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    Abrupt Edge
    Abrupt Edge
    Abrupt Edge
    Ebook405 pages6 hours

    Abrupt Edge

    By Angus Brownfield

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    About this ebook

    Jacob Gleason, restless youth seeking his destiny, is a moral blank slate when he stumbles upon Abrupt Edge, a Nevada wilderness Shangri La. It’s centerpiece is Carne Viva, a brothel for billionaires seeking sexual enlightenment. Edge Enterprise’s CEO, Isaac Wayman, offers him a job chronicling an incipient war with Glory, a fundamentalist Mormon settlement run by his brother and nemesis, Abraham. The war will only happen if Isaac precipitates it—and he’s nuts enough to do just that.
    Jacob sticks around when he falls in love with Gloria Bennett, Isaac’s personal secretary, and in lust with Asenath Wayman, Isaac’s cousin and true love, also la directora of Carne Viva. He must find his moral compass while trying to prevent the Glory War. On the way he debates with Justin DeFord, Abrupt Edge’s least likely client, the relative morality of multiple couplings with strangers versus the plural marriages of the polygamists over the hill.
    Add a temptress, Fay Marraine, who tries to steer Jacob away from Abrupt Edge, and Auntie Amity,an unlikely desert rat who rescues Justin from his scruples and introduces him to the true Zen of sex, and you have The Magic Mountain set in a desert instead of an Alpine sanatorium.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAngus Brownfield
    Release dateJul 18, 2011
    ISBN9781466153660
    Abrupt Edge
    Author

    Angus Brownfield

    Write what you know. I know me and I'm talking to you, reader, in the first person, not the anonymous third person, because when I write I write about me and the world that thrives around me. I wrote decent poetry in college, I couldn’t get the hang of short stories. I finished my first novel so many years ago writers were still sending their works to publishers instead of agents. My first novel was rejected by everyone I sent it to. The most useful rejection, by a Miss Kelly at Little, Brown, said something like this: “You write beautifully, but you don’t know how to tell a story.” Since then I've concentrated on learning to tell a good story. The writing isn’t quite so beautiful but it will do. Life intervened. Like the typical Berkeley graduate, I went through five careers and three marriages. Since the last I've been writing like there’s no tomorrow. I have turned out twelve novels, a smattering of short stories and a little poetry. My latest novel is the third in a series about a man who is not my alter ego, he’s pure fiction, but everyone he interacts with, including the women, are me. My title for this trilogy is The Libertine. Writers who have influenced me include Thomas Mann, Elmore Leonard, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Kurt Vonnegut and Willa Cather. I don’t write like any of them, but I wish I did. I'm currently gearing up to pay attention to marketing. Archery isn’t complete if there’s no target. I've neglected readers because I've been compulsive about putting words down on paper. Today the balance shifts.

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      Book preview

      Abrupt Edge - Angus Brownfield

      chapter 1: Eye in the sky

      Two Navy NCOs, technicians on weekend duty at a Naval ELINT (electronic intelligence) station on the California coast, were the first persons outside Mulee County to know about the Glory War. They discovered it by accident—fooling around, waiting for their ear in the sky to reach a precise position relative to a foreign communications satellite before beginning their cyber-snooping. To kill time they were looking at a live image of a swath of North America beamed down from a spy satellite. Despite being strictly forbidden, it was a busman’s holiday they’d taken before.

      This time they saw something that wasn’t supposed to be there. In the northeast corner of Nevada, in a couple of flat places amidst a lot of rough cut mountains, what looked like two large plumes of smoke or volcanic ash dominated the monitor. The plumes, plus their shadows, looked like a surrealist cartoon of a war zone.

      On adjusting the screen resolution they determined it was what it looked like: black, billowy smoke rising undisturbed; the wind light just then. What they couldn’t tell from the scan was that beneath the smoke two wilderness communities, one named Abrupt Edge, the other Glory, were dying in flames unabated, waiting for the last fuel to be consumed before burning themselves out.

