It was hard to believe what was coming from my wife when she unloaded about the coming mission or training that was going to take me away from home for many weeks to come. EOD Naval Training Center was in Indian Head, Maryland, located coincidentally on Strauss Street and there was no real short course to such training. Why I would need it was another question I could not answer. I called Herbert and told him the truth.

“I’m not going to the training at either Charm School or Explosive Ordinance Disposal, at least not in ten days,” I said, but did not continue with a threat. I waited almost a full minute for his reply.

“You work for the Agency now, which means you work for me,” he finally replied.

I still said nothing, hoping I wasn’t going to have to resign, give the house back, the Range Rover I was about to pick up, or even the cash I’d amassed to give my family some safety and reserves. There was another long pause before Herbert went on.

“Go home, and do what you must do, but during that time please consider getting back and forth to Washington to set up the new benefits company, to be called Blue Cross Blue Shield of the National Capital Area. You man is waiting. The National Reconnaissance Operations have moved out toward Washington Dulles Airport so you have a building available right on the Potomac, and that took some doing. The parking lot in the basement is bulletproof and secure, which means you don’t want to invite too many guests there who might get the wrong, or maybe the right, idea.”

“We’re going to need five or six Lear jets or something like them,” I said, thinking about what to tell my wife and maybe inviting her here to go along with the kids to D.C. “I’d kind of like to take Mary with me to D.C.” I threw in after Herbert didn’t respond right away with an agreement on the planes.

“You can’t,” he replied, almost instantly.

“Why not?’ I asked, in surprise, as it seemed like such a small request.

“You never, ever take family, friends, analysts, or any neophytes on a mission, and almost everywhere you go will be mission-oriented. Never, ever, ever,” Herbert repeated, very forcefully.

“What’s the big deal?” I asked, shaking my head and staring at the phone for a few seconds before returning the receiver to my ear.

“Your family safety would immediately become the primary force motivator ahead of the mission, that’s why, and that one’s been proven over the years many times.”

I changed the subject, understanding the logic and probably some losses had suffered to make the rule.

“Matt’s here in the driveway, and we had a tail from the airport to my home. What do I do?”

“It’s FBI, and that’s why they somehow knew,” Herbert replied. “They think you may be counterintelligence or something like that. You so far have seemed to leave a trail behind you which you have to stop doing if success is the object.”

“What am I supposed to make of that?” I asked, stunned. I was being followed by the good guys, not the bad guys as I’d thought. “You don’t sound at all upset.”

“Nah, actually it’s a good cover,” Herbert laughed. “It means they have little or no clue that you’re one of us.”

“Why would I care if the FBI follows me?” I asked, a bit mystified.

“Until they get tired, it can be annoying but never forget that the governmental agencies, almost one and all, don’t like each other and many times seek to screw up operations while never letting on that they’re doing just that. The good news is that your family couldn’t be safer with them all over the place.”

“Oh, great,” I breathed out. “I’ll get pulled over for speeding or reckless driving and stuff.”

“Not annoying in that way,” Herbert replied. “Those guys don’t care about any local, state, or other broken laws. Their mission is to find out about you and that’s probably it.”

“Probably,” I said to myself, but not into the receiver, but relieved nevertheless. “Do I tell Matt, as I think he’s worried about me and the family?”

“No, I’ll handle Matt. You just use him to get to the dealership and get your car. I have to go. I’ll call you later about the address of the new benefits company but you’ll need to come up with a policy to sell.”

He hung up before I could ask about either the details of the Range Rover or the kind of policy I was supposed to dream up out of thin air.

I shared my conversation with Mary when I was off the phone, although she’d remained close enough to catch the jist of it. We were relieved together, with her only serious question being about whether the agents following us might come to the door. I didn’t so but it wasn’t something I could even guess at. I’d been followed in Korea and now in New Mexico, but it wasn’t something I had much of any idea about other than the thought of it was itself annoying, as Herbert had mentioned.

After Matt headed back to my home, as I wanted to make sure the new car made it there, I drove the Rover off the dealer’s lot. I didn’t like its cream-white color, nor the fact that it was filled in the back with a custom picnic basket that the receipt showed cost four thousand dollars, plus a five-thousand-dollar roof rack. But the vehicle made up for such shortcomings by being much quicker than I thought. The 350 cubic inch engine, purchased from Buick by Land Rover to power the beast, had plenty of low-end torque. The entrance ramp for Interstate 40 was only blocks away. I pulled onto the freeway, a silver late model Chevy right behind me. The FBI was not taking any pains to hide themselves. I knew there had to be more Chevy follow cars, but I didn’t yet see them. I moved along at about seventy in the fast lane until I was beyond Kirtland and out into the desert boonies.

