Going Deep

“Going Deep”

A Gravity Seeking Squad Adventure Story in Telluride Co.

In the middle of nowhere lies the old mining town of Telluride, long ago a serious source of gold, silver and copper now in the “white gold’ business competing with Sun Valley for the well healed skiers. Complete with top line talent for its music festivals and a Sundance like film that feels just a little more special. Trendy millennials work the lifts and shops and some have set the place as a hidden Williamsburg with a West coast surfer vibe (lots of flat brimmed caps, even on the ladies).

It is here the agency has sent the 10 of us, on a 90 year old lead. APEX the agency’s latest super computer has been searching old agency data, going back to 1800s in some cases. The correlated results pushed up to core leadership, who are sending squads like ours off on seemingly aimless missions to find answers to questions no one ever asked. When we signed up we all knew the risks, but looking for a key when we haven’t identified the lock or even a door seems a bit like the agency just screwing with our psyche. Which for those knowing us, we are pretty unstable to begin with?  I mean who in their right mind would sign up with and agency that was so secrete it doesn’t even have a set of cool initials or acronym.

There are politics in every organization and the Agency is no different. Ever since the Banff mission went off the rails we have been assigned to the “old man” who’s heyday was establishing the back channels to help take down the wall.

Third from high command, since being pushed aside by the young turks who know tech better, but who’s field experience is like pee wee flag football in comparison. The old man has held secrets about secretes, many believe he has lost it. The commander keeps him close in private but not in public. He fairly young, having made major intel score during the Iraq conflict, contradictory WMD info to what the politic wanted. Never the less, key underground leadership were impressed. A chess grandmaster at 17, even worked on some of the software development at IBM for Deep Blue, the machine that beat Kasparov the best human player in the world. He put his mental power into creating APEX and the agencies new direction, one result is our Telluride mission. Computers can mine data but someone has to be in the field to connect the dots and validate. 

Number two is known in the trenches as Mr. Smile, first impressions are of a bright well educated gentleman who had a captivating smile and eyes. But we see is differently, the smile and look of the Joker when he has a knife in your back. We know the Banff debacle was his doing, to make us look bad and result on our demotion from the commanders #1 Squad to the Old Man’s only squad.

The Squad

Squad leader is Mel, tall and to the point he sets the time and place for everything. A competent pre- planner and as it turn out a great chef. There are some big players in the group who run their own shows in the real world, but check their egos, when the squad forms.  His key support is Divit, who is always to his right. They go way back and sometimes previous antics come up, usually after a few and while staring at a fire. These are the few times some deep secrets and scars are shared, though never fully.  Divit is the quiet type but a deep thinker and runs a program for the agency in public view, a chain of card stores. These have become the top secrete communication channel, sure we have super encryption, but the most secrete intel is exchanged the old fashioned way coded and hand written. What a better way to communicate than receiving a coded greeting card.

Our legal eagle is Jim, a partner in a well-respected law practice that looks like a standard business practice, but is actually one the most informed about international law and the clandestine agreements between world powers on espionage.  He keeps us from crossing the line, well that not really true, more like how far over we are…

In charge of local reconnaissance is Wolf, he has the courage the lion longed for and is always out finding that tidbit of info which makes the mission.  Taken under his wings on this mission two of the young guns RemXO and Dan, both have been on missions before and we are impressed,  they burn the midnight oil and as most new recruits. They have been able to secure some valuable local intel, sometime from a boisterous old timer who has had a few, or a damsel in distress.

Jamio and Kel are past the late scene, most nights. They are our forward attack team. Speed is there best tool, in and out of tight situations and traversing the most difficult terrain.  They are the ones who will see first if you send a distress call. 

Wild Bill is motor pool and surveillance.  Has arranges of road transport for all our missions, this one is no exception, we had a away team of four who need to make it far in the range to an old hunter’s cabin Bill made all the arrangements. HQ called him back mid-week, they are short these type of technical and logistic experts who know how to get things done without a commuter. The new recruits are nerds who have lots of classroom time but prime experience is surfing the net, put a wrench in their hand and they want to google a video on how to use it. Bill is self-trained, and an intuitive diagnostician and can fix any vehicle, in the action and under fire. The squad like hanging late night with Wild Bill and his Crown Royal listing to the stories of past mission. 