      The technicians, one petty officer third class and one petty officer second class, were mystified and fascinated by what they saw. It was so fantastic that no immediate explanation offered itself. But if they’d known the reason behind the fires, the Glory War, they would have been skeptical at best.

      Never guessing, for example, the fires were unabated because no one was left to fight them. Never guessing, likewise, how few persons got away from the conflagration: from Abrupt Edge only two, Jacob Gleason and Gloria Bennett, leaving on the dirt road south across the sage brush country in Isaac Wayman’s vintage two-tone Cadillac convertible.

      The technicians were looking at the raw material of myth and didn’t know it. Or history, if anyone recorded it. Which Jacob Gleason had contracted with Isaac Wayman to do; he had the responsibility to find the myth a home in the outside world. And he would have to rely for history on Gloria Bennett, who’d occupied several roles in both the communities ablaze.

      Most of the other actors couldn’t be reached for comment—may they rest in peace.

      The ELINT techs, excited by their accidental find like a couple of boys stumbling on an Indian burial mound, for comparison brought up archived material on another console. These were stored images from the past year’s photo updates of that stretch of Nevada. There was nothing among them indicating anything manmade in the area other than dirt roads that seemed to peter out before they reached the mountains.

      Given that their snooping could net them anything from a Chinese field day to Captain’s Mast, they were uncertain of what to do next. They had the foresight to capture a screen shot before the image with plumes went away, so they could ponder a course of action. The problem was, if they didn’t tell higher-ups and it turned out they knew something BIG before anyone else, their boss might get egg on his face and they, in turn, would get something more like shit on theirs as it flew off the fan.

      Pull weekend shifts till their enlistments were up.

      Their tentative explanation for the smoke was a military one and it was why they telephoned the officer in charge (officer of the deck they would have called him). They imagined something large, with lots of fuel aboard, had fallen from the sky. One technician said, Maybe a Stratotanker. Only there were two crash sites (if that’s what they were) and Stratotankers, the second technician reasoned, didn’t often crash in pairs. But it was as good a guess as any, something military falling out of the sky. It merited passing on up the chain of command.

      I’ll be the judge of that, said the officer in charge, on taking their call and hearing their guess at an explanation.

      He took about two minutes via his motor pool Wrangler to get from the station commander’s office to the radar hut, as they still called the building, and he walked in, having passed his palm across a screen feeding a computer that knew everything about him, down to his drinking patterns. He entered the room with that authoritative swagger of a recently promoted lieutenant commander. He stared at the picture the technicians had downloaded from the satellite before it passed on west. Then they showed him a cloudless shot of the same quadrant taken three months earlier. In that picture all they saw was run-of-the-mill sagebrush country, pretty much like the adjoining quadrants.

      Enhanced blowups of the pictures just taken, aimed at the base of the more southern plume, showed evidence of permanent structures—buildings, some with concrete walls, some, it looked like, with glass outer walls. And to the west of the southernmost plume, an airstrip, big enough to land a Hercules at least, maybe a C-141.

      The lieutenant commander called his office. He told the petty officer who answered to patch him through to a certain colonel he knew at Nellis AFB.

      When the Air Force colonel came on line the naval officer greeted him by name, asked after wife and kids and his golf handicap, then said, Listen, do you guys have a new facility at—? and gave the GPS coordinates.

      We might, the colonel said. The colonel muted the phone and snapped his fingers at a second lieutenant sitting at a desk nearby. He waved a piece of paper on which he’d scribbled the coordinates and said, See if we have any new facility here. Back on the phone he said, It might be on a need to know basis—we’re checking.

      Well, it’s got a paved air strip at least a mile long and extensive permanent structures which are ablaze as we speak. And, abracadabra, all that stuff wasn’t there three months ago, not a trace. This is the first this facility’s shown up on the satellites.

      Holy shit: have you dispatched fire suppression equipment to the scene?

      Me? I’m in Port Hueneme and we’re talking Northeast Nevada. The Navy doesn’t have anything up there. We’ve got facilities in Idaho but more than a hundred miles away.

      The second lieutenant caught the Air Force colonel’s eye, and with a shrug of the shoulders mimed a negative answer.

