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FIDALGO ISLAND, WASHINGTON:
Rita climbs out of the motorhome, taking a deep breath of fir-scented air as she slowly scans for witnesses around the dry lakebed. From the looks of it, the dilapidated bait and tackle shop is about to fall over. The information on the realtor’s website was very helpful in finding this location for her local tests.
She moves to the side of the trailer and opens the door on the control panel. When she flips a switch, the purr of the generator is the only sound for miles in every direction as the top of the trailer opens and the device rises up. When she activates her device, she feels a strange tingling sensation in her teeth, something she didn’t feel the last time. She studies the readout and sees a second frequency oscillating 180-degrees out from hers.
***
SPARROW VALLEY:
Their vehicle reaches the rim of the ancient volcanic crater, and Alex notices a large dark cloud with a hole in the center. He glances over at Okana. “That’s an interesting cloud formation.”
Okana barely manages to catch a glimpse before the angle changes as they head down into the valley. “Could it be a wind shear effect around the mountain?”
“Possibly, though I’ve never seen one like that.”
“Maybe it’s a contrail from a passing jet?”
Alex doesn’t answer when he sees a small disturbance below the opening in the cloud. The pointed outline of a transparent funnel slowly descends toward the ground.
Okana cranes his head around for a better look at the strange anomaly. “What the hell is that!”
“A tornado! Hurry, it’s headed for the ranch!” Alex immediately calls his Dad.
***
Robert Cave keeps the phone against his ear as he opens the screen door and steps out onto the back porch. “I see it, Alex. It looks like a tornado.”
“It’s heading right for you. Are the kids there?”
“No, they’re in school. I’d better bring the horses up from the pasture.”
“Forget about the damn horses, Dad. Just get in the truck and get out of there! We’re headed your way and will meet you on the road in a few minutes.”
Robert hurries down the steps. “All right.”
***
Alex and Okana turn off the highway onto the road leading to the ranch, but there is no sign of his father or his old blue pickup. When Okana parks in front of the house, Alex leaps out and looks around, but doesn’t see his father. “Robert?” he hollers as he runs up the steps and enters the kitchen. “Dad? Are you in here?” he yells as the sound of the wind howls louder and louder. He hurries from room to room, but there is no sign of him so he runs back outside.
As he runs down the steps, branches, grass, and leaves pelt him hard. He holds his arm up to block the small pieces of flying debris as he joins Okana and searches the area for Robert. “He might be in the old garage! That’s where he keeps his truck! Let’s go!”
When they run past the barn, Alex can see a strange mass of spinning trees and dirt in a cloudless tornado. The bottom of the transparent funnel is carving a meandering fifty-foot wide swath of destruction through the forest, ripping trees apart and clearing the ground beneath them as it surges in his direction.
Alex runs into the garage and sees the truck, but not his father. He hurries to the back of the building, where a storeroom has been dug out of the hill. When he throws open the door, he’s blinded by the beam of a flashlight. “Dad! Are you all right?”
Robert stands up from the wooden bench seat. “Yeah, the truck wouldn’t start.”
“C’mon! We need to get out of here! We don’t have much time!”
Okana is staring through a small gap between the large wooden sliding doors when Alex and Robert come out of the room. “We’re too late! It’s tearing the siding off the barn. We’ll never make it to the car.”
Alex grabs his father’s arm. “Let’s get into the storeroom! It’s our only chance!”
Alex grabs a length of slender rope and a shovel while Okana follows Robert into the small room. He ties one end of the rope around the handle, closes the door on the rope, and pulls the shovel against the outside of the door. An instant later, the roar from the tornado is nearly deafening, and he can hear objects slamming against the truck. The wind threatens to tear the door off the small room, and it takes all of his and Okana’s strength to hold it closed.
The side mirror of the truck punches a hole through the door and the strain on the rope is gone. The roaring of the wind suddenly vanishes, replaced by the sounds of huge objects slamming into the garage.
***
Derek Cave is sitting on the edge of his motorcycle, talking to Jessica Parker in the parking lot of the high school. He notices the strange looking tornado moving in the direction of his family’s ranch, and tries calling his grandfather, but there is no answer. He swings his leg over the seat and sits down. “Not good. Not good.”
He starts the engine, guns it a few times, then releases the clutch, and races out to the main highway. When he turns onto the dirt road leading to the ranch, the tornado is ripping the siding off the barn. It doesn’t occur to him that racing toward the destruction will put his life in danger. His only thought is to find his grandfather.