I am Dex; “scribe” is typed on my agency creds, I signed up before the last typewriter… 

The Mission

Over 300 miles of tunnels dug in Telluride, ideal don’t you think for an underground operations center. And a tunnel reaching the hot springs in Ouray, provides a constant power source. Here lies the epicenter of 1960’s agency operations and although closed for decades for more swank coastal digs it still remains top secret.  Our mission is to locate “the beacon” a device created by Nicholai Tesla during WWI. It was so ahead if it’s time that military elite could not understand it so they buried it. Today we know what it is and its power, a global EMP Electromagnetic Pulse Generator. A devise that could in a millisecond render every electrical system, radio and computer useless.  And unlike the limited EMP’s recently developed by DARPA which have only a few miles range last only a few minutes, this one uses the resonant frequency of the earth itself sustaining its energy forever. If deployed the only way to stop it is by an Alternating Harmonic Generator which would be powered by the same resonance of the earth, unfortunately Tesla never finished the generator, having lost his financing and then his sanity. Needless to say the device we understand to be fully charged by the hot springs thermal generator, and if falling into the wrong hands could be deployed in an instant. We are informed it is a onetime device; the energy discharged destroys the machine itself. At first hearing of this device we wondered who would want to set society back this far, to the age of oil lamps. It did not take us long to connect the dots, The Crimson Tide came immediately to mind among others. It seems that same group has serious hacking capability and discovered the existence of the device, even though the Agency thought it buried it deep. If APEX did not dig into all that old data it would not have been discovered. Looks like we handed the keys to the enemy… again. So the clock is ticking we know there are a number of cells working the area and looking for the right tunnel to find the secrete chamber that holds the GEMP(Global EMP). Our mission is to find it first and detonate it underground in the coper, gold and silver lined tunnels, there by sending all the energy to the earth’s core to be absorbed.

We begin to assemble the team with flights from NY and PA, we are fortunate to have an embedded team member Ryan who is posing as local farmer, so entrenched in the roll he hand us a dozen of his farm’s eggs when we arrive. We meet his partner Jen who is undercover also selling cut flowers and chatting up the locals for intel about the old mines.

Our black agency issued Tahoes would be a dead giveaway in a metro are but in a ski town it fits right in. Since the budget cuts of 2007 we have to self-provision, and we scatter through the local grocery in Montrose, each with a mental list rattled off by Squad leader Mel as we walk in. A weeks’ worth of food, ski gear, recon technology, seismic analyzers and the agency teleconference hub make for a tight fit as we start the almost 2 hour trip to the safe house.

 1948

The war over and second guessers and critics filled the back rooms of the strategic command meetings. If we only knew this or that, deployed forces here instead of there and so on. These were typical barrages, opportunities for positioning as all knew that there would be post war reorganization and each man wanted to save his fiefdom.  The weapons systems meetings were the most interesting. There was a build-up of new ideas from the Skunkworks and other top-secrete departments. Operation paperclip had harvested the best scientist and all had passionate concepts on weapons.  The Tesla device brought up by some but it was not understood and not new, it was also someone else’s idea. A electrical engineer who had followed Tesla carrier and apprenticed with him in Colorado, aggressively proposed it as an alternative to the Atom bomb, insisting it could be limited to shut down a whole region without any loss of life, but his effort was ignored. The internal politics were infused with anger, the generals lost men, many their relations and a weapon that did not kill was missing the need for revenge.

The engineer was given a meager budget and he and the Tesla device were sent to the deep underground facilities at Telluride, Colorado to do testing and research. The ground being lined with copper and the remoteness mean that testing could go unnoticed by radio surveillance satellites. The very small population of Telluride would make any spying attempt extremely difficult. The mining families were generations old and the mining operations brought in help but the downsizing kept new comers out, new jobs went to sons and nephews. A key family took in the engineer and his two apprentices who worked as a mining equipment engineers, this allowed crates of top secret equipment to be transported underground without notice. Over the next few decades the abandon tunnels would be enlarged and developed into high tech labs. Thermal generated power meant the place had been off the grid and not a single cable ran out of the lab. The impregnated copper stone make any radio frequency transmission impossible.    

Years of research into the Tesla device, resulted in proof of the genius’s theory about free power transmission and other technologies. Research was logged but some really smart people in the agency(there are a few) though the risk to high and the UG lab was shut down and caped with 12 ft of concrete in the 90’s, all files delete… they didn’t count on APEX.

Some secretes are meant to be kept but a super computer like APEX which is nearing AI (artificial intelligence) puts pieces together. 50 year old handwritten shipping manifests are not to difficult for it to digest. Since the microfilm scanner was connected, all the previous written documents are now a part of APEX’s conciseness, if you could call it that. Anomalies were found and a case started. Men not even conceived when the device was invented want to know all about it. Unfortunately APEX advanced encryption was compromised and a hack allowed copies of hundreds of files including the new special cases of which the Tesla Device and our mission. Needless to say we are at risk.. An I don’t just mean the Squad, I mean Western Civilization and the modern world…

First Days

Fitted to our agency issued skis are super-efficient Radio frequency scanners, our job is simple enough, ski every possible terrain and as fast as possible. The scanner interpolates GPS information and the smallest readings of radio frequency. The Agency scientists feel that a small fisher in the rocks might emit some of the energy contained in the device, given its oscillator’s power even at idle. We know for sure they were never able to turn it off, given is was in resonance with the earth, it need no additional power and so it remains a world changer… to no use other than those who wish to send us back in time 300 years.