      We don’t have anything up there either, old buddy. Maybe it’s Army, the colonel said, glad he didn’t have to take responsibility for anything.

      Maybe it’s civilian, the lieutenant commander rejoined, talking as much to himself as to his colleague.

      The colonel said, Civilians don’t put up facilities like that in three months unless they’ve got a cost-plus government contract. And then they’d put the plumbing in backwards.

      So maybe, said the lieutenant commander, it’s some spook operation out of the alphabet soup in Arlington or Langley. They’ve got the dough to do that sort of shit. Maybe they gave everybody on site LSD and they burned it down.

      Or they’ve got one of those Men in Black gizmos that blank out your memory and we’ve all been zapped with it. —Call your local sheriff is what I’d do.

      Sheriff... good idea. Or the BLM, they own most of Nevada, don’t they?

      The two officers had a good laugh about finding where the buck might stop while the two technicians eavesdropped while tuning up their cyber-snooping gear.

      This time they’d done the right thing, taking initiative. Because you never knew how higher-ups took initiative.

      chapter 2: The local sheriff

      Bertram Mills was the local sheriff the lieutenant commander called about the smoke plumes. He’d been sheriff of Mulee County for the last twelve years, a tough job for a man preoccupied with his blood pressure. He’d learned certain bio-feedback techniques which, along with minding his own business, his salt and fat intake, and the amount of exercise he took, kept his blood pressure within reasonable bounds.

      But a call from Port Hueneme sent his blood pressure sky-rocketing. He didn’t need to use his sphygmomanometer dealy-bob to know it was at least one-seventy over one-ten.

      Ablaze, you say.

      Bad to worse. Word had been buzzing around Mulee like blowflies around a corpse: something was not right up there, by which the sheriff meant up Abrupt Edge way. Would the military show up before he could get a grip on this Abrupt Edge brouhaha? Goddam, but he wished this weren’t coming at him from all sides at once.

      That’s Forest Service jurisdiction, commander. But I’ll get in touch with them right away and whoever’s got personnel closest will visually check this out. We’re not seeing any smoke here in Mulee yet—he left his desk and peeked out his office window—but we’ll check her, we’ll check her. —Why sure, I’ll call you back when we’ve got a handle on the situation, you bet. Damn, satellite photo: isn’t modern technology the living end? Might a been days before some hiker spotted it. Much obliged, and don’t you worry, commander. Nosiree. I’ll take it from here.

      First a hunter had reported hearing explosions from that direction at the start of the bow hunting season. There was nothing for a few days and the sheriff relaxed a little, but then a rock hound scrounging much higher up, near Jarbidge, had said he’d heard shots fired a long way off. Not shots like a seasoned hunter would fire—enough lead slung to scare the eye guards off every buck mule deer in the county.

      And four days ago there was the country boy dropped off at the Medical Center ER with two bullets in him. He didn’t have any ID, the ER doc told his deputy, but was heard to mutter several times as he faded into unconsciousness, Glory.

      As in the name of one of the communities under the pall of smoke the Navy guy called him about.

      Closer to the bone, his monthly stipend from Isaac Wayman hadn’t showed up in his Cayman Islands account yet. Nor had his, the District Ranger complained.

      Things were going bad, all right.

      As long as things went along nice and steady, the Cathouse Loonies, as the sheriff liked to call the Abrupt Edge folks, were a godsend. None of them had caused a tick of trouble. The occasional outdoorsman who noted airplane noises or thought they saw the sunset reflected by lots of windows at just below the horizon, had bought the explanation of a super secret government facility—like Area 51, the sheriff hinted—which it was their duty as good citizens not to blab about. As in days of yore, they were told, the motto was, Loose lips sink ships. Sheriff Mills would jolly the outdoorsman, saying that an upright citizen like himself should do what he could to defeat those damned A-rab terrorists by keeping mum about the facility.

