"Godammit! How’s he doing it?" General Rant asked his assistant, Major Vonda Shoope, one of the best intelligence electronics people in the military. The two were deep inside of Cheyenne Mountain at the U.S. Space Command’s Space Surveillance Center outside of Colorado Springs, Colorado.

"Fuck if I know, sir," Major Shoope answered as she lit up yet another cigarette.

"But we’re in the Box, we should know where the angels are coming from!" Rant insisted. The "Box" referred to the super-secret chamber in which they were working. Buried deep inside of the Cheyenne complex -- which itself is buried deep in the granite of Cheyenne mountain -- the Box is the Holy of the Holies for the cult of American electronic intelligence.

Ostensibly operated by the Air Force, the complex at Cheyenne Mountain is largely controlled by the National Reconnaissance Organization, the NRO being a key component of the National Security Agency. All of the might of this trillion dollar intelligence apparatus reports directly to the President of the United States, Kimball Grimes, who at this particular moment wanted Avon Carlson dead.

While the US had its doubts that the angels would actually appear, it nevertheless readied itself because it knew that Pastor Carlson posed a great psychological threat to America. Therefore, by 1:00 a.m. on December 12, 2004, key intelligence assets were in position to locate the source from which the angels were being projected, for the U.S. was certain that laser holograms were the only method by which Carlson could perform his miracle. Accordingly, a disinformation campaign had been readied by President in the event angels actually appeared.

The U.S. had also deployed offensive military weapons to take down what was predicted to be Hard Currency, NSA code for extraterrestrial craft. This was in keeping with intelligence analysis that any angels they would be holographic in nature, and thus would need to be projected from extraterrestrial craft hovering somewhere in earth’s atmosphere. The plan was to locate the Hard Currency and take it down.

An NSA Mercury spy satellite, part of the Vortex Communications Intelligence System, had its antenna pointed downward over Los Angeles just prior to zero hour. At 104 meters in diameter, the antenna was spindly piece of spider-work built to catch any electronic emission which strayed into its web. Having been vectored into the correct position weeks earlier, the satellite had a ten minute window to locate any electronic emissions that could account for the angels.

In conjunction with the Mercury satellite, the NSA also had two Lacrosse 3 radar imagining satellites scanning the earth and skies over the American Southwest and Pacific Ocean looking for any platforms from which the holograms might originate. The Lacrosse 3’s were supplemented by three AWACS, their powerful search radars probing for any suspicious air traffic in a 1250 square mile area. Two U7 Auroras were also airborne, their hungry sensors scanning the ground for any electromagnetic sources of energy that could be responsible for the launching of surface-to-air angels. Complementing the intelligence aircraft were sixteen F-15 Eagles armed with special weapons designed to shoot down Hard Currency.

When the angels appeared on schedule, Kimball Grimes, the President of the United States of America, immediately declared Omicron Alert, a previously unused state of alert reserved for an attack by extraterrestrial forces. Only six American generals knew what the alert meant; the cover story given to the rank and file was that foreign operatives might be using the holographic angels as a diversion to launch a nuclear or biochemical weapon against the United States.

At the President’s declaration, the supercomputers inside the Box kicked into TerraflopXTC, an emergency-only computational mode good for only five minutes. After that time, the liquid helium used to cool the processor arrays lost efficiency due to the heat produced by billions of transistor gates opening and closing trillions of times a second. That was it: The entire attempt to decipher the angels came down to billions of transistor gates opening and closing as zeros and ones passed through them. Yet the angels could not be sifted by the great silicon sieves of the military. Instead, these inscrutable angels whirled in the cold night and would only allow living eyes to see them.

Maybe there are some things which not are not electronic in any sense, thought Major Shoope. This was disturbing to her because, as she had reasoned since college, all things in the universe have to be electromagnetic because the universe itself is electromagnetic. She lit another cigarette and wondered what could possibly elude the largest electronic dragnet in the world. Hell, she had been on the team that had used a small camera on a Predator drone to sight a car carrying high-ranking Al Qaeda agents and kill them. One small plane, one small camera, facial recognition software, and one keystroke from a computer had launched a missile from the Predator. The missile was visually guided by an operative with a joystick to the driver's side door. Terrorists are no match for electronics, she reasoned, so how would these angels defy detection except by the human eye, which itself worked by converting light into electrical nerve impulses for the brain to decode within its neurons and then assemble into vision? Major Shoope did not like these angels. And had she known of other realities which had been kept from her due to secret clearances above even her impressive collection of clearances, she would have known that the angels did not like her either.

