Mid-West Campaign
Session Eighty-Six

Friday, 7 August 2001

After a month convalescing from severe gun shot wounds, Ugly Joe McPike returns to work. However, with Jane on enforced leave and Benedict missing presumed dead and Clint Stone also absent he has very little to do. He spends the day completing his transfer request and then goes home.

Monday, 9 August 2001

Agents Joe McPike and Clint Stone return to the mid-west FBI office. They are joined by Elise Steiger, recently resurrected and returned to active duty. They immediately open case BRB012 that has been on the books since 13 December 2000. McPike contacts Special Agent Shahjahan Ahmad of the Technological Crimes Unit in Tulsa to get more of a low down on the case.

Ahmad goes through the initial FBI report. The National Radiological Institute (Microfusion Group) has had an integral part of its Dernell Linear Particle Accelerator stolen. The Particle Accelerator itself is the biggest linear accelerator in the world, running to three miles in length, and was custom built to withstand high temperatures. The missing part (and it suddenly becomes obvious why this was passed to evidence response) is the Main Accelerator Chamber which weighed approximately 400 tons.

Ahmad says that according to his notes, there were two main projects using the accelerator at the time: W-Bosun and Microfusion. In addition to the loss of equipment the project leader of W-Bosun, Professor Reginald Alton, is also missing. For any further information, Ahmad suggests that the team contact Arnold "Arnie" Guthman - the Facilities Manager at the National Radiological Institute.

The team heads to the airport and catches a flight to Las Vegas. En route, McPike telephones Guthman to find out more information about the case. After speaking to Lucy Harris (administrative assistant for the facility) McPike is put through to Guthman. Guthman is a little surprised to hear from "another" FBI team, and tells McPike that special agents Vitrano and Lavin were at the site only one month ago enquiring into this case. A disturbing turn of events, but there's nothing the agents can do about it, so McPike presses on.

Guthman says that the theft took place on Tuesday 25 September 2000, during a changeover between the W-Bosun and Microfusion teams. Guthman explains that the sampling chamber needs to be changed every one or two weeks (usually when the teams change over). Changing the sampling chamber takes four hours, but the vacuum inside the accelerator needs to be pumped down, which takes about a day. Each team runs their project for one week, then swap over and process data the following week whilst the other team uses the accelerator.

On the day before the theft, the W-Bosun team finished their shift at 12:00 pm and went home, the Microfusion team arrived at this time to swap over the sampling chamber. Because it takes so long for to swap things over the scientists usually go for a drink. It was during the shutdown, specifically during the hours of 4:00am and 6:00am on 25 September that the machine was stolen. The theft was timed so that there was no vacuum and the accelerator was not in use.

Guthman won't be drawn on how the theft was accomplished, and suggests the agents see for themselves when they arrive. He does say that there was an enormous static burst at the time of the theft that knocked out all the cameras on the site for four minutes. However, to achieve such a feat would require a tremendous amount of energy (enough to light up Wichita for four days).

The agents arrive in Las Vegas, hire a car and head into the desert. It is a three hour drive to Broken Bow. En route, the agents realise how close they are passing to Area-51. The facility is twenty miles out from Broken Bow, deep in the Nevada desert. As the agents drive, they pass oases of green created by intensive irrigation on the part of pathological gardeners. The nearest habitation to the facility is the military base of the 32nd police division - who also police the base.

The site of the National Radiological Institute is massive. The agents are stopped at the gate by Lieutenant Harriman who takes his time checking their credentials. Security is obviously extremely high. The agents see signs warning of near-by minefields. The security system seems largely electronic, but the agents are also assigned two armed escorts.

Harriman gives them the following advice: "Keep your visitors' passes with you at all times; without them you are subject to seizure or death. Don't touch what you don't understand. Don't leave the area you're assigned to. Check the colour of your badge. If it changes to red get treatment. If it changes to black you're already dead."

Facilities manager Guthman is not available, so the agents opt to go straight to the scene of the crime. They are instructed to follow a military jeep that takes them to where the Main Accelerator Chamber used to be. The agents see is a large, generally rectangular, hole in the ground. They discover two circular scorch marks on the side of the hole away from the entrance to the tunnel (the accelerator). On the ground outside the area are other scorch marks forming a familiar triangle pattern - it is the same as the impression in the corn fields at the Prentice Farm (Case 1097-IN1).