  Mel, Divit and Jim are always first out that like the groomed trails but move quickly. There flying goose pattern insures the train they cover need not ne recovered. Kel and Jaimo are the wings of the goose and cover the edges and trees. They move very fast and we hope the scanner technology is up to their speed.

RemXO and Dan are on deep penetration, they need to sit and scan for a bit, their cover as Snow boarders made sense, sitting in the middle of a run was never logical till now!

 Wolf is on his own mission, sometimes linking up with other groups, but rarely solo always picking up a stray agent. Beyond his mission as the “Negotiator” he is in charge of tunes. The squad does nothing without music…

As aforementioned the agency budget has been decimated, long gone are the chiefs and dancing maidens. We are left to fend for ourselves in both cases. Turns out we have a few cooks on the squad and the meals are quite tasty. Mel is most formidable and the diners come out with the style of NY city restaurant. Salmon, beef brisket, and all the sides make for tempting overeating, thank goodness we are drinking in equal proportion.  Saving the modern world is hard work, one must be properly nourished and fearless.

Routine

Day in day out we ski our pants off covering all the terrain, eating and drinking the night away and repeating. No aware of the growing threat. But a field of red light flairs outside our window wakes us up. It’s the Crimson Tide and they know the agency is here, they know there is a safe house and all the details. We are screwed.. Immediately we take our rolls as old drunken skiers reliving lives passed, hoping against hope that while they know a team is present they don’t figure it to be us.

They are too easily convinced we look less like super spies than we think, not only are we discounted as a threat, they don’t even acknowledge our existence… They are focused on some college group, well-trimmed and fit, we have seen this before, when this type distracts our wives and significant others. You know the type, sharp haircut, 5’oclock shadow, tight fitting jeans, and a shirt that says there is a six pack underneath ready for viewing.  Man I hate those guys….

Back to work our pride weakened but relieved we did not need to go one to one with the Chrisom Tide, been decades since our combat training. Now we prefer just to blow things up from a distance!

The Find

It was late in the operation time line that we receive word from command. “Telemetry successful, multiple RF emissions detected”.  Armed with the GPS coordinates we broke into teams, to keep things covert we named the locations “See Forever”, “Little Rose”, “Butterfly” & “Boomerang”.

Teams used ultra-sensitive gear but no results. Concentrating on locating the device in such a limited time, our guard was down, and the Shadow of the Chrisom Tide covered us.   

While more than half the Squad was literally held up in the safe house the remainder was still out, their GPS location was odd and they were second guessing. It was in the middle of the old town. Calls back to HQ to confirm and recalibrate, had eaten up some crucial time and darkness fell. For the rest of the squad in the safe house now fully surrounded by the tide, the anxiety grew. Knowing there cover was blown they went dark, fearing and communication would but the last away team at risk. Calling HQ would be futile as we all know the score, we are our own. Our very existence would be denied, and reported as just a crazy bunch of guys reliving our youth.

We knew differently, our lives in real danger, the away team maybe in worse shape, and the future of the modern world in our hands.

In Town

The Old Opra House was pounding filled passed the fire marshal’s posting, didn’t matter he was there too with what seemed like the whole town. The band a Western ski town favorite “Leftover Salmon” was in full control. The mandolin player going nuts like he was playing a Stratocaster. It is this exact location that the reconfirmed GPS coordinates pointed too. Armed with RF signal meters the team made it down the stairs, that just seemed logical, but the signal got weaker. So up they went to the balconies and then the attic.  And opening the door to the tower the needle pegged.  Understanding cane upon them, the signal source being so high the reflections of the buildings through off the telemetry calculations. Finding a light switch proved almost as difficult as the location of the signal was not evident. Meters pegged in every direction pointed.

The Tide now occupying the safe house and in full interrogation mode, looking for the GPS info. We played dumb and by the looks of all the empty beer cans we could see they were questioning there intel. How could this bunch of fools be agents? We took a beating for good measure, but they bought it and left.

The away team returned, with cold beer which helped the wounded. Puzzled by the results and in communication with high command and ALPHA, all remained stumped. But not the old man, he sent an encrypted message; the tower itself was the device.  By the AM the Old Opera House was swarmed with construction engineer types, the building deemed unsafe and fire marshal arrested. Test determined high levels of asbestos and harmful gases leaking from an underground tunnel below the structure. The entire area sealed off…. all an Agency cover...

Our mission complete we were awarded the coveted White Round Button… and sent home…