After the angels appeared, optical experts -- those who used eyes and lenses -- determined that the angels were hovering at an altitude of 102,204 feet above sea level and were centered above the City of Whittier, California. The body of each angel was calculated to be five miles in length. The wingspan of each was fifteen miles from tip to tip. The angels were larger than anything which had ever been seen in the skies and yet they had no radar cross-section, a fact the Air Force took to mean that the apparitions were made of one-dimensional light.

However, the orbits of two small spy satellites equipped with high resolution cameras had been changed weeks earlier to allow them to photograph the predicted angels. As the digitized images were downloaded to ground stations, a most astonishing fact was revealed: One satellite had captured pictures of the backsides of the angels. The other, orbiting at an oblique angle to the angels, caught images of their sides Rather than being sophisticated holograms, which is what the NSA had thought would appear, these beings were truly three dimensional.

Captain Darrin Owensby was piloting one of the two U7 Auroras aloft that night. He was flying his aircraft over the city of Norwalk at an altitude of 103,216 feet when the angels suddenly appeared and he found himself close to one of them. Captain Owensby put his U2 into a gentle diving bank and quickly moved in for a visual intercept.

As he looked at the beings he guessed, based upon his days spent in the Catholic school, that they were archangels, such was their glory. He was stunned at their sheer size and brilliant magnificence. As his exotic surveillance aircraft slipped effortlessly on secret black wings through this most mysterious of all modern nights, Owensby let go of the fly-by-wire joystick in his right hand. He breathed deeply and peacefully all the while knowing he was about to die.

The electrical systems on the Aurora failed first. The dimly lit instruments in the cockpit went black. The computers ceased and the radios fell silent. As the plane was pulled into the singularity of the nearest angel, the concealed reddish exhaust slipping through the slits behind the jet engines grew a darker red and then flamed out.

Those on the ground grew alarmed when neither Owensby nor the Aurora’s computers failed to reply to commands. "Black Owl 2, report! Black Owl 2, I say report! Black Owl 2, what is your status? Do you have an emergency?"

The angel closest to Captain Owensby looked right into the eyes of the pilot, beckoning the aviator to ascend into heaven. The radar saw Owensby’s plane disappear off the screen.

General Rant’s phone rang. "We have a situation with Black Owl 2, General," the ground controller said, the controlled fear in his voice evident.

"Yes, I saw it here on the screen. What do we know?"

"Nothing general. There’s not even any debris falling down."

"Is it an abduction?"

"If it is, it’s not like any we’ve seen. There’s nothing out there… there’s no ship we can see that could have taken him. Captain Owensby flew right into the angel nearest his last position…." The controller was clearly stunned, his stumbling words unable to stay abreast of the terror pounding in his chest and churning his bowels. "We tried to override Captain Owensby and switch to autopilot, we even tried to remote fire the Martin Baker to blast him out of there, but the onboard computers wouldn’t respond. He’s one of our best, sir. I… he’s my friend, I just can’t believe the fuckers got Darrin…." The controller gasped for breath as a person must do when their job requires them to suppress loud cries of anguish."

"Juanita, I know Darrin and we’re going to find him," General Rant said to his ground controller in a reassuring, fatherly voice, the moment demanding that the distinctions of rank disappear and the unit pull together to rescue their fallen comrade.

But deep inside, General Rant knew that Captain Owensby was dead, probably having been vaporized by a high frequency field surrounding the angels. Rant made the decision to exact the full measure of brutality upon Carlson’s killer angels as he had been authorized to do if needed.

The Air Force’s Star-Shark hunter-killer satellite triplets, three groups of three satellites each designed to intercept incoming ballistic missiles, were orbiting at triangulated points above North America, ready to fire. The Star-Shark lasers were powered by a mixture of deuterium, nitrogen, and helium which was burned in a hydrogen chamber to produce monochromatic  plasma. The plasma would then emit photons which would be pumped into yittrium-alumina-garnet crystals until it the photons achieved population inversion and the laser lased in deadly coherence.  