The first thing I did was push the accelerator to the floor, as the traffic miraculously cleared. The next town was twenty-five miles south so there weren’t many places for vehicles to go when heading south. Belen, the town down south, only had six hundred residents. The Rover would do a very solid one hundred and ten miles per hour as a top speed, at least at the high New Mexico altitude. The Chevy stayed behind me, although about twenty car-lengths back. When I came to a dirt road I knew just after exiting using the Belen off-ramp, I pulled onto it, clouds of dust rising behind me.

The Range Rover took me north, bouncing around at about forty, occasional rivets and cracks having to be guided around, as even the Rover couldn’t handle some of the roughness of the arroyo-strewn roadway. I came to the top of a hill and stopped. I got out and waited for the dust to clear to see if the Chevy vehicle following me was there. There was nothing for as far as I could see.

I sat down and leaned my back into the left front wheel and relaxed. The FBI was only human and had to obey the rules of geography and physics like anyone else. With the engine turned off and there being no real wind the desert was quiet. I knew I was going to love balloon riding and chasing if I could arrange it with this Kris Anderson fellow. Had he been prepared for my introduction, I wondered but knew nothing. I thought about Herbert and other control officers who had to be like him. They weren’t so much about control as the phrase seemed to indicate. It was more like they were about hope that their agents would figure things out.

I stood up and dusted myself off, luxuriating in the battered but beautiful scenery and the fact that I’d outsmarted the FBI, and just at that instant, here a sound I knew so very well.

I used my left hand to block out the sun as I hunted for the source of the sound I knew so well. I saw it. The FBI was using a helicopter I realized. A Huey like the ones that had flown me into and out of the A Shau Valley. It was orbiting a few miles away at what looked to be about a thousand feet in elevation. The crew was no doubt waiting to see what I was going to pull next. I had to laugh out loud. These agents had been around the Horn a few times, like me. They knew what they were doing, and their budget was about as unlimited as that of the Agency for which I worked. As I started the Rover and headed back to the freeway I felt again the feeling of relaxation and security that had come over me when Herbert informed me that the tail was the FBI. They were doing their job and they were good. My family was safe enough for me not to worry that my new career was going to risk them.

I turned on the machine’s radio, which proved to be a good one. I played some old rock and roll, my usual choice of music. The song was called “Hardheaded Woman” by Cat Stevens, and that made me smile too. I was, indeed, married to a hardheaded woman, and I loved that fact.

I arrived home with fifty-five miles on the vehicle, a car that I’d fallen totally in love with once I got off-road with it. Matt was sitting in his vehicle, apparently not attempting to go inside. The man was a class act when it came to manners.

“I’ll be right back, I said to Matt, before checking in with my wife

“Call your boss,” Mary said when I walked in the door.

I dialed the number before doing anything else.

“Small errand before you start your sort of family rebuilding vacation,” Herbert said.

“Errand?” I asked, suspiciously. “Wasn’t Korea supposed to be an errand and not a mission?”

“You have to go to the Kirkland armory on the base and have them load a package into the back of your new vehicle. It’ll just fit and it’s heavy so take it easy. You have to deliver it to Tech Area 55 in Los Alamos in about two hours.”

Once more, he hung up after giving his inadequate instructions. What was in the package? How was I supposed to get to the base and then drive almost a hundred miles to Los Alamos in time?”

I told my wife what was said.

“That’s okay, we can stop in Santa Fe, and I can do some much-needed shopping.”

“Mission-related,” the phrase used by Herbert popped into my mind, but I just shook my head before approving of her plan. Everything in my life could not be defined as ‘mission-related,’ unless I was doing the defining or at least had a say in it.

“Sure, but we’re time-limited, so we must go, I have to talk to Matt because somebody needs to watch the kids and we don’t know almost anyone in this town. I haven’t even made it back to the Banker’s Life office yet.”

“Will he do that?” Mary asked, and once again I realized she was thinking clearer than I was. He might not. Maybe kids were not his thing. Maybe he didn’t want the responsibility.

Matt sat waiting as I walked up and made my request.