      Sheriff Mills, the District Ranger and the Chief of the Federal Water Conservation District, plus the state Water Master, had had a meeting over in Wells just the day before to talk about these recent reports of unrest involving the Cathouse Loonies. The District Ranger seemed to think there was an altercation between them and the Other Loonies, as they called the polygamists at Glory. Both contingents were heretofore model citizens and also contributors to the otherwise inadequate incomes of a lot of officials, not paying them to do anything illegal, rather to render expert consultation and advice. Which they did, advising, on their own time, the very prudent Isaac Wayman, king of the hill in Abrupt Edge, and Abraham Wayman, his somewhat less generous brother over in Glory, about ways to avoid damaging the pristine wilderness environment. They called their monthly stipends eco-greenbacks.

      In other words, they were being asked to look the other way, which might be a tad unethical, but it wasn’t messing with the penal code—according to Isaac Wayman’s high-priced lawyers. And who was going to look askance at an eco-greenback?

      The agenda of the meeting in Wells was twofold: first, create a unified story to cover their several asses. Which they talked through, to their mutual satisfaction. The other item was not resolved, namely, what do you do when the wheels start coming off the golden chariot? What do you do when the goose that lays the golden eggs is committing hara kiri?

      Among the suggestions tossed out was making the whole mess legal, as if the two communities had been somehow granted a license for the brothel and the primary rights to the water that irrigated Glory’s verdant fields.

      But now the Navy knew about the two places. And the navy guy said he’d talked to the Air Force, too. The Water Master likened this to a cat out of the bag. The District Ranger preferred the Pandora’s box cliché.

      Sheriff Mills said, Pretty soon CNN’s gonna have someone from their local affiliate out here asking questions, wanting on-camera interviews with the county’s most visible civil servant, namely, me.

      Shit sakes and little fishes.

      Fire was bad. Huge plumes of smoke had to be visible from the Granite City Highway. What if sparks lit the greasewood? Have a brush fire out there take out half the goddam National Forest, fire crews flown in from all over the West. Landing where? Who would the incident commander be? They could hear it now: Well look at that airstrip, would you? The Regional Forester would fly in from Ogden. The Mulee County Board of Supervisors would want a report and maybe the sheriff’s head.

      Shit sakes and little fishes.

      ##

      Bertram Mills looks like a sheriff. He’s tall, hair like the young Robert Goulet, only with a touch of silver at the sideburns, wears a full-lip mustache, like one of the Earp brothers, and has a dark tan—where his clothes don’t cover his skin. His hyperthyroid wife is a good seamstress and a fanatic about her husband looking GI, as she calls it. She’s altered his uniforms to fit his bulk and irons pleats in the back of his shirts. He creaks when he walks—all that paraphernalia hung from his belt—and his wife likes that, too, even if he feels as if he’s telegraphing his coming several seconds before he gets anywhere. She likes the smell of whiskey on his breath when he downs a shot or two coming off duty.

      Sheriff Mills knew that looking like a sheriff helped him get reelected every four years and he knew it helped in interrogating prisoners. Not that he ever roughed them up. He implied, by looks and demeanor, that he was always going to get the answers he was looking for. No need to waterboard or any of that other CIA shit.

      So when he got a call from the duty nurse over at the hospital that the young man who’d been shot and dumped on their doorstep was able to talk, he detoured through the bathroom to look in the mirror, making sure he was up to his lawman snuff. And damn if he wasn’t.

      He stopped by the nurses’ station before going into the boy’s room. An RN told him the patient was conscious but might not be free of some side effects of analgesics, that is, he was plain loopy. And, as a patient he did not seem very cooperative. He said he was now a fish out of water, a hawk with clipped wings, and he wanted to die. They had a surveillance camera in his room, to keep an eye on him.

      They had him in ICU since he was admitted, so any staff passing in the hall could look through the glass at him as well.

      Sheriff Mills took off his Smokey Bear hat as he entered. The room was lit only by the corridor lights and the TV, which was on but muted. The sheriff could tell the boy looking at the television wasn’t quite focusing. When the patient noticed a person in his room, he pointed the remote at the intruder and clicked, as if he could make him go away by changing channels.