The lasers were simmering, ready to unleash their streams of lethal photons upon any airborne platforms that were found. After the angels seized Black Owl 2 and its pilot, General Rant ordered the Star-Sharks to open fire upon the angels themselves. The satellites sent several gigawattts of laser power into the angels at an angle that allowed the beams to pass into space if they were not absorbed by the angels. Rant also ordered the sixteen F-15’s circling Southern California to open fire on the angels with rocket-assisted air-to-space missiles.

Unfortunately, all of this firepower was of no avail. The lasers and missiles passed harmlessly through the angels and trailed impotently off into space. General Rant watched his weapons of destruction disappear into the void, he took a long, pointless drag from his cigarette. He exhaled forcefully and with great anger only to have a high-tech air machine silently sucke the cigarette smoke into its depths. The smoke too disappeared without leaving a trace. "Goddamn fucking piece-of-shit aliens!" Rant snarled as he pounded his fist on his desk, furious that he had just lost a top pilot and a copy of the most secret aircraft on earth.

The General’s staff sat inside the Box looking at the live video feed of the angels, their consoles showing no data coming in from any of the Air Force’s surveillance planes or satellites. There were no detectable electronic signatures or emissions. Spectrographic analysis revealed not a trace of chemical or gas signatures The angels could only be seen by the human eye.

Earlier in the day the Air Force had even released five high-altitude weather balloons from the Pacific which were now floating in the vicinity of the angels. The instruments on the balloons detected nothing. Indeed, the only images seen anywhere on radar were those of the silvery weather balloons whose nine hundred foot circumferences of silver skin cast blips as immense as motherships.

When the angels disappeared from the video feeds, the chatter of voices from radios and speaker phones died down. No one was sure what to do or say. The trillion plus dollars spent by the US for an elaborate surveillance network had proven useless to locate what only the human eye could see -- and only then when allowed to do so by Pastor Avon Carlson. General Rant was supposed to report in to the Joint Chiefs in five minutes with an initial assessment to give to the President. He had nothing to say, not even an indeterminate "we’re working on it."

Next to Rant, Vonda Shoope sat devastated. Tears welled up in her eyes. "I’m so sorry, General. He was such a wonderful man. He and his wife just had a baby not six months ago." Looking down at the floor and sobbing, Major Shoope asked to be excused. Rant gave her leave and returned to his thoughts.

How the hell do they do it? General Rant kept repeating to himself after the Major had left. There were no clues. None. How the hell could Carlson have pulled off this so seamlessly, Rant wondered. Whatever technology Carlson was using, Rant concluded as he mentally prepared his talking points with the President, was something the minister had withheld from the United States. While this would not be the first treaty violation, Rant knew this time the U.S. response would have to be especially violent.

Four minutes were now left before Rant had to call the Pentagon. The Joint Chiefs and the President were waiting. The President was supposed to speak to the American public about the event, and Washington knew it couldn’t simply dismiss the angels. How the hell was the White House going to spin this one, General Rant wondered as he stared at blank screens and an awaiting telephone. The general pulled opened a drawer in his desk and removed a manila folder. Opening it, he looked at the secret memo for the tenth time:

Interrogation folders prefixed with the number 5700 are not cleared for dissemination under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) until 3075. The following Executive Summary of Interrogation is limited to Azimuth Level Personnel only. Any unauthorized transmission of the information contained herein is punishable by penalties as prescribed in the Roswell Secrets Act of 2001. Please see NSA 12-383 Revision C for Executive and Congressional exceptions to the foregoing.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Effective October 23, 2001, the NSA began to interrogate the twenty-one members of the Sentian race who were captured during our Special Forces raid (Operation Ice Dagger, which commenced at 0430 hours on 11 October 01) on their underground complex in Porcupine Dome, Alaska.

While we do not know, at least at this writing, the locations or total staffing of their other earth bases, we suspect that there are no more than fifty Sentian underground bases manned by between thirty and fifty personnel each.

While the Sentian race is not a signatory to the Geneva Convention, the United States has nevertheless granted them the same treatment afforded prisoners of war under those accords. Because we possess the legal authority to inter this group of aliens for an indefinite period of time, we are beginning to establish, both by direct interrogation and psychic remote viewing, a detailed history of the Sentian race. Our main purpose in interrogation is to determine the purpose behind the recent flurry of activity in American by this race of extraterrestrial biological entities.