***
INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION:
Commander Ethan Short hears a soft beeping and studies the digital readout on the station’s main computer. He turns to Anatole Bonich, his Russian friend. “Take a look at this. We’re getting some kind of E.L.F. signal, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from.”
Anatole pushes himself away from the viewing port, floating the short distance across the small room to join Ethan. “I have seen that signal before. It happened when they activated the space vacuum.”
Ethan thinks about a report he read about a government project called HAARP, for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. It was a program where extremely low frequencies were used to study the behavior of the ionosphere. Though denied by HAARP project officials, some respected researchers allege that powerful E.L.F. signals could be used for weather control.
When the signal abruptly stops, the men looked at each other, and Anatole grins. “You see. Nothing to worry about, comrade.”
***
FIDALGO ISLAND:
Rita flips another switch, and once the device is safely tucked into its trailer, she shuts down the generator, closes the side door, then climbs into her motorhome.
She sits in the driver’s seat with the engine off, and thinks about what just happened. After several moments when she has no idea why there is a second frequency, she starts the engine and heads back to the storage facility. “What is going on?”
***
SPARROW VALLEY:
Everything seems deathly quiet after the tornado passes. Alex tries to open the door, but it won’t budge. When Okana is beside him, they both kick against the wood, but it’s like hitting a brick wall.
Robert is standing a short distance away and sees the concern in his son’s eyes. “At least the tornado has moved on”, he mutters, trying to put a positive spin on the situation.
“Yes, but if we can’t get out of here, we’ll run out of breathable air in about thirty minutes.”
***
By the time Derek is near the ranch, everything stops swirling and falls from the sky, as if someone flipped a switch and turned off the tornado. He’s never seen anything like it. He can only hope Robert left before it tore the place apart.
When he turns the corner onto the driveway, he sees the house is barely damaged. There are two broken windows in the kitchen, but everything else is miraculously intact. He slides to a stop in the gravel, next to a strange car with pieces of barn wood on the trunk and roof. “Robert!”
He shuts down the engine and sets the kickstand before climbing off and running up the steps into the kitchen. “Robert? Are you in here?”
He hurries through the rest of the house, then runs back outside to look around. Most of the barn is still intact, so he runs down the road and looks through the opening where the doors used to be. The loft has collapsed, covering part of the stalls. “Robert? Are you in here?” He steps back and cups his hands around his mouth. “Robert? Can you hear me?”
He doesn’t know where his grandfather can be and starts to panic. Did he get sucked up into the funnel? Where can he be?
***
Alex is using his pocketknife to carve a small hole in the door panel when he hears a voice. Okana is beside him, using the rental car keys to help. Alex stops scraping and listens. “Stop,” he says to Okana, stopping Okana’s hands from jingling the car keys as he scrapes.
“What?”
“That sounds like Derek.” He kneels down and looks through the tiny opening. With everyone as still as can be, he hears his nephew’s voice again. “Derek! Over here! We’re in the garage!”
***
Derek thinks of every terrible scenario that could have happened to his grandfather, then it dawns on him. His truck. He looks across the dirt road at what is left of the garage. The entire roof is gone, and the sliding doors have crashed onto the blue pickup. He runs to the garage, hoping his grandfather is not inside the truck, crushed to death. As he gets closer, he hears a familiar voice call his name. “Alex? Is that you?”
Alex sighs with relief. “Derek! Over here! We’re trapped in the storeroom. Can you get us out?”
Derek assesses the situation and sees that the driver’s side window of the blue pickup has been pushed up against the entrance to the storeroom. “The truck is against the door. Let me see what I can do.”
Derek clears a path through the debris leading up to the truck, able to move most of it out of the way on his own. He hurls boards, shingles, tree branches, and old buckets to the side. One of the large wooden doors lay across the back of the cab and pickup bed, and the other is leaning against the passenger door. He grabs the edge and tries shoving it past the vehicle, but there is too much debris piled up against it, so he tries standing it upright. It feels like a million pounds of dead weight, so he takes a deep breath, grits his teeth, and pushes with all his strength.
Squeals of protest erupt from the old nails holding the wooden planks together as the door slowly becomes vertical. With a final shove, it drops away from the passenger door and crashes onto the shattered timbers on the floor.
“I’m almost there!” he hollers as he grabs the door handle. When he pulls, the door refuses to open. He squirms through the open window, carefully crawling over the shattered glass on the bench seat to the driver’s side, which is already busted out. “I’ll have you out in a minute. Is Robert with you?”
