.  This doesn’t look like it’s one for us.” 

Chapter  20: "Decisions?"

0945 Saturday, May 8, 2010

Boulder City Pool and Racquetball Complex, Boulder City, CO

Excerpt from the Personal Narrative of Mr. Jose Valenzuela   

Recorded June  2012

UNCLASSIFIED  

"It’s true.  Some guys are little hesitant when it comes to women. “

Jose watched the blue ball bounce twice 25 feet in front of him.  He had no chance.  Racquetball is the semi-official Air Force sport.  Even the smallest arctic Air Force station can squeeze in a racquetball court, the equipment is inexpensive, and the game improves agility, balance, stamina, and other good things while carrying little danger of injury. 

But, as he learned quickly, Rae Dunnan had all of those qualities along with practice.  She ran him from the front wall of the court to the back wall and then put a drop shot in the front corner that he couldn’t reach.  He could make the ball move faster than she could when he got to it, but getting a racket on the ball was becoming a bigger challenge for him as she wore him down. 

“Okay,” he said while trying hard not to sound winded, “two games out of three.  You won fair and square. And, I think you let me win the first one just so I’d keep playing. ”

“Could be!” she said with a smile, “but you’ll never know.”   She smiled to herself, “Poor man.  NASA had us playing for two hours a day and they even paid for coaches.”

Rae arrived in September of the previous year and they briefed her fully into the mission of The Project in November.  Before that briefing, her relationship with Jose was cool.  She knew that the rest of the team was keeping secrets from her and, though she intellectually understood the reasons, emotionally she didn’t like being an untrusted outsider.   

After the barriers of secrecy went down, their relationship warmed, but it still had a formality imposed by their professional roles.  It also didn’t help that during part of that time the blonde who insisted on being called Jelli kept bouncing around in Jose’s life. 

Rae drove to UNLV to teach a couple of nights a week and had to do prep work at other times, so she kept busy.  Jose and Rae hung out at unit parties, flew together in the F-5 every few weeks, and kind of double dated at dinner a few times, but there was a wall holding them back. 

During the UNLV Christmas break, Rae flew to Japan with Fred Landry to visit scientists she knew through the space program.  The Japanese Hayabusa mission to an asteroid had returned to Earth and the Japanese announced that they had particles in the sampling chamber.  Rae had helped to coordinate the original Japanese probe with NASA, so she had a legitimate reason for the trip.

From the point of view of the Project, the goal of her trip was to find out how much the Japanese understood about time bending and perhaps what they intended to do with the knowledge.  The Japanese were classically polite and completely solid in their professed ignorance.  By now, Fred Landry was openly skeptical of the intelligence data describing the buildup of a time warping site on the Japanese island of Hokkaido.  

At the end of March 2010 the Large Hadron Collider at CERN began its first full power operation. As Fred Landry feared, the LHC created standing waves that were seen as noise on some of the sensors The Project used to detect time tunneling events.  Rae and Fred worked on tweaking filtering programs through April and they still spent a lot of time refining observations.

Jose hadn’t seen Jelli since before Christmas, the rumor mill said she was talking about moving to Australia with Jack, and there certainly was no other romantic interest in his life.  He was afraid he was a little obsessed with Rae, but he didn’t know how to handle it.  The professional relationship was a barrier between them, so he was happy to get her into the neutral setting of the city park’s racquetball court.  As an added complication, he was still trying to figure out how to tell her what had come out of the Army Navy Country Club meeting a couple of weeks earlier. 

They put their rackets, eye protectors, and towels in his truck and then walked to a deli a block away where Jose knew they could sit outside.  She had on a Lycra sports top and shorts.  As they walked, Jose noticed that she glistened.  He liked the effect. 

Once they were settled with coffee in hand, Jose said, “I have news.”

Rae looked at him, “Project news?” 

Jose nodded. 

“Can it wait?” she asked. 
“Pleeez!”
she thought.

“Absolutely,” he replied. 

“Can we get in your truck, go to your house, and take a shower?” she asked.  She looked at him with such innocence that he knew she meant just the opposite. 

He stood up and reached for her hand.  They picked up their coffees and walked pretty quickly back to the truck. As he opened the door for her, she kissed him in a way that made it difficult for him to get into the left seat and drive home.

                                -----

The sun was going down.  It was cool and she was wearing one of his sweatshirts.  Her long legs were curled under her on the chaise lounge.  They were sitting next to his pool eating cold barbeque chicken when she said, “Okay, what did you want to tell me?”

“Not now,” he complained.  “My brain is mush.  Woman want too much sex.  Man must eat, sleep, regain strength.”

“That’s the best time to talk,” she said as she wiped her hands on a paper towel. 

He nodded, sighed, smiled, reached over to touch her, and then lowered his voice to a whisper, “We… you and I… have some things to figure out.” 

He went on to describe the change in mission and the desire of everyone in Washington who knew the details of the Project to distance themselves from it.  He talked in general terms about the Army Navy Country Club meeting, described the fading away of the Project’s official status, and speculated on how all of these changes might impact him.  He talked slowly and with some pauses as he framed the story, but Rae didn’t interrupt. 

He ended with, “I don’t know what these changes will mean for me, for you, and for us.” 

She looked at him with raised eyebrows, “For us?”  She was suddenly hot and cold at the same time.

“I’d like that,” he replied.  “I like to think of us.”

“I’m working on the idea,” she said. 
“Not too fast with this one”
she thought.  “You have great potential, but you sure have intimacy issues.”  Before he could protest she moved over and kissed him with a lot of passion. An hour later, if you perhaps were walking your dog past the house in this quiet subdivision, you would have heard a woman cry in anguish, “No more white jet?”  Jose didn’t get to sleep until many hours after that. 

Chapter  21: "Stay or Go?"

1307 Wednesday, October 13, 2010

TDA Detachment 1,  Boulder City, Nevada

Excerpt from the Personal Narrative of Mrs. Sally Arthurs    

Recorded April 2014

UNCLASSIFIED    

"Personal changes are often tough.  That’s why society makes such a big deal out of some changes like marriage.  We were making many changes to occupation, job status, and even job titles while trying to avoid public view.  That makes it more difficult on everyone.

”The Arthurs’ plane landed on time at McCarran, Sir.” 

“Thanks, Craig,” Lt. Colonel Jose Valenzuela responded to his operations officer.  “Sally told me they plan to drive straight here.” 

“We’re ready,” Pulliam replied. 

Jose turned back into his office and smiled at Dr. Rae Dunnan who was seated on his office couch. The office was small and he reached out and touched her left hand without moving from the doorway.  She smiled in response, but neither one of them said anything.  Jose took another walk around to make sure everything was in order, although they both knew he was just burning off nervous energy.

The months since May were quiet operationally, but busy in many other ways.  They completed an expansion of the operations building into what had been a spacious parking lot.  New computing and data storage facilities were installed and some people transferred from Homestead were in Boulder City and hoped to be settled before the holidays.