Pastor Avon Carlson is refusing to comply with the interrogation. Because he is a high profile public figure, we are unable to process him per the protocols allowed by the applicable Executive Orders. Carlson in fact remains an intractable problem and has again threatened to execute Part One of his ultimatum (an unspecified miracle) if the United States of America does not cooperate with his request for one

AX-10 or an optimized variant.

While our remote viewers are unable to locate the possible future miracle, we do know that its sole purpose would be to serve as the preface to Part Two of Carlson’s ultimatum (Worse Case Scenario) Plan Ettu has been approved to prevent any implementation of Part Two. Plan Ettu is to be executed only upon the direct order of the President. The Joint Chiefs have pre-positioned all materiel required to execute Ettu.

*****

Rant put the folder back in the drawer. He was certain that President Grimes had no other option than to order Plan Ettu be executed. The fact that Grimes had ordered the military to Omicron Alert status, which was the equivalent of admitting that the Worse Case Scenario was true, could only mean that the AX-10’s were even now being configured for deployment against the Sentiens by the National Reconnaissance Organization.

President Grimes was livid. It was 4:44 a.m. EST on the morning of December 12, 2004, and Pastor Carlson had not only just put angels in the sky over Los Angeles, but he had also either captured or destroyed an Aurora along with an American pilot. Despite repeated warnings from the State Department that Carlson not make any move which would affect the American public, the minister had now declared his intentions to proceed to Step Two. This was a clear act of war in Grimes’ mind, and he had no doubt that the key members of Congress would also see it that way.

After three years of clandestine negotiations and increasingly tense brinkmanship, the relationship between Carlson and Grimes had broken down. Carlson had now made good on Part One of his ultimatum. It was now time for the White House to take control of the situation to prevent Part Two from ever happening.

"Ladies and Gentlemen," Grimes began as his assembled team sat in the Oval Office, "I have had it with Carlson! He has now publicly humiliated my Administration, but worse he has attacked an Aurora 7 in American airspace. We don’t know if the plane was destroyed or captured, but the fact remains that the Sentiens have committed an overt act of war against the United States by attacking our plane.

Carlson will never get what he wants, and he, frankly, will never live to execute part two of his ultimatum. Having committed an act of war, I am now free to declare him an enemy soldier and order our military to take him out and attack his bases"

Grimes paused before continuing. As Commander-in-Chief, he had never issued such a patently horrific order as he was about to; he needed a moment to steel himself against the destruction which lay ahead. "It is now time to launch Plan Ettu," he decreed. The team members looked at one another in astonishment. Plan Ettu was thought to have been no more than a study in the possibilities of terror.

Upon finding out that Ettu had been ordered, an elite circle of people in the Pentagon would be even more shocked. The actual exercise of the plan might well cause significant damage once the AX-10’s went transdimensional. The quantum electrodynamicists in the NSA recognized that the AX-10 had spin-stability problems which could cause an electron cloud collapse. In the event of a collapse, the resultant fallout would register on any detectors within 300 light years of earth. And then what? Would the United States be destroying the quantum ecosystem of a more powerful nation?

Grimes looked angrily at his shocked staff. He was pissed off. He detested their weakness and incomprehension in times of severe trouble. "There is no option," he told them in a voice of icy rage. "Ettu must be executed and the military will take care of the aspects of the operation you find so disturbing. The responsibility for ordering Ettu to be launched is mine, and mine alone. However, you do have a job to do right now, and that job is to help me win the public relations war which Carlson has launched against the United States of America. We must utterly destroy his reputation and credibility; we must also use all means necessary to prevent him from proceeding to Step Two of his ultimatum.

"Let’s review Plan Echo again," President Grimes insisted, changing topics to the PR war the White House had pre-planned in the event the angels actually showed. "I want to make sure that the operation matches the leaks. Dr. Rogers are you ready to rehearse our press conference?"

"Yes, Mr. President. Briefly, you will say that last year the Advanced Defense Research Projects Association gave Cal Tech a significant grant for secret plasma research," Dr. Brooks Rogers, the President’s science advisor, stated. "We now know that a graduate student at Cal Tech used this secret U.S. technology to project plasma holograms into the upper atmosphere. This student did it under coercion from Pastor Avon Carlson; he was also under the influence of drugs supplied by Carlson.