“Yes, and Okana.”
“Is everyone okay?
“Yes, we just can’t get out on our own.”
“Okay, sit tight. I’ll find something to bust out the door.”
Derek knows his way around the garage and hurries across the debris to a small locker in the corner. He tosses the busted boards out of the way and opens the door, grabs a ten-pound sledgehammer, and carries it inside the cab.
“Stand back.” He rams the steel head against the wood several times until it punches through, then keeps beating away sections of the door until it’s larger than the window opening. He reaches inside for Robert. “Give me your hand and I’ll pull you through.”
Alex kneels down so his father can stand on his knee. Once Robert crawls out the other side, he squirms through the window. When he’s out, he looks around at what remains of the garage, and it’s a total disaster. He looks across at the barn and is surprised to see the heavy timber frame still intact, but it’s been stripped of most of its siding. He turns to Derek. “What about the house?”
“It’s still pretty much okay. A couple windows were busted out, but that was about it.”
Okana is right behind Alex and studies the garage door lying on a pile of thick wooden rafters, then hears a creaking noise from one of the standing walls. “Let’s get out of here.”
The foursome hurries outside and starts walking up the road to the house, surveying the damage, and it looks like a war zone. Trees ripped up, roots and all are strewn across the pasture. Boards, branches, farm equipment, and random debris are scattered across the whole property.
“Would you look at that?” Okana says, staring off in the distance behind them.
Everyone turns around and sees what caught his attention. It’s a definitive path left behind by the tornado.
Okana hooks his thumbs into his front pockets. “I’ve heard stories of destructive tornadoes leaving behind a literal path of destruction. I’ve seen video footage during the aftermath of a tornado, but the enormity of it all didn’t sink in until now.”
Alex notices the two broken windows on the house, as he climbs the steps onto the back porch and steps into the kitchen. He flips a switch on the wall and the ceiling light comes on. He walks through the rest of the house before heading back outside to his father. “It’s safe to enter. I don’t know how, but you still have electricity.”
“The power company buried the wires after the flood last year.”
Robert surveys what remains of the barn, the torn up forest, and the pasture. “What in the world is going on, Alex? It’s a beautiful day out. There isn’t even any rain or thunder. It just came out of nowhere. The sirens didn’t go off and the weather folks on the local news never came on the air to warn us. We don’t even get that kind of stuff out here.”
“We’re not sure what’s going on exactly, Dad. I’m glad we showed up when we did though.”
“Yeah, why is that? I didn’t know you were in town.”
“Right. Sorry about that. It was kind of a last minute thing. We were in the area and thought we’d stop by for a quick visit. Okana and I are actually headed over to eastern Washington to check on something, but we can stick around and help you clean up this mess.”
“We’ll be okay, son. I’ll call the insurance company before we do anything. You go ahead and take care of your business. I’m sure it’s important.”
Okana drags the boards, branches, and leafs off the rental car. The damage isn’t too bad. Lots of scratches, but no major dents. He looks over at Alex. “I’ll let you explain this to the rental company.”
Alex hugs his family, then he and Okana climb into the sedan and drive back to the main highway leading to eastern Washington. He stares thoughtfully through the front window. “What are the odds this would happen just after we see Rita?”
“Yeah, she seemed pretty pissed at you, but I don’t see how she can be responsible for this mess. No one can control the weather like that. Right?”
“I suppose you’re right. I’d better call Martin. Maybe he has some intel that can shed some light on things for us.”
Once he gets through to Donner, Alex explains what happened with the tornado. “I think it has something to do with the SV1, but I’m not one-hundred percent sure.”
Donner thinks about a recent call he received from Harry Clemens. “Listen, a friend of mine just told me about a tornado in Darrington last Monday.” He explains the strange circumstances. “Preston had a crew standing by when it happened, and got the contract for the rescue and cleanup. I don’t think it was a coincidence.”
Alex doesn’t like where this is leading. “Neither do I, but that would mean they did it from space, and I can’t see how that is even possible. We’re headed to Preston’s facility in eastern Washington to see if we can get inside.”
“Don’t do anything illegal, Alex. You’re listed in our records as a geologic consultant. It gets harder and harder to explain why a rock hound is breaking into classified facilities and leaving a trail of bodies, so be careful.”
“I will, Martin. I always am.” Alex smiles as he ends the call.