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| The Terrorist Factory Part Two, "Indian Operations" Copyright Joe Vialls ? |
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| Julia Long and two Marine Special Operations technicians stood in the centre of room 352 at the Oberoi Grand Hotel in Calcutta, while obsequious hotel executive Ribnu Chattergee waited anxiously for approval. The room had been redesigned exactly to the new specification and Chattergee was eager to leave. The Yanks paid well but they were an odd bunch. The woman in particular made Chattergee's skin crawl. As if reading his thoughts, Julia turned on her heel and faced him: "You may go. Tell reception that rooms 350 and 354 are also reserved for our use. No one is to enter them without my personal approval." As Chattergee scuttled gratefully through the door, Julia Long turned to the senior Marine technician: "Okay, Hank, unpack the gear and let's get started. The first ELF generator goes in the air conditioning duct to the left of the bed, and the second inside the wooden cabinet to the right. Then parasite-wire both to the hotel mains power and we'll calibrate to make sure we can entrain Otto's brain while he's lying in bed or sitting watching TV. We already have direct control of his television video input connector from room 350. Come on, hurry it up." Hank looked up from the padded aluminium case he was carefully unpacking on the floor: "Yes Maam. How much time do we have before Otto gets back from. the drilling ng site?" "Don't worry about him, Hank. That man has so much work to do I doubt we'll see him back here for two days at least. Gerald Smith from New Orleans has sabotaged the fluid system but Otto won't know what the hell is happening until it's too late to do anything about it. The drilling rig will disintegrate when the underground pressures get out of control. Langley wants that to happen real fast. God knows how much oil and gas is down there, but Langley doesn't want the Russians or Indian Commies to reach 20,000 feet at all. If they can't reach the oil and gas, the Russians and Indians won' t challenge US supremacy in the Bay of Bengal. Remember Libya gentlemen, remember Libya! Look what happened there when Qadhafi found all that oil after he took control in 1969. Now the Arab sonofabitch thinks he can ignore US orders. We won't make the same mistake twice." Julia leaned down and picked up the first of the two small but powerful extra-low-frequency generators. Both were disguised as normal electrical junction boxes that would attract no special attention if they were discovered by mistake. Holding one in her left hand, Julia Long walked towards the bed... Thousands of stars twinkled brightly in the jet-black night sky as Otto's ancient Austin limousine bounced along a rutted dirt track thirty miles to the south-east of Calcutta. The rusty springs groaned with agony as the Austin negotiated a sharp comer, before turning onto a raised gravel causeway that ran as straight as an arrow across the shadowed rice paddies. Far away in the distance Otto could see a tiny tree of lights that grew larger as his geriatric limousine bounced in and out of the potholes. Slowly but surely the tree took shape until the stark outline of a huge drilling derrick was painted against the backdrop of the night sky. Reaching up to a height of more than one hundred and fifty feet, it looked exactly what it was: the most powerful land drilling rig on the subcontinent, capable of soaking up the thousands of horsepower needed to drill more than four miles straight down into the bowels of the Earth. Owned by the Indian Oil and Natural Gas Commission, the rig had already drilled to 12,400 feet, and it was Otto's job to switch over from the simple Indian drilling fluid to the imported high-performance American system, designed to handle the tough drilling and extreme underground pressures expected between 13,000 and 20,000 feet: a task the American system could handle with consummate ease. Under normal circumstances it was one of the best systems in the world, and easily the most expensive. The luminous hands on Otto's black-faced chronometer showed I I pm as his limousine swept onto the rig site, throwing a cloud of dust up in the air as the driver screeched to an abrupt halt alongside the limousine of Otto's Russian opposite number, Mr Osimin. As Otto got out and walked across to his small caravan to get changed, he could feel the ground vibrating slightly to the beat of the V12 rig diesels, growling softly as they ticked over slowly at the base of the drilling derrick. The big rig was capable of generating enough power to light a small town. Entering the caravan, Otto was surprised to find his American relief Gerald Smith immaculately dressed and holding a bag in his hand. Smith was not due to leave Calcutta until the next morning, a fact Otto reminded him of with considerable force. Gerald seemed quite unconcerned at the pointed rebuke and said he had a plane to catch. Assuring Otto the high-performance fluid system had been mixed to perfection and was ready for immediate changeover, Gerald strode to the waiting limousine and departed immediately for