"The California Institute of Technology, situated as it is at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains in Pasadena, is the perfect location from which to project angels into the Los Angeles sky. Indeed, the FBI is ready to begin scouring the mountains around Cal Tech at the crack of dawn for the stolen holographic projectors."

"I like that, Dr Rogers," the President beamed, "’A grad student did it.’ It places the burden on Cal Tech to prove that a grad student didn’t do it. And if Cal tech doesn’t agree, their defense research funding will be jeopardized because the administration there has proven itself unable to manage its students, federal funds, and classified programs.

"To this point, I will reveal that, unfortunately, Cal Tech was already being investigated by the FBI because a doctoral candidate from Afghanistan is alleged to have given Pakistani agents in Los Angeles secret nuclear data to help Pakistan in its conflict with India. This bit of information will dovetail neatly into my reply when the press asks me why the U.S. military needs such technology as Carlson used. Dr. Rogers, where are we on that angle?"

"Sir, you will tell the press, and confidential sources will later confirm, that the technology was for possible use as a psychological terror weapon against Islamic and Hindu militarist states whose populations are religiously superstitious."

"I might add, ladies and gentlemen, that by co-opting Carlson’s miracle, we make our enemies think we have long had some scary technology they didn’t know about. This might help jump-start the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in the Senate. So, onto our suspect. Attorney General Peters, who is our prime suspect?"

"Mr .President, you will be able to tell the press that the FBI has already identified the suspect. The young man’s name is Frederick Luzendorf. He is a doctoral candidate in plasma physics at Cal tech. He is ready to sign a sworn statement admitting his involvement in the scheme. We will have Luzendorf in custody before your press conference begins to announce the arrest of Carlson."

"Splendid. Now, so the rest of you know what Echo entails in terms of Luzendorf, I want you to know that we’re not making him the fall guy for Carlson. We’re even going to ensure that he finishes his doctoral degree. The beauty of the plan is that Attorney General Peters will make a confidential phone call to the Chancellor of Cal Tech telling her that we will offer Luzendorf immunity in exchange for his cooperation.

"Dr. Rogers will then call and indicate that we consider Luzendorf to be a potential asset to the U.S. intelligence community who must be allowed to graduate. Of course, the National Science Foundation will be funding Luzendorf’s start up company to the tune of five million dollars for his trouble in signing a confession."

"Five million? That’s it?" remarked Vice President Chard. "God, for a scientist we’re getting him cheap Usually those guys wants a hundred times that amount!"

"Which is exactly why I picked a grad student," concluded Grimes. "Dr. Rogers I want you to get with my speech writers and put the finishing touches on your part of Plan Echo right away. Now, Madame Attorney General, you personally signed the arrest warrant and gave it to Colonel St. John before he left for Los Angeles?"

"Yes, Mr. President," replied Susan Peters, the AG, "and per our discussion, the warrant charges that Carlson committed espionage by recruiting Luzendorf, who had access to secret US defense technology, into his conspiracy. The State alleges that the Carlson used undue religious coercion and drugs to induce this young genius into yielding up secret American defense technology to advance his ‘flying saucer religion’

"We will tell the press what we know about Luzendorf, namely, that he is a known Carlson enthusiast who has been diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. Luzendorf is on heavy doses of Xanax, Effexor, and a new, highly controversial mood elevating drug called Neuagra. Luzendorf is also a known abuser of alcohol and street drugs. We will quickly uncover proof that Carlson plied his addictions by supplying him with, among other substances, cocaine. The FBI will also find that Luzendorf is a closeted satanist who met Carlson through Adera Huent, Carlson’s wife, who is both a lesbian and a satanist."

"Hmmm…" the President intoned and held his hand up for the AG to stop speaking. "The Satanist thing I’m okay with because we know she practices Wicca, but the lesbian thing bothers me."

"But we have photos," protested the AG.

"Yes and you know I said previously that we will never show those photos. My point is that I don’t want a backlash from the gay community."

"But if she’s a lesbian," the AG reasoned, "then we get the religious right supporting us in their media outlets."

"Well, she’s a witch, so we’re guaranteed to have the religious right in our pocket anyway. Let’s just leave it at, ‘she’s a witch,’ and avoid the gay thing. In any event, their media will announce the fact that she’s a lesbian for us. We don’t even need to go down that road. So continue, please."

