Gazing At The Muzzle Of Death

Nicki did her best to make me feel welcome. We sat on the floor in her one huge, windowless room, and talked for about a half hour until she passed out. She had made a bed for me from her couch cushions and the whole apartment seemed to have blankets and quilts everywhere. She worked at the same bar we had visited, serving food on the weekends and filling in as a bartender.

Jonas had enlisted in the Navy when he was 18 years old. He had been stationed in Fairbanks and worked at a secret site in an area just North of Fairbanks, called Poker Flats - or just "the flats" to locals. His sister told me that he met Dave there and the two had worked on the "heater," mainly installing coax cable and doing repairs following some tests. All through her conversation she would refer to the military as "the death ray monsters." But eventually the JD got the upper hand and she closed her eyes. The Jefferson Airplanes kept looping on the 8-track and I soon followed her in a deep sleep.

It was hard to tell time without a window. Fairbanks is rather dimly illuminated in mid-winter anyway. It was Saturday by my best recollection and I woke up to the sound of Jonas who had let himself in to fetch us for breakfast while Dave kept the Chrysler running downstairs. We eventually were back at the Mecca for a huge breakfast and Dave asked me my shoe size, left for a while, and returned with some heavy duty boots and thick socks.

I changed in the car while we headed North to a small town called Fox. Dave and Jonas visited a friend while Nicki and I stayed warm in the car. They soon returned with some two-way radios and the keys to a storage facility just off the Elliot Highway where there were two beefy snowmobiles packed with canvas packs.

Jonas and Nicki took one snowmobile while Dave drove mine. We went East along the Chatinaka River and, at times, actually on the frozen river. The trip was long and I realized the canvas bags contained more gasoline for the return trip. As we neared our destination I could see orange markers and the familiar "Restricted Area" signs. Dave and Jonas would stop periodically, as if to get their bearings, and we soon were approaching a steep incline where the machines were switched off, covered with a canvas drop sheet, and we continued on foot.

The area was remote, yet there were signs that it was well groomed and forested. When we reached the top of a ridge I could see an enormous area below us that was covered with rows and rows of metal poles - antennae -and small silver rectangular sheds where black cables originated.

It was oddly quiet. A higher ridge in the distance seemed to quell the wind so that we were in the midst of a quiet zone. Dave let me look through his binoculars at the field of antennae. It was impressive. The entire area was at least a mile square and the number of antennae must have been in the thousands.

Dave said that this was a phased array, but Jonas explained that this was a type of antenna where the signal being sent out could be focused to a very narrow beam - like a laser - and that it was capable of emitting a signal that was billions of watts in power.

At one point I questioned why an antenna system would be buried between such high ridges. "Wouldn't that interfere with the signal?"

"Not if you're sending it straight up!" Jonas explained that this energy was used to heat a layer of the atmosphere, to cause it to bend and thicken, and that it would then be ready for the "death ray."

"Death Ray! What do you mean by that?" I was remembering what Nicki had said the previous night.

"We'll explain all that when we get back." Almost as soon as we had arrived, it was time to return. Not only was the sunlight limited to a few hours, but it was damn cold. We scurried back to the machines and filled them with more gasoline. The ride back to the shed was brutal. The temperature dropped with the diminishing sunlight and the chill put me in a kind of sleepy, hypnotic state. I almost fell off the machine because of that.

Back in the car we warmed up. Nicki's Jack Daniels made sense and I took a few stiff hits. As we waited for the Chrysler to warm up, Dave and Jonas made their case, strong and with passion. I sat in the back seat and listened. It was terrible. And I was glad that Nicki had brought the JD.