Calcutta's Dum Dum airport. Unfortunately Gerald Smith had 'forgotten' to hand the office key to Otto, who was now faced with the complex task of changing systems at the dead of night without being able to check the fluid himself, because the test equipment was locked in the office. It was annoying of course, but no more than that. Otto had not anticipated his American relief might deliberately sabotage the drilling fluid system. Changing from one sort of fluid system to another is basically simple. When a rig is drilling, the fluid is pumped down the inside of the hollow drill pipe to the bottom of the well. where it squirts out through three jet nozzles in the drill bit, before coming back to surface in the space between the outside of the drill pipe and the walls of the hole. Once back at surface it flows through conditioning tanks then back down the inside of the drill pipe again. Just like a car's cooling system, the drilling fluid system works in closed circuit. And just as a car owner periodically flushes out his cooling system to replace it with fresh fluid, Otto was about to do the same thing to the 60,000 gallons of drilling fluid, with one important difference: the pressure at the bottom of the Indian well was more than seven thousand pounds to the square inch. It was a delicate and very dangerous operation, requiring a high level of expertise, Both old and new fluid systems were already weighted with suspended heavy mineral particles to overbalance the underground pressure. One tiny mistake with fluid weights and the pressure would force its way up through the weighted fluid, instantly hurling more than a quarter-million pounds of steel drill pipes out of the well with the velocity of a Saturn V rocket leaving its launch pad. It had happened all too often before, causing the deaths of many crew members unable to avoid the flying steel or escape the explosive gas cloud. Otto swiftly ordered the two huge fluid pumps lined-up on the spare tanks holding the new American fluid system, then arranged for a dump gate to be opened at the side of the rig through which the old fluid would be bled to waste. The four mighty V12 diesels started bellowing as power was fed to the fluid pumps and changeover to the high performance fluid began. Thirty minutes later, the new fluid completed its trip down through the drill pipe and back up to surface - then everything started to go wrong. Instead of stabilising at the right thickness designed to hold the heavy mineral particles in perfect suspension, the high performance fluid inexplicably started thinning. Osimin was as worried as Otto. The routine changeover had turned into an instant major emergency. Without support from the fluid for the heavy weighting mineral particles, only the pressure of the pumps continually moving the fluid round the system was effectively suspending them. If for any reason the pumps failed, the mineral particles would slowly sink to the bottom of the hole, well below a known high-pressure gas zone at 11,000 feet, which would rapidly unload up the well bore with awesome speed. A live high-pressure gas blowout was being prevented only by the two huge fluid pumps, each the size of a small truck, and they could not keep working forever. Rapidly clearing all non-essential personnel from the rig danger zone, Otto and Osimin retained only a small core of experienced drillers to handle the emergency. Shouting at the top of his voice, Otto rapidly outlined the only possible way of saving the rig and local village from destruction until they broke into the office to find out what had been mixed into the fluid system by 'mistake'. The others looked suitably grim, but what other course of action could they take? Otto Jewell did indeed 'have much to do' and would be unlikely to return to the Oberoi Grand Hotel for at least a week, if ever... Julia Long sat on the couch in room 352 at the hotel and relaxed with a glass of iced lime juice while looking carefully for tell-tale signs of her Special Operations 'modifications'. There were none at all. Both ELF generators were carefully concealed, and were calibrated so that each would deliver an equal-strength electromagnetic field to each hemisphere of Otto's brain as he lay in bed or sat watching TV. The resulting effect was similar to conventional stereo, though these powerful ELF generators emitted no audible sound. The ELF generators sent out fields only in the range of human brain activity, at frequencies between 0.1 and 25 cycles per second. By varying the output of the generators, Julia would be able to introduce a 'binaural split' where the electromagnetic fields from each ELF stereo channel sent fractionally different signals to each hemisphere, entraining Otto's brain with an electromagnetic beat frequency and rendering him powerless to resist conditioning. Julia would only use extra low frequency 2.5 to 1.2 cycle Delta fields on Otto initially, as the programme called for a shallow hypnotic trance to be supplemented by drugs. Once he was under basic control the team would be able to enter the room at any time, without Otto's knowledge, to physically condition him, after which the Delta field pattern would