"Well, that’s about it, Mr. President. The national security of the US has been breached, and one of our brightest young minds was led astray by this religious madman All the particulars you detailed are in the warrant"

"Will the warrant make good copy for the press?"

"I had our PR firm help me write me, Mr. President."

"Good work, Sue. I’m glad to know that Colonel St. John has the warrant and is ready to roll." At this juncture, Grimes stopped to pour a glass of water. In doing so, he couldn’t help but notice couldn’t help but notice Theodore Lance, his new spokesman, sweating profusely. "Ted, what’s going with you?" Grimes asked.

Lance, who had gotten the top job in government media only to find he had no stomach for the unending intrigue and almost infinite treachery which daily poured from the Grimes White House. He didn’t like Plan Echo and didn’t want to be its mouthpiece. Instead, he favored a straightforward approach. "How about telling the public that we simply cannot account for the appearance of the angels?" asked Lance.

"They won’t buy it Ted," President Grimes said, "if the angels had been fuzzy or unclear then that might be a great plan, hell, I could’ve even told them that global warming or solar flares caused the aurora borealis to stray south. But the angels were high definition. I need something better than "I don’t know" or I’m going to get my ass kicked big time."

Lance sat sweating and dejected, his temples pounding despite having taken three Advils and a blue xanax.

"Ted," the President began diplomatically, "you’re the new kid here, so I’ll let you slide this time because you don’t know all of the rules yet. The first rule is that the White House knows everything? Got it? We know everything, and we know everything all of the time. There is nothing we don’t know, and if there is something we don't know, nobody can know that we don’t know it, do you understand me?"

"Yes, Mr. President, I understand perfectly," Lance said, hiding his choking fear that he was about to be sucked into some qaugmire of lies so deep that he could wind up in prison if Carlson went to Step Two and the public found out.

"So are you in or out?" Grimes demanded. "Because if you can’t handle this then I want you to get up and leave right now. I can’t afford, nor will I abide, any equivocation. So tell me."

"I’m in, Mr. President," Lance said, fearing Grimes’ reprisals for leaving more than taking part in a collective lie which would culminate in an atrocity called Ettu.

Grimes had his doubts about Lance, but the negative publicity from losing his new spokesman at this particular time would raise far too many questions. "Thank you, Ted. I am glad to know we can count on you." Shifting from this tense moment, Grimes turned again to his AG and asked, "Sue, who do we have St. John posing as for the morning?"

"Special Agent Mc Kinnon of the FBI, Mr. President. He will be backed up by two other NSA agents he has already briefed. All we’re waiting for is your order to execute the warrant. Are we sticking to the original time you proposed last month?"

"I’ve been thinking about the timing of the arrest a great deal What I would first like you to do, Sue, is to instruct the Director of the FBI Field Office in L.A to personally visit the Chancellor of Cal Tech at 5:00 a.m. Los Angeles time. I want the FBI Director to tell the Chancellor that she has a problem on her hands because the Air Force has determined that the so-called ‘angels’ came from the area in and around the Cal Tech campus. Have the FBI demand an immediate investigation and send two dozen FBI agents over to Cal Tech by 5:30 a.m. I want Feds crawling all over the campus before Carlson goes on air. Make sure we have ten vehicles there with the FBI logo on them. I don’t want any subtlety. I want the media there, too. I want them going live on the spot.

"What about the Carlson interview with Dan Mantle at 7:00 in LA? Do you want us to arrest Carlson before the interview as we planned?" asked the Attorney General.

"No, I’ve changed my mind. I want to allow Carlson to begin the interview. And then, Madame Attorney General, I want you to have Carlson arrested during the interview."

Everyone in the Oval Office gasped

"Don’t worry," President Grimes laughed, delighting in having sucker punched inferior minds, "we won’t do it on camera. St. John is going to land at the SMN building in a Black Hawk with four Apache escorts circling overhead. I’ve arranged with General Rant for the Air Force to black out SMN’s signal just before St John and his men move in to make the arrest. Their signal won’t go back up until St John has Carlson in custody and is airborne and outbound.

"Ten minutes before St John lands, I want the news that we are landing to arrest Carlson released. I want the media to know that will be blacking out the signal. As soon as St John is about to make the arrest, he will call on his cell phone and order the blackout. The SMN signal will go dead.