His smile back at me was all I needed. He was in. “

“Can I take them for a ride in this thing?” he asked, and I nodded. The kids were going to love him, I knew. I went back inside to get some cash from my stash, which I’d moved from the shoe box to a hollowed-out book about the Inuit Eskimo culture that nobody was ever likely to open. I pulled out a thousand dollars in hundreds. I had no idea what the shopping expedition would entail but I’d already learned that the Agency American Express card was not to be used for personal purchases of female attire. I offered Matt some cash but he wouldn’t have any of that.

“I ride for the brand, like you,” he said, and I fully understood. Matt was a keeper and I knew I’d have some uses for him in the future.

The drive to the base in my new Range Rover, a vehicle I named and became known by almost everyone around me as ‘Bentley,’ was quicker than expected. I did note that my fifty-mile off-road trip had used up almost half of the Ranger’s twenty-two-point-seven-gallon fuel tank. The Rover was a wonder but not in the usage of gasoline. I knew I’d be filling the tank in Santa Fe on the return and I wasn’t totally happy about that. Riding along at over a hundred miles per hour wasn’t going to be a common occurrence.

The ‘package’ that was loaded into the back of the Rover at the armory was heavy indeed. The Rover was equipped with a load leveling system of the suspension but still, the back of the vehicle sagged a bit.

“What in hell are we carrying” I asked the Air Force sergeant supervising the loading.

“.50 Caliber machine gun barrels. A hundred and twenty-two of them.”

I was shocked.

“Who in hell at Los Alamos would need that many Browning machine gun barrels?” I asked.

“It’s Los Alamos, so nobody asks or even thinks about it.”

We drove the sixty-three miles to Santa Fe in less than an hour, the fifteen hundred rise up La Bajada Pass not bothering the Rover at all. With my foot on the floor, Bentley could do a steady eighty-five miles per hour up the pass.

The drive up to Los Alamos took about the same time, even though the distance was less. Even though the altitude of Santa Fe (the nation’s highest capital at 7100 feet, or so), Los Alamos is higher still.

Tech Area fifty-five wasn’t hard to find. The gate guard, who wasn’t bothering to check identification at the time, directed us to a little turn-off and there it was. An installation surrounded by barbed wire and all manner of scary warning signs. My wife wanted to wait outside as we approached the gate, but I didn’t slow or stop. We were let through immediately after being told that the delivery was late. I pulled through two more gates but had no problem getting finally to the main building.

A man in Air Force fatigue uniform, a gray jumpsuit really, stood at the position of parade rest, waiting. I pulled the rover up to his side. I got out of the
Rover, walked to where he stood, reading his name tag and checking.

I smiled at reading his name tag. The man’s double silver bars indicated he was a captain. His name tag read: “James T. Kirk,” as in the Star Trek television show and movie.

“You’ve got to be kidding me, sir,” I said to him, handing over my military I.D. as he held out his hand for it. “You can call me Spock,” I went on, with a big smile.

“Not funny at all,” the young captain spat out, looking at my identification quickly before handing it back.

“The director wants to see you,” the unhappy captain said. “Just wait by the side of the building over there,” he said, pointing.

Two men opened the back door of the Rover and unloaded the package. Both men wore heavy gloves and surgical masks, which didn’t make me feel comfortable about what we were carrying. I pulled the Rover over and my wife and I sat waiting until a steel door opened on the side of the concrete structure.

An aging man with an overly large forehead stepped out a few feet from the door before waving me toward where he stood. I got out of the Rover and began to walk toward him.

“Her too,” the man said, his voice crisp but a bit weak.

Mary joined me and all three of us went through the door, which somehow sensed us and closed silently behind us. I looked to see if there was anyone around that might be controlling the operation of the thick door but there was no one.

“Thank you,” the man said. “I’m Doctor Hans Bethe, project director of Antares.” He held out his hand, not to me but to my wife. When she took his hand he didn’t let go, smiling broadly. “Without your husband’s contribution, none of what’s going to happen would be possible.”

Mary laughed, finally getting her hand back. “I wanted to go to Santa Fe and shop, anyway,” she said.

“No,” not that,” Hans replied, “I mean about the object he brought us that is changing all of physics and opening new vastly different doors.”

Mary looked at me with a frown on her forehead but didn’t say anything.

