Naval Support Activity, Algiers Point, New Orleans:
Saturday 24 October 4:30 P.M. local time
Colonel F. Scott McClintock, United States Army, retired, stared through the one-way mirror at the small soundproofed room before him. October Guinness sat at one end of the table, a pad of paper and a pencil on the surface before her, a microphone clipped to the collar of her shirt. She was a small woman with a boyish body and honey-colored hair, which she wore pulled back in a casual ponytail. Dressed in a polo shirt and jeans, she looked more like a college student than a Naval officer. She was also the best remote viewer McClintock had ever worked with.
Most people had an imperfect understanding of remote viewing, seeing it as a magical ability to transcend time and space in order to gather information about a “remote” target. Only, there was nothing magical about RV.
The U.S. government’s awareness of the practice dated back at least to the end of World War II, when they’d captured a bunch of documents detailing some interesting Nazi experiments in the application of extrasensory perception to intelligence work. But what really caught the attention of the guys in the Pentagon was when the Soviets started investing in “psychic” stuff big-time back in the seventies. All the U.S. intelligence branches—the CIA, the Army, the NSA—had sunk money into the procedure over the years, although they were very careful never to use the word “psychic.”
The term “remote viewing” was a nice, sanitized expression coined by two of the physicists working on the phenomena for the government out at Stanford Research Institute. As they defined it, remote viewing required strict adherence to specific, controlled scientific protocol. Some of the guys working with remote viewing for the Army back in the nineties had gotten sloppy. But McClintock was always very careful to adhere to protocol; he didn’t want anyone to be able to claim that their results were contaminated by leading questions and “frontloading.”
He watched as his assistant, Peter Abrams, took the seat opposite Tobie. Normally, the Colonel was the tasker, the one who guided Tobie through her remote viewing sessions. But a clean session required the tasker to be kept ignorant of the target, and the Colonel had defined this exact target himself. He’d warned the Vice President that remote viewing didn’t work well with this kind of target, but Beckham wanted to go ahead with it anyway.
McClintock had read about the impending terrorist attack in the press. He’d long ago learned to discount most of the sensationalism pumped out by the mainstream media, but according to Beckham, this threat looked like the real thing, and the government had virtually nothing to go on. They didn’t know who was behind it. They didn’t know what the terrorists were targeting. About all they did know was the date—Halloween—and that it was somehow linked to an old sunken U-boat.
McClintock felt himself tense with anticipation as he watched Tobie settle comfortably in her chair and close her eyes. Up until now, their viewing sessions had all been training runs. Remote viewing was a skill like anything else; the more you practiced it, the better you got. Now, finally, they were being given a chance to contribute to the defense of the country—and maybe show the doubters in D.C. what a good remote viewer could do, while they were at it.
The physicists out at Stanford who’d done some of the early research on remote viewing had demonstrated that most people can be taught to do it, the same way most people can be taught to dance or play the piano. But that didn’t mean most people were particularly good at it. Remote viewing was a talent, and Tobie Guinness was a remarkably talented viewer.
Successful viewing required sinking down into what they called the Zone, which was basically the same state of relaxed reception achieved by deep meditation. Tobie was very good at reaching that state. McClintock could see her visibly relaxing, her breath coming deep and slow.
“Today is Saturday, 24 October,” said Peter, the microphone system echoing his voice as it was fed to the Colonel and their taping system. “That’s good, Tobie. Relax.” Peter laid his open palm on the opaque manila envelope that rested on the table before him. “All right, using the information in this envelope, tell me what you see.”
Like McClintock, Peter was watching Tobie’s face. He saw her mouth open, her nostrils flaring as if she were gasping for air. “It’s dark. Cold. It’s like…I can’t breathe. Oh, God.” Her voice broke, her face going slack with horror. “They’re all dead.”
Since Peter didn’t know the target, he didn’t understand what was happening. But McClintock understood only too well. “Back her out of there, fast,” whispered McClintock, his fingers curling around the frame of the one-way mirror because he knew Peter couldn’t hear him.
Peter might not understand what was happening in Tobie’s mind, but he recognized the signs of distress. “Okay, Tobie,” he said, keeping his voice calm. “I want you to back away from where you are a bit, maybe get above it. Now tell me what you see.”
