Terror Firma. Matthew Thomas

mission, they knew what they were about. For a split second Frank experienced a rare iota of panic; he was up against some frighteningly clever opponents. Slowly, using a little-known Zen technique picked up in the jungles of Vietnam, he re-levelled his inner karma. This was undoubtedly part of an ongoing routine surveillance – if they knew he had the merchandise he would have been taken out by now.

      Frank pulled himself away from the window and loped across his cluttered flat, made all the worse by his preparations for imminent departure. He’d deal with ‘Mr Frosty’ when he was good and ready. Even Frank admitted that as far as manifestations went of the International Papist/Masonic plot to elevate the Queen of England to a position of world power, enslaving humanity in the process, old ‘Two Scoops Freddy’ was hardly the most deadly component. Recently he’d heard rumours of something big brewing in the Far East – some fiendish consumer device which would finally tip the balance in the Illuminantis’ favour – though how and when he had no clue. What was certain was that in the coming struggle Frank was going to need every weapon he could get his badly blistered trigger-finger to.

      Rubbing puffy red-rimmed eyes, Frank pushed aside a mound of ScUFODIN Monthly magazines and copies of badly printed pamphlets (Kennedy – The Denture Suicide Hypothesis), to kneel down besides his battered VCR. After thumbing the well-worn eject button he slipped the cassette into its lurid rental-store case. The lengths the Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex would go to influence the minds of the public never ceased to amaze him. What Troy Meteor lacked in subtlety he more than made up for in xenophobic gung-ho. Frank had noted all the passages containing subliminal messages, not that they were needed – this particular piece of anti-alien propaganda laid it on pretty thick – negotiations must have taken a turn for the worse since ET. It had been a long night of constant freeze-framing, but well worth the risk to his already tattered sanity. In time, Frank’s findings would be passed on to the relevant groups fighting the imposition of the New World Order.

      In moments of doubt he wondered if it was worth it. Would they ever be free from the corrosive tentacles sprouting from the cancerous institutions of the state? At times it almost seemed a hopeless fight. The forces stacked against the brave few champions of liberty were insurmountable. What was needed was a victory that would shake the world to its very foundations – with that thought Frank allowed himself a knowing smile.

      Feeling a terrible thirst, he made his way over the jaundiced lino to his prehistoric fridge. He’d given up drinking the bottled water; they could get to that as easily as the tap supply. Beer was now his only hope.

      Tearing at the ring-pull he did his best to ignore the sickly-sweet smell that spilled from the chiller-cabinet. Wedged inside, his slowly putrefying houseguest looked back at him with big oval, black eyes, its three-fingered hands still clutching the bulging hieroglyph-covered satchel. Frank undid the oddly shaped latch and slipped out the large blue folder marked MJ13 – Property of the Committee.

      With a sardonic grin he mused that the disinformation started on the very cover. That its contents were entirely true he had no doubt, but if this document really was known to the Shadow Government, then its author was in very deep trouble indeed. It read quite differently from any official report Frank had ever seen. During his time in the Service several of his officers had kept similar journals. They had invariably been scrawled in dog-eared notebooks, in the brief shattered minutes before last lights, or in the odd disjointed moments of spare time that a military career afforded. None had been neatly typed and housed in an armour-plated folder that seemed to warp space-time with its very gravitas. The thought of some junior officer carting this tome around on active service, in the hope of one day being hailed as a syphilis-free Ernest Hemingway, couldn’t help but make Frank chuckle.

      Besides, few government reports were written in the first person. Randomly Frank thumbed to a page and began to read.

      After what happened to Apollo 11 there was no way we could go back to the moon. We had been warned off in no uncertain terms. Of course the great unwashed never got to know. A twenty-second transmission delay and ‘solar interference’ saw to that.

      ‘Twelve’ was ready to go and on the launch pad, but we pulled the astronauts and launched the empty ship instead – possibly the most expensive Fourth of July rocket to go up in history. My heart was heavy to think what my department could have done with the funds – got another Committee member to the top of the Kremlin perhaps, but then first time around that had caused more trouble than it solved. Uncle Joe went soft on us when it mattered.

      Thirteen was a nice touch if I do say so myself. By then we were better prepared to properly stage the event – the entire production went down like clockwork. Not having to film the surface sequences made it less of a headache, and the fact that the ‘mission’ was a ‘near disaster’ meant that no one suspected a set-up. The simplest plans are always best.

      One day I knew the story would make a good old-fashioned heart-warming patriotic film, we’d keep that one up our sleeve until we needed it most. Our Hollywood contacts were proving increasingly skilful at influencing mob psychology, and would only get better as the years progressed.

      Needless to say, the later ops were an entire fabrication. Golf on the moon – I ask you! Filming them wasn’t cheap, but far less expensive than actually firing those Jet Jocks off into space. Our unofficial funding was given some modicum of support when the billions of dollars officially earmarked for the space programme were diverted to our cause.

      If he hadn’t been such an arrogant son-of-a-bitch Frank could almost have grown to like the document’s shady author – a true professional in his chosen field. But Frank didn’t have to read far from any point in the manuscript to be reminded just what an insidiously evil, hard-assed bastard this guy was – the sort of faceless bureaucrat who usurped his nation’s power to weave his own personal web of lies and deceit, all the while, no doubt, believing himself to be a patriot.

      Frank would nail him. Frank would nail them all soon enough, and he’d especially nail ‘Mr Frosty’. His secret weapon, in this most secret of black wars, currently gazed back at him lifelessly from his fridge.

      ‘Not long now, good buddy,’ Frank said, taking the first sip of beer as he closed the file. ‘You’re my grey ace in the hole.’

       6. Publication

       West Virginia, USA

      At his remote mountain retreat high in the Appalachian wilderness Becker’s personal phone was ringing. He was much older now than he had been on that fateful night many years before when he’d initiated that wide-eyed fool Nixon into the darkest secrets of the Committee, but even carrying his advanced years Becker moved nimbly for a big man. There was more than one telephone receiver on his cluttered writing desk, but it wasn’t hard to know which one to answer.

      One phone was so black it seemed to create its own gravity-field. A series of flashing lights along its extended surface indicated sophisticated scrambling circuits were in operation. It connected Becker to the Executive Section’s Head of Communications in a bunker deep under DC. It didn’t ring often – Becker’s underlings knew better than to disturb him when he was at the cabin. On the few occasions there had been call to answer it a superpower had been toppled or a pope had been shot.

      The second phone was a translucent red. When it rang and flashed insanely it could only mean one thing, and it wasn’t that Gotham City needed Batman to pop a rolled-up sock down his tights. It could only mean the saintly head-of-state of Becker’s own ‘Great Nation’ had got himself into very hot water and needed bailing out. After all, everyone needed a legitimate day job, if nothing else to keep those IRS bloodsuckers off your back. What a waste of his talents, Becker often pondered, to be reduced to buying off two-bit whores and arranging ‘accidents’ for jewellery-encrusted pimps. Of late this second phone had done more ringing than the first. But today wasn’t to be its day.

      The third telephone was shaped like Mickey Mouse. There was no good reason why this should be so, but