I looked up to take in the massive size of the building’s interior. On the concrete floor were six long tubes, each about forty feet long and all pointed toward the center of the circle they were set in. Between them and the center of the circle was a series of what looked like giant eyeglass lenses delicately balanced with only the slightest of metal supports along their bottoms.

“This is Project Antares,” Hans said, waving his arm around to cover everything we could see. “This will one day power the entire earth, without ever needing to be refueled in any substantive way and there will be no pollution or radiation either. I mean no more than was in the powerpack you also helped us by delivering right to our door.”

The man’s enthusiasm was magnetic, and my wife was enjoying just how entranced he was with the project, its potential, and her. The comment about the package we’d delivered bothered me a bit but there seemed to be no way I could work in anything about what the contents had been, as I now had a pretty good idea that they weren’t fifty caliber machine gun barrels.

Mary and Hans walked away while I went in search of someone that I might be able to ask my question, but the place seemed deserted. Whatever was in the package had to be something everyone was waiting for but neither the package nor anyone to receive or work on what was in was around.

I heard Hans explaining to Mary that the long tubes were massive lasers and the huge glass lenses weren’t made of glass at all but were single decanted crystals of salt but like glass, because the glass wasn’t clear enough to focus the monstrous beams the lasers would project. Mary looked back over to me, and I knew Hans was losing her interest as he described how long the lasers would project.

“Three picoseconds are all they will shine for,” he finally said before taking her elbow and leading her to one of the salt lenses that had a small step set next to its two-foot thick curved surface. “You can’t believe much of what I’m saying I know, but this you can believe.”

His hand moved from her left elbow to the upper part of behind as he gave her a little shove to mount the step, which she did.

I shook my head, knowing I was going to get an earful about Hans Bethe on the way to Santa Fe.

“Lick the surface,” Hans instructed.

Mary leaned forward and touched the surface with her tongue and recoiled slightly.

“Salt,” she murmured, confirming how little of what the physicist was telling her she was absorbing.

Hans cackled with glee, like a small boy.

Mary stepped down and then walked to where I stood, avoiding any more physical contact with the strange but wonderful man.

Hans walked behind her until we were all together.

“How long was your time in the vehicle?” he asked, out of nowhere and without any context.

“How long?” I echoed, wondering what he might be getting at.

I looked down at my watch, the watch that wasn’t there, instead hopefully being shipped from Seoul to Albuquerque if Herbert had kept this word to make the call.

“More than two but less than three hours,” I said, before waiting to see what the information might cause him to say next.

“When you leave the facility then you must take these,” he said, pulling a medicine bottle from his vest pocket. He then pressed the bottle into Mary’s hand.

“Please take two pills from the bottle, one for each of you when you leave, when you go to bed tonight, and then in the mornings and evenings until they are gone. Tell no one about this as everyone in Los Alamos does not consider things the same way, especially when taking civilians into account. But you are not civilians, as none of this would be here if not for you.”

Abruptly, as if thinking of something else, he turned and walked away. “The door will open automatically. You may come back and work on the project at any time as it is your project too. You must go now from here.”

Both of us watched him depart as he headed deeper into the cavern of a building. I took the bottle from her hand and read the small notation on the white paper glued to its outer surface. ‘Potassium Iodide,” was printed across the top of the label, and right under that, ‘130 mg per tablet.’ I looked up to where the doctor disappeared. My mind went back to the Johnson Atoll visits my dad had made to observe the nuclear tests while we lived on Oahu. I knew what they were for. Dad had taken the same pills when leaving and coming back on those trips. It was to prevent thyroid cancer. The drug filled up the thyroid gland, so radiation had no entry, or so Dad had been taught. Thyroid cancer was the main negative result if exposed to high-level radiation waves.

The door opened as we walked toward it, with my trying to decide what I was going to tell my wife about what had to have been in the back of our Range Rover for the trip, which had to have been the fuel that was going to be used to power the giant lasers. I was also thinking about the rule of never ever taking family or friends on mission-related operations, which this one had become. What was I going to do with what I’d somehow, almost completely by accident been selected to do with my life? We were being followed by the FBI, the Mafia in Seoul wanted me dead or worse, and now my wife and I had been exposed to radiation amounts that we had no idea of, except Dr. Bethe, and that was even questionable. My career and life direction would have to be rethought as I had some time off, and Mary deserved to know everything to help me and herself decide just how much risk were we going to accept in our life and that of our children.

THE END OF VOLUME FOUR