Given all the recent cases, and the discussions with Marc Georgeson it seems obvious what happened here. This is the work of the brain bugs. They must have been the ones that let off the static burst that disabled the cameras. They simply used their high technology to remove the accelerator chamber. The chamber was too large to fit on the shuttle secured during Operation: Certain Death, so the bugs must have had access to another Pinnace-style vessel. Although it is likely that the equipment was destroyed when the brain bug craft was blown up six weeks ago, it cannot be ruled out that the accelerator chamber is on another, smaller, vessel at an unknown location.

The agents quickly congratulates themselves that they has solved the case without doing any work at all. McPike considers that their goal now should be to locate Professor Alton. He is the one part of this puzzle that they don't understand. To that end they need to interview his work colleagues. As its an enormous hassle getting clearance to go anywhere on this site, they head to an empty office and get the scientists to come to them.

In addition to the missing Professor Alton, the W-Bosun team was made up of Dr Clive Brown (who is still running programmes for the project), Dr Will Lao (who was Alton's lab partner, but has since joined another project), Dr Alex Youlton (also now on another project), Dr Simon Hernandez (who has left the site and moved back to academia) and Mr Eliot Green (a technician who still works in the facility). The head of the Microfusion team is Professor Lois Ernst, and the agents speak to her first.

The agents begin their interview with Ernst by asking about the accelerator itself. Ernst says that the microfusion team were creating a micro-fusion bubble at the source of the target. Hydrogen atoms were fired at incredible speeds at a Deuterium and Tritium rich material and the team observed the effects of its impact. McPike and Stone haven't a clue what she's talking about, but Elise's tiny grounding in physics allows her to draw some choice analogies.

Ernst says that if you could get the technology to fire two or three of these magnetic packets holding a "magnetic bottle" and have it arrive in an energetic state, it is theoretically possible to would dump large amounts of potentially fusionable material. You would have a nuclear gun. Of course it wouldn't be any use inside an atmosphere; it would have to be in a vacuum (in space). It would have the potential to deliver one nuclear attack per second, per device. This would have been the perfect weapon to counter the shaggai invasion. The agents can see why NTOP funded Ernst's research, and can appreciate why the brain bugs stole it. Ernst says that with the disappearance of the accelerator chamber, her research has been put back six years.

Turning to Professor Reginald Alton, Ernst says that she found the man repellent. He is academically very gifted and was the author of the paper Interaction of the W-Bosun with Dark Matter, which the agents have in their briefing notes. He was also trusted with the $50m project budget. However, he was also extremely dull (as one would expect from a Canadian), and used to bore people about his hunting adventures in California - it was a hobby he recently took up. He also used to hit on her, which didn't do him any favours. Ernst knows that Alton was divorced from his wife (who is still in Canada). She says that Alton started to spruce himself up recently, which has led to speculation that he was seeing a woman in California. However, Ernst can't imagine any woman being attracted to him.

The agents ask Ernst if there was anyone else on the site that Alton was particularly close to. The professor says that Alton wasn't at all popular for the reasons she has already highlighted. However, he did seem on good terms with Callaghan (from enrichment and extraction) and also with Pines. However, Pines's wife holds dinner parties for everyone on the site, so that's probably how Pines knows Alton.

The agents now interview the remaining members of the W-Bosun team. They get largely the same story from all of them. They don't believe he went hunting, but was using it as a cover for his trips to California. They think he is seeing a student at one of the many universities there. All his hunting stories seemed very well rehearsed, and he didn't know anything about guns or hunting practices. Eliot Green tells the agents that Alton said he was hunting the wrong sort of game (it was out of season). Alton mentioned the names "Chuck" and "Zed" as people in California that he knew. When asked what they think happened to the main accelerator chamber, the scientists postulate wild ideas such as aliens and time travel, that the agents are forced to poo-poo.

Next the agents speak to Dr Callaghan. Although Callaghan knew Alton as well as anyone on the site, he didn't actually know the guy that well. He says that Alton was more relaxed in the weeks up to his disappearance, and agrees that he probably had a girl in California. He says that he saw tickets to California in Alton's possession. The agents thank Dr Callaghan and call for Pines.

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