continue to be used every night to stabilise his sleeping pattern. A little later Alpha fields would be introduced,. forcing Otto into a relaxed, alert state while subliminal data was fed to him via the television. Julia Long glanced across at the innocent-looking 22" Sony TV in its carved wooden cabinet. It was a state-of-the-art Trinitron model with a revolutionary tube providing far better resolution than other models. Resolution was very important, because this particular television would be displaying two entirely different pictures to Otto at the same time: the first clearly visible to his conscious brain, with the second perceived only by his subconscious. As with initial hypnotic induction and post-hypnotic suggestion, Special Operations was way ahead of the academics. Most visual- subliminal techniques used by academic researchers and the media were based on simple 1/50th-second flashing messages woven into the standard television frames. Subliminal because they were too fast for the brain to to see consciously, but far too crude for Special Operations requirements. Special Operations used fast, efficient full-frame colour input that was also completely undetectable. In room 350 Julia Long had a series of VHS videotapes that would be used to interrupt the normal video films fed to Otto via the in-house hotel video system. They looked the same simply because they had the same film.content as those shown in the hotel TV guide. Unfortunately for Otto, each of Julia's tapes had been subjected to a special editing process where ultra low-light images had been overlaid on the magnetic tape. Too dim to be detected by the conscious brain or by sophisticated ultraviolet analysis, every one of the thousands of images would be readily absorbed by Otto's subconscious. The Alpha fields from the ELF generators would force Otto to remain alert but completely relaxed. Experiments had proved full relaxation to be a critical requirement: a single stressful distraction lasting a millisecond could stop the subconscious 'seeing' any subliminal input at all. As Julia Long finished her iced lime juice and walked out of room 352, she smirked to herself. Though dozens of earnest authors had warned of techniques such as these, the mainstream media had trashed every single one. Fortunately for Special Operations, it was beyond the capability of Joe public to believe that he or she could be influenced in this way, much less be brought under total control within minutes. In fact, the ELF fields were quite capable of killing unwitting victims by remote control, as Special Operations had proved on numerous occasions in the past. There were politicians and scientists out there who persistently refused to heed discreet intelligence warnings about their behaviour, which in turn led to them being found dead in hotel rooms after apparently indulging in bizarre sexual, rituals or drinking themselves to death. Too much of the same thing tended to draw attention, so the routine was occasionally varied with a few being programmed to take spectacular flying leaps from tall suspension bridges, drive into buildings at high speed, or hook themselves up to the electrical mains circuit. Most were messy, and all were fatal. With normal targets the procedure was easy enough. When the ELF fields entrained the human brain with a binaural beat, it was standard procedure to ensure the target's breathing was brought under control. If starting in high Beta, slower Delta fields were steadily introduced to decrease the rate of respiration prior to full electro-hypnotic induction. In order to kill a target, the silent ELF generators were turned up to full power in binaural mode. Completely at the mercy of the Special Operations controller, the target's physiology would be manipulated until systolic and diastolic blood pressures became identical, at which point the heart ceased to function and the target died. There was one drawback: powerful ELF fields always increased the level of serum-triglycerides in the target, which could prove embarrassing at postmortem, It was a simple matter to splash alcohol into the mouth of the target after death, then throw a bottle of booze on his bed or into his car. Basic stuff indeed, but it was more than enough to fool most pathologists... Otto Jewell stood in the office reading the chemical log, his lips compressed into a thin tight line. It was unbelievable! Gerald Smith had mixed ten times too much SA-81, a chemical used to thin the drilling fluid and coat the particles of heavy minerals used to control the underground pressures. Otto now knew the nature of the beast, and it was frightening. The only way to cure the problem would be to add vast extra quantities of inert mineral particles until the massive chemical overdose was neutralised. Rapidly running some tests, Otto found he would need to add 2,500 x 100 lb sacks of the powdered mineral before the fluid would recover. It had never been done before and Otto wasn't even sure the pumps would hold out under the colossal load. It would stretch them to the limits and beyond. But what could possibly be worse than waiting for the inevitable blowout? It was crunch time, no doubt about