      One chair stood by the bed and no place to put his hat, so Sheriff Mills sat in the chair, creaking as he did so, and balanced the hat on his knee. He sat for a moment to see if the boy would shift his attention away from the TV. The boy kept his eyes on a daytime fishing show, still not focusing, as if he were a moth attracted to the light.

      Sheriff Mills broke the silence. You feel like talking about it, son?

      He could use the word, son, not only because there was that much age difference between him and the boy—the nurse thought fifteen or sixteen—but because the boy looked lost in the hospital bed, the oxygen cannula draped over his ears, monitoring equipment attached to various parts of him. The automatic blood pressure monitor puff-puff-puffed and wheezed just after the sheriff sat down. A bag of fluid hung from a chrome stand, with a tube going down to a Y junction and on to a catheter inserted in the back of the boy’s hand. The sheriff watched a bubble in the line.

      What’s your name? the sheriff asked when he got no response to his open-ended question.

      The boy looked at him. In a while he said, Gabriel.

      Gabriel... ?

      Sorenson.

      You’re from... ?

      Glory.

      Glory, the sheriff echoed, connecting it with the Other Loonies. How’d you get here?

      The boy didn’t remember, or that’s what he said.

      Who shot you?

      They were too far away to tell.

      They?

      The boy said, I think they. Seems like shots came from two different places.

      The sheriff would pass that on to the state crime lab people, not to expect the bullets to match.

      Were you shooting at them?

      Didn’t have a chance to. Couldn’t see them, up there midst the rocks.

      Why were you shooting at each other? Sheriff Mills creaked some more.

      Do we have to talk about this? the boy asked, with a slight whine in his voice.

      Not now. But I’m gonna have to know sooner or later. I been told there’s a big fire up your way. People’ve heard shooting. You can’t just let these things go by the board.

      It’s between Glory and Abrupt Edge. You people never patrolled there so it’s not your duty. The Prophet saw to that.

      Prophet Wayman.

      Himself.

      Abraham Wayman, not so generous as his brother with his stipends, was the other source of contributions to various public servants’ nest eggs. Or maybe they weren’t nest eggs any more so much as legal defense funds. Sheriff Mills creaked some more as he envisioned himself, in one of those Day-Glo yellow jump suits his jail issued prisoners, being led into a courtroom in the Mulee County District Court, shackled. His lawyer would ask for a change of venue, of course.

      Can you tell me anything more? He was going to be waiting awhile, and he’d find out the boy’s story a long time after he had to go up there and check himself.

      It’s too late.

      Why?

      God’s will. God will destroy both their houses. The End of Days is at hand.

      But what started it all?

      Marian.

      Who’s she?

      Prophet’s daughter. The boy’s voice was getting fainter and now the nurse was standing in the doorway.

      What about Marian?

      The boy said, She’s the Prophet’s youngest and she’s ran off to Abrupt Edge to be a Jezebel. And with that he aimed the remote at the sheriff again and clicked it.

      Lordy, the sheriff said.

      Amen, said the boy, and let his hand drop. He closed his eyes.

      The nurse said, You should go, sheriff.

      Oh yes, yes indeed. I’ll be on my way.

      When he got back to his car he called the office and told the deputy in charge to check him out as patrolling the Granite City Highway, time of return after five o’clock.

      On the way he kept saying to himself, Marian, Marian.

      chapter 3: What the local sheriff found

      As Sheriff Mills approached the Abrupt Edge turnoff, he wondered how many of his deputies, plus forest technicians, wildlife biologists and plain old ditch riders for the Water Master were getting paid off by Isaac Wayman. Because somebody local besides him must know about the fires. You could see the smoke, a black squirrel’s tail on the horizon, five miles before the turnoff.

      Well, he said to himself, my goose is cooked. Then, hard on that flash of self pity, came a glimmer of fellow-feeling. Maybe more boys like the one in the hospital lay wounded or dying up there and needed tending. What the boy had said didn’t make all that much sense. It sounded as if there might not be anyone up there left alive—not in Glory, anyway. He’d find out. He didn’t want to know, but he had to.

