Page 16 of Radar

Thursday

Iniquus Campus

Yesterday’s flight from Bratislava to D.C. was a groggy blur of tight confines and pain.

Back in his own bed for the first time in a month, Xander had a solid night’s sleep. And though he wasn’t a hundred percent, he could stand without wincing.

He was more than ready to go get Radar.

Xander had lucked out with warmer-than-usual weather. And even with the sun just creeping over the horizon, he was comfortable with a fleece pullover.

Edging up to the Iniquus guard station, Xander lowered his window and gave his name as he handed over his credentials. Now, he sat and waited as a Cerberus K9 sniffed his car for contraband.

Xander knew that Iniquus was a fortress masquerading as a country club, much like the newly acquired Zoric island, Davidson Realm, but with polar opposite motivations.

If the Zoric machine let loose the dogs of war, he might call on his Iniquus friends to let him come and survive the apocalypse with them.

With the Zorics swarming toward their own safety, Xander had to at least consider where he wanted to be on Doomsday. He contemplated going home to protect his mom. But his mom would say, “I’m fine. Get out there. Do good. Come home safe.”

“Do good. Come home safe.” That was the little bird that sat on Xander’s shoulder, singing the tune in his mom’s voice when things got tough.

He’d promised his mom he’d do just that, and Xander worked hard to make his word his bond.

But in this fight, Xander wasn’t so sure that his good intentions could beat themachine.

Precisely what did the Zoric machine do?

Hidden in the Kyrgyzstan mountains, aimed at the war zones to the south, it was hard to figure it out exactly. Though everyone on the hunt for the apparatus agreed that the war-torn landscape offered the Zorics the degree of obfuscation they needed to continue their testing, anything that the Zorics engendered was easily attributable to something else. Was that a machine or an insurgent attack?

Figuring it out was like trying to grab hold of a shadow.

What the IC community did know was that part of the Zoric capabilities included “smart spoofing,” where the machine could influence GPS navigation by the tiniest increment, a measurement so small, in fact, that it was imperceptible to the navigator. In a short distance, it wasn’t a significant factor; over a long flight, it could throw a pilot completely off course, sending them to a different country or so far out over the ocean that they became fuel-critical.

Then there were the unaccounted-for electrical outages over wide swaths of Afghanistan to the south of Kyrgyzstan, extending to the Chinese border to the east and reaching as far as Syria in the west, but never at the same time. The AWG had speculated that whatever the Zorics were doing meant they needed to move the machine between trial events.

If this were true, it meant the machine had to be a size that could be manipulated by a small group, if not a single person.

And whatever the Zorics were doing didn’t just stop at GPS manipulation.

In fact, a dystopian reader would find a correlation between Zoric’s machine and potentially society-destroying electromagnetic pulses (EMPs).

In fiction, a large solar storm could cause damage to power grids by overwhelming the transformers with an electrical surge.

Decades ago, it was an electrical grid attack that landed the Zorics on the CIA’s radar (small r).

The Zorics had always had alliances in Iran. And because of that, The Family had held a grudge against Canada because the Canadian Embassy helped get Americans out of Tehran during the hostage crisis.

In 1989, with his freshly calligraphed graduate diploma in energy systems, Medved’ Zoric was finally able to do something about his family’s thirst for retribution. Medved’ shut down Quebec’s power for nine hours.

Public-facing, the electrical disruption was caused by a geomagnetic storm on the sun.

But the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, working closely with Langley and the FBI, believed that it was, in fact, Medved’ Zoric sabotaging Quebec’s hydroelectric power.

Okay, notin fact. In speculation.

The IC community couldn’t prove the connection to Medved’ Zoric.

“Come back to me when you have concrete evidence. Then we can get you funds and teams to make that go away,” the heads of departments had said.

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