that. Otto had a hurried conference with Osimin and the drillers, who rapidly agreed to give it a try. There was nothing else to do. Volunteer labourers were positioned at the hoppers to mix the sacks of minerals, while Otto and Osimin walked up the steps to the control panel on the rig drilling floor. Someone had to operate the pump controls, a job far too dangerous to delegate to the juniors. If the well blew out there would be scant chance of survival for those on the elevated rig floor, only feet from the mouth of the well. With an apologetic grin in Osimin's direction, Otto inched the pump controls forward almost to the stops. Clouds of black smoke poured out of the diesel exhaust stacks as the generators complied with the demand for an almost impossible increase in power. By the time 1,000 sacks had been mixed, the turbocharged diesels were screaming at full standard power and the pumps were under enormous strain. Poker-faced, Otto and Osimin stood on the rig floor and gripped the hand rails as the entire derrick shuddered with convulsions. Tentatively, Otto placed one hand gently on the pump controls again, looking longingly at the last half inch of emergency power available, but unwilling to commit the Russian rig's diesels to almost certain destruction. Osimin brushed Otto's hand out of the way and forced both controls the extra distance. Another tense three hours passed more slowly than the mind could imagine, with the diesels well across the 'never exceed' red lines on their rev counters. The turbochargers were going wild and spinning in the exhaust manifolds at over 25,000 rpm, their banshee wail making conversation impossible. The big pumps were labouring under a shattering load and there were still another 800 sacks to mix. The giant rig was vibrating so violently that Otto and Osimin's teeth started chattering uncontrollably. Then suddenly, without warning, the pressure dropped and the fluid returning to surface could be seen thickening rapidly. It had worked - really worked! Osimin was grinning and shouting in Russian while Otto shouted in English. Neither could understand the other but the message was clear enough. The rig was safe, the bloody rig was safe! Word swiftly spread to the crews outside the danger area, who came rushing back with grins all over their faces. Leaving the staff to clean up and get ready to drill, Osimin and Otto climbed wearily into their respect- geriatric Iimousines and headed towards Calcutta. Otto strode purposefully up to the front desk at the Oberoi and asked for the key to room 326. Swiftly intervening, lobby manager Chaudri selected the key to room 352 instead, telling Otto that as a favoured long-term guest, hotel management had decided to move him to a much nicer room at no extra charge. "Come," Chaudri said winningly, "Let me show you." Leading the way into room 352, Chaudri pointed to the new white towels in the bathroom, and the brand new fridge. Then Chaudri turned with a flourish and opened the twin doors of what looked like a cocktail cabinet, revealing the Sony Trinitron television set. Otto Jewell was suitably impressed. After Chaudri left, Ono looked around him The room was exceptionally quiet with thick pile carpets and heavy window drapes muffling all sound. The air conditioning ran with an almost silent low-pitched hum, unlike the unit in room 326. There was a marked similarity between room 352 and a soundproof recording studio. After supper in the hotel coffee shop, Otto returned to room 352, showered and then climbed wearily into bed. Within minutes he drifted off into what seemed to be a natural, dreamless sleep. It was no such thing. Immediately Otto lay down, Julia Long in room 350 switched on the highly-directional ELF generators, selected Delta band and flooded both hemispheres of Otto's brain with a powerful 2.5 cycle electromagnetic field. Switching to binaural, Julia adjusted the power setting and slowly started to decrease the Delta field frequency. Otto's respiration followed the silent beat, and in less than 60 seconds his brain was entrained at the optimum somnambulistic hypnotic induction frequency of 1.2 cycles. Julia listened carefully to Otto's breathing, faithfully relayed to her by the 'pinhole' audio bug drilled into the separating wall between the two rooms. "Okay, you two," Julia turned to her Marine technicians. "Use the pass key and start the programme. Be sure to cough before you approach the bed so I can turn the fields off. We don't want to knock you out as well, now do we?" It was a rhetorical question. The Marines had learned long ago that Julia was not given to idle backchat, so they quickly made their way from room 350 to room 352, Hank switching on a small battery- powered generator in his pocket, connected by concealed wires to an insulated pad stuck to the palm of his right hand. As they approached the foot of Otto's bed Hank coughed discreetly and one second later unclenched his right hand, placing it flat on the exposed skin of Otto's arm. Faster than a striking cobra, the -powerful zapper discharged a five-microsecond pulse which temporarily paralysed Otto's central nervous system, simultaneously destroying his spatial and time