      Damn that Isaac Wayman. Lay down with a rattlesnake... bound to get fanged in the ass.

      Except he liked Isaac Wayman, a man’s man, a dude (as in sharp dresser) who didn’t act like a dude (as in prissy). A fly fisherman for Christ sakes. Somebody you’d down a beer with at the local tavern.

      He knew Abrupt Edge had airplanes, two Learjets or some such, neat looking with the little winglets at the tips of the wings. The first time he met Isaac Wayman, rattlesnake—slash—regular guy, was in Reno. Isaac took him for a joy ride around Lake Tahoe in one of those jets, even let him ride in the copilot seat and handle the yoke for a couple of minutes. Isaac could sure enough fly one of those things.

      As he jounced along the road across sagebrush country, his blood pressure not up to any danger point but up, he wondered if the planes had been used to bomb Glory. Might explain one of those plumes.

      Naw. Cause how would you explain the other? Isaac Wayman didn’t bomb himself.

      He had the fleeting fantasy of getting into one of those babies, all fueled and ready to roll, and flying off into the sunset. Fly to Mazatlán, fly to Tahiti, stopping in Honolulu to refuel. All by himself. Munching sandwiches, drinking coffee from a thermos, like Lucky Lindy or Amelia Earhart.

      Then he thought of his wife, also Amelia, and Little Joe (who these days was six feet two and played linebacker for the Mulee High Stags) and Emilina, the one whose braces Isaac Wayman’s largesse had paid for, along with a vacation trip to China. He rewound the tape and erased the idea of fleeing. Even if he could fly one of those suckers, which he doubted, leastways landing it somewhere. He’d never even been certified on instruments in a single engine plane, let alone a corporate jet. Who was he kidding?

      Lay down with rattlesnakes...

      About five miles from Abrupt Edge, having traveled west from the Granite City Highway on seven miles of sand and hardpan, he turned north again, toward the smoke, which looked like pictures he’d seen of Mt. St. Helens a while after erupting, but this smoke was if anything blacker. Soon he was catching whiffs of burning rubber. He wished now he’d gone back to headquarters and checked out one of the Expeditions to drive up here. The Crown Victoria was just a little soft of suspension, and in his Chief’s car he didn’t mount a shotgun—which he wished he had along with him. No telling what he was going to find.

      When he got to a place where he could see the runway—landing lights lit, as if expecting an incoming flight any second—he saw that the jets weren’t there, and he was glad. He’d have been sad knowing such a beautiful thing as a Learjet was destroyed. (He felt the same way when he shot his annual mule deer, though he never told his hunting buddies.)

      When he got to the main gate—must be the main gate: big columns and an arch of wrought iron—he had to stop and reconnoiter on foot. When he got out of the car he blew his nose, the smoke was so irritating. Then he drew his pistol. A flatbed truck, maybe a hay truck, had rammed the gate and died against the futile bulge it made in the metal, tires still smoldering, each giving off its own plumelet of acrid smoke, blending with the smoke from buildings and vehicles inside the gate.

      There was also the smell of burnt hair, and as he approached the flatbed (God, why didn’t I bring a team up here) he saw that the body in the driver’s seat had been partially burned.

      Holy crap, this just went down! Distracted by fear for his own future, he had a hard time grasping he was walking onto a battlefield. People had shot and killed each other right here, not too long ago. Folks he may have passed in the aisle at Mini-Max or crossing the courthouse lawn.

      He quickened his step. He wasn’t going to get into the compound via the front gate. He’d need a wrecker to pull the truck back and, it looked like, a cutting torch to get through the chain on the gate. He looked inside, saw a Jeep in the same condition as the truck, and then he saw, craning his neck, a breech in the wall to the north of him, maybe a quarter mile away. Nothing moved inside the gate but eddies of smoke, like evil spirits harvesting the dead. He shuddered when he realized what sounded like some very sappy wood crackling in the midst of the smoke might be fat from a human body dripping into live flame. Now it wasn’t his blood pressure it was his stomach. He swallowed saliva beginning to gush out of his salivary glands. He told himself not to vomit and he didn’t.