"When the signal goes dead, our notorious, channel-changing public, will immediately flip to other stations to see if the cable is out. This is where we snare them. I want the reporters on all of the other stations breaking the news that the FBI is moving in to arrest Carlson and that the SMN signal has been blacked out for reasons of national security. I want to make this arrest very dramatic; after all, it is a matter of the utmost criminality

"What I’m thinking is the O.J. chase," Grimes enthused, genuinely happy that he was going to fuck over Carlson big time. "I want the news reporters on the ground and the news helicopters in the air to broadcast pictures of the Black Hawk taking off surrounded by Apache gunships. I want the media to interrupt all television and radio broadcasts worldwide to tell the public that Avon Carlson has been arrested and that the President will be going on the air shortly.

"I want the news helicopters to follow our formation taking Carlson back to Edwards Air Force base. I chose Edwards because it is a sexy, high tech base that has a lot of classified projects going on. The psychological impact of taking Carlson to Edwards is greater than if we took him to a base that is low tech, say, Camp Pendleton.

"Back to the O.J. angle: I want people glued to their televisions to watch our helicopters taking Carlson away. I want it to be just like in the old days when the Romans showed off their captives in a parade. Locally, I want people on the ground in L.A. to run out of their houses and look up in the sky for the helicopters.

"That means St. John’s formation makes a slow flight at low altitude over populated areas like Hollywood, the San Fernando Valley, and then down the 14 Freeway through Santa Clarita, Palmdale, and Lancaster. Just as St. John’s formation crosses into Edwards’ airspace, and this will be the climactic prelude to my press conference, the newscopters will have to back off. Just as they lose the helicopters, there will be one minute with absolutely no news..

"This dramatic interruption in the press coverage will leave the public and press desperate. We will let them squirm for that one minute. I will then begin an historic press conference in which I will tie all of the elements of the great mystery together and kick Carlson’s ass from here to the moon!

"This is why I want to let Carlson to do ten or fifteen minutes of the interview with Mantle. I want to ensure that he has made a total and complete idiot out of himself in front of the whole world before we expose him as a fraud. I told him not to pull that shit with the angels!" Grimes yelled as he pounded his fist on the table

"Goddammit, I told him not to pull that fucking stunt! I told him over and over not to do it! And does that dumb fuck listen to me, the President of the United States? No! In fact, ever since I’ve taken office he’s pushed me! He acts like he’s the goddamn Speaker of the House!

"Well, now he’s finally gone too goddamn far!" Grimes shrieked, the veins in his forehead bulging yet again, lost as he was in one of his famous purple rages. "If that bastard wants to play hardball, then he’s going to get this thing shoved right up his ass because ladies and gentleman, nobody fucks with me! I’ll show that goddamn asshole Carlson just how vicious this lame duck President!"

Grimes sat down in the big chair, his word for the seat behind the Oval Office. Winded from his rage, he scowled with contempt at those gathered around him as they stared back stoned-faced at him. He knew they were all thinking how scenes like this were going to read in their memoirs. Someday, some publisher would offer them blood money, and they would repeat all of this.

Fuck them, he thought, knowing he was going to order the whole goddamn Carlson thing classified for one hundred years before he left office, if for no other reason than to hide his role in perpetuating the US government’s secret involvement with extraterrestrial races.

That he also wanted to flick over their book deals so that his would become the authoritative best seller on the Carlson incident also crossed his mind. "Now please," Grimes concluded, "I have to go get some sleep so I don’t look like a sack of shit when I announce the capture of this most dangerous felon. I can’t emphasize enough how much want this thing done right, so make yourselves a big pot of coffee and get started right away. I don’t want a single fuck up This has to be flawless, because, frankly ladies and gentlemen, this is our swan song and we have to make it perfect Understand?"

Amid a chorus of "Yes, Mr. President" Kimball Grimes left the Oval Office and went upstairs to his private quarters He was asleep the minute his head hit the pillow, thanks to the little pills his doctor had given him. As Grimes was less than a month away from leaving office, he had decided to catch up on his sleep lately. In the beginning of his term, this situation would have kept him up all night, but now that the voters had rejected him for a second term, he wasn’t going to allow even angels to disturb his sleep.

Next Chapter                                            Home Page