orientation. Not wasting a second, Hank's colleague wrapped a tourniquet around Otto's arm, exposed a vein and swiftly injected sodium pentathol. The two Marines were fast. From point of entry the entire sequence was complete in twelve seconds. Both had done the same job many times before. Minutes later, Julia slipped through the door carrying an aluminium briefcase from which she withdrew a special pair of headphones that the Marines placed over Otto's head. The briefcase contained a miniature version of the laboratory equipment, designed to generate powerful electromagnetic fields in the immediate vicinity of Otto's brain, without endangering the Special Operations team. And so it was that Julia Long started to build a 'decoy' hypnotic level into Otto Jewell. In short sessions over two weeks he was trained to revert to a hypnotic trance only if given two complex trigger-words. Most evenings as Otto watched television he was unwittingly bombarded with subliminal films designed to enhance American 'patriotism', desensitise him to violence and force him to respond immediately to orders presented at subliminal level. His handling by the Marine technicians was savage: Otto was beaten under electro-hypnosis and the Marines warned him that if he failed to carry out their orders, his two young children would be sexually abused and killed. Slowly but surely, without his knowledge or consent, Otto was forcibly recruited as a lifelong member of American Special Operations. Once past the basic stage of induction, Julia Long left Otto in the care of her two Marine technicians, but continued to fly in occasionally from Morocco and Dakar to check on progress. On one of her flying visits during March 1984, Julia received a courier message to meet Louis McCaul at the US Consulate on Ho Chi Minh Street in Calcutta. With little ceremony, Louis ushered her into the bug-proof 'hard-room' in the Consulate basement: "We received a coded Cosmic International message by diplomatic courier. Take your time decoding it Julia, then I'll destroy the original and your translation." Julia sat down at the table and decoded Ithe message swiftly using a one-time-only pad. All Cosmic International messages were considered so sensitive they were never transmitted by electronic means; not even on the most secure cypher machines. The coded message she held in her hand had arrived that morning, carried personally by a first secretary from the US Embassy in New Delhi. Julia finished decoding and looked at her neat but short translation. Gordon Nobel was economical with words: "Your client required Moroccan facility Iatest 0600 hrs 10 April 1984. Operational designator Mike-Alpha-Delta-3. Get American Express to fix his route. You return independently. Ends." Julia gave the original, her translation and the used-one-time-only decoding coupon to Louis McCaul, who promptly-sealed them inside a small container. pressed a switch. In an instant the papers were incinerated in a flash of sear ing heat. Evidently, Mike-Alpha-Delta-3 was going operational. As she walked slowly back towards the Oberoi Grand Hotel, Julia wondered about the extreme level of security. In the past it had meant only one thing: a high profile close-in assassination of a political target. No matter what, the forthcoming mission had to be very dangerous for Mike-Alpha-Delta-3. Standard assassinations were normally carried out by American 'patriots' or hired assassins for a fee ranging from $50,000 to $500,000 depending on the difficulty of the shot and the overall importance of the target, the latter factor also reflecting the added level of risk to the assassin from the political target's bodyguards. But there came a point where no matter how patriotic or greedy the assassin, the risk of death or capture was so high that all refused the contract. Killing a politician from 500 yards with a rifle, then spending the $500,000 fee in the Caribbean was fair game for most patriotic mercenaries, but shooting a high-profile political target at less than 100 yards was attractive to no-one. There was little point having $500,000 in a Swiss bank if you were lying six feet underground, unable to spend it. This was when Julia's Special Operations group was normally called in. A conditioned assassin was trained to believe he could not faill his mission; that he was invincible. Because of the exaggerated self-confidence built in by electro-hypnotic techniques, a conditioned assassin was the only choice for close-in work. As she sat smoking a cigarette in the opulent foyer of the Grand Hotel, Julia nodded her head thoughtfully. Otto had obviously been selected for a high-profile close-in assassination, but who was it that had to die, and where exactly? Based on the Special Operations adage "in Cairo use an Egyptian, and in Tel Aviv an Israeli", everything pointed to English- man 'Mike-Alpha-Delta-3' being used in London or another British city. Then as a waiter showed her to a dinner table in the Oberoi Grand's Polynesian restaurant, she shrugged off the problem. In less than three weeks' time, Julia would learn the truth in Morocco. < Part One Part Three> |
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