      ##

      What Sheriff Mills didn’t know was that the lieutenant commander he talked to was an ambitious man who never knew what prudent move might bring him prominence. Acting on that ambition, he called a buddy, a Marine colonel in Naval Intelligence at the Pentagon, and asked him a question that had crept into his head while cogitating the mystery fires in the Nevada wilderness.

      Is it possible, he asked his friend, to mess with the pictures a spy satellite is taking—you know, like send signals up to the satellite fooling it into thinking a certain hunk of real estate looks just like an adjacent hunk? You know, kind of cyber-camouflage.

      After an embarrassing pause the Marine colonel, who did not mess around, said, How the fuck do you know about that?

      Hey, I’m just guessing. I can tell you what data signals a Russian weather satellite is sending home from six thousand miles away, but I don’t take pictures of anything, so I don’t know the possibilities for jamming.

      Is this a secure line?

      Of course.

      Okay, tell me what prompted the question. It didn’t just pop into your head like a goddam daydream of socking it to Angelina Jolie.

      Take it easy, said the lieutenant commander, who until then had never thought of ‘socking it’ to Angelina Jolie. A couple of my techs were downloading images from an eye in the sky, just practicing, you know, waiting for a certain classified event to happen. They saw smoke where there wasn’t supposed to be any. They found an archived shot of the same quadrant in Northeast Nevada and discovered big discrepancies between what showed three months ago and what’s there now. Like, too much stuff to be built in so short a time. Big cluster of frame buildings in one place, a lot of concrete and glass structures in the other. Now all on fire.

      Don’t get your bowels in an uproar about it, the colonel said, changing his tone, backing off from alarm. Just give me the coordinates; I’ll take it from there.

      You’re not going to tell me about my supposition.

      Not on your life, mister. You forget you ever asked me. And the Marine colonel from Naval Intelligence hung up.

      This left the lieutenant commander frustrated. He’d approached the colonel as a colleague; he got back an order from a superior officer, an order to belay his curiosity. And, to boot, he now had to wrestle with whether never having imagined socking it to Angelina Jolie made him a wuss.

      He got up from his desk to visit the head and, as he passed the desk of a young lieutenant—they played tennis together sometimes—he barked out: Make that desk ship shape before mess call, mister!

      chapter 4: And the FBI, too

      Since the 9/11 attacks there’s been a lot more mandated communication among intelligence-gathering agencies—‘shared intelligence’ is the buzzword—the earnestness and efficacy of which is often debated and sometimes debunked in popular journals. (Adding a layer of bureaucracy over a bunch of agencies bent on uncovering others’ secrets doesn’t change their stripes. If anything, it makes them more paranoid.)

      Not that 9/11 had anything to do with those strange outposts erected in the wilds of Nevada. (The Marine colonel, first hearing of them over the phone, pictured something right out of a John Wayne movie: a cavalry outpost on the great plains—Fort Churchill, Fort Laramie—under attack from marauding Shoshones or Utes.) Rather, he was interested in this apparent susceptibility in the satellite data-gathering system, for some of which he felt personal responsibility. If it didn’t take intimate knowledge of satellites, it took some extreme hacking abilities. It nettled and he wanted to find out the whys and wherefores.

      But this also nettled: if whoever exploited this rather significant susceptibility in order to build whatever was up there (he had looked at the pictures Telexed him and noted extensive cultivated fields on one side of the mountain spur and a class A airstrip on the other) then fucking jihadists or Russian mafia or even a well-heeled Columbian drug cartel could do it, too.

      So he called his contacts in the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division to worry about that end of the equation—not his bailiwick—while he started his staff and experts on the problem of teaching a satellite to sort out bogus signals sent by space hackers.

      What he told the Feds was intriguing enough FBI Headquarters phoned the Las Vegas field office to look into it ASAP. It happened that Special Agent Bryce Trumbauer was transferring to Salt Lake City—almost out the door, in fact—so the Las Vegas Special Agent-in-Charge (or SAC) asked him to

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