Tobie took another breath and shuddered, but McClintock could see the tension in her begin to ease. She licked her lower lip. “There’s a long, rounded object. I think it’s metal but it’s…It must be old. It’s rusted. Wet. It’s resting on something bigger, something flat. I think it’s also metal.”
McClintock felt his heart begin to race. He’d been working with remote viewing for some thirty years. Yet every time he witnessed a successful viewing, every time he watched someone reach out with their mind and touch a distant place—he still felt the same chilling rush of excitement and wonder.
“Good, Tobie,” said Peter. “Now I want you to move a little farther away.”
“Okay.”
“Tell me what you see.”
“I get the impression of water. Lots of water. Rocks. Pebbles. It’s a beach. A rocky beach. There’s a rise of ground…here.” Her pencil scratched across the pad as she drew a rough sketch. “A rise with trees.” She paused. “I get a sense of cold. Clouds.”
“Good,” said Peter as she worked on her sketch. She barely glanced at what she was drawing. It was as if the image flowed directly from her mind to the paper. “Now look back at the long metal object. What do you see?”
“Wooden planks. It’s…it’s like a wooden platform or a dock. That’s it. It’s a dock. Wharves. A long stretch of wharves. But they seem old. Deserted. There’s a big piece of machinery. Here.” She added to her sketch. “It’s yellow, and it sticks up in the air.”
A crane? wondered McClintock, watching her.
Her pencil skittered across the page. She said, “I see a long row of something rectangular. I get the impression of storage, like warehouses, although they’re mainly empty. And a road. Here.”
“Can you follow it?”
“Yes.” There was a pause. “It goes up a rise.”
“Go to the top and tell me what you see.”
“It’s open, like a meadow. Maybe farmland. But it feels oddly empty, like it’s…like it’s abandoned.”
McClintock knew a sense of frustration. Remote viewing worked best when the viewers were given specific geographical coordinates and simply asked to describe what was there. Back in the eighties, the Army remote viewers up at Fort Meade had successfully described secret Soviet submarine installations and the insides of enemy embassies. But there was a reason remote viewing had never worked well when it came to finding missing persons. The viewer could describe a room, maybe even a house or a ravine in the woods where the missing person was being kept. But where was that house? Where was that ravine?
Where was this beach?
McClintock had heard stories about how, back in the seventies, remote viewers at Fort Meade had helped the government find a Soviet plane that had crashed in the jungles of Africa. But that was a rare success story in the history of using RV as part of an attempt to find missing people or things. The Army viewers who had tried to trace kidnapping victims in Italy and Lebanon had been able to describe the captives; they had accurately described their physical health and mental states, the rooms in which they were being held, sometimes even the street outside. But they’d never been able to provide the specific type of information that could enable the Special Forces guys to go in and rescue anyone.
“Okay, Tobie,” said Peter. “Go back to the wharves and look again at the metal object. You said it was by the water?”
“Not by the water. On the water.” She worked on her sketches some more, refining them, adding details. “There’s another building. Away from the warehouses, maybe halfway up the hill from the water.”
“Tell me about the building.”
“I get the impression of metal. A wavy metal. It’s like another warehouse, but smaller. I can see cars parked behind it. No, not cars. Vans. Blue vans. I think they all have the same thing written on the sides.”
McClintock felt a renewed surge of hope. Most remote viewers couldn’t read words or numbers. McClintock had heard it had something to do with the way the two halves of the brain process information. But Tobie—like Pat Price, back in the seventies—could do it.
Her forehead crinkled into a frown. “It’s in Greek. No. Not Greek. Cyrillic.” A talented linguist, Tobie knew Russian. But many other languages, from Macedonian and Serbian to Belarusian and Ukrainian used the Cyrillic alphabet, and she didn’t know any of those.
“Militia,” she said. “That’s what it is. They’re militia vans. I think I can read…K…A…” Her frown deepened as she slowly sounded the word out. “KALININGRAD,” she said suddenly. “That’s it. Kaliningrad.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said the Colonel, pushing away from the window. He put in a call to Division Thirteen. “Matt? McClintock here. I think what you’re looking for is at a shipyard on a rocky beach in Kaliningrad Oblast. That’s right. Russia.”